Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker

by Finder, Henry

  Now they try to be surer about music, but they are still mercurial from day to day. “I just can’t stand to listen to classical quartets when they aren’t played on original instruments,” they will declare. Then the next day someone will give them a reissue of a Hungarian quartet playing Schumann, recorded in 1956, and that will become their new favorite. They try to console themselves by producing their own tapes, alternating selections from the record collections that they have been assembling since they were twelve with tracks from the new compact-disk reissues. These juxtapositions, they feel, illustrate important musical points. They place gut-string performances of the Haydn string quartets alongside the Quartetto Italiano’s performance of the same material, movement by movement. Or they produce scholarly tapes of popular music for their friends. “The Birth of Heavy Metal,” for instance—a compilation that pairs American Delta and Chicago Blues material with its English-working-class interpretations. The selections are written out in thin felt pen on the white, ruled cardboard insert of the tape boxes: Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads Blues” (1936), and then Cream’s “Crossroads” (live, 1968); Howlin’ Wolf’s “The Red Rooster” (1961), and then the Stones’ “Little Red Rooster” (1965).

  THE musical husbands are nothing like their best friends, the married musicians. The married musicians once really were musicians. They played in bluegrass bands around Cape Cod one summer, or had two years at Juilliard, or wrote satirical songs for the college revue. They are casual about recorded music; often they still use the record-player they had back then or else they actually own a boom box—a ghetto blaster like the kids in the park have—and take it with them to the office, on vacation, or out to the country. They keep beautiful instruments in their apartments—handmade f-hole guitars, or Bechstein baby grands.

  The musical husbands are also different from the High End Enthusiasts, with their “reference” records of the twenty-four hours of Le Mans and their speakers shaped like airplane wings; from the Serious Listeners, with their bookshelves full of early-twentieth-century recordings from La Scala; from the Focussed Collectors, with their six versions of “Show Boat”; from the Music Lovers, who are lusty rather than furtive in their musicality, and are full of musical gusto and musical wisecracks (“You call that bel canto? I call it can-belt-o!”); from the Musical Bachelors, who have Sony components and actually buy Harry Connick records; and from their own, moderately musical children, who sit in the middle of the living room, listening to Billy Joel on the Walkman, the music passing right through them, like juice.

  Above all, the musical husbands are different from their musical fathers. The musical fathers never thought much about sound, for they still had musical worlds to conquer. There was so much unheard music left for them to discover. The musical fathers subscribed to the Musical Heritage Society, and every month received a single white album with blue lettering, no pictures or liner notes; each presented a new Baroque composer, a “discovery”—Telemann and C. P. E. Bach and Vivaldi, back when Vivaldi was still something. They were in revolt against Romantic music and planted their flag on two fronts at once, moving into sixteenth-century Italy and early-twentieth-century Vienna simultaneously: they heard the first “authentic” recordings of Palestrina with the same pleasure they had taken in hearing the dissonances of Webern. They took their music seriously, were prepared to banish Tchaikovsky or canonize Gesualdo. The musical fathers loved boxed sets of records—the heft of them, their impressive taped bindings—and when their sons reached their early teens, they would give them boxed sets at Christmas. To have something in a boxed set (the symphonies of Beethoven; the motets of Schütz; Bach’s St. Matthew Passion) was to possess it—to have turned the waves of musical history into an object as solid as a doorstop.

  Not that the musical fathers were musical snobs. They loved Jimmy Durante singing “Inka Dinka Doo,” for instance, or the lyrics to the Peggy Lee hit “Mañana”: “Oh, the window she is broken, and the rain is coming in,” they would sing to their sons, with comic bravura. The musical fathers took positions and held them. They had the same seats at the symphony every Saturday night for twenty years, and then went to chamber-music concerts the next afternoon. Old soldiers in the musical wars, they recounted musical adventures to their sons. “When I saw how Toscanini had the Philadelphia horns laid out, I knew that we were in for trouble,” they said. Yet many of their musical adventures seemed filled with gaiety. Sometimes, they would recall, they could get silly at concerts, listening to the Chopin “Funeral March” played too slow, for example, and then laughing so much that the ushers threw them out of the hall.

  When the musical husbands think about their musical fathers, what they hear is not music but a rustle, as a father slips his record out of the paper-and-plastic inner wrapper; his decisive little pant as he blows the dust from the needle; the click of the record being placed on the record changer; the dull plop as it falls (a thrilling but oddly sinister sound, like a trapdoor being dropped open on a scaffold), and then the pause as the needle works its way across the first smooth, uninscribed eighth inch of vinyl; and finally—in the almost indescribably brief and exciting fraction of a second before the music actually begins—the hiss and pop of surface noise that precedes the orchestra, the sound of musical dust.

  The musical husbands have come to believe that it was these sounds, more than any others—the sequential plop of the heavy records, and then the microsecond of fuzz—that gave their fathers ease and security in the presence of music. Sound didn’t assault their fathers, didn’t jump them from behind. They began to hum before the music began, and they would sometimes break their musical routines by putting on a “comedy album”—Bob Newhart, or Nichols and May, or Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner—and they would start laughing before the first high-pitched, nervous, night-club sounds broke through the static. The musical husbands don’t know anybody who listens to comedy CDs, and they think this means something. Digital sound can never be funny: imagine an antic comedian’s voice suddenly breaking through, without preparation, deep and amusing and surrounded by perfect silence, as though by a black border.

  ARE the musical husbands really musical at all? The possibility that they are not worries them. Sometimes they think, The midrange has been there all along, but I cannot hear it. They know in their hearts that they don’t really like concerts. They drag their wives to concerts, but the wives sense that the husbands are not really happy there. They sit on their coats, fighting off the sleepiness from the big Indian or Chinese meal; they’re always overheated, and there’s nothing to look at except the grandiose, unconvincing biographies in Stagebill (“Over the last ten years, Eleanor Hemidemisemiquaver has become one of the harpsichordists most widely in demand for concerts and recordings.”) And in jazz clubs the sound is no good. The drums drown out the piano, the bass player has a pickup. The musical husbands would rather be at home.

  They can hardly believe it now, but there was a time, back when the musical husbands were in high school, when they went to rock concerts all the time. Jethro Tull, Procol Harum, Yes. Though they still love their Beatles records, the musical husbands realize now that as a sonic arrangement, rock is without body. “It’s all high notes, like a siren, and low, like a thump, with nothing in between,” they announce to their wives. What they don’t say is that they worry that the midrange may have atrophied in their heads from neglect. Maybe the fault is not in their speakers, or their cables, or their amplifiers; it is within themselves. All those neurons and nerve endings, shrivelled up—all their midrange software wiped out—from underuse in adolescence.

  This current of self-reproach and hopelessness makes it dangerous to bring the musical husbands together. Sometimes they can be kind and helpful to one another. They visit one another on Saturday afternoons, to examine new recordings and old speakers. They tweak one another’s CDs, placing rubber rings, like prophylactics, around the edges of the silver disks. (They have convinced themselves that this deepens and widens the sound.)
They spray Armor All on the disks, to diminish their metallic harshness, and listen to each other’s favorite passages. You see them sometimes in Tower, rummaging through the sale bins and sharing their enthusiasms, the whole universe of music stretching out around them.

  But on other occasions it’s dangerous to seat two musical husbands beside each other. They can get into an argument in the middle of dinner about nothing at all—about Monster cable, for instance.

  “Are you one of those guys who believe in Monster cable?” one will taunt the other, who has just finished explaining about the new disposition of his speakers.

  “It makes a difference. I can hear the difference,” the other says, stubbornly.

  “Sometime I’ll have to show you how electrons work. I guess you think the electrons need to be warm or something. You believe in Monster cable. I believe in physics,” the friend says. “The electrons don’t need to be warm or anything.”

  The other musical husband is so angry that he addresses his next remarks to his wife. “This guy is too ignorant to talk to. There is a difference, and everyone who listens seriously, anyone who has an ear, can tell.”

  “It’s just about how people listen to their records,” she cries, exasperated. She cannot even look at the other wife, for this is not just another bit of funny, forgivable masculine absurdity; it is deeper and more shaming than that. Meanwhile, her husband’s heart is broken: she has reduced him to a hobbyist, a hi-fi enthusiast, a nerd. Later, at home, the couple have a fight and the musical husband says, in the end, “You’re just tone-deaf. You don’t know how to listen. You hate music.”

  ARE the musical husbands basically husbands, and only musical on the side? Or is it the other way around? It’s certainly true that the longer they are married the more musical they become. At the same time, they enjoy acting the part of husband. “She keeps me on a short leash,” one will say ruefully to another when he is considering some musical purchase. “Yeah. Me, too,” the other musical husband will say. “We made an agreement—one CD a week. But I think this leaves me a loophole for LPs. I’ll stick them behind the sofa cushions.” They never feel so happily husbandlike, in fact, as when they are buying music in secret.

  And yet, although they pretend to enjoy their wives’ tolerant indifference, their deepest fear is that their wives were musical once, with their teenaged musical lovers. Although the wives tend to greet their husbands’ anxious, eager demands for musical attention with a few rote responses (“It’s lovely,” “How beautiful,” or just a long, perfunctory “Mmm”), sometimes in a department store or a coffee shop, especially around Christmas, a musical husband will notice a funny look crossing his wife’s face when certain songs come on. (Not good songs, usually: “So Far Away,” by Carole King, or even, God forgive her, “Stairway to Heaven.”)

  “Why are you smiling that way?” he’ll ask.

  “No reason.”

  “It made you think of something.”

  “Nothing.” But she is smiling, to herself. Often the music that makes her smile most (and it is not the smile she reserves for new friends or people he wants her to impress, but another, inward-looking smile) is alarmingly lengthy stuff—the first side of “What’s Going On,” or even “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” Sometimes they make love with music playing, but when they do the rhythm of the lovemaking never seems to give way to the swell of ambient sound that he imagines his wife once knew. Even sex has been digitized.

  After he has been away for a few days, the musical husband becomes a musical Othello, and searches his stacks of recorded music to find out what his wife has been listening to while he was away. Usually, it turns out that what she has been listening to is sad songs from the fifties, before they were born. He notices that often, even while he is playing records, she is singing to herself. Sometimes, between tracks, he will look up and listen to her sing. She sings in a high-pitched, child’s vibrato, and he can never quite make out the tune. “Crazy,” it sounds like, or “I Should Care.”

  “What are you singing, my love?” he asks her, suddenly and (he thinks) tenderly. But she can hear the anxiety and suspicion and mistrust—all the incidental percussion—in his question. So she says only, and almost to herself, “Oh, just a song.”

  1992

  LOUIS MENAND

  LISTENING TO BOURBON

  REPORTS of a drug said to relieve inhibition, promote conviviality, blunt the sex drive, and turn morbid misanthropes into jolly, can-do airheads did not come as a complete surprise to some of us, since we were already familiar with a substance that provides virtually the same medical benefits. How this product, which most people can acquire just by presenting a valid driver’s license, has managed to escape the attention of psychopharmacologists is a puzzle. Still, there is reason to be grateful to the philosophical branch of the psychopharmacological profession for identifying an issue that had, frankly, never seemed worth getting too ontologically bent out of shape about. And that is, of course, the question: Which is the real self? Is it the self on bourbon? Or is it the self unmodified by bourbon?

  This is not a matter to be approached glibly. For the problem of identity is a sea on which many philosophers have lost their way. Consider a bundle of sticks from which one stick is removed, and then another, and then another. After the removal of which stick does the bundle of sticks cease to be “a bundle of sticks”? Or take the case of the knife whose blade has been replaced once and whose handle has been replaced three times. What grounds do we have for saying that it is still “the same knife”?

  As with things, so with selves. The sexual stallion and future world-beater of nineteen, for whom three pizzas and an accompanied hour in the back seat of a car are just the beginning of a decent evening, and the sagging commuter of twenty-five years later, who staggers home hoping only to have the stamina to make it through the first half hour of “Charlie Rose,” are nominally “the same person.” But by virtue of what? Of having the same Social Security number? Identity is the artificial flower on the compost heap of time.

  So that when we begin to talk, as recent best-selling speculation on the metaphysics of pill-popping teaches us to talk, about the bourbon drinker’s “real self,” we are immediately made aware of a certain fugitive quality in the object of our attention. Certainly the person who after taking bourbon saunters merrily across the room at a cocktail party and says, with a feeling indistinguishable from sincerity, “Great to see you” to someone he has never met is not “the same” as the person who an hour earlier waited for the next elevator so he wouldn’t have to ride down with the boss.

  But then the person who has just finished a pint of coffee ice cream with cookie dough is, by every measure, not the person she was before she opened the freezer door. The person who has spent the night cleaning up after a six-year-old with a stomach virus is no longer the obliging and fair-minded chap he was when he bedded down the previous evening. The person who has paid seven dollars and fifty cents to sit through “Intersection,” starring Richard Gere and Sharon Stone, is not the person who thought this sounded like a really good movie. Mood transformations have many agents.

  Probably the only thing to say about the “real self,” in short, is that it is, of all our selves, the one it seems the least pretentious to own up to. Is this the self that greets personal setbacks with a chipper fortitude, that chatters amiably with idiots at a party, that maintains a healthy nonchalance in the company of members of the opposite sex? Or is it the self that would rather drive aimlessly for hours than ask directions, that broods for weeks after failing to receive an invitation to a party he had no desire to attend, that worries obsessively that his new haircut is a complete turnoff? Most bourbon drinkers have no hesitation in identifying the first self as a complete fake and embarrassment and the second as the self that, given the way things are, it is most reasonable to be. That’s why they need the bourbon.

  It’s true that bourbon drinkers can experience unpleasant side effects unknown to consumers of faddis
h pharmaceuticals. But bourbon has other advantages. A glass or two neat is as close as most people can get to feeling like a novelist or an Abstract Expressionist without actually having to write or paint anything—a state thought desirable even by novelists and painters, and one that cannot be manufactured by mood transformers that come in capsule form. Sexual performance may be reduced by bourbon, but ribaldry, which is, after all, a much safer indulgence, is nicely enhanced. And for steady users death, when it comes, though painful, is mercifully swift.

  1994

  ANTHONY LANE

  LOOK BACK IN HUNGER

  READY? Ready. O.K., here we go. “Fold the wings akimbo, tucking the wing ends under the shoulders as shown here.” Lovely. “Then, on the same side of the chicken where you came out from the second knee . . .” Umm. “Poke the needle through the upper arm of the wing.” Wings with arms, like a bat’s. Cool. “Catch the neck skin, if there . . .” Hang on. If there? If not there, where? Whose neck is this, anyway? “. . . and pin it to the backbone, and come out through the second wing.” And go for a walk in the snow, and don’t come back till next year.