David Gates - A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

For my community service, I chose to go over to Merrivale one afternoon a week and play for—I almost said pray for—the moribunds. Mrs. Gartner was now in her nineties, and she’d had a stroke on top of everything else, but the nurses thought she still responded to music, so they rolled her out, hands strapped to the arms of her wheelchair, like the statue of the Great Emancipator. The first afternoon, I tried them on the usual American songbook shit, but Deborah was in no mood to come in and sing with me, and who knows the words anymore to “Mountain Greenery” or “A Fine Romance”? Finally a lady in a flowered top and a white neck brace asked for “Sweet Caroline.” It’s one of those songs you’ve heard a million times, and I managed to get through it by ear. I didn’t know anything beyond “Where it began,” but the lady had the “Warm, touching warm” part, and a few of them came in on the dum dum dum: apparently this was a phenomenon at Fenway. So when I got home, I went online and ordered something called the Wedding and Love Fake Book —somebody else had a sense of humor, no?—with 450 songs: “My Cherie Amour,” “Baby I’m-a Want You,” “Danny’s Song” (that’s the one that goes “Even though we ain’t got money”), “Time in a Bottle.” And I paid the guy who tunes my piano to come from Hanover and try to get the one at Merrivale halfway playable. I’ve got my license back now, but I keep going there, partly to give my weeks more of a shape, partly to bring myself low. The nurses tell me I’m the favorite of all the people who come in, except for a woman who brings her Labrador retriever around.

During the school year I still drive down to teach, though now I put up at a motel and go back the next day. Otherwise, I’m here. I get up, drink coffee and—in order to irritate myself, I suppose—put on New Hampshire Public Radio and listen to the Morning Diddle Diddle Dum . (Did all those Baroque composers have Asperger’s?) Then I go to the piano and work at working, until disgust tolls fancy’s knell. In the afternoon, the obligatory walk in the woods, or perhaps a trip to town for pie and coffee at the Pine Grove, where I’m known for my geniality. Every Tuesday I drive to Hanover to give a piano lesson to a no-hoper high-school boy, and on the way back I stop by the state liquor store in West Lebanon for a couple of handles of Tanqueray. After sunset, of course, I’m immobilized, as the undead are by day: this is when I drink, and the town cops know my car. Picture the door to the freezer inching open, the hand creeping in. So I sip the hours away, playing computer solitaire and listening to the radio. In the p.m., I switch to AM—my little way of bidding defiance to Time—crossing over into the wonder world of Jesus: Hope in the Night; Brother Stair, “The Last-Day Prophet” who sometimes bellows in the voice of God; and Open Forum with Harold Camping, who mikes his Bible so you can hear the pages turn, and who’s calculated the Rapture for May of next year, and the end of time for October 21. I’d find this fixation hard to explain if there were anyone to whom I had to explain it. You don’t suppose He’s calling me, or that I’m seeking Him? And of course I worry about my work. When you lose a game of solitaire, a box pops up: There are no more possible moves. What do you want to do now? It’s one of those ironies so obviously pointed at you that you can’t take it seriously. As I tell my students, if you’re not at a creative impasse, you’re not paying attention.

I’ve already told you I studied with Morton Feldman, yes? Don’t bother to check—you won’t find me on Wikipedia’s list of his “notable” students, though I see they’ve got Kyle Gann, as well they should, and even Elliott Sharp. Back in the eighties, I wrote the music for a Canadian horror movie you wouldn’t have heard of—not that you’ve heard of Morton Feldman—which gave us the down payment for this house. I used to call it my big score; was that not witty? And ten years ago, or I guess more like fifteen, the Kronos was supposedly going to record a piece of mine, but of course by then they had Tan Dun— there’s a son of a bitch who knows how to work it—as well as the Africans and whoever else.

Oh well. Even back when I was studying with Mort, I knew that whatever sang to him was never going to sing to me. He knew it, too. But once, when I was broke, he bought me dinner and when he died, a couple of years before we moved up here, I helped put together a tribute in Boston; wasn’t I the shit back then? We recruited players from the BSO to do For Samuel Beckett , the last thing he ever wrote, and for a curtain raiser I’d worked up Palais de mari , his final piano piece. The chamber orchestra for the Beckett outnumbered the audience. You play Feldman with the sustain pedal mostly down, to make the notes after the notes, the echoes and harmonics, ring and shimmer and beat against one another inside the piano. A couple of minutes into it, I got lost in listening, fucked up a note, fucked up another—I doubt now that anybody noticed—and just got up and walked off. They must have thought I was too devastated to continue. So of course you’re asking yourself, Did he secretly have it in for this man?

Mort once assigned us to write a piece for soprano and string quartet based on an item out of The Buffalo News , and ever since I’ve mostly stuck to setting other people’s words—a sufficiently dinky arena for my dinky gift. This is going to sound like I’m bullshitting, but back in Buffalo I started writing a Watergate opera—this was long before Nixon in China . Then, around the time the Kronos deal was happening, or not happening, I thought I’d better take notice of hip-hop, as old hacks like Milhaud had felt they’d better take notice of jazz. Ah, that was the answer: sample a smidgen of Boulez or Golden P. Harris, whatever struck your fancy—this was where intuition came in—and sequence them to a dance beat, so people might actually listen to it, then put your text on top. In Sprechstimme: no more screwing around waiting for some melody to sing itself to you. I even bought a Roland 808, which I’ve still got up in the attic. And after I got over that, the answer was what? One’s oh-so-personal vision?

At any rate, I’m now working toward working on a piece—a little Gesamtkunstwerk , you might say, since it’ll involve some visuals in performance—that I’m calling Alcorian A-1949 . This is how they’ve registered Ted Williams’s frozen corpse at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Arizona. Did I tell you I saw Ted Williams once? My father took me to Fenway when I was six, just so I could say I saw him. And now I’ve said it. How I got the idea, there’s a man at the nursing home, Jimmy Condon, who used to be a great friend of the Gartners. Jimmy doesn’t let them wheel him out much—he says it gets him down to see old people—but I bring him what he calls “reading matter.” He likes fat paperbacks, mostly histories, and since he follows the Sox, I naturally thought of him when that biography of Ted Williams came out. The next time I went in, he handed it back. “Maybe you want to pass this along to somebody else,” he said. “You know his son put him in the deep freeze? Ted Williams. Yes sir. And then they cut off his head and froze that .” He drew a finger across his throat. “But I’ll tell you who was a hell of an athalete—Gene Conley. He’d pitch for the Sox and then turn right around and play for the Celtics. Two sports. Nobody can do that anymore.”

That made me curious enough to read the book myself—if I’d known how depressing it got toward the end, I would never have inflicted it on Jimmy. Not just the head business, but fat old Ted Williams, stroked out, hooked to machines, disinheriting his daughter and still signing autographs on his deathbed for his son to sell. But how the man could blaspheme!