Adrianne Geffel

by David Hajdu

  Adrianne

  Geffel

  A Fiction

  DAVID HAJDU

  For Renee Rosnes and Fred Hersch,

  who play with true feeling

  Nothing after this page is true.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  1.Favorite Corners (1959–1968)

  2.Junior Jam (1969–1976)

  3.Models and Muggers (1977–1978)

  4.Psychosynesthesia (1978)

  5.A Geyser on Grand Street (1978–1979)

  6.Chords and Baffling (1979–1981)

  7.Sweet Smells (1982–1984)

  8.The Devil and the Mailman (1984–1985)

  Epilogue

  Discography: The Music of Adrianne Gefffel

  INTRODUCTION

  The Oxford English Dictionary tells us this much:

  gef·fel ´gәf·әl v (1987) geffels, geffelled, geffelling 1 a: to release pure emotion in a work of creative expression, esp. music, with no filter, restraint, or regard for the effect on others: geffel on, geffel through, geffel along. BLURT, EGEST b.: to risk hurting another in order to be true to one’s self 2 a: vi gef·felled to have experienced exposure to unfiltered emotion in an artwork, whether for pleasure or educational purpose, out of perverse impulse, or to win a wager: totally geffelled, geffelled to death. ´gef·fel·ly, ´gef·fel·´esque adj ´gef·fel·´esque·ly adv [Orig. Adrianne Geffel, Am. musician]

  Like most people, I suppose, I knew what the word “geffel” meant before I knew much about the idiosyncratic American pianist and composer whose music inspired the term. My college friend Colleen broke up with her boyfriend for “geffelling” her one too many times. When Colleen and I started dating, in an ill-considered rebound experiment, things collapsed in a squabble over which of the two of us was “only geffelling,” “over-geffelling,” or “not geffelling enough.” At one of the first publications I wrote for, a now-defunct alt-weekly in Boston, The Real Paper, an editor called for sizable revisions in an early piece of mine, scrawling in the margins, “GIMME SOME GEFFEL!” Try as I would, I could never fully satisfy that request. In similitude, as in reality, only one person could deliver what the subject of this book gave the world.

  I had a vague grasp of the fact that a real human being named Adrianne Geffel did something so unique and important that her name had fallen into common usage. There are nods to the woman behind the word in many of the ways people evoke her sensibility. I can hardly imagine an election cycle without political commentators flinging her name in both praise and rebuke, lauding one candidate’s fiery rhetoric as “Geffel-worthy,” and decrying another’s lack of message discipline as “going full Geffel.” A living (or, some suspect, once-living) person with the name Adrianne Geffel peeps through the buzzy crosstalk.

  In time, I began to discover what it was about Adrianne Geffel that led her to enter the lingua franca of American culture. I gave her music a listen and was hit hard by the elemental truth of her work: No one has ever made music like the music of Adrianne Geffel. Put plainly, with no hyperbole, her music is not to be believed.

  How was it possible for any mere human to create work so powerful, so disruptively unshakable? Who was the artist who created such an art? I needed to know and set out to learn all I could about Adrianne Geffel. I found the path to that knowledge a bumpy one.

  At this point in our cultural history, Adrianne Geffel is surely name-checked and referenced more freely than understood deeply. Most of what we think we know about Adrianne Geffel—and much of what we know we think about her, and some of what we know we know—is received knowledge and may be somewhat questionable, based not on the facts of her life and work but, rather, on the many ways Geffel and her music have been portrayed in popular culture, represented and appropriated over the years.

  For instance, how literally should we take Sofia Coppola’s Oscar™-nominated Geyser, a semi-factual, semi-fictional film “inspired by” the life of Adrianne Geffel? It’s obvious that we are meant to see Geffel in the character of pianist/psych patient Darian (no last name mentioned in the film, though we can see in one brief shot in the scene of her rifling through her wallet for money to pay her hypnotist that the surname on her driver’s license is McGuffel). Are we intended then to believe that the real-life Adrianne Geffel, like Darian in the film, administered self-shock treatments with a rewired hair curler?

  In the realm of literature, much the same, Geffel was clearly the model for the pivotal character—a musically gifted alien being from a frozen, dying, Syracuse-like other dimension—in George Saunders’ short story “The Girl with the Headphone Head.” Yet this should hardly be taken as a suggestion that Adrianne Geffel is or was ever an actual alien.

  Images of Adrianne Geffel, enigmatic and inescapable, waft through American culture to remind us of her inescapability as an enigma. The fine-art world paid prominent homage to her when the new Whitney Museum opened with the show “Impulse and Impetus: (Re)Imagining Adrianne Geffel.” In the varied spheres of music, Geffel has been cited as an influence on artists as popular as Cardi B, who paid vivid tribute to her in the number-three pop hit “Bite My Tits”:

  You can bite my tits

  For a nickel

  Make it hurt

  Like Adrianne Geffel

  Through all of this, Adrianne Geffel is simultaneously ever-present and ever-elusive—as an abstraction, ubiquitous, and as a person, the opposite.

  This book is an attempt—dare I say the first attempt I know of, if not the first attempt of my own—to tell the full story of Adrianne Geffel’s life and music. Two previous books have taken up the subject of Geffel from narrower points of view, of course. My Adry: Biran Zervakis Tells the Intimate, Inside Story of His Discovery, Adrianne Geffel by Biran Zervakis as Told to Dominic Palazzo and Isabel Weinstein-Palazzo, out of print since its publication, attracted some attention before it was withdrawn from distribution over charges of plagiarism from the estate of Sidney Sheldon. A somewhat technical study of Geffel’s medical history has also been published as She Heard Music but There Was No Instrument There: How America’s Top Neurologist Changed Adrianne Geffel’s Life by Dr. Emil Vanderlinde. It is of specialized interest but not without value to readers with the necessary scientific training and curiosity about the author.

  My goal in researching and writing this book was to construct as full and evocative a portrait of Adrianne Geffel as possible through the testimony of those who knew Geffel best, knew her fairly well, or knew her somewhat better than that, as well as those who just knew her. I made every effort to find and interview as many firsthand witnesses to Geffel’s life who were still living at the time of my inquiry and willing to speak forthrightly, without bias, and cede the copyright to their comments. All interviews were conducted in person, typically in the interviewees’ homes, assisted-living quarters, or workplaces, at the Panera Bread in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, or alongside my faculty cubicle at Columbia University, over a period of more than nine years, but less than ten, beginning in the summer of 2009. I retained all the interview testimony for use in this book by means of memory or a Tascam DR-05 portable digital audio recorder.

  In duty to the principles of oral history, I strove to trigger memory and facilitate reflection, and sought not to distort through the questions I posed or the manner I have presented the answers in these pages, notwithstanding necessary alterations to avoid reader confusion or legal action. To maintain the appropriate focus on the interview content, I have not included my questions to the interviewees, unless they are necessary for space-filling or comprehension. I edited primarily for sense and grammar, augmenting the recorded interview testimony with my own language and/or ideas only when the interviewees proved disappointing.

  Over the course o
f this work, I have come to admire Adrianne Geffel far more than I did before I learned anything about her. While I never had the good fortune to meet her or see her perform, I feel, through the candor and richness of the lessons those I’ve interviewed have taught me, that I almost know Adrianne Geffel—and not just as a word, a concept, or a historical figure, but as the subject of this book.

  CHAPTER 1

  Favorite Corners

  (1959–1968)

  Carolyn Geffel (mother):

  Before we realized there was something wrong with her, we thought Adry was just the happiest little girl in town. She never cried, not very much at first. She needed for nothing but her bottle when it was feeding time. Both of our children were bottle babies, so you know. Adrianne was born in the year of 1959—on May 19, 1959, to give you the exact date—and our son Donny, for Donald, preceded her by three years, a few months, and I don’t remember how many days, exactly. You’d have to do that arithmetic.

  We gave her the name of Adrianne: A-D-R-I-A-N, plus another N and an E. Her full, official name was—I should say is, because that’s the way I feel on the subject—her name is Adrianne Antoinette Geffel. We just loved the name Adrianne. It has nothing to do with Rocky’s girlfriend or the Anti-Christ. They both came along after we named our Adrianne. I’m not talking about the real Anti-Christ. I don’t know much about that. We’re not very religious. My husband Greg and I just enjoyed the sound of the name: “Adrianne”—you could emphasize the last syllable, if you wanted to, and it would sound a little French. Adri-anne—tre continental. “Bon jour, Adrianne! Como tale vu?”

  I took French in high school, instead of Spanish or German, and I would have continued with the language if I had gone to college, which I had definitely planned to do. I was accepted to Cedar Crest College in Allentown with a partial scholarship for accounting, but that wasn’t in the cards once our first child, Donny, came along and Greg and I fell in love and got married. So it’s “Adrianne,” and most people pronounce it like the boy’s name, Adrian, and that, in fact, is how Adry always pronounced it or pronounces it, probably, to this day.

  I’m sorry my French is so rusty. There’s German on Greg’s side of the family. They call it Pennsylvania Dutch here, but a lot of people know it’s really German. So I’ve picked up some of the German language from Greg’s older aunts and uncles, when we saw them on the holidays and funerals. I have no prejudice against the German people or their language. I just didn’t want to name my daughter Olga, so we named her Adrianne.

  Gregory Geffel (father):

  As my wife Carolyn has stated correctly, both Don and Adrianne were nourished on baby formula in the period of their infancy. We recognized that option as both nutritionally beneficial and more sanitary. Hell, it is a formula. It is developed by scientists of baby nutrition. Also—a secondary consideration for us as parents, we received a good discount on formula, through our business associations with the A&P as the primary propane distributor for the county. The A&P does not merchandise propane on the retail level. However, it utilizes a fair amount of canister fuel in the making of prepared foods, and while that was a fairly new grocery category in that time period, it did call for the use of propane.

  Carolyn Geffel:

  Looking back, now that we know what Greg and I know about Adry and her condition, I do wonder if she might not have been better off on breast milk, rather than the bottle. Something funny could very well have slipped into the formula at the factory. There would be no way for us to know if some foreign something-orother got mixed up with the formula. Some trace amounts of Clorox or VO5 or anything like that could have gotten into one of the baby bottles, and we’d never know.

  Gregory Geffel:

  One thing you need to understand is there’s no such thing as one hundred percent purity. The government even allows for this. Regulators factor this into the regulations. If what you’re buying is liquid propane, and that’s what you’re paying for, the law takes into account that life is not perfect. That tank of what you’re purchasing on the assumption that you’re getting propane might be just ninety-six, ninety-seven percent pure, and that is legally permissible. I don’t understand all the intricacies of baby formula as well as I know household fuel, but I know nothing is a hundred percent.

  Carolyn Geffel:

  Well, our baby Adry was the closest thing to perfect I ever saw, as long as there was no music playing.

  I can still picture her sitting in her playpen. She would stay there for hours and never even look at her toys. I had an adorable stuffed koala bear in a polka-dot dress when I was a girl, and I kept it my whole life to pass on to a girl of my own, when I was lucky enough to have one, and I gave it to Adry. The poor dress had disintegrated by that point, but the little bear survived. I called her Koalie—I guess that may not seem very imaginative, but that was her name. Adry’d be there in her playpen with Koalie, and they would sit there together, perfectly quiet and still, like two pretty little toys. It was so sweet to see. She had baby dolls in precious little baby-doll outfits and stuffies and all the usual rattles and balls and blocks with the letters of the alphabet on them. She wanted for nothing, and that’s all she wanted in the world—nothing.

  Once she started crawling, she would scoot around the floor and find her way to a corner of the room, and sit there for hours. She had her favorite corners, like everyone. She favored the far corner in the living room, down by the door to the bathroom. I could keep an eye on her well enough from where the couch and the chairs were, if I kind of got halfway up from my seat and looked down there. She liked to sit there in her favorite corner and just hum little tunes.

  Donald Geffel (brother):

  There are some pictures in the picture boxes of Adry and me in our room before they made her her own room. Have you seen them? They’re before anything I actually remember. I was only three or four. I know there’s one of me standing on my bed. I’m dressed up in my Zorro P.J.’s and acting like I’m Zorro. I haven’t seen it in a while. We got all the old pictures out when Adry got famous. The writers liked to run photos to show her before she became the well-known Adrianne Geffel. My parents gave me some of the old Kodak snapshots they dug up, but I think they kept that one, and now all that stuff is packed away. My uncle Bobber has a lot of it. It would be fun to dig it out again, now that she’s not around.

  I had a cool toy rifle, and I’m posing with it in that picture, pretending it’s a sword. I was pretty creative like that, although Adry inevitably got more credit in the creativity department. It looked like I was pointing the sword at Adry—it was a rifle, but in my imagination, it was a sword. You could see her there in the picture, I’m pretty sure, sitting in the corner humming one of her little songs. I doubt very much that I was actually pointing at her, really. I don’t recall playing with her very much. She kept to herself, and so, so did I.

  I had to be four or five when they did the construction and moved the propane gear into the garage, or what used to be the garage, and Adry and I got rooms of our own. It was around the time I started kindergarten, because they knew I was going to school and, owing to the fact of Adry’s activities, they wanted to get the propane tanks away from us.

  Gregory Geffel:

  Carolyn had been observing Adrianne’s behavior and growing concerned. The both of us were concerned. Carolyn conjectured the possibility that propane might be leaking from the tanks we kept in inventory in a storage space adjacent to the kids’ bedroom. Consequently, I converted our garage into a storage facility and made the original storage space into a bedroom for Adrianne. From that point forward, we parked the car on the street in front of the house. As you can imagine, that added to my workload in the winter months. Out in our part of Pennsylvania . . . we’re not fifty miles from the Canadian border, one hour from Ohio, driving west on Route 80 and not much longer to Lake Erie and after that, to Canada, going north. There’s no interstate north/south here, so the road time on the state highway is slower.

  Caro
lyn Geffel:

  She positively cooed in tune—little melodies, like nursery rhymes and lullabies, only not any ones we sang to her. She made them up herself in her own head and sang them to herself. I don’t mean singing with words, because she wasn’t really making words yet, and she was making music—sweet little tunes that she would hum to amuse herself.

  [Geffel is asked if all the music her daughter made could be described as “sweet.”]

  Oh, that’s a point to consider, yes. She made all kinds of music, you could say—happy and sad, quiet and sometimes just terribly boisterous—depended on her mood. If she was colicky, she could make some awfully colicky sounds. Fortunately, Adry was mostly a very happy little girl.

  Donald Geffel:

  I was only in kindergarten when I realized for the first time how things were different with Adry as my sister. We were playing Play-Doh. I was very good at Play-Doh. Remember, I told you, I had a distinct creative streak. I was working hard on my project and must have started humming to myself. The teacher said, “Donny, what a pretty tune you’re humming! What song is that?”

  I said, “Oh, that? That’s something my baby sister made up. She sings it to herself.”

  The teacher said, “Well, your sister learned herself a very pretty song.”

  I said, “She didn’t learn it. She made it up. She makes up her own music and sings it to herself all day. It’s kind of annoying.”

  And the teacher said, “You’re very clever, Donny. But it’s not nice to fib. Don’t be a fibber. Good boys don’t fib.”

  I smooshed my Play-Doh into a clump and brought it home from school and told my mother, “Look—I made a present for Adry.”

  Gregory Geffel: