Four Music Lessons
The unreachable green on both sides of Lawler Lane flashed by the windows of Dad’s MG as he tapped the wheel in time. “Galveston” played, Glen Campbell’s version. It started with a gallop — I imagined horses breaking free — flush of orchestra. I knew even at nine what victory sounds like.
“Galveston,” Campbell sings, “Oh Galveston! I still hear your sea winds blowin’…” There’s a big-eyed girl and he’s not with her. Why? “She was 21 when I left Galveston.” The music feels rushed and wrong.
Then cannons flash, or we’re told they flash, and before we can make any sense of it, “I am so afraid of dying.” Songs never talk about dying. Dad doesn’t listen to stuff like that. He wouldn’t say something like that.
Dad focused on his day in the morning; we didn’t talk much as we drove. His name had been cropping up in the local paper and he never seemed happy to see it. He was angry at home. I looked for the kind of clues an 9-year-old looks for and I wasn’t sure what I saw.
The Glen Campbell tape rolled in his tape deck all that year, and some of it made sense to me. “Wichita Lineman” I understood — it was about a lonely man and it sounded lonely. But it didn’t make Dad especially quiet, or whatever he was feeling as he fixed his eyes ahead and fell into himself.
“I clean my gun, and dream of Galveston.” It’s the cleaning, the readiness for violence, that felt eeriest. I knew there was violence in my dad and this sad song evoked it. He didn’t become angry in the car, but the song warned me not to talk. How? There wasn’t any anger in the music. Eventually I decided the story could only be about Vietnam.
Vietnam alone evoked that look on Dad’s face when it came up: a pained triumph that didn’t rule out the threat of violence. I’d already learned this at home. To understand it better, I picked from a list of possible subjects for history reports “Why Did We Lose the Vietnam War?” I asked Dad where I should start researching. He said, “give it here,” and filled three pages in my notebook — a history that painted the French as the original Cold Warriors. “Having researched this subject thoroughly,” it concluded, “it is not at all clear to me that we ‘lost’ the Vietnam War.”
He slid it across the table. “There you go, boy — all set.”
I didn’t question Dad, just took the notebook. And I didn’t open my mouth while Galveston played. I listened. The trees flashed.
The Devil’s Tricks
I spent the summer of 1995 shoveling hot patch into asphalt craters in my hometown, and that’s where I met Stan. Mustachioed, solitary, Stan seemed too young to have wrung though two marriages and an LSD habit so bad that it turned him to fanatical religion. I didn’t think he could be over 35. That summer in Stan’s Public Works truck, I grew repeatedly amazed by how much of the early 1960s seemed alive in the men I worked alongside, though they must have only been children then.
“It ain’t the 60s no more, Telgarski,” they’d warn each other. Even Stan got a dose.
“Poor Stan,” said an old guy I drove out to the quarry with one afternoon to have fresh patch poured into the truck bed. “He still thinks it’s the 60s, but it ain’t the 60s no more.”
While other trucks played the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Stan’s was purely blues.
“It ain’t the 60s no more, Stan,” Pete shouted as his own truck turned down Laurel Hill. Stan wanted to take a break away from Pete — which, if you knew Pete, made sense — finally shutting the engine down three streets away to we could stare at the leaves and listen to the blues. It sounded like John Lee Hooker but without Hooker’s voice.
He told me a part of his story, organized as a recovery narrative. We’d been comparing drug stories for most of that ride but Stan had me whipped. It took place in the last moments of his wild years, after he’d been rolling on LSD for the third day straight. His daughter was young then, barely two, and the day was hot. “My hands were sweating, but I only noticed that when I picked her up. And as I was holding her there I remembered that sweat can transfer all those chemicals. Like, just by holding my daughter, just by doing that, I could be getting her high. I was all done at that point. No more drugs, and nothing that made me crazy for drugs neither.”
He told me about his church, a charismatic minister with a bunch of school chairs in a basement. “We just groove in there, you know.” He said the word “groove” like he was grooving on it.
“It ain’t the music the devil loves, it’s the lyrics.”
“So the lyrics have to be religious?”
“Yeah but not just the words.” Grade two hot patch cooled in the back of the truck, which would make it harder to shovel later on. “It’s the spirit they’re sung in. They’ve gotta come from the right place. But music is just music — ain’t ever bad on its own.”
I had a cassette tape of Paganini’s Caprices I’d borrowed from the library and I slid it into the tape deck one evening as we pulled our gloves off and started the long drive back to the depot.
Niccolò Paganini, I’d learned only the week before, was a contemporary of Byron’s who, like Byron, encouraged rumors that his talent was born of a pact with the devil. But Stan said God loved all music that didn’t have lyrics. We listened to the first caprice as we set off for a spot where it would be safe to dump the rest of the hot patch, now too cold to use. I’d heard the tape just once before and smiled to remember how with the very first notes, Paganini made the atmosphere haywire, a slippery violin that squeaks away from the player.
“No way man,” Stan said. Shaking his head, bothered for Paganini’s sake. “That guy’s way too nervous. That guy’s living the wrong life.”
God’s Silence
Without the lights, all we could make out were the glow strips Namrata had the good sense to lay down in the wings. Adam, dressed in black, waited beside me. The blackness of the drapes, floor, and the sliver of stage otherwise invisible from the wings made it impossible to take in one another clearly, impossible to see anything more than the deep-sea phosphorescence of those arrows.
I’d been asked to direct a play produced by the Harvard South Asian Association. There’d been Bollywood music playing and a din from the gathering crowd, so the sudden silence when the lights went down felt physical: there was no division now between the invisibility of the stage and my own vanishing.
Weeks ago, we’d decided to open the play with the sound of a Muslim call to prayer. There was no muezzin in the cast or crew, and only one volunteer seemed to have the whole of adhan in his head. I had my doubts when he first cleared his throat at rehearsal. Gokul didn’t seem musical. He carried himself stiffly and majored, I think, in math. But of course I was wrong, and as the first Allaaaa hu-akbar emerged I began to feel a little of what might entice a listener to turn to it. And then the Shahada: ʾašhadu ʾan lā ʾilāha ʾillā Llāh. I furrowed my forehead with pleasure.
When I say I vanished in the darkness backstage, I mean for a play to work, a director’s effort must appear invisible: the pieces I’ve put in place have to operate on their own. Considered that way, casting myself in a nonspeaking role was little more than a way of gawking at the action from center stage, even taking an early bow. It was the last play I’d direct before I started going deaf, but I didn’t know that then.
In my mind, in the dark, I reviewed what would happen next: Adam and I would proceed onstage after Gokul’s song, thick wooden dowels in our hands. The production called for two guards, and I wanted those guards to be alien. “Let the two gora do it,” I told Aditi, using the south Asian slang for white guy, a word I’d only learned when I started directing Desi theater. Adam and I were both the color of milk. I liked the switch.
But we couldn’t come onstage quite yet. First the silence had to lean into itself. Later, Adam told me it wasn’t as quiet as I’d remembered it. Apparently, I was whispering to myself under my breath. I asked him what he heard.
He said he’d only remembered one line, which I’d turned to say to him directly. Just as the first silence fell, I’d said, “This is my favorite part.”
Limbus Puerorum
Without music for two years, thanks to the deafness that’s deepening on me, I’ve recently found that on good days, with the help of high-powered headphones, I can hear it again. Depending on the recording, the instrumentation, the pitch, it sometimes sounds the way it did, or close enough. Flutes are gone, and soft voices, and most of a piano too (not the forte part, but the piano part). Violins remain, and brass.
At first, I only wanted to hear my favorites, but now I want to fall in love again. I’d never given Bach’s Orchestral Suites any attention so I’m trying them. Of course, I’d heard some in the past — you can’t be alive and miss Bach’s Air on a G-string, the second movement of Suite 3. Anytime is a good time to play it.
I play it today on Mediterranean Lane as I walk around blind curves, over the stone heaps of ruined walls, past towering, weatherworn barns. Orchestral suites are collections of dances, and I find myself surprised, pausing to admire guttered rivulets and overgrown fields that used to be farms before the farmers fled west, by how much I want to move, puff my chest, strike out with my arms. The song is a dance.
I’m surprised, too, by how easily the sounds in my ears seem to command the things around me — the chipmunks dashing over the road, the lightly swaying elms — it all seems orchestrated.
Now, near-deaf but reprieved, I move with new pleasure. The final movement of Suite 3 is a dance, a “Gigue,” pronounced like a Frenchman was attempting to say “jig,” because it is a jig: a prancing march, echoed at intervals by a wall of brass that leaps from nowhere.
Suddenly the street is playful, the houses are playful and the yards. A pair of deer stand motionless in a field. No: only one is real. The other is a deer statue that someone has put on their lawn.
The brass clears its throat to speak, then retreats, nears to speak.
The real deer bounds away. Then the statue bounds away.