Read Let's Just Say It Wasn't Pretty Online
Authors: Diane Keaton
Listening doesn’t seem connected to ears. Listening reverberates from ideas that have no concrete existence. Listening requires attention. I’m very good at hearing things I want to hear, like Duke’s rant this morning about TLC’s
My Strange Addiction
, perhaps the most disturbing reality show on television: “Mom. Last night I saw a woman eat rocks, a man who eats drywall … But wait, wait, wait, Mom, the best was the fat man who buys Ring Dings from the 7-Eleven, then pours gobs of tartar sauce over the chocolate topping, takes another Ring Ding, crushes them together like a sandwich, and eats them. Disgusting. Right, Mom? He’s like really addicted to tartar sauce, right. But wait, Mom, the worst gross-out was the woman who drinks bleach every day and takes baths in it, too.”
“Interesting, Duke, but I highly doubt she drinks it. Wouldn’t she be dead if she drank bleach?”
Duke’s observations are always entertaining. On the other
hand, the nightmare of listening to four-year-old Duke screaming “MOM, MOM, MOM, MOM, MOM, MOM, MOM, MOM” at the top of his lungs, had been the kind of torment that made me want to rip out my hair.
Actually, I’ve heard there are forms of torture that render the slightest sound so unbearably loud, suicide seems the only relief. Not only have shrill sounds of wailing creatures been used to get information from prisoners. But some of the incarcerated have been tortured mercilessly by so-called “sound bombs.” In Guantánamo Bay, Neil Diamond’s “America” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” were used successfully. The euphemism for musical torture is called “acoustic bombardment.”
One day a few years ago, a mild form of acoustic bombardment drove me nuts at breakfast. I suggested that Duke try not to turn the TV and radio on at the same time. Perhaps, I added, he shouldn’t give his tutor, Russell O’Connell, a hard time after school every day as well. Dexter, not a morning person, yelled, “Mom, Duke came into my room without asking, jumped on the bed, and woke me up at six
A.M.
”
“That’s so not true, Dexter,” Duke yelled back. “Oh, and P.S., Mom. Guess what? Russell O’Connell said you’re impatient.”
Wait one little minute—was I hearing right? Where did
Russell O’Connell get off criticizing me in front of my son, especially since I happen to be his employer? Hurrying past Dexter, I got another update: “Mom, Duke fed the rats more cheese. They’re so fat they’re going to explode. What are you going to do about it?”
“Okay, okay, Dex. Just calm down. I’ll take care of it.”
Inside my bedroom, I shut the door and called Russell O’Connell. In no uncertain terms, I told him I didn’t think it was a good idea to speak poorly of me to Duke, who, as we both knew, had issues with authority. Not deterred, Russell began a long-winded defense. Downstairs, I could hear the drama escalating. Cutting to the chase, I said, “Excuse me, Russell, with all due respect, just promise me you won’t do that again.” The clamor downstairs was getting out of hand. Miley Cyrus was singing at full volume, our neighbor’s cat was howling in heat, Duke and Dexter were in a knock-down, drag-out fight, and Emmie was barking her head off at J.J., the gardener, who was collecting trash barrels. The sensory overload hit me like a stun gun, and suddenly, go figure, I knew what it must have felt like to be Russell O’Connell listening to me, Diane, mother of Duke, interrupting him yet again. That’s when the truth came trumpeting in, and it was an unpleasant truth, an awful truth. Russell O’Connell was right: I
was
impatient.
In the car a half hour later, with Dexter driving, we set
out for the bus stop. I turned on the radio. It was Rihanna with “Stay.” Duke, sitting in the back, wanted to change the station to 97.1 AMP Radio. And me? I wanted Sirius radio’s CNN with Carol Costello or NPR’s
Morning Edition
. We flipped a coin. Duke won. AMP Radio played Skrillex’s “Bangarang.”
Music is too intense for everyday life. Take speakers. Why are speakers in so many rooms of so many houses? Speakers invite distraction. Sure, people love them, sure realtors recommend them for resale, but does anyone really want to live twenty-four/seven in Melody Land? It’s inhumane. Music is not something you want invading your life when you’re just trying to get through the day. Besides, built-in speakers look like giant ears sticking out of the walls.
At Sunset and Mandeville, Dexter interrupted my train of thought by asking if she could play Frank Ocean’s new mixtape. “Sure, but slow down and pay attention to the signs. Okay, Dex? We’re in a school zone.” Ocean sang, “There will be tears I’ve no doubt. There may be smiles but a few.” Tears, yeah, no doubt, I thought. “And when those tears have run out you will be numb and blue.” Boy, that’s for sure.
It was quiet in the car. Even Duke was silent. We all listened: “I can’t be there with you, but I can dream. I can’t be
there with you, but I can dream. I still dream, dream, dream. I still dream.” What is it about music? With the very first word of the first sentence, a song can hit you like a ton of bricks. It can reduce you to tears. It can part the sea. Music is the only experience that involuntarily illuminates our deepest feelings. Granted, what does it for me might not do it for you. But that doesn’t change the fact that music is the most intoxicating of all the beauties combined, and it belongs to everyone.
Knowing that an emotional display was the last thing Dex could handle, I turned my head away and let the tears fall. Inside the window of Leoni’s Laundr O Mat, I saw a woman smoking a cigarette as she folded clothes. “I can’t be there with you, but I can dream.” Was she dreaming? Was Dexter dreaming, too? Was she dreaming of Nico, her new boyfriend? Was there a smile as she thought of him, or a tear? “I can’t be there with you. But I can dream.”
I used to watch Mom put the needle down on a brand-new 33⅓ record album. Suddenly Bing Crosby’s voice resonated through the living room while we opened Christmas presents. Music was a shared event. Mom would take out her sheet music and play the piano while Dorrie, Randy, Robin, and I practiced “Silent Night” before putting on our red wool scarves in Southern California’s eighty-degree heat to go
Christmas caroling. I can’t remember a time I wasn’t a member of a choir. Choirs were like being part of something larger than myself, something worthy of God. At Willard Junior High School, I was an alto with the all-girl Melodettes. We sang songs like “When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob Bobbin’ Along.” The lyrics reminded me to be nicer to my sister Robin, even though she wasn’t a bird, and she constantly stole the Hydrox cookies on my plate when Mom wasn’t looking. In my senior year at Santa Ana High School, I was invited to join Harlan Anderson’s Esquires and Debutantes, where we sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone” in venues like the local Kiwanis Club. I never failed to cry. My tears were audience pleasers. Soon after, Mr. Anderson gave me my first solo. During the early 1970s, Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You” told me the story I wanted to hate but loved to hear. The story of goodbye. The perfect goodbye. The perfect loss. The perfect ache. Nothing does words better than music.… Joni was my first Frank Ocean. “I remember that time you told me, you said, ‘Love is touching souls.’ Surely you touched mine.”
Dad’s words were not like music when he used to say, “Diane, are you listening? Did you hear what I said? What did I say? You didn’t listen, did you? How often do I have to tell you to close your mouth and open your ears?” This lecture
always culminated with “In one ear and out the other, Diane. In one ear and out the other.” Poor Dad—his advice invariably fell on deaf ears.
I was thinking about Dad’s plight as Dexter pulled into the Arco gas station across the street from her bus stop. As I’ve gotten older, I’m proud to say, I’ve stopped being a selective listener, at least when it comes to Duke and Dexter. I’m their mother. I have to listen. But I want to, as well. “Mom. Mom.”
“What, Duke?”
“Listen to this, and tell me what you think. Is it as good as Jason Lee or not? Listen. ‘My name is Earl, and I’m just trying to be a better person.’ ”
“You got it down, bud, you got it down.”
“Can I buy a pack of iD spearmint gum? Please?”
I gave him my credit card and told him to fill up the Rover and not to forget to get Dexter a pack, too. Dexter sighed. She was worried about the psychology test she’d taken. “There was a section where I had to know the hypothesis, the subjects, the control group, the experimental group, the independent and dependent variables, and the results for two experiments we learned. If I got four wrong, Ms. Kopick will pretty much probably give me a low C or a high D. I knew the experiments, but I’m pretty sure my hypothesis was wrong.”
Duke came back as Dexter’s bus arrived. Before I knew it,
she was out the door, and gone. But wait a minute, what was the result? Was it C bad or D bad? “Mom, how’s this? Miiiiyyy naahemm is Errrrrrrrrrrllll. And Iey’mmmm jeest tryin to beeeee a better peeeerson.” Me too, Duke.
After I dropped Duke off, I turned the radio to 89.3 and I heard Gregg Korbon begin to tell his wife, Kathryn, a story. I was familiar with StoryCorps’s recordings of ordinary Americans on NPR. I lingered on the word “ordinary” and started to listen.
There’s a Little League baseball field in Charlottesville called Brian C. Korbon Field, and I would like to tell the story of how it got its name. The story goes back twelve years ago, when our son Brian was getting ready for his ninth birthday in January. He started having difficulties sleeping and he said that he did not want to celebrate his birthday. He said celebrating his birthday would bring his death and he would never make it to double digits, meaning ten years old. We didn’t understand that, because he was healthy. He had had heart surgery when he was a little baby, but that had gone well, and the doctors told us that we really didn’t have anything to worry about.… His mother would cuddle him at night and talk to
him about his fears—he had terrific fears about going to sleep. And we had a child psychologist see him, because we couldn’t understand why he had these fears.
Well, over the next several months he got better, and he seemed to be coming out of his depression. He started to say he wanted to have a party—his belated birthday party—but he didn’t want it to be called a birthday party. He wanted it to be called a Happy Spring party, so we planned it, and he wanted to just have three friends. He had a friend named Ben, a little girlfriend named Jamie, and he had a boy named Cam that had always wanted to be friends with him, but Brian didn’t really spend much time with them. It was kind of like he was trying to finish up unfinished business.
Now, during the two weeks before the party, Brian did lots of unusual things. He got Kathryn’s Mother’s Day card in advance and a present. Mother’s Day was two weeks away. And then he also got my Father’s Day present, even though that was months away. He got a trophy he picked out that said “World’s Greatest Dad,” and he begged Kathryn to get it, but she said, “It’s a couple months away. We don’t have to do that yet.” He wrote letters to his grandparents—all the things that
he’d been planning to do and hadn’t done, and his spirit seemed to be getting much better.…
The morning of his birthday party he woke up and there were several things he did down in his room that we didn’t realize till later, but he wrote letters to some of his friends and put a sign on his door. The sign said, “On a trip. Don’t worry about me.” And then the kids came for the party, and they had a great little party. He didn’t want any gifts, but his little girlfriend gave him a kiss and his friend Ben wrote a song for him. And then it was time for them to leave and for Brian to play Little League. He’d just joined this team. He wasn’t very good. He was the littlest kid on the team. I took him, and Kathryn was going to join us a little bit later.…
We went to the baseball field. When Brian got there, he was so brave. He had always been afraid of the ball and kind of tried to shrink away from ground balls and stuff like that. But he was fearless. He was charging after the ground balls and he was really just having the best time. He had said he wanted to score a run more than anything. So I was sitting in the stands and it was his first time up at bat. He got walked to first base. The next little boy hit a triple, and Brian ran around the bases, crossed home plate. This was his
second game, and the last time he got stranded at third base and didn’t make it home. So this time he tore around the bases, crossed home plate, and the fans gave him a big applause, and he looked up at the stands and our eyes met, and he was the happiest little boy you ever saw.
He gave me a high five and went into the dugout. And then he collapsed. And the coach brought him out—his limp body out—and I looked at him, and he was blue. And I’m an anesthesiologist, and that’s what I do, is resuscitate people, and I resuscitated him. But something inside told me he wasn’t coming back. The ambulance came, which was right across the street, and we went to the hospital with him. They tried to resuscitate him, and he wouldn’t come back.
After he died, I went to the ballfield to get my car, and it was the most beautiful spring day I have ever seen—the next day was Mother’s Day. The honeysuckle was out, which for that early in the year is very unusual, and there was another Little League game playing and barbecues going on with square dancing in the picnic shelters around the field. And I was standing in the field looking at the other kids playing, and I smelled the honeysuckle, and the clouds were beautiful—crisp,
blue sky.… Then all of a sudden, everything got very clear. I’ve since heard other people describe this kind of great moment—that I could see everything clearer than I’d ever seen. The colors were clearer and brighter and the smells were stronger, and I had the sense that everything was okay. I was at peace. And that, if I could bring Brian back, it would be for me, not for him—that he had finished. He had finished his job here, and the unfinished business was just mine.
I’ve never known a “great moment,” or the sudden awareness of everything becoming crystal clear. I’ve never experienced a devastating tragedy. But I heard Gregg’s words. I listened. His story entered my thoughts through the sound of his voice in my ears. It was unlike other perceptions of beauty, which in my case usually come with the word NEED. Hearing Gregg did not make me try to one-up him with my own tale of woe. There was no thought of casting myself in his story, as if I could somehow make it mine, as if I were the narrator. This wasn’t like listening to music. It was more like an act of love. And, like love, it came with a price. Contrary to what I’d always thought, being an audience is active. If you want to be an active listener, it’s best to say one
thing, and one thing only, and that is this: “What happened next?”