Nicholson Baker - Traveling Sprinkler

He was a young kid with a beard, retro-hippie-ish but with an official AAA shirt on, recently graduated from the University of New Hampshire. I flipped open my wallet and gave him a twenty from the back of my stash, where the twenties usually hide. I couldn’t afford it, but it’s important to give credit where credit is due.

“What kind of songs do you listen to when you’re driving?” I asked.

“The Cowboy Junkies,” he said. “They’ve got a song called ‘Common Disaster.’ Also I like Ben Taylor. He’s the son of James Taylor and Carly Simon.”

“Thanks for telling me.”

I scribbled “Common Disaster” and “Ben Taylor” on my folded-up piece of paper. Then I wrote “everything bagel” and “You’ve got to keep thinking”—maybe they could be songs.

MY JAW ACHES, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense. The cigar smoking is not good for it. It’s not the jaw it once was, and I’ll tell you what happened. In freshman year of high school, when I played basketball, I knew this kid named Ronnie who was a master dribbler. He had many tricky dribbles, but there was a certain move that worked every time — a low double-bounce feint, performed inches above the floor, that threw you off when you were trying to block his shot. I admired him very much even before we played basketball together, because of how well he drummed on his algebra textbook.

And the interesting thing about him, which I found out in gym class, was that he was missing a pectoral muscle. I don’t know if he’d been born without it, or if he’d had it removed, but it wasn’t there. He could drum in patterns I’d never heard before, and he could turn in the air and make a basket from half a mile away, and he did all this with only one pectoral muscle. Once he said, matter-of-factly, “Black people are just better than white people. They’re better at all sports, they sing better, they climb the rope higher, they run the hurdles faster, they win at the Olympics. They’re just better at everything.” And I thought, He’s absolutely right about that. Even so, I wanted to learn how to do his double-bounce trick.

I watched his moves carefully at practice, and then I went off to a far corner of the gym to try the double dribble. I thought I had it, or a close approximation of it, but a few days later, when I tried it in a game, I did something wrong. I bent low, feinted, double-dribbled, and the basketball came up fast and hit me in the jaw. I felt something go pop. It was extremely painful. Tears obscured my vision. Somebody grabbed the ball and I backed away from the action to recover. The pain was all over the right side of my head.

It didn’t go away. At inter-high band practice on Saturday morning we were playing a piece by Vincent Persichetti and an arrangement of Santana’s “Black Magic Woman.” My jaw hurt too much to play, but I pretended by frowning and putting my lips loosely on the reed. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t making any sound — the bassoon part was doubled by the bass clarinets and the baritone saxes. At Youth Orchestra on Sunday we spent an hour on The Pines of Rome , by Respighi, and I faked playing there, too, saving myself for the exposed passage near the beginning of Afternoon of a Faun . I had trouble eating a Ry-Krisp when I got home. I gave my jaw two days of rest, but then I had to practice a Milde étude for my lesson on Thursday.

I found out that the only way I could play the bassoon with a bearable level of pain was with my jaw positioned in a slight state of dislocation. Every day I popped my jaw gently out of alignment and practiced. I didn’t tell my teacher, Bill, for a few months, and the pain gradually diminished. But there was something clearly not right in what I was doing. When I finally told him about the basketball incident, he laughed a sad, kindly laugh. “I guess that’s dedication,” he said. He had a flaxen-haired girlfriend who was also a flutist. I had kind of a crush on her. I think Billy knew. They played the Villa-Lobos “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 6” together — a winsome, wide-wandering duet for flute and bassoon. Once the two of them taught me how to smoke a joint. It did nothing for me.

And that’s how I wrecked my jaw.

• • •

I’VE BEEN WORKING on a love song that goes, “I want to go to the beach, I want to take the dog off the leash, I want to stare out to the east, I want to see a new shade of blue, I want to smell the seaweed with you.” The first melody I tried was too close to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” so I rethought it. At one point I stopped singing and said, with amazement, “I’m actually writing a frigging love song.”

I wish I could sing “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5” for you. It’s the famous one. “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 6” is for flute and bassoon, and only bassoonists and flutists know about it, but “Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5” was an international hit. Heitor Villa-Lobos put on his hit hat that week and produced a masterpiece that everyone should listen to when they are seeking comfort.

Just saying the composer’s name is a musical experience. You need that sh in there: Villa-Lobosh. He was a prolific composer from where — Buenos Aires? Somewhere like that. São Paulo? Oh, Bachianas Brasileiras , right. He was a Brazilian composer. In nine separate short pieces, he took the example of Bach and gave it his own Brazilian bean-salad sexual curvature. And for No. 5, he used eight cellos — I think it’s eight, or twelve, or fifteen, an incredible number of cellos — and one human voice.

You can think of Villa-Lobos sitting there thinking, No, I’m not going to have one cello, or two, or three, I’m going to have a whole lot of cellos. All played by beautiful dark-haired women in loose flowing skirts. And they’ll all be doing pizzicato, plucking their long strings with their heads cocked to one side, bung bung bung bung bung bung bung bung bung bung bung bung bung bung —a pizzicato obbligato. Obliged to pluck. Pluck on, beautiful cello women! And then coming in over the mandatory pluckage is a melodic line that’s like Bach but it’s been run through the South American flan factory, sung by a singer named Victoria de los Angeles. My father had her record. She’s some kind of full-chested contralto, or maybe she’s a soprano, and she can belt it out. She goes, “Laaaaaaaaaah, daaaah daaaah daah daah dah dah daaaaaaaaah!”

Well, I can’t get that high. Anyway, she sings like a mad tropical bird, and it’s just a fondue of molten wanting and grieving and everything that you wish you could remember and feel and know. “Noh ooh, doo dooodoo dooooo deedoodie dooooooooooo! Dooooooo dah deee da doodie dooooooh!”

Sorry. I don’t even come close. But today I looked up Victoria de los Angeles on iTunes and listened to her sing the Bachianas again, for the first time since I sold my bassoon. It’s an old recording, all mono. I heard the same hiss, the same cellos. I could see my dear father standing between the Bose speakers, listening and moving his arms. All those cello players are dead and gone now, probably. And my father is gone, and Victoria de los Angeles is gone, and Heitor Villa-Lobos is gone now, too. He died when I was two. He wrote too much and most of his compositions are forgotten. But he did dream up this big, bad moonload of greatness for a loving voice and a bunch of cellos. When Victoria of the Angels started singing, I just lost it. It’s spontaneous. It’s the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, is what it is. All carefully written down as notes.

• • •

I ANSWERED THE PHONE. “Hi,” said Roz.

“Hi! Just a sec, let me turn this down.” I was listening to “You Dropped a Bomb on Me” at high volume. “How are you making out?”