Revenge of the Paste Eaters (17 page)
I really enjoyed the concert.
I have most of your albums.
Your work has touched my heart.
Somehow it seems important that I let you know that.
i was in high
school
during the sixties when good music was invented.
There were radios and stereos and noisemaking instruments before the sixties, of course, but I had the excellent fortune to come along at exactly that moment when music changed from the stuff my parents liked to My Music. The harmonies and rhythms and lyrics and particularly the guitar riffs spoke directly to my soul. It was as if I woke up one day to a chorus of Bad Boys (so few even pretended to be angels) singing about the way I looked at life, the people I loved, the very core of who I was. My heart and soul was in this music. When I tipped my head back and crooned along with the radio, I sang with conviction and a solid sense of kinship.
The sixties, as we experienced them here in the Midwest: all appliances were avocado green, rust brown, or burnt orange. Shag carpeting was so cool that some people ran it right up their walls. Some fool discovered paisley. It was widely rumored—although never proved—that the lyrics to Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” had something to do with drugs. Boys could get thrown out of school for having long hair. A boy’s hair was “long” when it touched the collar of his shirt. The issue of being able to choose our own hair length was a serious one at my high school, one that was fought vehemently on both sides. We were rebels. Rugged individualists. Down with the Establishment.
Although my parents (bless their hearts) continued acquiring material goods just as fast as they could afford them, the overall feel of the era was flavored by the back-to-the-basics people who eschewed big agriculture, the chemical poisoning of the earth, rampant overconsumption of superfluous goods, and red meat. They lived on their own land and grew their own food, educated their own children, and purified all of our souls. My family never even met anyone like that, but their values still carried influence on the style of the times. Anything requiring rigid structure, too many machines, or too much technology was suspect. “Artificial” described things bad, “natural” described things desirable. As the civil rights movement gained credibility, “isms” were systematically identified and deemed bad: racism, ageism, classism, sexism. We would all be equal on the playing field. These were all new ideas in the sixties, raw and uncomfortable and slightly against the grain. We were reinventing ourselves.
Because we were all equal and because we were all dedicated to giving our brothers and our sisters a hand up, any one of us could do anything we wanted to do. We had only to spread our wings and we would soar. We could be artists or CEOs. All any of us needed to be, for instance, Eric Clapton, were the tools, the inspiration, and parents who would be willing to tide us over until our bands took off.
In the mid-sixties I had not yet heard of Clapton, but I had shopped around for shortcuts to fame and fortune and I had made my choice. I decided to be a star. I wanted to be like Mason Williams and I saved my hard-earned cash to buy a guitar so I could teach myself to play “Classical Gas.”
This ambition describes my musical acumen in so many ways. Skipping lightly over the notion of teaching yourself how to do something you don’t know how to do, I did not really catch the fact that when Mason Williams himself played “Classical Gas,” he did so with a guitar, an accompanying banjo, and a full orchestra behind him. I also skipped over one of the words in the title of the song that might have suggested a rather broader background in music theory and education than the one I brought to my guitar. If I had taken up the flute, it would have been to single-handedly play the
1812 Overture.
There were a few other smaller problems with my budding career as a star. The instrument—particularly the secondhand $35 version of the instrument I had—can be hard to tune. Even more difficult if the ear doing the tuning can distinguish sharp from flat, but has no idea what—for instance—“C” might sound like.
There were other complaints I began to file almost immediately against the instrument:
• The strings hurt my fingers. When the pain stopped, my fingers were covered with calluses that interfered with my sense of touch.
• The instrument is so designed that the greatest dexterity is required from the hand my brain does not favor. I can barely maneuver a pair of pliers with my left hand—why should I be able to finger chords with it?
• Playing the guitar requires an innate sense of rhythm. I have an innate sense of rhythm. It is not, shall we say, the workhorse of the organism. Much like my sense of pitch, my sense of rhythm is relative. When challenged by unexpected complications (wrapping left-hand fingers around the note F, for instance) my sense of rhythm adapts to the circumstances. This annoys my audience more than it does me.
I was not relying solely on the guitar to sweep me into the world of rock music—I also planned to sing. I was born for this career choice, I believed, because even as a small child I remember sitting on the back steps and singing my heart out. I wrote all of my own music, as a child. As I recall the process, I was unfamiliar with the mechanics of composing music so I simply sang an ever-changing panoply of notes on the theory that a song was in there somewhere and my job was to stumble into it. I remember being encouraged to spend a lot of my time outside, breathing “fresh air” and finding “something to do,” which suggests that my musical writing style was hard on my mother’s nerves.
In fact, my mother never did warm to my singing career. When I threw my fifteen-year-old heart and soul into “House of the Rising Sun,” for instance, I might find my mother standing in the doorway, her face artificially solemn as she would muse, “I wonder what they do there?” And then she would burst out laughing, destroying my entire creative ambiance. I took this to mean my mother didn’t believe I had the life experience to draw on to properly render the lament of a prostitute. With other songs—particularly those that required complex fingering—I might glance up and find my mother lurching through the room, fingers snapping, head bobbing, hips swinging, as if she were having some unusually rhythmic spastic fit. I could often gauge exactly how close I came to hitting the high notes by her wince. I asked her once if I had a good singing voice, and she said, “Well, honey—it’s
loud
. . .”
Another problem with my musical career was that practicing the guitar ate viciously into my free time. I needed time to wander the gravel pit and write cathartic stories in my head. I had imaginary characters to nourish and develop. I did not have time to sit around sawing the skin off the tips of my fingers and discovering for the umpteenth time that my fingers still would not go from here to there in the time the music allowed them. I spent more time tuning the damned guitar than I did playing it, it ate up my discretionary allowance in replacement strings and sheet music, and no matter how much I practiced, the next time I took my guitar out of its case my entire family scattered like cockroaches suddenly exposed to light.
I found the field of music rigid and restrictive. A child of dubious accomplishment and self-confidence, I found refuge in English classes where language skills came easily to me and where I discovered that the ability to say something really well could sometimes obscure even what I was saying. I loved music, and I thought fondly of music as a sister art. However, the actual manufacture and production of music owes an inordinate debt not to the whimsy of the muse, but rather my old nemesis, the Mistress of Math. This was an unwelcome discovery for me.
My sister the UnWee, who was for many years a professional musician, also played the guitar briefly. She was the one who tried to tune my guitar for me for a while, then held it up to her eye as if she were sighting a rifle and said, “The neck is warped.” This is apparently a bad thing in a guitar, at least for many people. For me it was just one of the many ways I found, through the years, to bolster the careers of my fellow musicians. We may all still be equal, but there is one less player cluttering up the field.
Curiously, as a result of my efforts to teach myself the guitar I do still think of myself as, if not a musician, at least as a kindred spirit. An appreciator. I’m not a failure as a guitar player—I’m just not a very good one. Having tagged along behind for maybe half a block, I have a greater appreciation for the journey of those who are very good. And when so moved, I still throw my head back and sing along.
i admit it freely,
easily, to anyone who asks: I am a recovering flash-and-trasher. If someone sold it, I bought it, used it, broke it, and threw it away. Flash the cash, bash and trash. There was not an earth-friendly bone in my body.
I remember twenty-five years ago nearly screwing myself into the floor with embarrassment when a luncheon companion took issue with the foam containers that came with every Big Mac. McDonald’s, she informed the counter clerk, was single-handedly filling the planet with toxic, nonbiodegradable ozone-killers and any day now we would be sucked by the vacuum of outer space through the hole in the sky and scattered across oblivion. She wanted a foam-free hamburger. (Actually I think it was worse than that. I think she was a vegetarian and she wanted a meat-free, foam-free hamburger with no tree-killing paper products involved in its delivery. I remember looking up at their sign, which boasted
200,000,000
HAMBURGERS SOLD
and wondering why at least one of us was there.)
The counter clerk, who was about twelve and who had only just concluded his course on How to Handle Unreasonable Customers, blinked at her and he said, very seriously,
Well, if you don’t want it, you can always throw it away.
This did not have the pacifying effect on her that he had anticipated.
She described overflowing landfills, hideous toxic substances leaching into the drinking water of innocent children, global warming, the disappearance of the rain forest, the systematic destruction of the Asian tiger, the African elephant, the Chinese panda, and a host of small songbirds right here in Michigan, all caused by the foam packaging foisted upon an innocent planet by McDonald’s, Inc.
My friend was years ahead of her time, and too young and too dedicated to her cause to ask herself what having one twelve-year-old counter clerk take her hamburger out of a foam container and hand it to her—and then throw the used container away—would do to save the world. She was going to save it that day, right there, in that restaurant.
To calm her, he put it in a paper bag.
To be honest, she was not the most stable friend I had, and it occurred to me, as she went off on a tangent about deforestation and slash-and-burn economics, that she perhaps had less fear of being hauled off to jail for Excessive Political Integrity than I had.
It was a long time before I ventured into any McDonald’s with a vegetarian again.
In fact, the sins I have committed against my planet were ghastly and almost unrelenting for a good twenty-five years.
And then I fell in love.
With a woman who devotes one day a week to shipping worms to people.
People who hardly ever go fishing. (This is, in fact, a touchy subject.)
Or perhaps these people do go fishing: I’ve seen these worms, and they are way too skinny to fit any hook I’ve ever used.
These worms eat people’s garbage.
When I walked into her house, there were four separate trash bins on her back porch.
When I helped her wash dishes, she washed tin cans. Plastic milk cartons. She spoke some sort of secret code revealed to her by mysterious markings on the bottoms of plastic containers.
Oh my God,
I thought,
This woman is a recycler.
This will never last.
Worms do not eat my garbage. I don’t cook. The worms would starve. I’ve been told they don’t care at all for secondhand cat litter, so they are useless to me.
I have, however, begun recycling water cartons. I buy my water by the gallon, six gallons at a time, and the cartons began building up on me. I decided to recycle. I recycle by stomping on the plastic cartons and throwing them into a plastic bin.
There is something wrong with my method, however. I’m not sure what.
So far, they have not biodegraded. They have not recycled. They haven’t done much of anything that I can see. They just accumulate. The back porch is nearly full now, and I can see no changes taking place even to the very first cartons I put out there.
I am resisting the urge to throw them all into a big plastic bag and toss them in the trash.
i am watching jasmine
sleep.
I took the day off work for that express purpose. At eighteen she is my oldest cat (thirteen years Babycakes’ senior), and she has made it clear she does not expect to stay with me forever. Her bones creak and her joints are stiff and, although she is fond of me in her own way, I can sense that she has been preparing for a transition.
She is at this moment curled up like a small black ball on the quilt on my waterbed, not unlike a small wad of roadkill. She hasn’t moved since I got up this morning. I am in the computer room, where I can lean back and crane my head around the monitor to study her through the doorway. From time to time I watch her intently, or I get up and go peer over her until she breathes. It is and is not my fault she is in the condition she is in today, and I am struggling—belatedly—to be responsible.
Yesterday I was late for work because, in the final upheaval between responsibility, good pet ownership, and the sporadically hectic schedule that has become my life, I took a few hours off work to take her to the vet and have her put under so they could shave the mats that have been growing in her coat since last spring. At first I thought she would take them out, and then I thought they would grow out, and then I thought I would take them out. I was wrong three times in a row. At eighteen she has considerably more patience with me than she had when she was younger, but even that does not extend to spending hours in uncomfortable positions while a deranged human cuts off her coat with a pair of dull scissors. So knowing (and not really processing) the risks, I took her to the professionals and had her shaved.