Me Talk Pretty One Day (2 page)

It turned out that Agent Samson was something along the lines of a circuit-court speech therapist. She spent four months at our school and then moved on to another. Our last meeting was held the day before school let out for Christmas. My classrooms were all decorated, the halls - everything but her office, which remained as bare as ever. I was expecting a regular half hour of Sassy the seal and was delighted to find her packing up her tape recorder.

“I thought that this afternoon we might let loose and have a party, you and I. How does that sound?” She reached into her desk drawer and withdrew a festive tin of cookies. “Here, have one. I made them myself from scratch and, boy, was it a mess! Do you ever make cookies?”

I lied, saying that no, I never had.

“Well, it’s hard work,” she said. “Especially if you don’t have a mixer.”

It was unlike Agent Samson to speak so casually, and awkward to sit in the hot little room, pretending to have a normal conversation.

“So,” she said, “what are your plans for the holidays?”

“Well, I usually remain here and, you know, open a gift from my family.”

“Only one?” she asked.

“Maybe eight or ten.”

“Never six or seven?”

“Rarely,” I said.

“And what do you do on December thirty-first, New Year’s Eve?”

“On the final day of the year we take down the pine tree in our living room and eat marine life.”

“You’re pretty good at avoiding those s’s,” she said. “I have to hand it to you, you’re tougher than most.”

I thought she would continue trying to trip me up, but instead she talked about her own holiday plans. “It’s pretty hard with my fiancé in Vietnam,” she said. “Last year we went up to see his folks in Roanoke, but this year I’ll spend Christmas with my grandmother outside of Asheville. My parents will come, and we’ll all try our best to have a good time. I’ll eat some turkey and go to church, and then, the next day, a friend and I will drive down to Jacksonville to watch Florida play Tennessee in the Gator Bowl.”

I couldn’t imagine anything worse than driving down to Florida to watch a football game, but I pretended to be impressed. “Wow, that ought to be eventful.”

“I was in Memphis last year when NC State whooped Georgia fourteen to seven in the Liberty Bowl,” she said. “And next year, I don’t care who’s playing, but I want to be sitting front-row center at the Tangerine Bowl. Have you ever been to Orlando? It’s a super fun place. If my future husband can find a job in his field, we’re hoping to move down there within a year or two. Me living in Florida. I bet that would make you happy, wouldn’t it?”

I didn’t quite know how to respond. Who was this college bowl fanatic with no mixer and a fiancé in Vietnam, and why had she taken so long to reveal herself? Here I’d thought of her as a cold-blooded agent when she was really nothing but a slightly dopey, inexperienced speech teacher. She wasn’t a bad person, Miss Samson, but her timing was off. She should have acted friendly at the beginning of the year instead of waiting until now, when all I could do was feel sorry for her.

“I tried my best to work with you and the others, but sometimes a person’s best just isn’t good enough.” She took another cookie and turned it over in her hands. “I really wanted to prove myself and make a difference in people’s lives, but it’s hard to do your job when you’re met with so much resistance. My students don’t like me, and I guess that’s just the way it is. What can I say? As a speech teacher, I’m a complete failure.”

She moved her hands toward her face, and I worried that she might start to cry. “Hey, look,” I said. “I’m thorry.”

“Ha-ha,” she said. “I got you.” She laughed much more than she needed to and was still at it when she signed the form recommending me for the following year’s speech therapy program. “Thorry, indeed. You’ve got some work ahead of you, mister.”

I related the story to my mother, who got a huge kick out of it. “You’ve got to admit that you really are a sucker,” she said.

I agreed but, because none of my speech classes ever made a difference, I still prefer to use the word chump.

Giant Dreams,

Midget Abilities

MY FATHER LOVES JAZZ and has an extensive collection of records and reel-to-reel tapes he used to enjoy after returning home from work. He might have entered the house in a foul mood, but once he had his Dexter Gordon and a vodka martini, the stress melted away and everything was “beautiful, baby, just beautiful.” The instant the needle hit that record, he’d loosen his tie and become something other than the conservative engineer with a pocketful of IBM pencils embossed with the command THINK.

“Man, oh man, will you get a load of the chops on this guy? I saw him once at the Blue Note, and I mean to tell you that he blew me right out of my chair! A talent like that comes around only once in a lifetime. The guy was an absolute comet, and there I was in the front row. Can you imagine that?”

“Gee,” I’d say, “I bet that was really something.”

Empathy was the wrong tack, as it only seemed to irritate him.

“You don’t know the half of it,” he’d say. ” ‘Really something,’ my butt. You haven’t got a clue. You could have taken a hatchet and cut the man’s lips right off his face, chopped them off at the quick, and he still would have played better than anyone else out there. That’s how good he was.”

I’d nod my head, envisioning a pair of glistening lips lying forsaken on the floor of some nightclub dressing room. The trick was to back slowly toward the hallway, escaping into the kitchen before my father could yell, “Oh no you don’t. Get back in here. I want you to sit down for a minute and listen. I mean really listen, to this next number.”

Because it was the music we’d grown up with, I liked to think that my sisters and I had a genuine appreciation of jazz. We preferred it over the music our friends were listening to, yet nothing we did or said could convince my father of our devotion. Aside from replaying the tune on your own instrument, how could you prove you were really listening? It was as if he expected us to change color at the end of each selection.

Due to his ear and his almost maniacal sense of discipline, I always thought my father would have made an excellent musician. He might have studied the saxophone had he not been born to immigrant parents who considered even pot holders an extravagance. They themselves listened only to Greek music, an oxymoron as far as the rest of the world is concerned. Slam its tail in the door of the milk truck, and a stray cat could easily yowl out a single certain to top the charts back in Sparta or Thessaloníki. Jazz was my father’s only form of rebellion. It was forbidden in his home, and he appreciated it as though it were his own private discovery. As a young man he hid his 78s under the sofa bed and regularly snuck off to New York City, where he’d haunt the clubs and consort with Negroes. It was a good life while it lasted. He was in his early forties when the company transferred our family to North Carolina.

“You expect me to live where?” he’d asked.

The Raleigh winters agreed with him, but he would have gladly traded the temperate climate for a decent radio station. Since he was limited to his record and tape collection, it became his dream that his family might fill the musical void by someday forming a jazz combo.

His plan took shape the evening he escorted my sisters Lisa and Gretchen and me to the local state university to see Dave Brubeck, who was then touring with his sons. The audience roared when the quartet took the stage, and I leaned back and shut my eyes, pretending the applause was for me. In order to get that kind of attention, you needed a routine that would knock people’s socks off. I’d been working on something in private and now began to imagine bringing it to a live audience. The act consisted of me, dressed in a nice shirt and tie and singing a medley of commercial jingles in the voice of Billie Holiday, who was one of my father’s favorite singers. For my Raleigh concert I’d probably open with the number used to promote the town’s oldest shopping center. A quick nod to my accompanist, and I’d launch into “The Excitement of Cameron Village Will Carry You Away.” The beauty of my rendition was that it captured both the joy and the sorrow of a visit to Ellisburg’s or J. C. Penney. This would be followed by such crowd pleasers as “Winston Tastes Good Like a Cigarette Should” and the catchy new Coke commercial, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.”

I was lost in my fantasy, ignoring Dave Brubeck and coming up for air only when my father elbowed my ribs to ask, “Are you listening to this? These cats are burning the paint right off the walls!” The other audience members sat calmly, as if in church, while my father snapped his fingers and bobbed his head low against his chest. People pointed, and when we begged him to sit up and act normal, he cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted out a request for ” ‘Blue Rondo à la Turk’!”

Driving home from the concert that night, he drummed his palms against the steering wheel, saying, “Did you hear that? The guy just gets better every day! He’s up there onstage with his kids by his side, the whole lot of them jamming up a storm. Christ almighty, what I wouldn’t give for a family like that. You guys should think of putting an act together.”

My sister Lisa coughed up a mouthful of grapefruit soda.

“No, I mean it,” my father said. “All you need are some lessons and instruments, and I swear to God, you’d go right through the roof.” We hoped this was just another of his five-minute ideas, but by the time we reached the house, his eyes were still glowing. “That’s exactly what you need to do,” he said. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner.”

The following afternoon he bought a baby grand piano. It was a used model that managed to look imposing even when positioned on a linoleum-tiled floor. We took turns stabbing at the keys, but as soon as the novelty wore off, we bolstered it with sofa cushions and turned it into a fort. The piano sat neglected in the traditional sense until my father signed Gretchen up for a series of lessons. She’d never expressed any great interest in the thing but was chosen because, at the age of ten, she possessed what our dad decided were the most artistic fingers. Lisa was assigned the flute, and I returned home from a Scout meeting one evening to find my instrument leaning against the aquarium in my bedroom.

“Hold on to your hat,” my father said, “because here’s that guitar you’ve always wanted.”

Surely he had me confused with someone else. Although I had regularly petitioned for a brand-name vacuum cleaner, I’d never said anything about wanting a guitar. Nothing about it appealed to me, not even on an aesthetic level. I had my room arranged just so, and the instrument did not fit in with my nautical theme. An anchor, yes. A guitar, no. He wanted me to jam, so I jammed it into my closet, where it remained until he signed me up for some private lessons of fered at a music shop located on the ground floor of the recently opened North Hills Mall. I fought it as best I could and feigned illness even as he dropped me off for my first appointment.

“But I’m sick!” I yelled, watching him pull out of the parking lot. “I have a virus, and besides that, I don’t want to play a musical instrument. Don’t you know anything?”

When it finally sank in that he wasn’t coming back, I lugged my guitar into the music store, where the manager led me to my teacher, a perfectly formed midget named Mister Mancini. I was twelve years old at the time, small for my age, and it was startling to find myself locked in a windowless room with a man who barely reached my chest. It seemed wrong that I would be taller than my teacher, but I kept this to myself, saying only, “My father told me to come here. It was all his idea.”

A fastidious dresser stuck in a small, unfashionable town, Mister Mancini wore clothing I recognized from the Young Squires department of Hudson Belk. Some nights he favored button-down shirts with clip-on ties, while other evenings I arrived to find him dressed in flared slacks and snug turtle-neck sweaters, a swag of love beads hanging from his neck. His arms were manly and covered in coarse dark hair, but his voice was high and strange, as if it had been recorded and was now being played back at a faster speed.

Not a dwarf, but an honest-to-God midget. My fascination was both evident and unwelcome, and was nothing he hadn’t been subjected to a million times before. He didn’t shake my hand, just lit a cigarette and reached for the conch shell he used as an ashtray. Like my father, Mister Mancini assumed that anyone could learn to play the guitar. He had picked it up during a single summer spent in what he called “Hotlanta G.A.” This, I knew, was the racy name given to Atlanta, Georgia. “Now that,” he said, “Is one classy place if you know where to go.” He grabbed my guitar and began tuning it, holding his head close to the strings. “Yes, siree, kid, the girls down on Peachtree are running wild twenty-four hours a day.”

He mentioned a woman named Beth, saying, “They threw away the mold and shut down the factory after making that one, you know what I mean?”

I nodded my head, having no idea what he was talking about.

“She wasn’t much of a cook, but hey, I guess that’s why God invented TV dinners.” He laughed at his little joke and repeated the line about the frozen dinners, as if he would use it later in a comedy routine. “God made TV dinners, yeah, that’s good.” He told me he’d named his guitar after Beth. “Now I can’t keep my hands off of her!” he said. “Seriously, though, it helps if you give your instrument a name. What do you think you’ll call yours?”

“Maybe I’ll call it Oliver,” I said. That was the name of my hamster, and I was used to saying it.

Then again, maybe not.

“Oliver?” Mister Mancini set my guitar on the floor.

“Oliver? What the hell kind of name is that? If you’re going to devote yourself to the guitar, you need to name it after a girl, not a guy.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “Joan. I’ll call it…Joan.”

“So tell me about this Joan,” he said. “Is she something pretty special?”

Joan was the name of one of my cousins, but it seemed unwise to share this information. “Oh yeah,” I said, “Joan’s really … great. She’s tall and …” I felt self-conscious using the word tall and struggled to take it back. “She’s small and has brown hair and everything.”