The usher said, “Your music fell down, so you might want to check your place.”
My music fell down. My Napster fell down. My iTunes, my collection of old and musty vinyl. What of those songs taken to heart, symphonies poked over in digital bitstream mapping, re-productions of the rhythms of those loved pop songs infused with meaning beyond their bearing for having been heard in a youthful pizza shop over a calzone after a breakup. We laugh:
at teenagers’ online diaries, the new boyfriends every two days, their names typed and hyped in scintillating electronic neon onscreen: Carlos, Tyler, Hunter, Logan.
But we’re no better.
We’re just more pensive, aware, perhaps, of the complexities of our own deep symbolism, of the effervescent connection to some higher art imparted by our pet names. But if I remember the girl’s name—and in this case how could I forget, being each others’ first time?—I recall just as vividly the taste of the sauce, rich and a bit more acidic than is the wont these days.
I remember the bite of the pepperoni.
You may call me unromantic, but Giorgio’s was a damn good calzone.
But as well, the inevitable perfume—Fendi was big that year—and the Stones singing “Angie” over the pizza joint’s speakers, a “classic” even then, and the light moving slowly on toward afternoon across the gaudy pink tile.
“Your music” is that realm of ink blotted into half notes and quarter notes, into treble and bass clef, imagined tones of rough timbre on bad guitars and failing amps in stinking rooms with peeling plaster stuck back together by gallons upon gallons of Navajo White.
S____ and I lived for a while in a tiny house, mostly square, previously rented by one Walter Mays. He was a composer and, while there, I had liked to think that music—his music—was somehow in those walls, infused into that moldering plaster.
It wasn’t, of course, but we did get his mail.
His mail was extraordinary. It boasted of artists’ retreats and symphonic symposia, workshops for composers and musicians. There is a long gestational period, apparently, before his music could be mine as well, and it can’t be born through plaster walls.
It came, one day, through my radio. I was driving an old Volvo 240 turbo down Douglas and the local public radio station was broadcasting a recording it had made at a local arts festival. And there was his music, Dr. Walter Mays’, blasting out in brass at 3,000 hertz, onto DAT, through a temporal tunnel from two weeks before, through the translator station to the big antenna, through the big antenna and across the airwaves, into my car’s antenna, through its tuner stage and amplifier, through a few feet of speaker wire, into a couple of electro-magnetic transducers and across a paper cone, and, at about 3,000 hertz, through the air in my car to my ears.
And even then it wasn’t mine.
For it was good, and it was new, but where was the girl and the light, the perfume, and where, oh where, was my calzone?
Music falls on us, sometimes, like a frost falls: by the time we can see it, the realization has already happened somewhere in the atmospheric chemistry we breathe in. The frost has fallen before the dawn, even, but the dawn is that day many years later, decades after the first time, when we awaken hearing Bach and begin, again, to cry.