by Meghan Daum
During the years that I was a member of the New Jersey All State Orchestra I would carpool to rehearsals with the four or so other kids from my town who made All State every year. This involved spending as much as two hours each way in station wagons driven by people’s parents and, inevitably, the issue would arise of what music would be played in the car. Among the most talented musicians in school was a freshman who, in addition to being hired by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at age twenty-two, possessed, as a fifteen-year-old, a ripe enthusiasm for the singer Amy Grant. This was back in the mid-1980s when Amy Grant’s hits were still relegated to the Christian charts. Our flute-plaing carpool-mate loved Amy Grant. Next to Prokofiev and the Hindemith Flute Sonata, Amy Grant occupied the number-one spot in this girl’s studious, late-blooming heart. Since her mother, like many parents of Baggers, was devoted solely to her daughter’s musical and academic career, she did most of the driving to these boony spots—Upper Chatham High School, Monmouth Regional, Long Branch Middle School. Mile after New Jersey Turnpike mile, we were serenaded by the wholesome synthesizers of songs like “Saved By Love” and “Wait for the Healing,” only to spill out of the car and take no small relief in the sound of twenty-five of New Jersey’s best student violinists playing “Eleanor Rigby” before the six-hour rehearsal.
To participate in a six-hour rehearsal of the New Jersey All State Band or Orchestra is to enter a world so permeated by Music Is My Bagdom that it becomes possible to confuse the subculture with an entire species, as if Baggers, like lobsters or ferns, require special conditions in order to thrive. Their ecosystem is the auditorium and the adjacent band room, any space that makes use of risers. To eat lunch and dinner in these venues is to see the accessories of Badgom tumble from purses, knapsacks, and totes; here more than anyplace are the real McCoys, actual Music Is My Bag bags, canvas satchels filled with stereo Walkmen and A.P. math homework and Trapper Keeper notebooks featuring the piano-playing Schroeder from the Peanuts comic strip. The dinner break is when I would embark on oboe maintenance, putting the reed in water, swabbing the instrument dry, removing the wads of wax that, during my orthodontic years, I placed over my front teeth to keep the inside of my mouth from bleeding. Just as I had hated the entropy of recess back in my grade-school years, I loathed the dinner breaks at All State rehearsals. To maximize rehearsal time, the wind section often ate separately from the strings, which left me alone with the band types. They’d wolf down their sandwiches and commence with their jam session, a cacophonous white noise of scales, finger exercises, and memorized excerpts from their hometown marching band numbers. During these dinner breaks I’d generally hang with the other oboist. For some reason, this was almost always a tall girl who wore sneakers with corduroy pants and a turtleneck with nothing over it. This is fairly typical Music Is My Bag garb, though oboists have a particular spin on it, a spin characterized more than anything by lack of spin. Given the absence in most classical musicians of a style gene, this is probably a good thing. Oboists don’t accessorize. They don’t wear buttons on their jackets that say “Oboe Power” or “Who Are You Going to Tune To?”
There’s high-end Bagdom and low-end Bagdom, with a lot of room in between. Despite my parents’ paramilitary practice regimes, I have to give them credit for being fairly high-end Baggers. There were no piano-key scarves in our house, no “World’s Greatest Trombonist” figurines, no plastic tumblers left over from my father’s days as director of the Stanford University Marching Band. Such accessories are the mandate of the lowest tier of Music Is My Bag, a stratum whose mascot is P.D.Q. Bach, whose theme song is “Piano Man,” and whose regional representative is the kid in high school who plays not only the trumpet but the piano, saxophone, flute, string bass, accordion, and wood block. This kid, considered a wunderkind by his parents and the rest of the band community, plays none of these instruments well, but the fact that he knows so many different sets of fingerings, the fact that he has the potential to earn some college money by performing as a one-man band at the annual state teacher’s conference, makes him a hometown hero. He may not be a football player. He may not even gain access to the Ivy League. But in the realm of Music Is My Bag, the kid who plays every instrument, particularly when he can play Billy Joel songs on every instrument, is the Alpha Male.
The flip side of the one-man-band kid are those Music Is My Baggers who are not musicians at all. These are the kids who twirl flags or rifles in the marching band, kids who blast music in their rooms and play not air guitar but air keyboards, their hands fluttering out in front of them, the hand positions not nearly as important as the attendant head motions. This is the essence of Bagdom. It is to take greater pleasure in the reverb than the melody, to love the lunch break more than the rehearsal, the rehearsal more than the performance, the clarinet case more than the clarinet. It is to think nothing of sending away for the deluxe packet of limited-edition memorabilia that is being sold for the low, low price of one’s entire personality. It is to let the trinkets do the talking.
I was twenty-one when I stopped playing the oboe. I wish I could come up with a big, dramatic reason why. I wish I could say that I sustained some kind of injury that prevented me from playing (it’s hard to imagine what kind of injury could sideline an oboist—a lip strain? Carpal tunnel?) or that I was forced to sell my oboe in order to help a family member in crisis or, better yet, that I suffered a violent attack in which my oboe was used as a weapon against me before being stolen and melted down for artillery. But the truth, I’m ashamed to say, has more to do with what in college I considered to be an exceptionally long walk from my dormitory to the music building, and the fact that I was wrapped up in a lot of stuff that, from my perspective at the time, precluded the nailing of Rachmaninoff licks. Without the prodding of my parents or the structure of a state-run music education program, my oboe career had to run on self-motivation alone—not an abundant resource—and when my senior year started I neither registered for private lessons nor signed up for the orchestra, dodging countless calls from the director imploring me to reassume my chair.
Since then, I haven’t set foot in a rehearsal room, put together a folding music stand, fussed with a reed, marked up music, practiced scales, tuned an orchestra or performed any of the countless activities that had dominated my existence up until that point. There are moments every now and then when I’ll hear the oboe-dominated tenth movement of the Bach Mass in B Minor or the berceuse section of Stravinsky’s Firebird and long to find a workable reed and pick up the instrument again. But then I imagine how terrible I’ll sound after eight dormant years and put the whole idea out of my mind before I start to feel sad about it. I can still smell the musty odor of the inside of my oboe case, the old-ladyish whiff of the velvet lining and the tubes of cork grease and the damp fabric of the key pads. Unlike the computer on which I now work, my oboe had the sense of being an ancient thing. Brittle and creaky, it was vulnerable when handled by strangers. It needed to be packed up tight, dried out in just the right places, kept away from the heat and the cold and from anyone stupid enough to confuse it with a clarinet.
What I really miss about the oboe is having my hands on it. I could come at that instrument from any direction or any angle and know every indentation on every key, every spot that leaked air, every nick on every square inch of wood. When enough years go by, the corporeal qualities of an instrument become as familiar to its player as, I imagine, those of a long-standing lover. Knowing precisely how the weight of the oboe was distributed between my right thumb and left wrist, knowing, above all, that the weight would feel the same way every time, every day, for every year that I played, was a feeling akin to having ten years of knowledge about the curve of someone’s back. Since I stopped playing the oboe, I haven’t had the privilege of that kind of familiarity. That’s not an exaggeration, merely a moot point.
VARIATIONS ON GRIEF
Several years ago, my oldest friend died, presenting me with an occasion not to be sad, not to cry, not
to tell people and have them not know how to respond. Several years ago, I decided to create an ironic occurrence rather than a tragedy, a cautionary tale rather than the wretched injustice it really was. This is a neat trick, this business of utter detachment from everything less than great that goes on, this position of being perched on a cartoon drawing of a crescent moon, looking down at all the lonely people, all the stupid ones with their souls so foolishly close to the linings of their coats.
What my friend did was catch a virus from the air. This is true. This is, in fact, the only aspect of the event that remains unequivocal. I now suspect it was hantavirus—the strain that is passed along from even the most remote contact with rodents—but there was never any concrete evidence of this. Like a tuft of dandelion seed, this virus wafted into Brian Peterson’s body as he walked down the street or sat by a window or perhaps even slept in the bed he’d purchased from Jensen-Lewis, the bed with the Ralph Lauren sheets for which he’d fastidiously shopped at Bloomingdales—“fabric for living.” Except that he died. All but dropped dead. Unlike an encounter with a dandelion seed, contact with such a virus is a one-in-eight-million chance. Four to six people each year die of this. One stands in greater risk of being abducted by a celebrated criminal, or of being visited by the Publisher’s Clearing House Prize Patrol, or of standing on the precise acre of land where a jetliner falls after the failure of a hydraulics system. This is the sort of chance that, upon impact, transcends itself and becomes something closer to fate.
Brian is someone who accomplished nothing in his life other than his death. This is an ugly admission, a brutal interpretation of facts I have not been able to process any other way. He died at twenty-two. Very few people came to his funeral. There were only a handful of friends to call, vague acquaintances who had faded into the murk of adulthood, who had disappeared down roads of maturity that always appeared to Brian as hazy and not worth the trip. His life had been a string of failures: an unremarkable education in suburban public schools, an abandoned college career, a less than half-hearted attempt to become a writer. He was an only child, spoiled by parents who had no friends and furnished him with an expensive car and expensive clothes that he drove and wore no particular place. His audience was himself, a reflexive relationship that resulted in unbearably empty spaces for both parties. This was a life bereft of even tragedy, until he finally fixed that. He let death come to him—although that, of course, is a matter of interpretation, as is every component of the existence and lack of existence of Brian Peterson.
I liked Brian because he liked me, because he laughed at my jokes, let me drive his car, and complimented my appearance even when I’d done something atrocious to my hair. I liked him because he didn’t hold me in contempt for refusing to reciprocate the romantic aspects of his affection for me. He let me talk about other men. He let me watch whatever I wanted on his TV, even if it was National Geographic specials about the spotted leopard of Ghana. I liked Brian because he had nothing to do with the passage of time. He was immune to maturity, resistant to forward motion. He existed the way childhood homes are supposed to and never do, as a foundation that never shifts, a household that never gets new wallpaper, or turns your bedroom into a study, or is sold in exchange for a condo in Florida.
When he left this planet, he left me and very few others, and if those Christian alternatives to life really exist, then he must know by now that we will never be reunited. If those opposable H’s are true, then he is in Heaven for never committing any crime, and I’ll find myself in Hell one day for the spin that I have put on his death. My spin is this: I believe that he couldn’t do anything other than die. None of us who grew up with him could imagine an alternative. And the fact that he didn’t officially kill himself was enough to make all of us believe in the supernatural, or at least some kind of devilish warden hovering over our lives, whispering in our waxy ears, “Do something, or die.”
Some specifics: Over the New Year’s weekend of 1993, Brian came down with the flu. He called in some antibiotics and took a few. Then he left the cigarettes on the kitchen table, lay down in bed, and never got up. Also on the table was the December 22 edition of the New York Post, the January issue of Esquire, and a copy of TV Guide already cracked at the spine. He was a person who planned his television watching as if the programs were activities written in a Filofax, as if they were the contents of his life, which they, in fact, were. They were standing appointments, not even penciled in.
On January 4, Brian’s mother called me. I was eating a bagel. I answered on the third ring; somehow I remember this. She told me he was in the hospital, that he had lain in bed in his apartment for six days until she and his father had come in from New Jersey to see what was wrong. She said something about shallow breathing. There were some words to the effect of calling a private ambulance service, of Brian being too weak to move from his bedroom to the elevator, then the intensive care unit, some diagnosis of atypical pneumonia, some negative HIV test, some reversal of the pneumonia diagnosis, some rapid deterioration of lung tissue, doctors “in a quandary,” relatives flying up from Florida. Apparently there was a priest involved; things were that bad. Brian’s mother spoke in simple, even words. I debated in my mind whether I should call her Mrs. Peterson or Jan, her first name. If I called her Mrs. Peterson, as I probably had in the past, would that mean that things were normal, that I was acting “normal” about it? She told me not to come to the hospital, that Brian didn’t want people to see him as he looked very bad. I wrote a card and sent it by messenger from my office the next day. I had one of those jobs which allowed for such things. I worked at a magazine about beauty. I had an office and a computer and a phone with many lines. I had swank health insurance, a gym membership, all the things Brian never got around to acquiring because he never got off the frozen plateau I’d long considered to be nothing more than his pathetic ass.
This is about death. Although for Brian, death seemed to be there from the beginning. It seemed to have settled, seed-like, into his pores from the time he was small. For Brian, there was something about life that he just couldn’t do. And what was amazing was the unusual way in which he chose not to do it. Nothing about him was morbid. His world was clean and high in quality. He took hour-long showers. He wore Armani jackets. He drove his very expensive car to New Orleans for the hell of it. He dropped out of two colleges because he wasn’t enjoying them. He refused to get a job because he didn’t want one. His parents paid his rent on a huge apartment in SoHo, which he decorated with the obvious accessories of one who sees life through fashion magazines and Williams-Sonoma catalogs. On the walls, he had the Ansel Adams photograph, the Van Gogh print. Brian was the owner of six separate remote controls. There was the television, the VCR, the cassette player, the compact disc player, the other cassette player, the cable box. As with his magazines, he often spread the remote controls out into a fan-like shape on the chrome coffee table. He dusted and vacuumed every day. He talked about his life as being “very good.”
Brian was a firm believer in not spending time doing anything that wasn’t enjoyable. The result is that he did very little; there was never much to enjoy. I say this as a person who only really knew him from the beginning of adolescence to the end of it, a time when pleasure comes in tiny spurts, when happiness presents itself in bursts at the ends of long, painful confusion. He had absolutely no concept of work, of the notion of reward following sacrifice, of dark preceding dawn and all of that. It seems unlikely that he really ever knew how to study, that he understood what it meant to make a phone call in order to find a job or make a professional connection or even arrange for anything other than Chinese food delivery or a haircut, the latter of which he obtained at Bergdorf Goodman’s for eighty-five dollars. I have never in my life witnessed a person like Brian, a person who never witnessed life. I have never in my life allowed a person to cater to my whims the way he did, believing, as he did, that I had a life, albeit a cheap and filthy life, full of low-paying jobs, too mu
ch homework, and a college dorm room that smelled—as he declared the one time he visited—like “urine.” Maybe this is what I liked about him, that he could so easily turn me into a working-class heroine, that even in my saddest moments of friendlessness and directionlessness, I had ten times the life that he had. And I never even had to feel guilty; he still thought his life was great, an empty space of leisure and blank pleasure that I too could obtain if I had fewer of what he termed “hang-ups.”
This is about death and it is about blame. I blame Brian’s parents for everything. The thing I say to no one is that they killed him. By paying his rent, by not making him study trigonometry or stay in college, by not saying no to the car or the apartment, or the gas money for solitary trips to nowhere, or the racks and racks of Paul Stewart shirts, Howard and Jan Peterson caused the death of their son.