Steve Tomasula: IN & OZ

World Premier

One Night Only

A Performance of “The Essence of Music”presented so that the world can hear for itself the difference between True Music and the bastard children masquerading as the Real and True Music, a grotesquerie of Honesty, a saccharine TRAVESTY of HOW THINGS ARE which distorts not by lying but by FRAMING the world in such a way so as to CROP from view the WHOLE OF MUSIC and make of it a standardized assemblage of sounds to play while in the car or vacuuming the house, The Lap Dog of Muisakal Inc. and all its Movie-TV-Satellite-Theme Park-Action Figure-Billboard-Toilet Seat-Coffee Bean-Shower Curtain Subsidiaries, the darling of the corporate culture newsletter — a.k.a.

The Daily Times —giving Customers (a.k.a. Readers) what they want—50,000

Shareholders can’t be wrong!

— FAMILY RELATIONS! SENTIMENT!

HIGH SCHOOL MEMORIES!

EPIPHANIES!—

faceless, nameless, ubiquitous mUSic valorized for its vanquishing of elitism, its glorification of The Common Man and The Common Woman and their place on the Common Assembly Line and the power it gives him AND her to assert their SELVES by BUYING OUR PRODUCT. Listen to it now and again and you’ll discover the Miracle of LOVE. And so convenient it can be turned on or off like a FAUCET….

Since Photographer had composed the fine print, it ranted for several pages, comprising as it did a kind of manifesto.

On the night of the performance, Mechanic manned the enormous scrolling contraption he had cobbled together from junkyard parts and abandoned circus equipment: a huge canvas scroll powered by a 600 h.p. diesel engine that roared when he shifted gears to make the canvas gradually unwind like the roll of a player piano as it crossed the stage. At the rear of the warehouse, Photographer manned a movie projector, lying on its side so that as the scroll unwound from one spool to the other, the pages of sheet music, which Photographer had photographed then spliced together to form a continuous movie, would be projected upon the blank canvas of the unscrolling scroll, in synch with it.

Composer sat in the front row of the dozen folding chairs they had set up. There was no one else in the audience, save Poet (Sculptor). Mechanic could tell that this was a special occasion for her by the way she’d gotten dressed up. Though she wore the same battle-ship gray factory uniform she’d had on at the anti-billboard meeting, the tails of its work shirt were tucked in. She’d also buttoned the top button of her shirt in a formal sort of way. She sat politely waiting, feet flat on the floor, knees together, her hands clasped around a Mason jar full of dirt in her lap. To amuse her, Mechanic revved the engine and worked the clutch; Photographer held a palm against the film’s rotating take-up reel to adjust its speed, the two of them tuning like a violinist and cellist.

Then they were ready.

In the idle before the first downbeat, the slamming boom of warehouse doors echoed throughout the cavernous metal building. A woman appeared — a woman in a smart, white-satin business suit. She strode toward them like a fashion model on a runway, hips and shoulders swiveling in sync, her high-heels clicking loudly across the concrete floor. She held a tiny, white lapdog that shivered from the damp of the leaky warehouse/auditorium, cowering as she swung it onto her lap to take a seat in the audience.

Throttle open. The diesel engine roared deafeningly. The projector flickered to life, bringing up the first bars of the projected music. In the glow, Mechanic could see Composer following the music with his eyes, his face a portrait of a man gazing out into the rarefied air of a mountain he had tried to scale all his life. Though Mechanic was occupied with running the scroll, shifting gears to speed it up at the fast parts of the music, slowing it down when the notations said decelerando , the engine roared continually, reverberating so loudly in the otherwise empty warehouse that the floor shook. Through it all, Composer sat transfixed, and Mechanic was touched to see how moved Composer obviously was by the kindness his friends had performed for him: he seemed to be living and dying by turns as the music took ecstatic flight or plunged into somber depths. Often, he would bite his knuckles, barely able to watch, or clasp his hands prayerfully as a particularly moving passage was projected to wall-size. Poet (Sculptor) also concentrated with the attention of one learning a new language, squinting to follow the notations.

The other woman sat stupefied, her hands clamped over the ears of the dog in her lap. As the overture progressed, her head swiveled from Mechanic operating the scroll, to Photographer operating his projector behind as if she were passing an auto accident and didn’t know whether to gawk at the mangled wreckage on the highway or the bodies in the ditch. They had nearly reached the one hour mark when she finally let go of the dog and put her fingers in her own ears against the roar of the engine. Then as the second measure began, she cradled her head in her hand. Mechanic was glad she was sitting behind Composer so he couldn’t see her inattention. He was glad she was in front of the projector so that Photographer couldn’t see that half of the audience was such a — Such a — Yes, there was no denying the word — such a philistine. Though he couldn’t follow most of the music himself, he understood the undivided attention it required, while she had given up on following it so completely that she was grooming her dog — a visual equivalent to the elderly who leave their hearing aids at home, then thinking the music has ended, begin talking loudly over the soft passages of a symphony.

Why had she come, Mechanic wondered, traveling to a neighborhood that was obviously worse than her own? Her lips formed a perfect Cupid’s bow and were painted red, her suit so tailored to her body that it could not have come off of any of the standard racks of IN. Compared to the grays and browns that dominated IN, her sleek white suit made her a gleaming new Ferrari to their graveyard of discarded washtubs, and he couldn’t stop stealing glances at her. Two hours later, when the music hit a lengthy passage that was all in third gear, he was able to prop the throttle in a fixed position and leave his stool. She obviously hadn’t known to come prepared, so he walked past Poet (Sculptor) and went to her and, in the deafening drone, offered by way of gestures for her to take half of the sandwich he had brought for his own dinner. She shook her head, mouthing the words NO THANK YOU, and he was struck by how gracious she was, even in refusal, as though it didn’t matter that she was there in a perfect white suit, perfect blonde hair, while he was a pile of mechanic’s weeds, the whiteness of his sandwich bread accentuating his tool-blackened fingernails.

Her dog stared at the sandwich. Using gestures again, he offered to give it to him, and again by mouthing the words with lips so red and full that they seemed to move in slo-motion, she said he was too kind. But after he vehemently asserted that he didn’t mind, she acquiesced, and he gave it over.

Perched back on his stool, again in control of the throttle, he ate his own half of the sandwich. The dog had already finished, and was sniffing around the base of her chair, licking up crumbs. Mechanic resolved to stop staring at the woman, but as the concert drove on, she made looking at her increasingly easy, her eyelids growing heavy, drowsily closing for longer and longer periods. Finally her head nodded down to her chest. When her dog reared its hinnie, he was glad she was asleep so she couldn’t see it crap on the warehouse floor.

Seven hours later, as the last few bars of music were projected on the scroll, he was only staring at her, slouched in her metal folding chair, her dog asleep in her lap, her own eyes shut too, her ears plugged with Kleenex against the roar of the engine.