Other types of directly struck idiophones include cowbells, triangles, and glockenspiels.
I could bang my head on a glockenspiel right now thinking about my behavior in high school.
I liked my friend’s parents a lot.
I was deeply ashamed of myself.
I felt awful about that bed.
It was the bed I was focused on.
It was the bed I clutched in my hand like a crumb.
It was the bed I gnawed and gnawed on in my sleep.
I was racking up stories about not dying in those years.
I was hanging them over my bed.
They hung there, loaded, over my head.
It hurts my stomach to think about them now.
More cowbell.
In college I once walked through a large puddle of gasoline at the gas station with a lit cigarette in my hand.
I was buzzed and had my headphones on, blasting music.
The guy who was standing by the gasoline tanker truck next to the spill was yelling and waving at me frantically.
I didn’t understand.
I walked through the puddle.
I must have been walking on air.
I must have been flying in a sleigh.
I must have been going to see Santa.
After I cleared the puddle, it dawned on me.
I understood what the puddle was and why he had gestured so wildly.
I stopped in my tracks for a second.
He looked at me sadly and shook his head.
I was horrified but pretended it was nothing.
I kept going.
I had a couple more years of drinking in me after that.
It’s really not all that easy for one world to turn into another.
I don’t know why we are stuck in a horrible world as it plods to its logical end.
I want to open the door and get out of the world.
I want to open the door and let more worlds in.
I want to be in two worlds at once.
I want to be in three and four and five worlds at once.
I want to sextuple my worlds.
I want candy and coffee to dance for me.
I want the ancestors to speak through my slit.
I want to transmit their message like Tchaikovsky did.
I can’t believe how he was working near-blind while composing The Nutcracker.
The Christmas tree becomes huge. 48 bars of fantastic music with a grandiose crescendo.
That’s what Tchaikovsky was working with, friends.
That’s all that guy had to go on:
just a few words.
How he ever made those sounds, I don’t know.
I want to know what he had to guide him.
11.
The New York City Ballet production of The Nutcracker has been a holiday staple in the city since its opening on February 2, 1954. The ballet begins with the following image: two children, Fritz and Marie, face us, fast asleep before a closed door. They wake up and turn around to look through the door’s keyhole. Through that tiny opening they spy their parents preparing for a holiday party. They scuffle with each other, trying to catch a glimpse.
This is hardly an auspicious beginning for a ballet: two children, first asleep, then tussling with their backs to us, vying for glimpses of action that we, the audience, can see only hazily, through a scrim. Yet with this initial image of two small just-awakened people, scrapping to get a peek of another world, we begin a journey in which we observe, and ultimately take part in, a joyful and dramatic enlargement of vision.
(This theme of expanded vision is emphasized through the fact that Marie and the Nutcracker-turned-prince spend almost the entire second half of the ballet—after the tumultuous battle—as exalted observers. They don’t actually do any dancing; they just sit. Yet they provide a crucial visual counterpoint: Marie and the prince watch the same parade of dancing sweets we are watching, only from the opposite side. An important aspect of the second act is that we, the audience, are able to watch them mirror our watching.)
By the end of The Nutcracker, we have gone through the keyhole with Marie, traversed the superhighway of the plot, and then emerged, like her, into a final moment of illumination: with the house lights on, with every performer onstage facing every applauding audience member, this traditional dissolution of the boundary between observer and observed in the theater has a greater resonance. We are all, finally, in The Nutcracker. We are all together in the bright white light in which everyone and everything is visible.
12.
My mother recently told me she was having some trouble with her eyes. She went to the eye doctor, and the nurse stood her in front of the eye chart with the black plastic lollipop you use to cover one eye.
My mother covered her right eye and read the chart with her left just fine. Then she covered her left eye.
“I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “The chart disappeared.”
The way she told it to me, it sounded like there was a magician with her in the doctor’s office. After the trick was over, though, my mother was still in the dark. She still can’t see out of her right eye, and she still doesn’t know why. She didn’t ask the doctor or nurses that day. She doesn’t like asking questions. She is supposed to go back to the doctor, and until then, she has constructed her own ideas. That they may be incorrect is not a problem for her. Her ideas are her creations, and she loves them.
My mother is happy with her ideas like a mouse that has happened upon a crumb. The world may seem wild and uncontrollable, but a crumb is not. A crumb makes sense to her; she knows what to do with it. She grabs at it, holds it, and will not let it go.
This is in no way a weakness.
I know well how a mouse can be a king.
I know well how a mouse can terrorize with her seven heads and her fourteen eyes, all of them seeing something wrong.
13.
The two mice wake up from their nap under the king-size bed.
They are at the department store because they are going to get married soon.
They are putting together their wedding registry, which is a bit like writing a wish list for Santa.
They agree that next they are going to look at comforters.
“I want down,” says Mouse One.
“I am allergic to down,” says Mouse Two.
“Come on, that fake down is awful,” insists Mouse One.
“But I’ll sneeze!” protests Mouse Two.
Just then my mouse-size mother comes under the king-size bed and joins them.
The mice welcome my mother and offer her some Gouda.
My mother and the mice nibble Gouda together in the VW Bug.
The two mice are in the front of the car, and my mother is in the back.
My mother explains to the mice that she has figured out what is wrong with her eye.
She finally read the literature the doctor sent home with her.
She has the severest type of macular degeneration, the kind that causes the most dramatic and irreversible vision loss.
“If I look out of my right eye now, I can’t see,” she says to the mice.
“That’s scary,” says Mouse Two.
“Did you choose your china yet?” my mother asks.
“Not yet,” says Mouse One.
“Let’s go look at china,” says Mouse Two.
Mouse One starts the car after several tries.
At last they zoom away, looking for china signs.
14.
If everything I ever drank danced for me, dear God.
If boilermakers danced for me.
If beer danced for me.
If bourbon danced for me.
If whiskey danced for me.
If bright green crème de menthe in crystal glasses danced for me.
If gin and tonic danced for me.
If grain alcohol and punch that tasted like cough medicine danced for me.
If wine in wineglasses danced the cha-cha.
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If wine in boxes danced the minuet.
If wine in thermoses danced the flop.
If wine in jelly jars danced the bump.
If wine in plastic cups danced the pony.
If wine in wine bottles danced the Macarena.
If gin in shampoo bottles snuck into my high school dorm did the slide.
If wine coolers shimmied.
If whiskey sours did the wobble.
If daiquiris nodded in time.
Dear God, you know where I am going with this.
You know the punch line already.
If long island iced teas at a joint in Ohio called the Travel Agency.
If airplane bottles in cars.
If poetry with wine and cheese.
If no poetry and no cheese, just wine.
If they all danced for me.
If magic, eye-patched Uncle Drosselmeier visited me in my sleep.
If he turned his screwdriver.
If he drank his screwdriver.
If he left me sleeping there.
If he left me to spin in my bed.
If everything became awake.
If everything screwed in a light bulb.
Why aren’t we dancing? is a really good question.
We should all dance with our drinks.
We should all Marie-size ourselves and dance with Marie-size beverages.
We should all drink what Alice in Wonderland drank and become big and small.
Alice’s bottles said Drink Me.
Every bottle said Drink Me to me.
I don’t drink anymore.
I don’t know how some days.
I was a kid when I drank and now I’m not.
I was a kid who called beer “liquid bread.”
I was a kid who called bloody marys “liquid pizzas.”
I was a kid who had what you might call a “carb face.”
I had cheeks so chubby that when I smiled you couldn’t see my eyes.
I had chubby cheeks like a mouse.
I was storing things in there.
I had compact cars in my cheeks.
I was going places.
I was walking through gasoline with fire in my hand.
My head was an idiophone then.
It needed to be directly struck.
15.
My mother and I recently had a big argument on the phone.
I really let it rip.
I tore a hole in the scrim.
A few days later this thing came up with her eye.
I know I did not give my mother her vision loss.
We fought; she has an eye that went black on her.
It’s not related.
The black eye and our fight are not brothers.
The black eye and our fight are not sisters.
My mother and I fight, and it’s not a family.
A fight is not a family.
Half the time you can’t even see it.
We fight in the air between New York City and Tampa.
We fight in the air over North Carolina.
We fight like the Wright brothers flying on the beach at Kitty Hawk.
We take turns like the Wright brothers flying that crazy machine we built together in the bicycle shop.
We take turns like the nutcracker brothers standing together backstage.
We take turns like the nutcracker brothers going into the spotlight.
We take turns like the nutcracker brothers being broken and being fixed.
I sometimes don’t even know if we are battling or not.
Sometimes a battle can be eating lunch with your mother.
I think she is battling as she wheels her walker past the people who are supposed to assist her with living.
I would like to be assisted with living.
I wish I had a mother who was a humongous, lit-up tree.
I wish I had a mother who was an unarmed bunny-drummer.
I myself am a mother,
and I know how hard it can be to mother.
I am a mother who is a tree or a rabbit or a small iridescent paper circle, I don’t know.
I don’t know what I am anymore.
I ate a stack of pancakes as big as my bed, and now I forget.
I need to lie down.
I need to lie down in the snow.
I need to message Tchaikovsky.
I need to message Tchaikovsky about having almost nothing to go on,
just a few words.
I need to message Tchaikovsky about how annoying it is that words are not music.
It really is not very easy for one world to turn into another.
I do not tell my children too much about other worlds.
I just join with them in the idea that this is the world and it’s solid and it’s stable and it doesn’t fall apart or disappear or move.
It’s not changing.
This world is not changing, children.
Don’t change the world.
I take my three children to Tampa to see my mother, and we all agree on the idea that we are a family eating lunch and that this is not a battle.
We sit at a big round table in the assisted-living dining room.
When I see them all together, it makes perfect sense.
16.
My mother and the mice are not having much luck finding china, so they decide to stop at a bar.
The bar is in the rough part of the department store, near the camping equipment.
My mother and the mice are drinking boilermakers.
The mouse-size people in the bar do not like the mice with my mother.
The mice with my mother are of indeterminate gender.
They might be men and they might be women, it’s really hard to say.
While this is generally unremarkable for mice in a drama, it’s less readily accepted by people in the world.
When the news comes out in the bar that these two mice are getting married, a mouse-size guy tells the mice with my mother that they need to leave; this bar won’t serve them.
The mice with my mother are used to this, unfortunately.
The mice with my mother do not want any drama, so they leave.
But my mother is drunk and wants to fight.
My mother has had only one boilermaker, but that is still one too many because she is a lightweight.
My mother breaks her beer bottle over the head of the mouse-size guy and then runs out of the bar.
The mouse-size guy is on the floor, bleeding.
The mouse-size guy’s friends run after my mother.
The mice with my mother are starting the Bug so they can circle around to pick her up.
Mouse One finally gets the Bug started.
My mother is running like hell toward the Bug.
My mother dives into the back.
The Bug takes off like a rocket.
Mouse One is driving the Bug with their heart in their mouth.
It must be hard to be queer in a world that does not want you to be queer.
Tchaikovsky was reportedly gay and was reportedly terrified that this fact would be discovered.
There is some dispute over whether his death at age fifty-three was from cholera or was self-inflicted because his sexuality was about to come to light.
Imagine preferring death over having your whole self come to light.
Imagine that much terror.
Imagine being a rabbit in a hat and being scared to death of the magician’s gloved hands hovering over your ears, equating the word abracadabra with the word annihilation.
Imagine how small your world would be if you feared any magic whatsoever: your entire life deep down inside a black hat.
I wonder how the world would sound, living like that.
My mother and the mice are speeding down below, where you can’t see, through the department store.
Suddenly Mouse One, who is driving, swerves to avoid an oncoming scooter driven by a drunken cockroach.
Their car crashes into the
leg of a dining table.
Everyone is hurt; my mother is thrown from the car.
The drunken cockroach’s scooter fishtails but miraculously keeps going.
Look, it is starting to snow.
When we see static on TV we call it snow.
Writing is not TV.
TV and writing are fighting during my lifetime, it seems.
TV and books are fighting, I should say.
TV and movies and books are fighting, I should say.
TV and movies and books and the internet are fighting, I should say.
It’s not a real fight; it’s a fixed fight.
People go see it anyway.
My son tells me this writing business is on its way out.
My thirteen-year-old son tells me books are gonna be KO’d soon and I better find something else to do.
Every child I’ve ever met loves a good fight with his mother.
And to go and sit on the couch afterwards.
And to eat snacks and have a cuddle.
II.
1.
When who you are is an affront to other people,
when your way of being is an affront to other people,
when your way of writing is an affront to other people,
when your writing about a particular subject is an affront,
when your voice being heard is an affront to people, the people with the dominant voice,
the people whose concerns are not yours, the people who think you should write about x and not y, the people who think great art should be about important abstract ideas and not mice and their problems,
to this I say: fight.
You just have to fight.
You just have to get in there with the unarmed bunny-drummer and fight.
You just have to get in that Nutcracker.
Just get in that goddamned ballet already.
Just drink from the drink-me bottle, size yourself up, and get in there.
No one ever said it was going to be easy.
No one ever said this world was going to be all dancing Polichinelles and Mother Ginger.
You know another name for The Nutcracker?
I’ll tell you another name for The Nutcracker.
It’s The Ballbuster.
I have had my balls busted, I tell you.
I have had my balls busted by mice rejecting my work.
I have had my balls busted by mice who say, “This is a problem:
your writing is not short stories,
it is not a novel,
Idiophone Page 2
