I listened to all this on the elliptical trainer. Walden said he began as a drummer and he still thinks like one. The drummer in him, he said, brings the funk out. “Drumming is so raw. Brutal. Snot. It’s a thing that happens that you can’t get by playing the pretty keyboard. The people who stay popular year after year are funk people who understand rhythm.” Why was that? Because people want to dance. “Even look at a chick like Barbra Streisand, who I adore,” he said. She didn’t have a huge pop hit till she left her Broadway singing style behind and started emphasizing the syncopation: “And we got nothing to be guil—tee—of.” What Walden is always trying for is a hit. “A lot of people don’t talk about that, but I will.” To get a hit, he said, you have to be totally committed. “You have to put your hit hat on.”
Shit, my hit hat! Forget the misery hat, where’s my hit hat? I wanted one. I did a round of the upper-arm machines wanting to write a hit song called “Why Are You Fat?” I have the beginnings of an unpleasant potbelly and I hate it. You’re fat, I wanted to say, because you are a lazy fat fuck. You eat bags of nut snacks that make you fat. You eat peanut butter crackers that make you fat. You sit on your donkey ass smoking Fausto cigars and drinking coffee and eating stale shortbread cookies rather than going outside and mowing the weeds or taking a walk with the dog or eating a carrot and writing a poem. You’re fat because the corn in food is so ridiculously cheap, and you’re too fucking lazy to read the ingredients to see that they’ve put twelve powdered poisons in there. And you’re fat because you’re morally fat. You haven’t taken time to figure out what’s right. You don’t do enough for other people. You failed to have a child.
But at least you’re not fat from taking antidepressants. Roz did a powerful show on weight gain and antidepressants. People start taking Zoloft or Paxil and they blimp out—they put on forty pounds of belly fat immediately. Plus they lose their joy in sex, and they’re addicted to the pills, and if they try to go off them because they don’t like being fat and want to have a few solid orgasms, they experience awful neural symptoms called “brain zaps” or “brain shivers.” Ugh.
Was there a hit song there? “Brain shivers, I’ve got the chills. Brain shivers, can’t get off the pills.” Possibly, with the right bassline.
• • •
I WENT OUT to the parking lot and discovered that I’d locked my keys in the Kia. I could see them dangling below the steering wheel. That’s the second time this year that I’ve locked myself out of my car, plus three dead-battery jumps. It’s pure absentmindedness, fat-headedness, and there’s no excuse for it. I called AAA and told the woman my problem. She said, “I can help you with that.” However, because I’d used up all my free service calls it would cost me forty dollars. I said I understood. She said the truck would be there in half an hour. Triple A works just the way real insurance should work, pooling many payers to help out unfortunate fools like me with their infrequent crises. Health insurance can’t work like that, because, as Prince said, we’re all going to die. Health insurance is doomed, because everyone is doomed and everyone can’t pay for everyone’s needless colonoscopy and preventive polyp removal. This and Obama’s wars may bring down the government. If a collapse comes, followed by hyperinflation, we’ll suffer and get thin and there won’t be so many academic departments of creative writing. Please just ignore this tiresome politicizing.
I went back inside. It happened to be bagel morning at Planet Fitness, and the bagels were going fast. I love onion bagels, and everything bagels, even though it hurts my jaw to chew them. They help me think, and I was famished. I toasted an everything bagel after hacking it apart with a plastic knife, and while I was waiting for it to brown I listened to Whitney Houston sing “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” I carved out a generous wodge of cream cheese and spread it around and went outside to lean against my trunk. I chewed and listened with awe and an odd kind of patriotism to Whitney’s Super Bowl performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” while I admired the unusual Portsmouth mist. The best everything bagels come frozen from New York City, but these were quite good. What makes an everything bagel great, even better than a cigar, is the almost burned bits of onion. The crunchy, sweet, bitter bits of tiny onion asteroids taste beyond-words good. They help a lot if you’ve drunk too much Yukon Jack the night before, but I’m finding that they help even if you haven’t. I haven’t had anything to drink in more than a month and I feel great. Caramelization is the great achievement of cooking.
I sent a text to Roz. “Just hoping you’re feeling okay—also sad news, Nan’s mother (next-door neighbor Nan) died.” Nan and Roz hadn’t been close friends, but they liked each other.
The Triple A man arrived at 7:51. The radio was going in his truck before he shut off the motor. He used a technique I hadn’t seen before. With a rubber bulb he inflated the gap between the door and the car and then he angled a long metal tool in. But instead of trying to get a purchase on the clicker’s indentation to pry it upward, he reached farther. I thought he was going to try to open the door by pulling on the door handle, and I said, “I’m afraid this isn’t a car that unlocks automatically when you pull the inside handle.”
“I’m going to unroll the window,” he said drily.
“That’s brilliant,” I said. I looked in through the window on the other side and watched the clawed chicken foot of his metal tool pushing and pulling the window handle around. It took him a long time, but eventually he got the window open enough to get his arm in, and then he pulled on the lock and opened the door.
“Fantastic,” I said.
He tapped his head. “You’ve got to keep thinking.”
He was a young kid with a beard, retro-hippie-ish but with an official AAA shirt on, recently graduated from the University of New Hampshire. I flipped open my wallet and gave him a twenty from the back of my stash, where the twenties usually hide. I couldn’t afford it, but it’s important to give credit where credit is due.
“What kind of songs do you listen to when you’re driving?” I asked.
“The Cowboy Junkies,” he said. “They’ve got a song called ‘Common Disaster.’ Also I like Ben Taylor. He’s the son of James Taylor and Carly Simon.”
“Thanks for telling me.”
I scribbled “Common Disaster” and “Ben Taylor” on my folded-up piece of paper. Then I wrote “everything bagel” and “You’ve got to keep thinking”—maybe they could be songs.
Twenty-six
MY JAW ACHES, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense. The cigar smoking is not good for it. It’s not the jaw it once was, and I’ll tell you what happened. In freshman year of high school, when I played basketball, I knew this kid named Ronnie who was a master dribbler. He had many tricky dribbles, but there was a certain move that worked every time—a low double-bounce feint, performed inches above the floor, that threw you off when you were trying to block his shot. I admired him very much even before we played basketball together, because of how well he drummed on his algebra textbook.
And the interesting thing about him, which I found out in gym class, was that he was missing a pectoral muscle. I don’t know if he’d been born without it, or if he’d had it removed, but it wasn’t there. He could drum in patterns I’d never heard before, and he could turn in the air and make a basket from half a mile away, and he did all this with only one pectoral muscle. Once he said, matter-of-factly, “Black people are just better than white people. They’re better at all sports, they sing better, they climb the rope higher, they run the hurdles faster, they win at the Olympics. They’re just better at everything.” And I thought, He’s absolutely right about that. Even so, I wanted to learn how to do his double-bounce trick.
I watched his moves carefully at practice, and then I went off to a far corner of the gym to try the double dribble. I thought I had it, or a close approximation of it, but a few days later, when I tried it in a game, I did something wrong. I bent low, feinted, double-d
ribbled, and the basketball came up fast and hit me in the jaw. I felt something go pop. It was extremely painful. Tears obscured my vision. Somebody grabbed the ball and I backed away from the action to recover. The pain was all over the right side of my head.
It didn’t go away. At inter-high band practice on Saturday morning we were playing a piece by Vincent Persichetti and an arrangement of Santana’s “Black Magic Woman.” My jaw hurt too much to play, but I pretended by frowning and putting my lips loosely on the reed. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t making any sound—the bassoon part was doubled by the bass clarinets and the baritone saxes. At Youth Orchestra on Sunday we spent an hour on The Pines of Rome, by Respighi, and I faked playing there, too, saving myself for the exposed passage near the beginning of Afternoon of a Faun. I had trouble eating a Ry-Krisp when I got home. I gave my jaw two days of rest, but then I had to practice a Milde étude for my lesson on Thursday.
I found out that the only way I could play the bassoon with a bearable level of pain was with my jaw positioned in a slight state of dislocation. Every day I popped my jaw gently out of alignment and practiced. I didn’t tell my teacher, Bill, for a few months, and the pain gradually diminished. But there was something clearly not right in what I was doing. When I finally told him about the basketball incident, he laughed a sad, kindly laugh. “I guess that’s dedication,” he said. He had a flaxen-haired girlfriend who was also a flutist. I had kind of a crush on her. I think Billy knew. They played the Villa-Lobos “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 6” together—a winsome, wide-wandering duet for flute and bassoon. Once the two of them taught me how to smoke a joint. It did nothing for me.
And that’s how I wrecked my jaw.
• • •
I’VE BEEN WORKING on a love song that goes, “I want to go to the beach, I want to take the dog off the leash, I want to stare out to the east, I want to see a new shade of blue, I want to smell the seaweed with you.” The first melody I tried was too close to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” so I rethought it. At one point I stopped singing and said, with amazement, “I’m actually writing a frigging love song.”
I wish I could sing “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5” for you. It’s the famous one. “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 6” is for flute and bassoon, and only bassoonists and flutists know about it, but “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5” was an international hit. Heitor Villa-Lobos put on his hit hat that week and produced a masterpiece that everyone should listen to when they are seeking comfort.
Just saying the composer’s name is a musical experience. You need that sh in there: Villa-Lobosh. He was a prolific composer from where—Buenos Aires? Somewhere like that. São Paulo? Oh, Bachianas Brasileiras, right. He was a Brazilian composer. In nine separate short pieces, he took the example of Bach and gave it his own Brazilian bean-salad sexual curvature. And for No. 5, he used eight cellos—I think it’s eight, or twelve, or fifteen, an incredible number of cellos—and one human voice.
You can think of Villa-Lobos sitting there thinking, No, I’m not going to have one cello, or two, or three, I’m going to have a whole lot of cellos. All played by beautiful dark-haired women in loose flowing skirts. And they’ll all be doing pizzicato, plucking their long strings with their heads cocked to one side, bung bung bung bung bung bung bung bung bung bung bung bung bung bung—a pizzicato obbligato. Obliged to pluck. Pluck on, beautiful cello women! And then coming in over the mandatory pluckage is a melodic line that’s like Bach but it’s been run through the South American flan factory, sung by a singer named Victoria de los Angeles. My father had her record. She’s some kind of full-chested contralto, or maybe she’s a soprano, and she can belt it out. She goes, “Laaaaaaaaaah, daaaah daaaah daah daah dah dah daaaaaaaaah!”
Well, I can’t get that high. Anyway, she sings like a mad tropical bird, and it’s just a fondue of molten wanting and grieving and everything that you wish you could remember and feel and know. “Noh ooh, doo dooodoo dooooo deedoodie dooooooooooo! Dooooooo dah deee da doodie dooooooh!”
Sorry. I don’t even come close. But today I looked up Victoria de los Angeles on iTunes and listened to her sing the Bachianas again, for the first time since I sold my bassoon. It’s an old recording, all mono. I heard the same hiss, the same cellos. I could see my dear father standing between the Bose speakers, listening and moving his arms. All those cello players are dead and gone now, probably. And my father is gone, and Victoria de los Angeles is gone, and Heitor Villa-Lobos is gone now, too. He died when I was two. He wrote too much and most of his compositions are forgotten. But he did dream up this big, bad moonload of greatness for a loving voice and a bunch of cellos. When Victoria of the Angels started singing, I just lost it. It’s spontaneous. It’s the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, is what it is. All carefully written down as notes.
• • •
I ANSWERED THE PHONE. “Hi,” said Roz.
“Hi! Just a sec, let me turn this down.” I was listening to “You Dropped a Bomb on Me” at high volume. “How are you making out?”
“Well, so I’m having it done tomorrow.”
“You’re kidding. That’s so soon.”
“I know. They had an opening at the hospital and the doctor says one of my ovaries is at risk, and I kind of like my ovaries.”
“Me, too.”
“So, it’s tomorrow.”
“Can I be there—or—”
“Lucy’s driving to the hospital with me, and Harris says he’s going to try to be there as well—so it might be difficult.”
“Oh. Hm. Well, what are you doing right now?”
“Nothing,” Roz said. “I’m not supposed to eat anything, so I’m just sitting here staring at a tub of sesame seeds.”
“That doesn’t sound like much fun.”
“No, and the idea of them feeling around in my innards tomorrow disgusts me. Those gloved groping hands, ugh. I hate surgery.”
“Should I come over and fluff you up?”
“I’m in my pajamas and I’m not going to be much fun. On the other hand, tomorrow’s really impossible, and I don’t want you to think that you’re not part of it, because you are. You really are.”
“Then why don’t I drive over and see you right now? We can watch a movie. I rented the Talking Heads movie, Stop Making Sense. I’ve never seen it. I don’t believe you’ve seen it, have you?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Well then, what do you think? We can have a pre-op viewing of the Talking Heads. I think they wear enormous suits with huge shoulders. It’s directed by Jonathan Demme. It’s supposed to be good. We can watch people in huge business suits singing ‘Take Me to the River’ and forget about our troubles.”
Roz chuckled. “That sounds kind of good. Bring your pajamas and we can have a pajama party. And can you bring the dear dog?”
“He’d love to see you.”
“Good, then come over.”
Twenty-seven
I SHOWERED OFF the day’s cigar smell and found a fairly clean pair of pajama bottoms, and Smacko and I drove at a good clip to Roz’s condo in Concord, which is easy to spot because on the steps up to her door are many small mossy pots. Roz offered both of us seats on the couch—idly I tweaked the piping on the armrest while she smelled the dog’s paws, as she liked to do. She was wearing a light bathrobe and pajamas and fluffy slippers. She asked me how my music was going.
“Going fine, going well,” I said.
“Can I hear some songs?”
“I’m still fiddling with them. I put some marimba trills in one of the songs. It’s for you. Actually, several of them are for you. I’ll burn you a CD when they’re done.”
“Marimba trills. How nice.”
Roz had popped some popcorn, but she said she couldn’t have any. Then she relented. “Oh, heck, I’ll have two pieces. They won’t kill me, and I’m starving.” She crunched defiantly.
> We started the DVD. It was a concert movie and David Byrne looked completely insane. He had no stage patter. He began singing “Psycho Killer” on a bare stage, with his guitar and a drum loop. I didn’t like it much. I glanced at Roz. She looked doubtful.
“Hm,” I said, “shall we skip ahead?”
“Maybe.”
We skipped through several songs. “Slippery People” was a bit of a disappointment—more of the musicians were on the stage, including two backup singers who helped a lot, but it didn’t sound as good as the recorded version, with Tina Weymouth playing her clean thumpity-funk bass. There wasn’t much humanity in what David Byrne was doing. It was all too arty, too knowingly ironic. Maybe at a different time I would have liked it, but it definitely wasn’t the sort of thing to watch if you were with a person who was having a hysterectomy the next morning.
“I really don’t know what to say,” I said. “Let me see if I can find ‘Take Me to the River.’”
“Okay.”
I skipped to the end, where they all did an extended version of “Take Me to the River.” It was good. They were sweating now, and the beat was phenomenal, and a percussionist named Steve Scales was malleting away on an array of gourds, and the audience helped them with the chorus. I looked over at Roz, who was rocking, to my immense relief. The Talking Heads had come alive, and it was pure river-bathing genius. Even David Byrne was smiling, finally.
When it was over the audience went wild and the Talking Heads did an encore, which we fast-forwarded through. The stage crew, in black, filed across the stage, and he thanked them. The credits came on. Fifteen minutes had elapsed for Roz and me.
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