I woke up
yesterday, drank my coffee, and decided on the morning trot to listen to Biber’s Requiem,
a tremendous piece.
That to me
is totally normal—it could have been Buxtehude, who also
has an amazing work, Membra
Jesu Nostri. Or I could have listened to Bach, of course,
because he is the molten core of the earth for classical musicians.
But if I
can say stuff like this, and listen to stuff like this, it’s because somebody
stuck a cello into my arms and suggested I might embrace it. And I did,
variously, with mixed results until recently. And besides opening a seriously
beautiful world, the cello gave me friends like Geek and Dorothy.
We were
teenagers, which is by definition not easy. We were also fucked up in other
ways—both Geek and I were gay and not talking about it. Which is a pity, since
there wasn’t much we didn’t talk about. We hung out a lot together,
played a really awful Rossini
duet together, and did gigs together. Do you ever need to put a string bass in
an early 70s Pinto? Unbelievably, Geek can do it.
Like every
clique, we chose to define ourselves and forget what the rest of the world was
saying about us, if anything. And happily, it worked. Music was our life,
mostly—and what free time we had, we hung out in the orchestra room. There,
we’d practice, talk, and devise new ways to torment Mr. Percy, perhaps the
blandest man I have ever encountered. (He married, coincidentally, a woman who
was exactly his equal in apersonality—dammit, computer, you know what I
mean…..)
Geek had a
quirky sense of humor, which extended to putting the local wunderkind, Sharon Levanthal, into his bass case
(the bass having been removed), standing it and her up in front of our friends’
houses, and ringing the doorbell. Then, from the bushes is which we were
hiding, we could observe the astonished reactions.
There was
nothing malicious in this, and mothers began to take as a matter of course the
sight of a vertical bass case, which began to talk, if memory serves, in the
course of time. In fact one friend’s mother routinely greeted Sharon, and would
pat her head through the case. Sharon squeaked back.
Weekdays
were West High, and the orchestra room. Saturday mornings were WYSO, or the Wisconsin Youth Symphony
Orchestras. And if Mr. Percy suffered from severe micropersonality, Dr.
Rabin was seemingly the opposite. Generally, he was heard before he was seen,
and the character force was felt before he entered the room. And to this day,
Geek swears that the best interpretation of the violin solo in the Shostakovich
Fifth that he’s ever heard is Sharon Levanthal’s.
For years,
we called each other, always starting with the formula:
“Myrc,”
“Geek”
For some
reason, my mother Franny found this fascinating. “What do you say after the
Myrc / Geek,” she asked. Answer—nothing: we just started talking.
Geek,
wisely, decided to go to Interlochen—the high school, not the summer camp. And
there, well—let the school’s website
tell the story:
Interlochen
Arts Academy is the world's first and foremost fine arts boarding high school,
offering the highest quality training with college-preparatory academics.
Right—nice
to know! Though I might ask why, if you’re so great, my computer has never
heard of you…..
So
Dorothy and I soldiered on at West High, and later at the University of
Wisconsin, where we both studied nursing. (She stayed in the field, I moved on,
as do most nurses—Dear Reader, there is never a nurse shortage, just an active
nurse shortage.) And we played music together too, and through her I met a
genteel lady of European charm, Mrs. Hagen, who played the viola in the
Beethoven string trio (Dorothy was a violinist).
“Air
your cello,” she would greet me, in her remarkable house filled with art, (her
husband had been a distinguished professor of art history).
It
was a refuge—the house, the music, the friendship. Because things were
seriously not right at home. How not right? Not mine to say, and perhaps
neither I nor anyone knows the full hell of it. Because however successful
Dorothy’s parents were, they were miserable together. And I could feel
it—especially when I stayed with the family in their Lake Superior summer home.
She’s
a brave woman, Dorothy—a woman who raised a child by herself, and who decided,
she once confided, to go on through the pain of her life just for him. And she
always gave more than she got. When my father Jack landed in the ICU five days
before his death, who was there? Dorothy, and what was she doing? Untying my
father’s hands, since all of the other nurses were worried that he would try to
rip out his breathing tube. (Of course he would—wouldn’t you?)
“Do
you need money,” she whispered, as I got off the plane that day, the day I got
the call from Franny. She knew I was in Puerto Rico, that I was underemployed,
that I was still harboring the ridiculous dream: I was gonna make a living as a
musician.
I
didn’t, of course. Nor did Geek, who told me, a couple years ago, that the bass
was now sort of a party trick—and there weren’t many parties.
I
can imagine that. Geek is running a bookstore / bar, and it’s one of the few
independent, gay bookstores left in the country. As such, it gained the
gracious attention of the Phelps
family, who were standing around in the freezing February weather with their signs
announcing that God Hates Fags outside of the Aut
Bar. Where was Geek? Warm, inside, and busy running a fundraiser—he had hit
on the scheme of getting people to pledge money for every minute the Phelps
family spent outside the bar.
Right—so
he had gone on and given back. And I? I had written a book
and after years of silence, called Geek to ask him what to do about it. He was
generous with a young and not-so-young writer, who went on to do the
unthinkable.
Publish
the damn thing as a paperback through CreateSpace, an Amazon-owned company.
Yes, that Amazon—the company that is busy putting him out of business.
I
tell myself that independent bookstore owners are going to have to look at
Amazon as small businesses look at Sam’s or Costco, as a business that supports
their business. I tell myself that I will call Geek and confess—he’ll sigh and
forgive me, I hope. I tell myself that I’ll just send him the book, with a
little note, begging forgiveness. I tell myself that Geek would like to know
that I’m playing cello again, and raising money for kids in the third world—Bach and Beer.
I have no problem telling myself things.
The
question?
What
am I gonna tell Geek?
