Me Talk Pretty One Day (3 page)

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
.

M
Y 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 offered 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 turtleneck 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.”

“Is she stacked?”

I’d never noticed my cousin’s breasts and had lately realized that I’d never noticed anyone’s breasts, not unless, like our
housekeeper’s, they were large enough to appear freakish. “Stacked? Well, sure,” I said. “She’s pretty stacked.” I was afraid
he’d ask me for a more detailed description and was relieved when he crossed the room and removed Beth from her case. He told
me that a guitar student needed plenty of discipline. Talent was great, but time had taught him that talent was also extremely
rare. “I’ve got it,” he said. “But then again, I was born with it. It’s a gift from God, and those of us who have it are very
special people.”

He seemed to know that I was nothing special, just a type, yet another boy whose father had his head in the clouds.

“Do you have a
feel
for the guitar? Do you have any idea what this little baby is capable of?” Without waiting for an answer, he climbed up into
his chair and began playing “Light My Fire,” adding, “This one is for Joan.

“You know that I would be untrue,” he sang. “You know that I would be a liar.” The current hit version of the song was performed
by José Feliciano, a blind man whose plaintive voice served the lyrics much better than did Jim Morrison, who sang it in what
I considered a bossy and conceited tone of voice. There was José Feliciano, there was Jim Morrison, and then there was Mister
Mancini, who played beautifully but sang “Light My Fire” as if he were a Webelo Scout demanding a match. He finished his opening
number, nodded his head in acknowledgment of my applause, and moved on, offering up his own unique and unsettling versions
of “The Girl from Ipanema” and “Little Green Apples” while I sat trapped in my seat, my false smile stretched so tight that
I lost all feeling in the lower half of my face.

My fingernails had grown a good three inches by the time he struck his final note and called me close to point out a few simple
chords. Before I left, he handed me half a dozen purple mimeographed handouts, which we both knew were useless.

Back at the house my mother had my dinner warming in the oven. From the living room came the aimless whisper of Lisa’s flute.
It sounded not unlike the wind whipping through an empty Pepsi can. Down in the basement either Gretchen was practicing her
piano or the cat was chasing a moth across the keys. My mother responded by turning up the volume on the kitchen TV while
my father pushed back my plate, set Joan in my lap, and instructed me to play.

“Listen to this,” he crowed. “A house full of music! Man, this is beautiful.”

You certainly couldn’t accuse him of being unsupportive. His enthusiasm bordered on mania, yet still it failed to inspire
us. During practice sessions my sisters and I would eat potato chips, scowling at our hated instruments and speculating on
the lives of our music teachers. They were all peculiar in one way or another, but with a midget, I’d definitely won the my-teacher-is-stranger-than-yours
competition. I wondered where Mister Mancini lived and who he might call in case of an emergency. Did he stand on a chair
in order to shave, or was his home customized to meet his needs? I’d look at the laundry hamper or beer cooler, thinking that
if it came down to it, Mister Mancini could hide just about anywhere.

Though I thought of him constantly, I grabbed any excuse to avoid my guitar.

“I’ve been doing just what you told me to do,” I’d say at the beginning of each lesson, “but I just can’t get the hang of
it. Maybe my fingers are too shor —… I mean litt —… I mean, maybe I’m just not coordinated enough.” He’d arrange Joan in my
lap, pick up Beth, and tell me to follow along. “You need to believe you’re playing an actual woman,” he’d say. “Just grab
her by the neck and make her holler.”