“Anger came back to me then,” Jake said, his gaze resting on the floor. “Not anger at those people in Nashville. Naw. I learned to handle the meanness folks showed each other a long time ago. Anger at me. Anger at God. If I’d let myself, I’d have hated Him too much right then to ever make it back.
“Thought I’d left that hate and anger behind me for good. But just when I was goin’ for the big one, the dream I’ve been holdin’ on to all my life, there it was. Just waitin’ to destroy me once and for all. And for the first time in years I didn’t have no place to turn.
“God knew what my limits were. But He still had me take all those dreams and all those hopes and carry them off across the ocean, then stand there and watch them get turned to dust. It hurt, man, hurt worse than anything I’ve ever known.”
The circle sat and rested in silence, all eyes on Jake’s bowed head. With her free hand Amy reached over, made beckoning fingers for Karl to join up. One by one we grasped each other’s hands.
Pipo reached over for Jake’s other hand. “You’re on, big man.”
Jake let loose a broken-winded sigh that went on and on. Then, “God, you know me and still you made me do it. You put this inside me, Father. You gave me this dream. And then you told me what to do with it. All I did was what you said for me to do. I did my part. And it still wasn’t enough.
“You made me a man, Lord. But you don’t treat me like no man. You let them laugh at me. You let them heap scorn on my head. They wouldn’t come out and say it, but I could hear their thoughts clear as day, and they were sayin’, the man just ain’t good enough.
“What hurts me most of all is that you say I’m not good enough too, Lord. By not bein’ there when I really needed you, you said it plain as day. So what’s a man supposed to do, Lord? Where’s a man supposed to turn?”
A long silence stretched out before Amy finally spoke, her quiet voice weighed down by Jake’s pain. “Heavenly Father, your ways are so difficult for us to understand at times. I see the pain of my beloved husband, and I must ask too, Father, why it must be so. I ask for him because he cannot find the words to ask you himself right now. Show us what the purpose is here, Father. You know the innermost needs of our hearts, and you can hear the plea in Jake’s heart. Heal him, Father. Ease his pain. Show him how much we need him, how much we all rely on his strength. Help him to see what a good and great man he truly is. And help him to understand why he had to suffer as he did. Grant him the wisdom of understanding. Give him the miracle of your divine healing.”
****
Up close the Reverend Bill DeLay held the same calm power that he radiated from the podium. His wife Cathy was a motherly mixture of softness and understanding and strength. Where Bill was quiet and reserved, Cathy was outgoing and sympathetic. She greeted us with warm, genuine hugs. There was no false gushiness about either of them. All that they gave came straight from the heart.
Amy had called them the morning after our return from Karlsruhe. When I walked into the room she looked over and said, it came to me during the prayer last night. Now I don’t know why it took me so long to think of it. What are you doing, I asked. She cradled the phone to her ear, said, calling in some reinforcements.
The DeLays had their own individual ways of dealing with Jake’s pain. Cathy listened with silent commiseration, feeling for him. I watched the sorrow in Bill’s eyes grow ever deeper; then he shifted his attention to something without meaning—the table, a magazine on the nearby stand, the kitchen door, anything that held none of Jake’s agony. Once the pain diminished, he would turn back for another dose. It was a remarkable show of strength, this willingness to hear Jake through to the end.
Jake finished with, “Seemed to me that God wasn’t there for me. Felt like I was lookin’ for Him as much as I was a recordin’ contract. Why’d He send me there if it wasn’t to get started on an album? I ain’t lyin’. Nashville was the first time in years I felt like the Lord wasn’t there when I needed Him.”
“He was there,” Amy said, holding one of his hands with both of hers.
“Of course He was,” Cathy DeLay agreed. “But it does seem as if He’s sometimes hard of hearing, doesn’t it?”
Bill DeLay spoke for the first time since the meal had begun. “ ‘Awake, O Lord! Why do you sleep?’ ”
“That’s from Psalms, isn’t it?” Amy asked.
“The forty-fourth,” Cathy confirmed.
Bill DeLay seemed to read off the wall behind my head:
Awake, O Lord! Why do you sleep?
Rouse yourself! Do not reject us forever.
Why do you hide your face
And forget our misery and oppression?
We are brought down to the dust;
Our bodies cling to the ground.
Rise up and help us;
Redeem us because of your unfailing love.
“That about sums it up,” Jake said, not lifting his eyes from his plate.
“David’s army had just suffered a tremendous defeat when he wrote that,” Bill said. “He was asking his Lord why it had happened, why they had to suffer the distress and scorn and shame of it all. They were His chosen people, His blessed children. The only thing David could use to describe the feeling was that the Lord had slept through David’s hour of great need.”
“Left David to suffer alone,” Jake said. “Don’t make no sense at all. Right when you need Him the most, He ain’t around.”
“The Bible says God is Spirit and must be worshiped in spirit and in truth,” Bill replied. “We must seek Him through the presence of His Spirit in us.”
“Sometimes in moments of great trial our distress robs us of the ability to find Him,” Cathy agreed. “We must be strong in those times, Jake. We must remember the Lord we serve, and have faith.”
“Who knows what His divine plan might have been here?” Bill took off his glasses and rubbed tired eyes. “We know from Acts that Paul was called by the Lord’s messenger to go to Rome. But right after the message arrives, his ship is hammered by a storm that blows them a thousand miles off course, and they become shipwrecked on Malta. There they are, wretched and tired and starving, and then to top it all off as they were trying to get a fire started Paul gets bitten by a poisonous snake. Who could ever have thought that the Lord had a hand in this? Yet because of this seemingly random series of events, Paul was able to convert the entire island nation. He established an enclave of Christianity that a thousand years later became a front-line bastion against the spread of Islam.”
The minister put his glasses on again and leaned across the table toward Jake. “In times like these, you have to seek His will. You have to hunger after His guidance. You must hold fast to hope. You must be patient and wait upon the Lord.”
“And know He will answer you,” Amy said quietly.
Bill slowly nodded his head. “That most of all.”
Chapter 13
The day Alessandro called, Jake had taped a hand-printed sheet to the bathroom mirror. He caught me looking at it and said, “Lead singer of the Rez Band, dude by the name of Glenn Kaiser, put it together. Found it in their magazine yesterday. It really touched deep, thought maybe I’d keep it up for a while.”
I peered at the mirror and read:
The Christian Musician Must Be:
More concerned with relationships than musicianship (God, family and church)
Desiring the fruit of the Spirit more than the fruit of one’s artistic labors (Gal. 5:22–24)
Desiring God’s approval more than man’s acclaim
More active in prayer than in trying to get one’s songs recorded[11]
I felt his pain, felt a need to give him back what I had received. “You’re one of the most godly men I’ve ever met, Jake.”
“Always room to improve,” he replied. “Always something else inside I’ve gotta learn to turn over to the Father. Always one more dream, one more ambition, one more hope I’m tryin’ to keep all to myself.”
I kept my eyes
fastened on the paper. “I’ve received a call from Como. The club’s opening back up late next week. And Giorgio Coppa, this singer I’ve been working with, wants to start work on his album in Turin three days from now.”
“And?”
“I don’t know what to do. I feel like I have to go, but I don’t know if I want to.”
“You don’t know if you’re strong enough to hang on to what you’ve found,” Jake corrected.
“That too,” I admitted. “But I promised Alessandro I’d be there when he reopened. And I signed a contract to perform on Coppa’s album.”
“Then you gotta go,” Jake said. “Ain’t no other way. When do you leave?”
“After tomorrow’s performance.”
“Not bad timin’,” Jake said. “Band’s got a three-week break. Shame you won’t be gettin’ any time off. You figure three weeks’ll be enough?”
I shrugged. “How can you be so sure I need to do this?”
“Don’t take it so hard, man. You gotta remember there’s a lesson in everything.” Jake’s words seemed directed more toward himself than to me. “Sometimes you don’t know what it is ’til it’s over, and sometimes it’s only so’s you learn to lean heavy on the Lord’s strength. That’s what you gotta remember while you’re down there, my man. You can’t resist it, but He can. Use this time to learn how to seek Him out.”
“Is it all right if I take some of the songs to work on while I’m gone?”
I regretted saying it as soon as the words were out. A shadow of pain flickered across Jake’s features, a stab that bit deep. He pulled the stone mask back into place, said, “Ain’t no reason why you shouldn’t. Take any you want.”
Mario was just as firm when I told him about it. “We learn a lot of big lessons through the tough times, Gianni. Maybe you oughtta see this as a testing.”
I muttered something about not being so sure I was ready for any such testing just yet.
“You’re ready,” he replied. “If He’s given this to you, it’s for a reason.”
But what happens if I don’t make it, I asked myself, sensing a familiar gut-level hunger at the thought of all that was waiting for me. “That’s easy for you to say.”
“What, you think you’re the only one who gets tempted? You think the Lord’s laid some special burden on poor little Gianni?”
“Take it easy, Mario. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Wise up, Maestro. The world hits us all, every way it can. You gotta learn to stand strong in the Lord, turn from temptation when it beckons. See it for what it really is. You can’t hide behind the band for the rest of your life. If He calls you to go out in the world, then go. Just remember to be in the world, but not of it.”
Two days later I flew from Dusseldorf to Turin. It was the first time I had been on a plane since my return from America as a child. I sat and watched the clouds flow by beneath me and tried to remember that other voyage. So much had happened to that lonely little child. So very much.
Turin—along with Milan, Rome, Naples, and Verona—was a major center for the Italian recording industry. Although I had spent enough time there to know my way around, I had never felt comfortable in Turin. There were too many people, too much dust and noise, too strong a sense of living inside an industrial prison. The people I knew within the Turin recording business wore thick skins and blinders; they carefully filtered everything they saw and heard and experienced.
The city was ringed by hills and filled with the companies that supplied the Fiat fortress. In the dry summer months the air remained still and stagnant, its load of smog and dust growing daily heavier. By early June, when I arrived, streetlights glowed at night with soft silver halos. On the worst days pedestrians hid red-rimmed eyes behind dark glasses. They breathed and sweated through scarves held to their faces, and dreamed of escaping on weekends to the overcrowded beaches along the Italian Riviera.
At night men dominated the city. They gathered in the piazzas and punctuated the dry dusty air with their voices and gestures. They strolled and talked and filled the cafes with their smoke. In the quarters where the Southerners lived, the Nopolitans and the Calebresi and the Pugliese and the Sicilians imported to staff the industrial might of Fiat, the men carried rosaries or worry beads and clicked the baubles in time to their speech.
Few women appeared on the streets after dark, and those who did remained close to their husbands—not necessarily with them, but close. Trios of men walked and talked and smoked and fanned the air with their hands, while their women followed three paces behind, equally involved in their own world of gossip. At night the women did not sling their purses over their shoulders; they grasped them in the hand not needed for speech and pressed them close to their chests. No matter how involved their own discussions might become, one eye was always fixed on the man up ahead.
Giorgio Coppa was operating from a Turin studio because it was the only one available at such short notice. Coppa usually waited for the flame of inspiration to ignite, then moved heaven and earth to record while the emotions were still fresh. The result was a panic-driven effort by all involved to gather at his beck and call. Studio time and recording costs were doubled by his tendency to arrive with half-finished songs, then doubled again by working with studio musicians who, having never heard the songs, practiced in sound rooms costing seven hundred dollars a day. Added to this was Coppa’s love of a good time. The record companies endured him because his albums sold, and sold well.
As usual, I stayed in a small guesthouse on a quiet tree-lined back street. It was four blocks from the noisy chaos of Turin’s Porta Nuova train station and was surrounded by private villas and carefully tended rose gardens. My daily guitar practice was a delight to the old signora who ran the place. She invited me to use her rooftop terrace; for two hours each day I shared the morning with the birds and the awakening city.
Instead of joining Coppa and his band upon arrival, I called from the guesthouse and asked when I was to play. His road manager was clearly pleased to hear from me, but very concerned when I refused to come join the revelry. Come on over and hear the songs, he urged. I would listen to them before I was to play, I responded, very afraid of my own weaknesses. When was I scheduled to be recorded, I asked. There was a long pause on the other end, then the reply, we’ll have to get back to you.
That evening Giorgio Coppa himself came over to talk with me. With him was a young girl who scarcely took her eyes off him long enough to say hello, a young record company executive I did not know, and Ricki, Coppa’s road manager.
“We were worried about you, Maestro,” Coppa told me. His voice was warm, gentle, concerned, like his songs—all soft romance and barely veiled desire.
I held up the sheet of Jake’s lyrics I had been working on when the signora had called me to the door. “I’ve got work to do, that’s all.”
But Coppa wasn’t satisfied. “You know it means a lot to me, to all of us, that you’ve always been a part of our group when we record. Not just some musician off the street in for a few takes, grab the money and ciao ragazzi. That’s not how you’re feeling about it now, is it, Maestro?”
“Not at all.”
“So why don’t you come join us? Bring your work if you like, but come over, spend some time.” His expression was like his voice, all concerned coaxing. “You know I like to have your advice on the songs. We’ve got some nice people over there, good times for everybody.”
Ricki, the road manager, made a circle with thumb and forefinger behind Giorgio’s shoulder and gave me a lewd grin.
Giorgio pressed it home. “Why don’t you come on over, Maestro? We don’t mind you working around there, right, Ricki?”
“Not at all.”
“We just want you around when we need that special input you can give. You can understand that, as much a professional as you are. We can find you a little space where you can get off by yourself and work on your songs all you like.”
“Assolutamente,” the recor
d company representative agreed, the gleam of avarice clear in his eyes. “If Giovanni di Alta is finally doing songs of his own, we want to work with him right from the start.”
I could feel it all closing in, feel the rising tide of desire. Eager forces tugged at me to return. The young girl idly stroking Coppa’s arm looked fantastic. If I didn’t have her I could easily have another, I told myself, and knew it was true. Appetite surged into a gnawing hunger. All those things I had left behind suddenly looked more attractive than anything I had found. In that moment they also looked much more real.
Yet the voice of my heart’s yearnings had gathered strength over the past few weeks. Prayer was there waiting when I resisted the hunger in my body. I said the silent words, and felt stairs rise out of the darkness. I clung to what seemed a feeble strength and prayed for help. I’m falling, Father, I prayed. The words were a gift that came from somewhere beyond my own desire-fuddled brain. All I needed was to hesitate, to listen to the deeper yearning. Help me, Father. Save me from myself.
Coppa leaned forward and patted my shoulder. “You’ve just come in today, isn’t that right? You must be very tired.”
The temptations and the prayer did battle for my allegiance. I managed a nod.
“Why don’t we leave you to rest, and perhaps you’ll come join us tomorrow, yes?” He took my silence for assent and graced me with his smile. “Sleep well, Maestro. We need you and your talents on our side.”
It was not an easy night. I tossed and turned and dozed in fits. There were so many good reasons for giving in to the desire. So many. Toward dawn I made my fifth or sixth trip down the hall to the bathroom, and was halted in my tracks by the sensation of standing at the mouth of a chasm. In the hallway’s gloomy depths I saw the maw open at my feet, wider and wider, while I stood with one foot to either side. I returned to bed, remembering the last time I had sensed such a powerful impression, sitting in Professor Schmitz’s practice room, chaining the music and myself to his inhuman discipline. There was something that needed doing, I realized as I pulled the covers back over me. It was not just that I needed to resist this temptation. I needed to take some definite step.
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