He kept with him, at all times, a laminated page from a Japanese encyclopedia, a gift from a voice teacher he’d met while coaching in Japan years ago. The drawing captured the surfaces of bone within the head, the plates of reverberation and cavities of resonance, and it accentuated a parallelism between structures, a relationship of arches; the interior of the head seemed to have been designed by an inspired architect. “Isn’t it wonderful?” He revealed the drawing to Ryan, shared it like a glimpse of ancient treasure, and shared his theory that Italian was the ideal language for classical singing, because it took such advantage of this internal amphitheater. “I’m obsessed with this picture. I sleep with it. I show it to my nephews and nieces. Isn’t it glorious?”
Ryan found Cowart’s eccentricity soothing. Together they laid a foundation. But Italian was only the beginning of the pronunciation he needed to learn; the grandees he mocked in this aria came from all over the continent. There was a Russian, a Spaniard, a German, a Frenchman, a Pole, and as he poked fun at them, he adopted the quirks of their versions of Italian, with the Russian’s Italian vowels sliding backward and rolling around like marbles in his mouth, with the Spaniard caressing his j’s, with the German employing his lips and tongue like weapons. It was an aria of linguistic slapstick, and by the time Ryan arrived at the festival for rehearsals, he was on the brink of making it a piece of bravura.
During rehearsals, he applied some finishing touches to his enunciations. He added some physical comedy, miming and posing. He devised a dance, a swaying two-step that channeled lots of his father’s comic dazzle and a little of his moonwalking skill. And on opening night, when he performed, the festival audience laughed aloud, with big guffaws here and there in the crowd. They yelled “Bravo!” at the curtain call. Some got carried away, dispensing with opera convention and letting out whoops of appreciation. The Washington Post, in a review by its chief classical music critic, gave him one sentence: “Ryan Speedo Green, who sang Don Profondo with a warm mien and sound, seems fully ready for a big career.”
Brian Zeger—the head of the Lindemann Program, who sometimes envisioned Ryan becoming an artistic “shape-shifter”—traveled down from New York for the third night. He told Ryan afterward that he would arrange for him to sing the aria for Maestro Levine when the program started again in the fall, that Levine would love it.
“I feel like the sky’s the limit,” Ryan said, driving away from the festival grounds, folded into his economy-size rental car.
SIXTEEN
RYAN BOWED HIS head over a plate of eggs, potatoes, and biscuits, and thanked God for the food, as his mother had taught him to do when he was a child. He and I sat in a chain restaurant in Staunton, west of Richmond and almost to the West Virginia border. The restaurant had a rustic theme, with rough beams overhead and old rifles mounted on the walls. In his prayer, he used his customary words, then stopped, shut his eyes more tightly, hunched his shoulders, and said, “Lord, please Lord, help me to help at least one or two of these kids today.”
Months earlier, I had spent some time in and around the facility, and the director had asked if I thought Ryan would be willing to speak to the kids. Despite all his fear about revisiting the past, he was more than willing.
On the afternoon before his breakfast prayer, we had driven toward Staunton on the route he’d taken in the back of the police car, through the forest that clung to the edges of the road. “I had no idea where I was going,” he said. Otherwise he was quiet.
We exited the highway and wound to the top of the knoll and parked in a lot surrounded by a patchy field. There was no one outside on the grounds. A scattering of crows seemed to own the expanse of rough grass and gave out isolated caws to confirm their possession. Below, in the distance, an industrial plant emitted a steady hiss and a percussive clank, but the noises were far-off and faint. Staunton wasn’t a big town, yet it was spread out, and the existence of the center at the top of the hill, the center that had finally shed DeJarnette’s name, felt like it would be easily forgettable.
“Cell Phones Are Not Permitted Past This Point,” read a sign in the waiting area, and another stated, “No Weapons.” Ryan struck up a conversation with the receptionist, mentioning his past, his present. She told him she’d worked on the wards of the old center, the boarded-up pair of mansions with pillars and balconies on the opposite hill, then quit before the new facility was built, quit before Ryan’s time. Turnover among the ward staff had always been high, then and now. She’d returned to this safe position behind plexiglass. “It is so heartwarming to see someone like you,” she said. A heavy door opened, and the director, Jeffrey Aaron, ushered us into the facility.
The plan was that Aaron, who’d been a psychologist at the center for over a decade and had just taken over its leadership, would give Ryan a tour, so he could look around privately, without being the object of everyone’s attention, and then, the next day, Ryan would deliver a presentation to the kids and another to the staff. Aaron was in his late forties; he had a goatee and wore a gray tie and casual gray pants. He led us along an immaculately clean corridor. A harsh cry—crow-like, though louder and more protracted—came from somewhere within the building. He swiped a card and tapped a code and unlocked another heavy door, this one to Ryan’s old unit, and from the moment we proceeded forward, Aaron was no longer Ryan’s guide.
Ryan’s memory of the layout was immediately so precise, and the force of emotional gravity so strong, that he went directly toward one of the two seclusion cells, as though pulled there by a chain. The cell was empty, and he stepped inside. He touched the cinder block.
“The walls weren’t blue,” he said to Aaron.
The director replied that the color had replaced off-white sometime between then and now.
“And there weren’t any of these fish.” Ryan’s tone was flatter than usual, not accusatory but not friendly either. He stared at the few big tropical fish, yellow and red, painted onto the blue.
“No,” Aaron said.
Turning in every direction, Ryan scanned and inspected the surfaces of each wall. “Being here at the center,” he said to Aaron, “it feels like every minute you’re living on glass, and the second you break that glass, you’re in seclusion.” He spread the fingers of both of his large hands over the cinder block, removed them, returned them to the wall, and walked out of the room. He spun and went back inside. “This cell felt like a torture chamber.”
He pressed his fingertips to the blue, dragging them two or three inches, as if searching for something. “The walls don’t feel the same. They weren’t like this. I remember the texture so clearly. They were so much more rough.”
Aaron said that they’d received a lot of repainting, a lot of layers. Ryan wondered to himself about the stains that had been covered over, and I thought about some of the scenes that the director had recounted to me, the kids pounding their heads against these walls and the staff having to decide whether to intervene, maybe just by standing there and holding a pillow between a kid’s head and the wall if the worker didn’t feel too endangered.
Ryan drifted out, reluctant to leave. Another shriek resounded from beyond the unit. His pod of twelve kids was empty. The kids were elsewhere, the unit peaceful for the time being. Somewhere, someone began banging, the noise violent enough to reach us. Ryan walked with purpose, ahead of Aaron, again as though pulled.
“This was my cell.”
Aaron knocked to be sure that no one was inside. The room, it turned out, had no one assigned to it; the shelves and cubbyholes were devoid of belongings. Without pausing, Ryan lay down on the thin mattress and remained on his back, rigid, unmoving.
* * *
The director took us to the gym, where Ryan would give his talk in the morning, and there Ryan met a few teenagers having their recreation time. He tossed a football to a stocky girl in sweatpants, the ball wobbling and falling at her feet, and chatted with two boys. The eyelids of one of the boys sagged, and his posture was vaguely skewed;
he gave off a hint of mental illness. The second boy’s stance and speech suggested nothing abnormal besides a barely contained readiness to erupt. The second boy was probably five eight, with broad shoulders. Ryan had been around this kid’s size when he’d been here. The kid had a short Afro and wore red leather high-tops and blue jeans decorated with a pattern of silver studs. The two boys struck Ryan with a visceral recollection, a memory not new but newly physical. Half of the recollection was that when he was here, he’d been revolted and terrified by the mentally ill, afraid that he might be as sick as they were. The other half of the memory that knifed through his body was that, like the second kid, he’d been a threat to everyone.
Aaron introduced Ryan, saying nothing about his past, only that he would be singing opera and speaking to them tomorrow.
“You a singer?” the second boy asked.
“Yes.”
“I’m a rapper. That’s what I’m going to be.”
“Hey, all right!” Ryan smiled and offered an excess of enthusiasm.
“I’ll check you later,” the teen said, all but sneering, and walked off.
In Aaron’s office, Ryan told the director how badly he wished to have an effect on the kids.
“You will—though they might not thank you right away.”
Ryan and I went for coffee after the visit, and he kept our conversation focused on the rapper: how much he hoped to reach him. “He was the first one I saw when we walked into the gym, the first one my eyes went to. He’s going to be the toughest nut to crack.”
Then the afternoon, the walls he’d touched, the bed he’d lain on, assaulted him. “My brain hurts,” he said. “I better sleep.”
* * *
In the morning, after the prayer and the breakfast, we returned to the top of the knoll, the field of crows. “I’m not going to lie,” he said before we got out of the car. “I’m nervous. Nervous.” He laughed in a way I’d never heard from him before, a choked falsetto. “I don’t want to say the wrong thing, I don’t want to mess up. I want to make an impact. The people who said I was worth something, Mrs. Hughes, Mr. Brown—that’s so rare in this world. I would give anything to be that person for someone.”
Aaron took him straight to the gym so that, before the kids came in, he could run through the two pieces he would sing with the accompanists Aaron had lined up. He’d found them among his staff. One administrator would play the show tune Ryan had chosen to include, and before that, because the administrator had arthritis and couldn’t manage sixteenth notes—apologetically, he lifted and displayed his crippled hand—a part-time music therapist would play “La calunnia.” A keyboard was set up along one sideline, in front of an elevated alcove that Ryan would use as a stage. He asked the pianists gently for three or four adjustments of tempo, and told them both, generously, “That was amazing.”
The kids filed in and sat in rows of plastic chairs. Some were in slippers, some in high-tops, some in T-shirts, some in hoodies.
“This gentleman is named Ryan Speedo Green.” Aaron stood before them, near a short set of steps leading up to the alcove. “And he’s a star. And he flew down here from New York City just to be with you—that’s actually the truth. He sings at the Metropolitan Opera House, which is one of the most important opera houses in the world. Things are going pretty well for him. But they weren’t always going so well, and he decided to come down here to tell you about his journey.”
During Aaron’s speech, one of the younger kids, around ten, perched himself on the railing of the alcove steps, above and behind the director. Intermittently, he spat down on Aaron’s head. The rest of the residents looked on without reacting, as though the spitting was too common and trivial to draw much attention. Ryan was reminded of himself, ungovernable, as a child. The spitter slid away.
“Good morning!” he began. He wore a charcoal-gray suit. “Or, in Italian, it’s ‘Buongiorno.’” Staffers stood at the perimeter of the chairs, their walkie-talkies crackling, but he seemed to be aware of only the kids. He spoke only to them. “You know, I’ve sung in front of thousands of people, but nothing is more nerve-racking to me than coming to sing in front of you guys. It means more to me than you can possibly imagine. So thank you—thank you for letting me sing and talk to you.”
He smiled, seemed to lose his direction, and repeated, “‘Buongiorno.’ Can you say that? ‘Buongiorno.’ Try it. ‘Buon—’”
The staffers must have tensed, wondering if the group would go along with this hokey exercise. He waited in the silence, his smile stiffening into a grimace.
“‘Buon,’” most everyone called out finally.
“‘Giorno.’”
They responded.
“‘Buongiorno.’”
“‘Buongiorno.’”
“Yes! That sounded great! Now you can say ‘Good morning’ in Italian! Okay, how tall do you think I am?”
Back at breakfast, he’d asked for advice about his presentation, and now I wished I’d done more than assure him that the kids would be moved by whatever he was compelled to say. He was flailing, foundering.
“Six five” came the first guess. The game ended with the accurate answer.
“Yes, that’s right.” His eyes skittered this way and that; he was lost again, but collected himself. “I wasn’t always this size, though. I was five seven and one hundred and forty pounds, and I was where you guys are. I was here. Yes. I was here in this facility. I came from a single-parent household, and I lived in the kinds of places maybe some of you come from. My siblings have been in and out of the system. My stepbrother’s in prison right now. Where I lived in high school, the kids around me were selling drugs big-time, and it was scary. I really didn’t feel safe until I left for college. But being here was one of the scariest experiences of my life.
“I felt so alone. I was the kid who fought everyone around me. I was the kid who cursed everyone. Whenever I got upset, I wanted to harm somebody. Somebody needed to feel how angry I was. Everybody needed to feel it. I spent plenty of time in seclusion. And in that cell, you know, at first you’re furious and then it’s all despair. You are so alone. But here’s one thing I remember, here’s one thing about my time here. It’s something I want to tell you. I had a favorite possession. I had a radio that for some reason someone here gave me. I don’t know why they did it, but I’m sure I didn’t deserve it, and I wasn’t any kind of musician. I wasn’t a singer; back then, I didn’t have any idea I could sing. But in my room, I would listen to the songs that were playing that year, and I would mouth every word. I would sing to myself, for myself.”
Abruptly he stopped talking, climbed into tenor range, and crooned a couple of lines from hits of that time. They were songs the kids recognized, and they laughed with pleasure.
“I think that radio helped me start to realize something, even though I didn’t know it till later. And one of the things I want to say to you is to try and find something that matters to you, something you’re interested in. Really try.”
He walked over to a boy whose tattoos covered both of his arms. “Like, maybe you have an interest in art,” he said to the kid. “Maybe you didn’t know this, but ancient cultures used tattoos to describe memories of the past or to put good fortune into the future.” He went on, veering from one tattoo-related topic to another, talking about a famous fashion designer who’d started as a tattoo artist. He attempted to somehow transform all the ink embedded in the kid’s arms into something that would save him.
He stepped over to others in the crowd, naming interests and careers that fit with anything he noticed or sensed about them. One kid could be a sports referee, another could be a social worker. He didn’t see the rapper anywhere. “Okay, enough of my talking,” he said. “Do you know what opera is? When I was your age, I thought opera was a ginormous obnoxious Viking lady with horns and a sword, screaming and breaking windows.” Before he sang, he explained his character and translated some of the words: “Terra…sotto voce…cannone…Now you’re learni
ng more Italian!”
Then he performed from the raised alcove, his makeshift stage. Mid-aria, he hopped down dramatically. But meanwhile, the spitter, who had left the railing earlier, returned and reclaimed his perch. It seemed that Ryan’s size wasn’t going to dissuade him from showering his scalp, until Ryan incorporated him into his act, pivoting and leaning toward the boy and booming into his face. The boy scurried in retreat; Ryan sang to the audience. The kid scampered back up the railing, poised to spit; Ryan turned and bombarded him playfully with his voice.
Finished with the aria, he asked if there were any questions. A teenager in a hoodie put up his hand and demanded, “When are you done?”
“I’ll be done soon, don’t worry. If you want to stroll around, it’s okay. It really is. It won’t bother me.”
He pushed for more questions, answering everything that came his way—“What’s your favorite basketball team?”; “What helped you the most when you got out of here?”—talking at great length and with all sorts of tangents, refusing to relinquish any chance to connect, until Aaron signaled that it was time to wrap up. Ryan sang the show tune, “This Nearly Was Mine,” a ballad from South Pacific, and staffers knuckled away tears. When he was through, he said to the kids what he most needed to say: “I believe in you, I believe in you, I believe in you.” They stood and drifted out of the gym while employees surrounded him, hugged him, thanked him, had their pictures taken with him. The kids passed by, saying nothing.
“It’s such a privilege to meet you guys,” he called out to the backs of their heads as they disappeared. “Thank you for listening to me.”
Sing for Your Life Page 21