I'm Sorry You Feel That Way (10 page)

“Two things I want to tell you,” Jack’s wife said. “First of all, take your Pill. Always. Don’t be sloppy! Take it at the same time every day. Don’t forget to take it!” She lit a cigarette. “Second, don’t get married. If you do the first, then the second should be no problem.” She took my dollar, handed me my change, then asked did I know anyone who liked to read because if I did there were a whole bunch of paperback James Bond books on that table over there. “For cheap,” she said.

For a girl like me—a girl growing up in a western Pennsylvania Rust Belt town; a girl whose old man goes to work clean but comes home dirty, whose mother keeps one eye on
The Young and the Restless
while folding the laundry and running the sweeper; a dreamy and moody girl, melancholy and full of angst; a girl with a talent for histrionics, sentimentality, and exaggeration, who knows in her heart she’s too lyrical for the nitwits tugging at their testicles and sniffing their fingers in English class but too ornery for the mama’s boys who would never dream of changing their own spark plugs, not that they’d even have at hand the tools necessary for performing such a task, not that they’d even know how to change their own spark plugs let alone their oil or their brakes—a honey-tongued, blue-collar bastard like Bruce Springsteen is hard to resist. At age thirty-two, I would proclaim that it’d take a whole lot more than pretty words to make me lay down, but when I was fourteen years old and kneeling as if in supplication before my Emerson stereo, I listened to Springsteen in the privacy of my bedroom, the curtains drawn, the shades down, my heart pounding. Behind a door that was closed, then locked, Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen demanded to know if love is wild and if love is real. He was pleading to give him one last chance to make it real. He was promising to liberate me, to confiscate me, he said, “I want to be your man,” and even if I wasn’t perfect, I wasn’t a beauty, I didn’t need to feel bad about it because in his eyes, hey, I was all right. He accepted me just the way I am. Springsteen swore he loved his girl so much that he wanted to die with her on the streets tonight in an everlasting kiss. There was something dynamic and sexy, beautiful and brave, about such a man. I wanted to marry him or someone exactly like him. At age fourteen, I wrote down the things Springsteen said in my diary, then I lifted the needle so I could hear him say them again.

 

 

 

 

 

By age thirty-two, I had some things in common with Jack’s ex-wife: motherhood, divorce, part-time income generated from garage sales. What happened to the girl I used to be?

Love had let that girl down. She’d been sloppy about taking her Pill, which meant she ended up married, then divorced. She didn’t believe in Springsteen anymore. In fact, she thought Bruce Springsteen was full of shit. For many years, she could only listen to him if she was drunk.

The girl and I both knew this was pathetic. So did our friends who would agree to come to a party at my house only on the condition that the girl I used to be didn’t get drunk and weepy and play Springsteen, but if she did, she didn’t dance that hump-the-wall dance she always dances to Springsteen, but if she had to, she didn’t, under any circumstances, sing along with Springsteen.

“Especially ‘Rosalita,’ ” the man in my life said.

Al is usually indifferent to Bruce Springsteen, though there have been times when he’s allowed me to put
Born to Run
on the turntable, and he’s sat patiently while I insisted he listen to the words, man, just listen to the words. “I like him okay,” Al said, “and other people might like him, too, if you weren’t always trying to cram him down our throats.” Like Springsteen was a horse pill or my boss’s homely daughter that I was trying to find a date to the senior prom.

“That dance you did to ‘Rosalita’ last Thanksgiving?” Al said. “When you humped the wall?
I
thought it was kind of cool, but I think it made some people feel uncomfortable. I’m pretty sure that’s when people started putting on their coats. And your singing? Well,
I
thought your singing was awesome, just hilarious, but that’s just me.”

I told Al that he wasn’t exactly someone who’d be mistaken for Bruce Springsteen, either. But I shouldn’t have been insulted. Because it’s true: I’m a terrible dancer, awkward and noodle-armed, lascivious and likely to stumble, to trip, to fall down, and I’m a horrible singer, warbly and wobbly and quivering, breathy and giggly and off-key. My performances don’t bring anything positive to anyone’s Springsteen experience, except maybe alcohol and enthusiasm.

“I am so much cooler than Mr. B.S.,” Al said, “you just don’t know it yet.”

What then occurred to me was this: maybe I couldn’t be a girl in a Springsteen song, maybe I’d never be loved by an intense and poetic man, but I could be the mother of a Springsteen. I could live with that. I could live through it. At age thirty-two, I decided what I wanted most of all was to be the mother of a guitar-playing boy.

 

 

 

 

 

Bruce Springsteen’s mother may have taken out a loan to buy her son his first guitar, but I would do my son even better, I would use my MasterCard to buy him one. It wasn’t cheap, but the kid at the music store said it was called a Baby Taylor, and he seemed excited that a mother would purchase such an instrument for her ten-year-old. This kid was pierce-lipped and unnaturally pale, he’d painted his fingernails black, but his approval convinced me I had done right by my boy.

In my daydreams, a guitar son would be the most fun kind of son to have, not so oafish and hungry like a football son, not so in need of money for computer chips and space camp like a brainiac son. Besides, sports and nerd things are boring, while rock and roll, as a guitar boy could provide, is cool. He would rev his motorcycle in front of my house, guitar strapped to his back, and tucked away in his back pocket, he’d keep a notebook in which he scrawled poems about the beauty of a mother’s love that he would later turn into songs about the beauty of a mother’s love. His hair would be moppy and his face would be unshaven, but this would not detract from his moody-but-vulnerable handsomeness. He’d wear a white T-shirt every day.

One day, my guitar son would come to me, he would tell me this is his one last chance to make it real, he’s moving to New York or to Los Angeles or to whatever American city is most important to the music scene at that time, and he’d express his gratitude for all the support and encouragement I’d given him over the years. “It’s really meant a lot,” he’d say, and that’s when I’d tell him I have a little something for you. I’d hand him the big pile of cash I’d been setting aside for years and years, money I’d scrimped and sacrificed to save so he could follow his heart, chase his dream, know his destiny.

Furthermore, I believed starting my son with guitar lessons now, at age ten, would make him popular with girls once he got to high school, and I knew it would win him the favor of people sitting around the fire on camping trips.

“I hate to butt in,” Al said, “but maybe you should ask him if he wants to take guitar lessons. It wouldn’t hurt to have his input.”

I asked the boy did he want to take guitar lessons.

He said no.

“This is just a suggestion,” Al said. “You can take it or leave it. It’s just a crazy idea I had. But I was thinking. Since you’re so interested in the guitar, maybe you should learn to play it. Maybe it’s you who should sign up for lessons. What about that?”

The idea was absurd. I had no interest in learning how to play the guitar. I looked at Al and raised just one eyebrow. Earlier he had been teaching the boy to speak in a British accent by shouting the words
I want a baked potato!
Their accents were terrible. Then the two of them shouted,
Tirty-tree and a turd, farty-far and a fart.
It was, Al explained, a lesson in fractions recited in an Irish accent. I didn’t think this man should have any say in my son’s musical education.

When I asked the boy why not, why didn’t he want to take guitar lessons, he said because he didn’t feel like it.

“You don’t feel like it!” I said. “Well,” I told him. “You have a choice. You can take guitar lessons or you can fold a basket of laundry that contains my bras and panties. It’s entirely up to you. You decide which you feel like doing, then come tell me your decision.”

 

 

 

 

 

The guitar teacher had two things in common with Bruce Springsteen: strumming and plucking a stringed instrument, and the same initials. The guitar teacher’s name was Bill Schatz. I found Mr. Schatz in the phone book under the listing for the Western Colorado Academy of Music, which was really just a cramped one-room storefront downtown next door to the Christian Science Reading Room. I signed the boy up to take guitar lessons from Mr. Schatz every Tuesday night from six-thirty to seven-fifteen.

Mr. Schatz was sixty-eight years old. He had thin white hair that he combed down flat so it spread like wispy fingers over his forehead. His face was round, his glasses were round, his shoulders were round, his gut was round. He was a stocky, bulky guy. When the weather was above sixty degrees, Mr. Schatz wore a short-sleeved, loudly patterned Hawaiian shirt. When temperatures dropped below sixty, he wore an acrylic powder-blue sweater with a snowflake pattern across the chest. The sweater was tight, accentuating his pregnant ladyesque belly. He wore black jeans and cheap white tennis shoes. He was sick a lot, frequently blowing his nose into a white hanky.

“What do you think of your guitar teacher?” I asked my son. “What do you think of Mr. Schatz?”

The boy said Mr. Schatz was weird. He commented on how Mr. Schatz kept asking us to repeat ourselves. We couldn’t tell whether this was because Mr. Schatz was hard of hearing or because the things we said were unfathomable. “What?!” he’d say, scrunching up his face, and “Huh?!”

I thought this made the guy almost impossible to have a normal conversation with, but Al, who is slightly hard of hearing himself, believed otherwise.

“Mr. Schatz is a genius!” Al explained. “He communicates through music! The man’s head is just so full of music that there’s not room for anything else.” If Al could pick any talent for himself, it would be a talent for music. When Al was a boy in Detroit, he’d taken accordion lessons, but when his father got laid off, the family couldn’t afford the lessons, and that was the end of Al’s musical training. One was supposed to see this as tragic. One was not supposed to picture Al, clad in lederhosen, a crown of edelweiss on his head, playing polkas in a beer tent. One was not supposed to think maybe his old man’s getting the ax was a blessing in disguise, and if one did think this, one was not supposed to say so.

Mr. Schatz didn’t play polkas. He was a jazz guitarist, light jazz, the kind of music you would never associate with smoky nightclubs and turtleneck-wearing, finger-snapping cool cats who inject heroin and wear berets. No, this was the sort of jazz you might pound the phone against your head in time to as you wait for the next available customer service representative to take your call. Mr. Schatz was good at playing this so-called mellow jazz, and had, in fact, played with Henry Mancini at Red Rocks Amphitheater. He’d been invited to go on the road with Mancini’s band, but because he married Mrs. Schatz, the girl of his dreams, Mr. Schatz gave up the road and became a middle school band director. Mr. Schatz and his wife, Dorothy, raised two boys, one of whom provided Mr. Schatz with a grandson named Hans, while the other provided a grandson named Luke and a granddaughter named Leia. Mr. Schatz showed us a picture of his grandchildren, little moppets with blond pageboy haircuts. All three looked exactly alike.

“Hans and Luke and Leia,” I said. “Your sons must’ve really liked
Star Wars.
”

“What!?” Mr. Schatz said.

“Your grandchildren are named Hans and Luke and Leia like the characters in
Star Wars
?”

“Oh,” he said. “Yes.”

Even at age ten, my son knew Mr. Schatz was uncool.

But Al took one look at Mr. Schatz’s guitar, a Gibson L-5 the man bought a million years ago when he was seventeen. It was an ornate piece of wood, stunningly beautiful, Al thought. The blond maple, the hand-polished frets, hand-polished neck and body, oiled fingerboard and bridge. Yes, Al thought, it’s an instrument that’s lovely to look at, but it’s also beautiful to listen to, like a thousand angels singing a thousand truths about one’s innate goodness—and Al was overcome by what is commonly known among music store owners as “guitar lust.” Before long, Al would buy one guitar, and then another, and then another. He would spend thousands of dollars on guitars and guitar accessories. Strings, a tuner, stands, picks and straps, a polishing cloth, hard cases. But to justify putting guitars and guitar accessories on his Discover card, Al decided he needed to learn how to play the guitar.

He, too, signed up for lessons with Mr. Schatz.

“What kind of music do you fellows like?” Mr. Schatz asked during their first lesson.

Al gushed that he loved music, that he had an appreciation for all different kinds of music, that music made him feel good, and it made him feel happy and alive, and that he was excited about learning how to read music, how to play music, especially the guitar.

The boy said he didn’t know.

“Sure you do, son!” I said. I was sitting in the corner. I’d brought along my checkbook to balance so I could fake busyness but still witness the boy’s musical awakening. “He likes Bruce Springsteen!” I told Mr. Schatz.

“What?!” the old man said.

“Springsteen!”

Mr. Schatz said, “Oh.”

I didn’t know whether Mr. Schatz thought I was inaudible or idiotic, but in either case, he was moving on. He told the boy and Al to open their
Mel Bay’s Modern Guitar Method, Grade 1
to page one, and their first lesson began.