Dead Languages (10 page)
So far, so good. This was the standard opening. The audience liked nothing so much as the standard opening and the initial hostility dissipated into a more passive skepticism.
And it is a good morning, isn’t it? The sun’s shining, the sky’s blue, the fog’s far away. We’re happy. We—all of us gathered here today—are happy. We come from good homes, we have good parents, we wear good clothes, we read good books, we eat good food. We’re good. We’re happy. But on the other side of this city, ladies and gentlemen, in the Mission, in Hunters Point, in the Fillmore, the sun isn’t shining and the fog is thick. The boys and girls in those areas don’t wear good clothes. They don’t read good books. They don’t eat good food. They’re not happy. I urge us to do all we possibly can to make these poor people happy.
There are only a few times in my life I’ve been so excited that I lost my awareness of language, but this was one of them. It wasn’t just adrenaline or the articulation that is anger. It was some beautiful form of fear, an ethereal realm of complete panic in which the mind shut off, the mouth popped open, and words came of their own accord. I heard someone shout, “Yeah, they eat shit, but they drive Cadillacs,” and someone else project the same syllogism into what I took to be a rhetorical question—“If they’re so poor, why do they dress so fancy?”—but I couldn’t have stopped talking if I’d wanted to. Good words emerged from my mouth and were amplified for miles. A microphone is said to be very sexual. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Who cares? All I know is I squeezed that thick, throbbing object in my fist and did what all of Mrs. Fletcher’s pamphlets on public speaking had so strongly encouraged me to do because it’s such incontrovertible evidence of the orator’s mastery over his situation. I walked away from the podium.
Away.
I picked the microphone off the podium, walked toward the audience, stood at the base of that huge hill, and finished my speech.
I urge us to accept little Negro boys and girls from the Mission, from Hunters Point, from the Fillmore, and I urge us to give them scholarships if they can’t afford to come to Currier, which they can’t. I think they can learn from us, but I think we can learn even more from them.
I hope you’ll let me tell a little story that points a moral in this direction. Most of you know I’m a very fast runner. This past summer, I ran every Saturday in the invitational track meet at CCSF. All my opponents were Negroes and, although I ran in the twelve-and-under, some of them weren’t twelve and some of them weren’t under. Some of them were more like sixteen. Every Saturday I ran only one race, the seventy-five-yard dash, and every Saturday I won. I won by six, eight, ten yards. I forget my times.
At first there was what in the track-and-field world is called “bad blood” between me and my competition. They didn’t like the fact that I won so consistently and easily. They didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t a Negro. They told me to go back to Snob Hill, they claimed I was wearing illegal spikes, they told me my nose was an unfair advantage in the wind. But on the last Saturday of summer they finally admitted that they weren’t going to beat me and, after the race, they gathered around and asked me my name and bought me soft drinks and pinched my thighs in play. One boy showed me how to shake hands. Another boy asked me over to his house. I say: Let’s gather around them and ask them their names and pinch their thighs in play. Let’s show them how to shake hands. Let’s ask them over to our house. Accept Negroes at Currier. Support them with scholarships. Let ’em in, give ’em gold! Jeremy Zorn for President.
I thought I hit just the right grace note at the finish and began to bow when Mr. Kirby rushed up and grabbed me by the arm. At first I thought he was trying to congratulate me, then I thought he was trying to arrest me, then I realized what was going on. Third period immediately preceded lunch time, and when dozens of upperclassmen brought their bag lunches to the assembly no one had suspected any foul play, but now a good percentage of the male population of the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades were throwing a good percentage of their bag lunches at me. I think even some of the third-graders were throwing the sugar cookies that, in all good faith, I’d bought for them. The girls weren’t throwing things. They were calling me names I really don’t need to repeat. The microphone, which I’d left on the ground, screeched. Some students whistled, others popped bags, a lot of people were booing. But it was the older boys, my peers, who pelted me with apples, eggs, peanut butter sandwiches, bags of Fritos, animal crackers, carrots, cartons of milk. After a bullfight in Barcelona, this would have been an expression of admiration, even love, but, epilogue to a speech at Currier, it was something less than laudatory.
Mr. Kirby got hit by as much as I did, and as he walked me back to my seat he said, “Someday you’re going to learn, Mr. Zorn, that if you ask for trouble, goddamnit, you’re going to get trouble.” I hadn’t asked for trouble. I’d only asked for a chance to say what I wanted to say, and when I said it I was ecstatic and the rank and file were agitated. I crawled underneath the chair and, watching food fall at my feet, listened to Mr. Kirby announce: “Assembly, dismissed; conduct, disgusting.” The teachers took their sweet time suppressing the riot. I don’t think they much liked my speech, either. Out of the crowd, ostensibly on business, with a camera around her neck, a note pad in her hands, and tears in her eyes, came Mother, shouting: “I got it. It’s all on film. You were beautiful, Jeremy. My little Demosthenes—you’re going to be famous!”
MOTHER’S ARTICLE
was rejected. I didn’t become famous. I lost by a landslide. Miss Hewitt got so fat she had to enter a hospital. Miss Gordon received four out of every five votes but was unable to establish the Shasta daisy as the state flower and was defeated in her bid for reelection by a girl from Sausalito who thought Currier should install soft-ice-cream machines in the cafeteria….
Fame? Virgil stuttered. He wrote and rewrote the
Aeneid
the entirety of his adult life, averaging one hexameter a day. In his will he told Tibullus to burn the poem because the last eleven lines of Book XII didn’t scan properly. One can’t help but want to go back to the
Aeneid
with greater patience after hearing that. In his first speech as prime minister, Winston Churchill sometimes paused as long as five seconds before crucial phrases. The House of Commons thought he was employing silence as a rhetorical device. He was trying not to hyperventilate. Later he said, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” He adored alliteration. There’s hardly a sentence he wrote that doesn’t swoon in sound. Handsome Loud Blazer, instructor of Psychoanalysis and Literature at London Prep, once said, “In every staccato rhythm, every pinched phrase, every aborted clause, the alert reader can hear echoes of Mr. Maugham’s speech defect.” Which strikes me less as literary interpretation than pedagogical sadism. Demosthenes, of course. Moses, of course, whose Ten Commandments tablet God rived in half to remind him he couldn’t control language. Aristotle. Aesop. Charles I. George VI. Erasmus. Marilyn. All tellers of tales really, in one medium or another, and all people known by only one name, as if they’d contrived a way to contract their tongues’ Tower of Babel to a manageable logo.
The pressure that underlies stuttering also generates the ambition to succeed—to succeed hysterically and on the same field as the original failure: somewhere within the world of words. Very few stutterers I’ve ever met yearn to become glassblowers. Promptly after losing the presidential nomination, I joined the chorus. Mother didn’t think this was a very good idea, since singing was very low in her cultural hierarchy—vocalization being one of the performing rather than creative arts—while Father, bouncing back nicely from Montbel, thought it was an even worse idea: all the rehearsals were pointing toward a Christmas concert in Ghirardelli Square. I didn’t care that we sang hymns in praise of someone else’s savior. The material didn’t matter. What mattered was coming to school an hour before classes started, donning my red robe, standing on the stage with a hundred other red robes, and being unable to hear my own voice: being part of a long song outside myself.
What mattered even more was a soprano named Cindy Du Pont de Nemours, who prompted the first real romantic passion in my life since I fled Faith five years before. Cindy Du Pont de Nemours was driven to school in a black limousine, was the only girl at Currier to wear either nylon stockings or high-heeled shoes (which nearly got her expelled but ended up causing a furious new trend in fifth- and sixth-grade fashion), and would get people Gauloises if they asked very nicely, but what I loved about her was that during rehearsal she wore the collar of her robe up. The white collar on her red robe: she wore it up. I never asked if she knew the white collar on her red robe was up. I thought maybe that was the style in Montparnasse or maybe she just liked it that way. With her collar pressed to her cheek, French pastry stuffed during quick breaks into her mouth, and her hair tied in an auburn bun, she looked like a saint.
She would say, “I like zuh azelete.” She actually talked like that. She added a
Z
to every word she possibly could, so I took to calling her
Z,
as in “You looking forward to the Christmas concert, Z?” or “Hey, Z, g-g-got any
croissants
left?” Her English was nah zo good, but she sang beautifully, without the trace of an accent, and she was our only soloist. Whenever we rehearsed one particular song, whose title I forget but whose theme was quite clearly the beauty of the Christian night, Z would step onto her very own carpeted platform and descant on the beauty of Christian night, then sashay back into the soprano section while the conductor held her hand and said,
“Merci, mademoiselle, très bien!”
The conductor was a voice coach at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. I suspected him of spending the first hour of his morning at Currier for the exclusive purpose of escorting Z back into the soprano section after she sang her solo on the beauty of the Christian night. Everyone else he treated with a contempt bordering on repulsion. He had a wooden leg and would limp up and down the stage, tapping people on the head with his cane when he thought they weren’t giving it their all, clapping his free hand on his good leg to some distant rhythm that only he heard. He also had a gold front tooth; he liked to stand next to one of the floodlights and let that tooth glint into your eyes and say, “I’m sorry, but under no circumstances can I call that singing.”
He never said that to me. He never told me he didn’t like my singing. I was in a special section of the chorus, way in back. It wasn’t exactly alto, wasn’t exactly tenor. It wasn’t bass. It was a special section for boys whose voices cracked on every eighth note, boys who had no real business being in chorus. To us he’d say, “You’re doing fine. Not so loud, though. A little softer, okay, guys? You’re our muted harmony section, our low melodists in the background. I want you to be singing that close”—he’d hook his cane on his left arm, holding his right thumb and forefinger an inch apart—“to a whisper.” Then he’d hobble up to the front and ask Z what song she wanted to sing next.
On the night of the Christmas concert Father said he felt like he had his sea legs all the way back but also said he wouldn’t be caught dead listening to the children of the rich sing Christmas carols to white-shoed tourists in Ghirardelli Square, and Mother’s opinion was that the whole ball of wax was too vulgar for words. They both ended up going, of course. Only Beth didn’t come. She was typecast as a frustrated little fat girl in
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
and couldn’t skip dress rehearsal. What was this aspiration of hers to become an actress? It would have been about as likely as me winning a slot on the six o’clock news. Once she even tried out for cheerleader and came home crying; I served her dinner in her room and tried to come up with reasons to live.
While Beth was spreading malicious rumors concerning the art teacher and Miss Brodie, I was singing ballads about a virgin birth. Christmas in San Francisco never has anything to do with snow or sleigh bells. The moon hung above us soft and full, the stars were white light on a warm black sky. We sang atop a three-tiered platform to the patrons of a shopping plaza in the Square. The conductor had his own little stand. Some people, when they got a look at his limp, figured us for a needy group and rang quarters at his feet. I’m sure he would have kicked the money back to them if he could have. He seemed a little distracted, but everyone else was happy. All the parents, shoppers, and visitors applauded our performance taking pictures, requesting numbers they used to sing when they were kids. Right below us, a water fountain rose pink and fell blue. Above us, on the terrace, sounds of crystal and silver came from an outdoor café. The boys and I in the muted harmony–low melody section must have gotten carried away by the festive atmosphere because we forgot about our instructions to remain musically anonymous and sang so loud that, even though we were standing in the last row of the last tier, the conductor came up to me during intermission to say: “I could hear you.”
I thought the chorus in general and my little coterie in particular was having its best night ever. I assumed he was complimenting me on knowing when to let out all the stops, so I said, “Oh, thanks. You could actually hear us all the way in back, out of all those voices? Great.”
He was propped against a lamp. With one hand he was twirling his cane, and with the other he was trying to get his gold tooth to refract the light of the lamp and blind me in the left eye. “You don’t understand,” he said. “I don’t want to hear you. I thought I told you to be that close”—he let go of his gold tooth, pressed his thumb and forefinger together—“to a whisper.”
“You did,” I said. “B-b-but I thought, what with all the water f-f-fountains and people and all the applause—”
“A TV crew is supposed to be here shortly and there’s a chance we’ll get on the eleven o’clock news. On the rest of our songs, I want the five of you to mouth it.”