Authors: Barbara Hall
“So you’re telling me to sing?” I asked. “Do you have any idea what my mother would think about that?”
He laughed. “Well, this is a separate issue. I’m telling you that you probably can sing if you want to. You can probably do anything if you want to. The things that fall by the wayside are the things we let go. I never would have let go of my own band if I hadn’t found something I liked better. I liked selling guitars better. The gravest illusion we impose on ourselves, Blanche, is that life just happens to us. But the truth is, we make choices. When you say yes to one thing, you’re saying no to another. And vice versa.”
“Did you ever think of being a philosophy professor instead of a guitar salesman?”
He laughed. “Everybody has a philosophy, Blanche. It just comes down to how you use it. Every time I sell someone a guitar, I know it has the potential to change their lives. The rest is up to them. I just deliver the tool. I mean, what can I say? I like selling the tool.”
He walked me back to the house and told me to say hello to my mom. He’d call her the next day to make sure she was okay. He didn’t say anything else.
When I went inside, my mother’s bedroom door was closed and the light was off.
I lay on my bed and stared at my father’s guitar until I felt like it wanted to talk, wanted something from me, and then I turned over so I wouldn’t have to see its scarred face or hear its silent demands. As much as I didn’t want to, I thought about what Ed had said about making choices but finally just fell asleep.
I
WAS BACK AT THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR TO MY PARENTS’ IN
Silver Lake, with the ladies who took care of me, Joss and Mimi. They were exactly as I remembered them. They always had an attitude that everything was particularly right in the universe and there was nothing to worry about. The foster kids were all there, too, and I saw their faces, one by one, all their different skin shades and expressions of concern and hope and worry and pleasure.
In the dream, I was reading to them. I taught myself to read at age four, legend has it, and so it really had happened that they would gather around me to listen to me read from various picture books. I remembered the feeling I had then, of being a kind of leader, and feeling proud that I had this special skill. I remembered wanting to share that with them
and being glad that I could. My place, in those days, was that I could read. It mattered to me. It mattered to them.
Before this dream, I would have sworn up and down that my being special was centered around having a famous father. But it came back to me, again, that I had no sense of my father’s being famous. What I realized was that in that little backyard world, I had my own fame. I liked it a lot. And I moved into the dream feeling all peaceful and excited, two warring emotions that came together perfectly, and I had a sense that this was how all of life was supposed to feel.
The discrepancy in the dream was that I was my true age, fifteen, and everyone else had stayed exactly the same. I saw the eager faces of the foster kids staring up at me and I felt like I had to stop reading and tell them that something was wrong. I had grown up. But I knew if I stopped reading, they would stop looking so happy, and I just had to keep that happy expression on their faces. The feeling that had started out as being needed, in a good way, changed into a heavy sensation of being required and demanded.
It started to thunder in the distance and I could see dark clouds gathering. This wasn’t a feeling that I knew much about in life, as thunderstorms were almost as rare as blizzards in L.A., so it seemed like an event I had conjured. Something I had seen in a movie. I was excited about the thunderstorm but I was also afraid and had a vague understanding that it couldn’t be real. That all these worlds had no right to converge.
Someone in the group started to cry; I was really torn about whether or not to stop reading. The thunder grew
louder and all the kids became distracted and I just kept reading, trying to keep them from being afraid. After a while, the kids ran away and I was suddenly alone, reading to an empty yard. My father came out into the yard then and I smiled when I saw him and finally stopped reading. I stood and walked toward him and then he was my mother, also stopped in time, a very young version of her with short curly hair and a wide smile. I walked up to her and said, “Mom, there’s no one out here. It’s storming and we should go inside.”
She said, “Go get them back, Blanche. The kids will listen to you.”
“I don’t want them to listen to me. I can read but I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“But they believe you do,” she said.
“What difference does that make? I’m just a kid.”
“You’re a special kid,” she said.
That was exactly like something my mother would say, that infuriating dreaminess where life was a story you were telling yourself. And suddenly I was really angry and I started yelling at her. “There has to be some way to be, something that you just are, not something you make up about yourself. Anybody can decide they’re special.”
“Anybody can. Not everybody does.”
She kept laughing and started twirling and the thunder got louder. I raced toward her and tried to grab her but my hands kept passing through her as if she were a ghost.
I woke up, just as light was starting to come through my window. I sat up, breathing hard, and told myself it was just a dream and it was all going to be fine.
I knew the dream had been trying to tell me something about what I needed to do. Now I knew what that was.
I had to get the band back together and go to Coachella, and how I felt about that on a rational level didn’t matter anymore. It scared me to think that was what Viv would call Guidance. I didn’t call it that. I called it a dream.
But as I lay there waiting for the rest of day to break, I knew it was as real as anything. I knew what I could do.
S
PRING ARRIVED
. M
ONTHS PASSED
. I
WON’T BORE YOU WITH
them.
All you really need to know is that I decided to sing.
I talked Ella back into the Fringers by telling her I would sing.
I talked Gigi back into the band by threatening to tell everyone we knew a few secrets about her from when she was thirteen!
The band practiced. I’d created a set list of five songs. Four of my own and one of my father’s. We played them until they were committed to memory. I kept studying and going to classes and taking tests and getting As. I had to change my schedule at Peace Pizza. I saw Jeff watching me as I darted out the door after my shift.
My mother made it clear that since my father was coming
she and Ed wouldn’t be joining me at the festival. She said she wished it could be otherwise, but there was no way.
Gigi’s parents agreed to drive us. Her mother made T-shirts and flyers and plans for where we would stay and where we would eat. I kept e-mailing my father and he answered regularly. We would meet next to the stage where we were set to perform an hour before the event. We had the sixth slot, which meant we were going to perform at around three on the day of the Unsigned Competition. He mentioned my mother, admitting that he’d told her about his coming. She e-mailed back and said she wasn’t coming. He made no comment other than that.
He wrote:
Should I bow out gracefully? I don’t want to interfere.
I answered:
That’s her own thing. You should come. I’m looking forward to seeing you.
He shot back:
And I’m looking forward to seeing you. I just don’t want to be disruptive. I remember those festivals. On the one hand, you want to be entertaining. The audience expects that. On the other hand, you want to demonstrate your art. It’s a delicate balance.
I thought about what he said and replied:
I think I have a good set list.
Two seconds later he answered:
Don’t forget about the tempo change. That’s a really dynamic move. Do you know what I mean? Change makes people sit up and listen. Think about it. Everyone likes a shift in the mood, even if it’s complete silence.
I wanted to ask,
Is that what you think you did by leaving? Did you change the tempo? Did you make everyone sit up and listen? It’s one thing to do it for an audience, but what about your kid and wife?
I didn’t, though. I kept the conversation on the level of music.
My mother and Ed let me make my plans. They weren’t involved. Ed didn’t say another word about the night I’d cried. I was grateful.
Coachella was the last weekend in April, and the week before, I was feeling confident, even if I had butterflies in my stomach. Ella and Gigi had started to look at me the way the kids did in my dream. I’d explained the songs again and told them their parts, the tempo, and what I was going to say between songs. They never argued and waited for orders.
I never figured out the tempo change. We tried it a couple of times but the band wasn’t ready for it. I changed the
lyrics in my songs and reworked some of the chord changes and Ella and Gigi went with them.
I asked my father in an e-mail:
Did you ever feel that too much responsibility is given to one person? And you don’t want to be that much in charge?
He finally e-mailed:
A visionary carries a lot of weight.
I said to him:
The tempo change, it’s too hard. You have to get everyone to agree with you on it.
He responded:
Yes. That’s why it’s a challenge.
I worked with Mr. Carmichael after school on singing. He gave me good tips and exercises to strengthen my voice. He was nice enough never to tell me that I wasn’t a good enough singer. He said, “The important thing is to sound like yourself and infuse it with meaning.” One day, in between vocal workouts, he asked, “What was it like, having Duncan Kelly as a father?”
I didn’t get mad at him for asking. I told him I didn’t know, because I really didn’t.
All the pieces of Coachella fell into place, and two nights before we left I was supposed to work at Peace Pizza. I decided to do it to calm my nerves. I was spreading out dough and pizza sauce and grated cheese in the back when Jeff appeared.
“So this is it, Street. Maybe your last few days of obscurity,” he said.
“Unlikely,” I said. We smiled at each other. “I’m not going to get famous. I’m just playing a lame bill at a famous festival. No one is going to come to see us.”
Jeff waited for me after closing up shop. It had fallen on me to count the money in the cash register.
Jeff said, “How did we do?”
“We made a hundred and ten percent profit, which is probably wrong.”
“It usually is when you do it. I like that you have us too far on the profit side. It shows an attitude of optimism.”
I walked toward my mother’s house and he fell into step beside me.
I said, “Why do you keep on seeing good things in me? Why can’t you just see me as a freak?”
He smiled and said, “I try but I always come up short.”
“I’m not a normal girl and I’ve noticed you like normal girls.”
“How have you noticed that?”
“I’ve observed.”
He shook his head and said, “I don’t believe in normal.”
“You’re the only one.”
“I’m not the only one.”
I stopped and said, “Jeff, I’m not your kind of girl.”
“I don’t have a kind of girl,” he argued.
“Yes, you do, whether you know it or not. You’re going to go on with your life and be an engineer or whatever. I’m not in your landscape.”
“What do you know about my landscape?”
“I know you have a real shot at joining the real world and I’m always going to be someone on the fringe. I’m a Fringer.”
Jeff seemed to think about that for a moment and then he said, “Blanche, you’re an artist.”
I turned on him. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know, exactly, except I don’t have that ability but I like to be next to it.”
“Oh, I’m some kind of exotic animal?”
“I don’t know how you define it. But when I look at you, I always see someone who doesn’t look at the world the way the rest of the people do.”
“So you’re admitting it. I’m a freak.”
He shrugged again.
“Everybody has to be what they are. I know I’m a gear-head. It’s not like I would have picked that, but it’s what I am. I look at you and I see someone who has a different idea about life. People like you put into words or music ideas about life so we can understand it. You give us something bigger to dream.”
“That’s a nice way of saying I’m a freak.”
“I don’t really believe in freaks. I believe in artists and visionaries.”
“I know what that means. A crazy person.”
“Do you think you’re a crazy person?”
We had veered off from my path toward home and were approaching the beach. The sound of the water meeting the sand was soothing. I stood very still. Jeff was staring at me.
I said, “Jeff, there are days when I wish my parents were accountants and I was following in their footsteps, when the only thing I ever knew or cared about was numbers. Just some undeniable truth. I hate how uncertain it all is.”
He shook his hair and said, “Blanche, you’re just full of it. I see how excited you get about the music.”
“I do and then I feel crazy. I sit in my room and I dream about feeling like other people. Not looking like them or behaving like them but feeling like them. Do you understand?”
“Sort of.”
“And then when I think of being that way, the way my mother is now, settling for a quiet life, I feel completely miserable. There’s just all this tension all the time. I’m pulled all over the place. And the only relief from that is to write something or play something. That’s how I end up doing it. It’s not pleasant.
“But you,” I went on, surprised at how much I was talking, “you are a different story. You have your idea of a perfect system. You see the numbers and they calm you down because they make sense.”