Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return

by Martin Riker

  See the first lesson life taught me was physics, and I learned it the hard way, which was good practice for later on.

  That particular prickle bush was in a neighborhood called the Hill in a town called Pittsburgh in a state called Pennsylvania. In case you don’t know those places, I’ll describe them for you: the Hill looks like a hill, Pittsburgh looks like a wedge, and Pennsylvania looks like a clog, which is a big Dutch wooden shoe. I hope I do not seem to be putting on educated airs, mentioning that Dutch shoe. Truth is, my education was of the narrow sort, and I have never once in my life seen a real wooden shoe, only in pictures. Nor have I ever so much as set foot outside the Pennsylvania clog, or hardly left the Pittsburgh wedge, in fact for my first fifteen years I never even climbed down the Hill’s hill. And needless to say, never have nor will these feet ever come close to the continent called Europe, nor the country called Netherlands, which is where Dutch people live with their wooden shoes.

  But let’s get me out of that prickle bush before I start to bleed. I’m a small boy, who’s soon enough grown to a small youngster. I keep growing and growing but no matter how big my body makes itself, compared to everybody else I’m still small. Can’t say I loved that. My mother never worried about my size, in fact the only part of me she seemed to mind at all were the ears, which were stubborn or maybe just dull, but were no ways hip to the sundry varieties of music she was always trying to pack into them. Oh, I loved when she sang to me, but other than my mother, there was nobody I’d stand to listen to at all. “Don’t worry,” say the neighbors. “Henry’s young. Musical feeling don’t start till eight, nine. Let the boy be a boy for a while!” So my mother, being a good mother, let me be a boy.

  And the Hill back then was a fine place to be one, and I have nothing but fine memories. It was a real community and people knew how to have a good time together. The men worked down the Hill and the women watched over the Hill and the kids crawled like ants all over it. Weekends folks spent out on porches and stoops, or visiting round the houses, and everybody knew everybody, and for the most part everybody got along. It was like growing up on a desert island, but filled with kids and grown-ups. You didn’t think about the future, until one day you did, and then you didn’t think about much else. For me, that day came earlier than most, just two weeks before my eighth birthday, when it came time to pick an instrument.

  For having waited so long for her musician, my mother was much choosier than you’d expect. I guess all that waiting somewhat elevated her expectations, because now it turns out trumpets cause head pains and pianos don’t grow on trees. My eight-year-old arms couldn’t reach the end of a trombone slide, and my eight-year-old fingers didn’t span the fingerboard on a bass. Drums were too boomy, flutes too fruity, and let us not so much as discuss the violin. All seemed just about lost till finally along came the saxophone. Now there was an instrument my mother could countenance, by far and without question the least wrong instrument of all. So, quick as St. Nick, I’m a sax man in training, and boy what a training it was.

  You ever hear a tale how Charlie Parker stepped into a woodshed and stepped out a short while later the greatest sax man ever lived? Well, Henry Nelson climbed up to an attic (with dusty low light, squinty eyeballs, sweat-dripping t-shirt, the whole bag) and came out a whole lot later barely holding his own. If that makes no sense, then perhaps now’s the time for me to mention the first of many misconcepts I mean to speak to in these pages.

  See there was around that time a belief widely held to (or at least my mother held to it) that a true musician never set foot in school. Musical talent came natural, and school just messed you up. If you were even halfway serious, you’d hole up in a shack with a horn for the long side of childhood and musical talent just magically happened, or so people thought, and for all I know they still think it. Well, if you ask me, this is untrue. This is a misconcept. Something happens when you hole up in that room, but that something will not always resemble music. Oh, for Charlie Parker maybe it did (or maybe he snuck some lessons and just never told anybody). But not for Henry Nelson! See, for all my inspiration and dedication and perspiration, I suffered a shortage of the most important –ation of them all: education . . .

  Here Henry leaves off from his own life’s story to lecture (essentially it was a lecture) for several pages about youth education, starting with music lessons but quickly expanding to the importance of education more generally: how education leads to opportunity, how parents need to play an active part, how young people are the future, and so on. The style shifts—long paragraphs of earnest, heartfelt advice. And while I know I said I was going to include the entirety of Henry’s chapter here, the truth is, I do not have that part memorized. In fact, my memory had forgotten these pages even existed until I arrived at them just now. This is not because Henry’s chapter suddenly became, in these pages, quite boring, but because it became so boring that most nights, when he reread his chapter, he skipped over these pages himself. He would pick up with:

  And that’s why, if there’s one thing I mean to convey to young people setting out to play music, or whatever else you might do, it’s to take it from an old washed-out has-been might-have-been never-was and get yourself some lessons.

  But let’s get back to me. By now I’d come down out the attic, a skinny dehydrated fourteen-year-old with no natural talent or instruction and well on my way to setting a new world record. I mean a record that never even existed before I came along to set it: the world record for lack of progress. I started gigging around the Hill, and at first, no surprise, things did not go too well. But you know, stick with it long enough, even a lack of progress progresses, and by the time I hit mid teens, my badness had become a kind of talent. I was so bad I was almost good. Or, I was so bad it confused folks, they didn’t know what to do with my no-good talentless noises, and some started calling it a “style,” while others just called it baloney or worse. But I got work, then more work, and before long even my mother could squint and convince herself I was on my way to becoming the great musician she always imagined. It seems strange to say now, but no less true for seeming strange, that for a brief shining moment, Henry Nelson’s lowdown life appeared to be full of promise. And that was when I first stood up and looked around, and when I finally decided it was time to head on down the Hill, but I’ll be darned if I’m going to pack all that happened next into the same chapter with all this I’ve said already.

  Unfortunately, that was all. He never wrote a second chapter.

  Now, one thing I should have mentioned earlier, but did not mention earlier because that would have spoiled the effect of mentioning it now, was that during the entire time I spent with Henry, while he was working on his saga, he was still just in his midthirties. Not his seventies, not his sixties, not even his fifties or forties. In fact, he was just about the same age I would have been, had I lived as long. If he nonetheless wrote as if he’d reached the end of a long life that had left him sage and world-weary, that is not because he was an insincere person, but simply because this was how he’d decided to feel about himself. He had a romantic vision of life that he strongly held to, even if no one around him would ever have guessed. In this vision, he was the Henry Nelson who had lived a lifetime’s worth of trials and tribulations, and whose existence continued on, now, primarily for the purpose of writing it all down.

  All the more odd, then, that night after night he failed to. Frankly, I could never understand it. He kept a second notebook, a “scratch” one, or rather he kept a series of these in which he would write things down then scratch them out, sometimes letting them sit a day or two first. These were anecdotes or bits of stories of his past exploits, and many were exceptionally funny or surprising, I thought, but none was ever copied into his primary notebook. Oh, I had my theories: (1) that he admired his first chapter too much and felt he could not regain the “spirit” of it; (2) that secretly he did not want to proceed, but only to stay in his made-up universe, fiddling forever and ever; (3) tha
t he simply lacked confidence in his writing, just as more generally he lacked confidence in himself.

  Whatever it was, it was frustrating. I felt frustrated for Henry, and even more for myself, for it seemed to me that once he finally did push forward, he would finish his saga in no time. And if he finished his saga, he would at that point wake up to the fact that he was still essentially a young man, with a life very much in progress. He would live his life rather than eulogizing it, and perhaps—who knows?—start drinking again (a circumstance I, Samuel Johnson, selfishly longed for, since no matter how involved I became in Henry’s life, still somewhere in my mind’s heart I always held out hope for a new return to my son). Yet stuck as he was in his saga, he was stuck also in the “self” composing it, the sagely world-weary self, who moved through his own private world as if through the hallways of a nursing home, vaguely aware that life outside still persisted but seeing no opportunity or reason to take an active part.

  That, then, was the situation Henry found himself in—or the situation he had placed himself in and that I, Samuel Johnson, found myself in—for the first three and a half years we were together, and up until the day when he volunteered at the local library, where his life at long last took an eventful turn.

  A program was being organized to provide free music lessons to people in the community, and Henry had been asked to teach saxophone. The opportunity to teach strongly appealed to him, to the sagely part of him, but I suspect even more appealing was that the Saturday morning sessions overlapped with Alma’s committee activities, when he would normally sit out in the hall. And since the lessons were for charity, to help out people in the community, she had no choice but to let him go.

  From the start, Henry loved this program, loved being a teacher and sharing what he knew. When Saturdays rolled around, he now woke full of vitality, and fixed and ate breakfast with a cheerfulness that clearly concerned Alma—not simply, I think, because she did not recognize this Henry, but also because she suspected there was more to his new vitality than he was letting on. Before long, the program’s organizer asked if he would also run a small swing band with the other teachers. They would rehearse Saturdays after lessons and would perform for charity events around town, maybe pick up some paying gigs on the side. Thus Henry became leader of the Teachers Band, and it was through the Teachers Band that he came to know Benjamin, an undergraduate English major at a local university who’d seen a flyer for the program, had called to volunteer, and now drove up from Oakland each Saturday morning to teach music theory and piano.

  They could not have been more different, Henry and Benjamin. They had the Teachers Band in common but demographically, dispositionally, and in just about every other way, they were worlds apart. You might say their friendship was based on these differences: they were not just friends but a particular kind of friends, the kind who know nothing about each other’s lives outside of the one situation in which they see each other, and so allow each other to be whoever they wish to be within that one situation, without having to answer for whoever they are everywhere else. To Henry, Benjamin might as well have been from outer space, and this distance freed Henry to be his energetic, playful, smart-alecky self—the self from his saga—rather than the mopey recluse everyone else expected of him.

  “Jewish people ain’t exactly white people,” was one of the first things Henry ever said to Benjamin (who was Jewish), and he meant it as both an endearment and a joke. In fact, Henry rarely said anything to Benjamin in earnest, but would constantly gibe about how Benjamin’s feet flailed around when he played, or how badly he cluttered his chord voicings, his music theory that could use more music practice, and so on. The fact that Benjamin really was not a very talented musician might have added sting to these gibes had Benjamin been the sort to take offense, or had Henry been anything more than a mediocre musician himself. Which I suppose was another thing they had in common.

  And when the Teachers Band started performing in the community, if a performance happened to conflict with one of Alma’s church activities, it was Benjamin who gave Henry a ride. And after such events—which did not happen often, or at least did not conflict with Alma’s schedule as often as Henry might have liked—Henry and Benjamin would stop afterwards at Ritter’s (a beloved Pittsburgh diner with a pebbled exterior and booth radios and wood paneling that I had previously been to several times with Orson) for burgers and fries. Henry would tell Benjamin his stories, those slightly tall tales he was always writing in his extra notebooks, which were really very entertaining and which would have made excellent chapters—I thought—in his saga, and Benjamin would laugh and smile and egg him on.

  Until one day, on one such occasion, following a local charity fashion-show fundraiser, after they’d ordered food and Henry had just told Benjamin about how once, for a few months, he’d juggled three girlfriends all living within two blocks of each other, how he’d had to stick to a strict schedule like in the military and take vitamin supplements to keep his cock up and it was like holding a full-time job plus overtime and weekends . . . As he was wrapping up this story, his voice full of energy and humor, with Benjamin saying how crazy that must have been, Henry suddenly, in a zealous burst, blurted out to Benjamin that he was writing a book. Actually what he said was that he had written a book. And seeing as Benjamin studied English (“Though my book’s in American,” was his joke), he asked if Benjamin might want to read the first chapter.

  “Of course!” Benjamin smiled with such natural enthusiasm that it was as if he’d been waiting to be asked. “I absolutely want to read your book!”

  That was their entire discussion, or the entire portion of their discussion that mentioned Henry’s writing. A tiny discussion, an inconsequential moment in the history of human discussions, yet for Henry Nelson nothing was ever the same again.

  The following week he spent shifting between anxieties high and low, faced for the first time with the possibility that someone else, an actual living person, was going to read what he had written. Those late-night hours he would normally spend writing, or trying to write, or thinking about trying to write, he spent instead copying out his chapter into a separate notebook for Benjamin. And meanwhile he did his best to avoid Alma, who had grown increasingly suspicious, and increasingly everything else she was in addition to being suspicious, and had for the past few weeks been following Henry more closely than ever, and particularly now, with him acting so strange.

  “Henry,” she said to him finally. This was at the dinner table. “What are you up to?”

  Henry did not stop eating or look up.

  “Nothing,” he said. “I’m up to just exactly nothing.”

  “I know you’re up to something. It better not be what I think it is.”

  “Can’t be what you think it is”—Henry chewed—“since you seem to think it’s something, and if you’re thinking anything at all, it’s not that, because it’s nothing.”

  “It better not be what I think.”

  “There’s no ‘it,’ even. Not even an ‘it’ to keep the ‘nothing’ company. There’s just nothing, all by itself.”

  “You wouldn’t even be talking so much if it weren’t something.”

  “I wouldn’t be talking if you didn’t keep asking.”

  “Excuse me?”

  And here Henry looked up, and on Alma’s face, in addition to anger, there were other emotions, less aggressive, more fretful emotions, and I felt bad for her then.

  “Well”—she finally broke off—“it just better not be what I think.”

  Finally Saturday arrived. Henry stowed his second notebook in his saxophone case and headed off to the library. Alma had offered that morning to cancel her church activities and go along with him for the day, and Henry had praised the idea highly, encouraging her as sincerely as he could, no doubt reasoning (correctly, as it turned out) that it was the best way to convince her not to.

  It was a longer walk than usual because he stopped so often along the way—be
cause he had started out too early—yet eventually he arrived at the library entrance, then in the big wooden foyer, then downstairs to the basement, where by that time he was already late.

  His first student sat bored, a young man who could not yet hold a whole note, so they spent the lesson making sounds through their mouthpieces.

  Second came a pretty young woman entering high school who did not sound particularly good to me, but who was already far better, Henry assured her, than he’d been at her age.

  Third was a new student, a man who had played many years ago and had recently found his old horn in the basement. It turned out he wasn’t there for lessons but only to ask Henry how much he could get for it, and finally he offered to sell it to Henry right there.

  The fourth student I do not remember. In fact I only remember any of these because it was such an anxious day for Henry, and I suppose for me as well. For I was tuned in to Henry’s life rather intently, by then. I had come to feel myself a part of his life, with a stake, if only imaginary, in what was about to happen—and each of these lessons seemed to last an entire lifetime.

  Fifth was the man who ran the program, who’d originally asked Henry to volunteer. He was a decent saxophone player, not better than Henry but not much worse, and the two sat talking for most of the session until it was time for the Teachers Band to rehearse.

  “Henry, hello!” said Benjamin when he saw him.

  “I brought it,” said Henry, not joking or jovial or teasing in the least.

  “Brought what?” said Benjamin, which obviously was not the response Henry expected.

  “The . . .” Half the band was sitting down already. “What we talked about.”