by Barbara Hall
“Are you getting all Buddhist on me or something?”
“Oh, no,” he says, as if the talk has suddenly turned serious. “I was raised Lutheran. But I’m religiously unaffiliated.”
“Why don’t you have to worry about rent?” I ask.
Patrick shakes his head, as if he only wants to clear the hair from his face.
I say, “Patrick, everyone wants to know your story.”
He smiles. “Everyone wants to find the Holy Grail. But to do that, you have to get on a horse.”
“Okay, whatever,” I say as I put the lesson tickets away.
Patrick leans against the counter, looks at me, and says, “Pearl, why do you take him on?”
“Who?”
“Franklin. Why do you want to prove anything to him?”
“I don’t want to prove anything. I just want to keep my job.”
“You have your job. Franklin would never fire you. He’s in love with you.”
“No, he’s not. Don’t say that.”
It doesn’t matter how much I love Franklin. I want to be employed for my talent.
Patrick smiles. His long eyelashes float down, then back up.
He says, “The whole dilemma between men and women is they’ve tried all the configurations and now they’re bored. The genders are out of ideas.”
I say, “So what? People run out of ideas. It happens. Your beloved Paul Simon ran out of ideas. So he went to South Africa to get some new ones. That’s where Graceland came from. A dearth of ideas.”
He laughs. “You aren’t going to get me on that one. I don’t care enough to argue.”
“Why not?”
Patrick says, “I was talking about relationships between men and women. You abruptly shifted. You’re trying to figure me out. You’re looking for clues.”
“Clues? I don’t think you’re that much of a puzzle.”
“No, I’m not. I just have a policy. Wait until asked.”
“And what, no one ever asks?”
“No one ever does,” he says, and goes away whistling.
I can’t resist. He is making me do it: “Okay, Patrick. What instrument do you play?”
He turns and smiles. “All of them.”
“What do you mean, ‘all of them’?”
Still smiling: “None of them.”
“Which is it?”
“It’s both,” he says, and disappears behind the books.
I HAD NO HOPES of Hallie’s showing for our second lesson. Hallie was not what we call in violin-teaching parlance a sure thing. A sure thing is a student whose parents are so invested in their child’s musical future that they force him or her to take lessons. This works until the child enters the early teens. Then the child becomes rebellious, starts acting out. She (I say “she,” because it is usually girls who are saddled with this particular burden) stops practicing, starts back-talking the teacher, and generally self-destructs. Not long after that, she examines other outlets for her frustration and turns to cigarettes, drugs, alcohol, bad grades, crime— or sometimes the guitar. At this point the parents become overwhelmed by the situation at hand, and they tell the teacher, in desperate tones, “We simply don’t have time for this anymore. We have bigger problems.” That’s when the music teacher says something like, “Stick with the violin. It’s the way out.” But the parents have lost faith in music by then. They have turned to counseling, discipline, prescription drugs, or organized religion, all of which roads lead them further into hell.
The less traveled path is that the student’s enthusiasm for music actually takes off, and by the time she reaches her late teens, she is obviously destined for an actual career in music. At this point the teacher becomes desperate. Here the teacher is faced with a person who is going to embark on the career that she herself has abandoned. It is too hard to face. So the teacher becomes angry and demanding and generally unhelpful. And the parents decide it’s not working out, or the student becomes aware that the teacher is no longer interested in teaching, and it all comes to an end.
Maybe they go off and find better teachers. They must. I never get to know what happens after students leave McCoy’s. That is, I’ve never cared enough to try. Except once.
After Hallie, I stopped trying to inhibit my students. I just encourage them, at all levels, for any reason. I don’t make them practice and I don’t yell at them and I don’t put up a fuss when they talk about quitting. Which is why I now have the most students.
Hallie did show up for the second lesson, ten minutes late. I was already packing up, as I had been doing the first time she showed up. Her adopted mother escorted her into the room and said, “How long is this going to take?”
I said, “Mrs. Edwards, it always takes half an hour. But if you show up ten minutes late, it only takes twenty minutes. Which means you have cheated yourself out of the full lesson.”
Mrs. Edwards smirked. “I’m not cheating anybody. None of this was my idea. And anyway, it’s the state’s money.”
I said, “Then you are cheating Hallie.”
Hallie looked at me. Which was quite something to behold. Her dark eyes rarely landed on a single location for any amount of time.
Mrs. Edwards, whose face had turned a funny shade of pink, said, “Hallie should understand that everything she gets is icing on the cake. She should show some gratitude.”
I looked at Hallie. “Are you grateful for your music lessons?”
Hallie shrugged, looked away from me again, as if I were the enemy.
“You see?” Mrs. Edwards asked me.
“Please wait downstairs,” I told her.
And Mrs. Edwards left.
Hallie was left standing there, holding her violin case. She was staring a hole in the worn-out carpet, which couldn’t really use any more holes.
I told her to take out her instrument, and she did. She stood there while I tuned it, then checked the rosin on the bow. Everything was in order.
I said, “This instrument holds its tune very well.”
Which was unusual, I didn’t add, for an instrument of such poor quality.
Hallie said, “Yeah, I keep it tuned.”
“What do you mean?”
She shrugged. “I tune it.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond. I had not taught her how to tune the instrument for a few reasons. One is that it is extremely difficult to tune a violin. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you will break a string. A violin string is expensive— nine bucks a pop—so I don’t encourage my kids to try this until their parents (or whoever is paying for the lessons) are firmly committed.
The other is that unless you have an electronic tuner, a tuning fork, or another tuned instrument at hand, you simply can’t do it. Unless you have a perfect ear. Perfect pitch. Something like 2 percent of the population has that. I have relative pitch, the next best thing, but I don’t tell anyone. It makes people crazy. It’s like telling someone you can see the future.
And so when Hallie said that, I knew she was 2 percent of the population, and I knew it was a secret she had been keeping, to ensure her own survival.
“Sit down, Hallie,” I said.
She sat. She turned her ankles on their sides as she looked at me.
“Close your eyes,” I said.
She blinked at me. Her eyebrow ring glinted in the light.
“Why? That’s weird.”
“Just indulge me,” I said.
She closed her eyes.
I played the open-string D.
“What note is that?” I asked.
She hesitated, her eyes still closed. “How do I know?”
“Just guess,” I said.
“Play it again,” she requested.
I did.
Without opening her eyes, she said, “D.”
I tried it again all over the scale, notes out of order. She got them all right. I told her to open her eyes. She might have noticed that the color had drained from my face.
I said, “How did
you know that?”
She shrugged. “I read it in a book.”
“Read what in a book?”
She said, “What the notes are.”
“Yes, but how do you hear them out of relation?”
She grew agitated, started chewing on a hangnail. She wouldn’t answer.
So I said, “How do you know it, just by hearing it?”
She sighed, let her hands drop to her lap. “I hear stuff, all right?”
“What stuff?” I asked.
She looked me in the eye, and it was scary. There was something about her gaze that threatened to expose everything. I didn’t look away, but I could imagine why most people did.
She said, “There’s this department store my mother used to take me to, when I was little. It made me crazy. It made my head hurt. Because I could hear this high buzzing sound. I asked her what it was. She couldn’t hear anything. But I just kept bugging her about it till she asked one of the clerks. The clerk said, ‘There’s a high-frequency security system in here. Nobody can hear it. But it gives some people headaches. Maybe that’s what’s happening to your daughter.’ ”
I just stared at her. But because I didn’t look away, she kept talking.
She said, “My mother explained about the headaches, but I said, I don’t have a headache. It just hurts my ears. I can hear it.”
“All right,” I said slowly. I had never had an experience like that, but when I was little, I had had a similar problem. I could hear people talking at great distances. I could hear my parents talking in another room, downstairs. I could hear our neighbors talking. Which was quite a feat, if you consider that we didn’t live in a cheap apartment building with thin walls. We lived in a house, with several yards separating one house from another.
I tried telling my mother once, and it frightened her so much I never mentioned it again. She told me in no uncertain terms that what I was suggesting was impossible. So I went along with her version of reality and made it impossible.
After that, I started to hear people’s thoughts.
But I had never, ever told anyone that.
And I eventually stopped doing it. It was too scary.
All this talk about seeing into people’s souls. That’s nothing. Try hearing it.
I spent the rest of the lesson just playing notes for Hallie, as she sat in the chair, her eyes closed. I played the notes all up and down the scales. Sharps, flats, naturals. She identified them all. It turned into a game. We started to laugh. We were laughing, in fact, when Mrs. Edwards tapped on the door and stuck her head in.
“I have to get dinner started,” she said.
Hallie opened her eyes and looked at me. I smiled at her. She didn’t smile back, but it didn’t matter. The connection was solid. There was no turning back.
4
THERE IS AN OPEN mic at McCoy’s the first Sunday of every month, like Communion. Open mics can be a dangerous and horrible thing. You are exposing yourself to the possibility of musical crimes being committed on hallowed ground. All honest musicians despise the concept of the open mic. Untrained people come, and if they are bad, you feel they are defecating on your property. If they are good, you feel they are showing you that you’ve been defecating on your property. Nothing positive can come from it, though we all pretend it’s important to foster the idea of musical community.
McCoy’s tolerates the open mic because it is good for business. Open your doors, with the promise of a PA system, and people will come. They will come lugging guitars and saxophones and bongos. They will sing or speak or gyrate or pray their emotions for the entire world, or at least for the small audience, to hear. I hate the open mic, as any real musician does, but I go along with it because Franklin says it is good for the store.
McCoy’s open mic is legendary. We have somehow managed to convince people that only the accomplished players should show their faces. The employees kick the evening off by playing their instruments, setting the standard, showing the would-be musicians that they are most likely out of their league. We usually manage to discourage people. Sometimes the odd maniac leaks through.
The maniac on our particular circuit is a man who calls himself Billy Beelzebub. Billy is a slim man in his late twenties who can barely play his untuned Telecaster, and he allows himself to be accompanied by a drunk fiddle player named Louise, who is so bad she is almost endearing. The only reason they don’t get booed off the stage is that Billy wears a very expensive cowboy hat and is an accomplished lyricist. He can’t play for shit, but his words are funny and he has actually accumulated a small cult following.
On the nights that Billy shows up, he goes on last. He likes to go on last. He thinks he is sending a message this way. We allowed him to do that for years, but in recent months, Franklin has insisted on playing the closing number. He always plays Doc Watson’s “Windy and Warm,” which leaves everyone, including Billy Beelzebub, in the dust.
I am tired of hearing Franklin’s playing, so by the time he goes on to close the evening, I am usually outside smoking a cigarette. It’s not that I don’t like the way Franklin plays. It’s technically perfect. It’s just that it has no heart, which is something I can’t explain. And when music has no heart, it creates a vacuum in which no human emotion can exist. No joy, no sensuality, no hope. No pain, no loneliness, no grief. So when Franklin plays, I feel the walls closing in on me, and I feel the air being sucked out of the room, and I have to escape.
This particular night, while Franklin is playing and I’m outside smoking, Billy Beelzebub finds me.
He says, “You know, your boss doesn’t encourage music.”
I say, “Why should he? Why should anyone encourage music? If you can stop playing, you should.”
Billy shrugs, taking the cigarette from me, and says, “Anyone who tries to keep music from the people is doing the devil’s work.”
I say, “A strange sentiment coming from someone whose last name is Beelzebub.”
“That’s just my stage name,” he says.
I light another cigarette to replace the one he stole, and say, “Billy, that is not a name to mess around with.”
“Aw, it’s just for fun,” he says, suddenly morphing into Hank Williams. “Besides, my music has a right to be heard, no matter what I’m calling myself.”
I say, “If you spent as much time on your music as you do on your image and your grumbling, someone might encourage it.”
He smirks, squinting at me as smoke curls around his eyes and gets trapped under the lip of his cowboy hat. “Is that how you talk to your students?”
“No. My students are there to learn, so I encourage them. You might want to think about signing up for lessons.”
“I don’t want to learn no fiddle,” he says. Believe me when I tell you this man has learned everything he knows about the South from the movies. Those of us who actually survived an upbringing there don’t suffer pretenders gladly. They don’t know what they’re wishing for. They don’t understand the pain and tragedy and history of bloodshed that led to the superiority of its music. Such things don’t come cheap.
I have a student, Joshua, a teenage boy who is being forced to learn violin, even though his real ambition is to play keyboards like Stevie Wonder. He goes to Crossroads, a rich white private school in Santa Monica, and his mother drives him to his lessons in their Jaguar. When she can’t take him, she sends him in a limo. He tells me he never wanted to learn the violin (which was his mother’s idea, of course) because it is such a white instrument. A rich white instrument at that, he says. “You don’t understand,” he told me. “I despise my pedigree. I’d give everything I have just to have been born black in South Compton.”
I don’t think I slapped him. I remember wanting to. In the old days I would have terrorized him with a barrage of words, which might have included “privileged pansy-assed ingrate.” But these weren’t the old days, so I think I said something like, “Be careful what you wish for.”
“Oh,” he said,
puffing up his nonexistent chest, “or what? I might turn black? I hope God is listening.”
I gently directed him back to his scales.
I thought he would stop showing up for lessons after that, but he didn’t. His rebellion and his dreams of being black were encased in the cotton of privilege.
I am thinking of delivering the lost diatribe to Billy Beelzebub when the front door opens and Clive comes rushing out. His eyes are shining and he is a little winded.
He says, “Pearl, you gotta come hear this kid.”
“What kid?”
“He just got up onstage with Franklin. Can’t be more than fifteen. You’ve never heard anybody play harp like this.”
I take the last drag off my cigarette, and I consider saying, Oh, who cares? Everyone plays the harmonica. But Clive is standing there with all this hopeful enthusiasm, and I know if I walk away I will just start to feel old.
I turn to Billy. “Shall we go hear the latest prodigy?”
Billy shakes his head. “No, man, my work here is done.” And he lopes off into the night.
I follow Clive back into the performance room, and I can hear the harmonica blaring, hitting and bending and harmonizing notes as if powered by God’s own breath. I am drawn to it, the way the children were drawn to the Pied Piper. We stand in the back of the room, and I watch this tall, lanky white kid wailing away on his harp while Franklin struggles to keep up with him on guitar. Franklin has a stiff, bewildered smile on his face. I can see his admiration for the kid, mixed with intense envy and a dash of frustration. Clive and I stand very still, just listening, watching. The audience is going nuts, or as nuts as any coffeehouse audience ever does, which means they are clapping and issuing forth the odd “Whoo!” and “Go ahead!”
When the song ends, the room erupts in applause, and even Franklin claps, smiling at the kid, who bows humbly toward his audience. Then Franklin bows, which is a tiny bit pathetic, as if he were part of the phenomenon. The kid tucks his harmonica into his pocket, gives a little wave, and leaves the stage.
Franklin says, “That’s all we have tonight, folks. Come on out again next month.”
Someone inquires after the kid’s name. Franklin says, “Adam Pearce. That was Adam Pearce. Thanks, Adam.”
