Calypso(34)

“Sit down,” he’d say, gesturing to the couch. “I want you to listen to this. I mean really listen.”

I knew a guy in high school, Teetsil, who’d do the same thing. “There’s this song you have to check out,” he’d insist, taking Born to Run or some LP by the Who out of its jacket, filling his bedroom with the pleasant stink of new record.

Though I’d pretend otherwise—“Wow, great!”—nothing Teetsil played ever moved me or made me feel any better about the world I was living in. My dad, though, the things he exposed me to blew my mind. “Who is this?” I’d ask.

“Never mind that now, just listen.”

He tried doing the same to my sisters and my brother, Paul, but none of them ever heard what he and I did. John Coltrane’s “I Wish I Knew.” Betty Carter singing “Beware My Heart.” The hair on my arms would stand up, and everything else would recede—my shitty life at school, the loneliness and self-loathing I worried every day might drag me under—all of it replaced by unspeakable beauty. “Are you getting this?” he’d ask, his hands balled into fists the way a coach’s might be, pacing the room as I listened. Afterward, spent, he’d turn down the volume, and we’d share that rare silence that was companionable rather than tense. This was what we had in common—music.

When he was growing up, jazz was the equivalent of rap or punk rock. Listening to it meant something. It made you a certain kind of person, especially to parents whose best-loved instrument was a bouzouki. I don’t imagine Pappoú could have distinguished Miles Davis from a passing dump truck. It was all just noise to him. That might have been part of its appeal to my father, but it had nothing to do with mine. Music is the only way I didn’t rebel against him.



Sitting in the silent afterglow of a song he’d just ordered me to listen to, I’d imagine myself onstage, sweat-drenched at the piano like Oscar Peterson, or perhaps I was the headlining trumpet player or guitarist taking a bow. The audience before me would be going wild with appreciation, though one person in particular would stand out—my father on his feet, cheering. “Did you hear that? That’s my son up there!”

There was a baby grand piano just outside the bedroom I occupied until I left for college, and I’d strike the keys from time to time, imagining how proud I could make him by buckling down and really learning how to play. By the age of twelve, though, I knew a setup when I saw one. There’s an expression you often hear from recovering alcoholics: Don’t go to the hardware store for milk. If I were to master an instrument, or do anything creative with my life, I’d have to do it for myself, and myself only.

As an adult I regularly return to Raleigh and read out loud at what used to be Memorial Auditorium but is now part of the Duke Energy Center. My family will attend, and afterward—without fail—my father will say, “That was nice and everything, but it wasn’t sold-out.”

“Well, actually, it was,” I’ll tell him.

“No, it wasn’t,” he’ll say. “While waiting for you to walk out onstage, I counted thirty empty seats.”

This is him all over. The place accommodates more than 2,200 people, but all he can see are the unoccupied chairs.

“As a rule, five percent of concertgoers who buy their tickets six months or more in advance either forget to show up or make other plans in the meantime,” I’ll tell him, quoting my friend Adam, who started producing events thirty years ago and knows what he’s talking about.

“That’s not true,” my father will say. “Those seats weren’t forgotten. They were empty.” This, as if a marked disinterest in me had turned them a different color.

“OK,” I’ll say, thinking, Who does this—goes to the shows of people they’re supposed to be proud of and counts the empty seats?

Were I playing the piano to a packed house at the Monterey Jazz Festival, it would be no different. “Where the hell was everyone?” he’d ask when my set was over.



He takes a lot of naps now, my father. Two or three a day by my count, at least when we’re all together at the beach. In twenty or so minutes he’d wake up, recharged, and though I wanted to join the action downstairs, I didn’t want him to wake up in an empty room. There was nothing to do but wait, I supposed, and in the meantime I’d put together a playlist we could listen to. A little Jessica Williams, followed by Sam Jones and Eddie Higgins, people he might not have heard lately, a bill guaranteed to really shut us up for a while.





Untamed



Aside from Peter, who supposedly guards the gates of heaven and is a pivotal figure in any number of jokes, the only saint who’s ever remotely interested me is Francis of Assisi, who was friends with the animals. I recall pictures of him, birds perched on his shoulders and his outstretched hands, deer at his feet, maybe a cougar in the background looking on and thinking, There are some birds and deer I can kill, but wait…who’s he? Creatures gravitated to St. Francis because they recognized something in him, a quality that normal men lacked. Let that be me, I used to wish when I was ten and felt so desperately alone. There’d usually be a hamster clutched tight in my fist, trying with all his might to escape instead of resting companionably in my palm the way he was supposed to.

Skip ahead fifty years. It’s late summer in West Sussex and I’m seated on the patio outside the converted stable I use as my office. It might be midnight or two a.m. I’ve brought out a lamp and set it on the table in front of me. To a casual observer, I’m tabulating receipts or writing letters, but what I’m really doing is waiting, almost breathlessly, for Carol.