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Breathe at Every Other Stroke
Stories
By Pamela Gullard Henry Holt and Company
Copyright © 1996 Pamela Gullard
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8146-4
CHAPTER 1
Some Say Fire
I was waiting for them to blow up the Dumbarton Bridge. It was the old drawbridge I had crossed so often when I lived with my mother in San Jose and took singing lessons from my aunt over the San Francisco Bay in Fremont. Now the bridge seemed sad and obsolete. Just north, the new suspension bridge running parallel to it already carried a heavy flow of commuter cars high above the swells.
On the shore, about a mile or so away, I sat on top of a huge Hetch Hetchy water pipe as wide as a man is tall and gazed at the old bridge. My dream of becoming a singer seemed sad, too, and almost obsolete. There was $224 left in my savings account after this last all-out effort to get started as a singer before I hit twenty-five. If something didn't turn up soon, I would have to go back to my accounting job at Compu Corporation. I would spend the rest of my days alone in my cubicle living for the satisfying but tiny ping of balancing the accounts at the end of the month. It occurred to me that a wiser person would have gotten a new dream up and running before the old one was blasted.
The pipe I was sitting on was cradled in scaffolding a few feet off the ground and ran across a strip of marsh to the edge of the bay. My legs, spread out before me, were stiff from the penetrating cold of the metal, and in my back was a sore knot. To my left, a black guy wearing a tam sat eating a tuna fish sandwich. A legal notice at the back of the Times Tribune had said the army would dynamite the old bridge at 10:30 A.M. Thursday. It was already 12:23. The delay made me long for yet dread the explosion even more.
How many times had I crossed that bridge? It rested right on the water so that, in a storm, waves came scudding across the center line. I would arrive at my aunt Celia's apartment feeling as if I had practically swum there. Aunt Celia, standing at the piano with one hand on the keys, would throw back her shoulders and exhort me to sing as if I owned the world.
"I don't own the world," I would say, my sheet music in hand.
"Pretend."
"OK. Maybe it's possible while I sing, but what about when I stop?"
"On stage, the time between songs is almost as important as the music. Your beautiful voice won't get you anywhere without presence."
"How about if I just try for California?"
I shut my eyes not so much to rest as to ignore the guy eating his sandwich. While you're singing, the audience loves you and you can feel it. They close their eyes when you do. Their clapping at the end of the song washes over you like a thousand hands touching you.
The audition at the Skylit Basement the day before had gone pretty well at first. I sang a complete set before the manager stopped me. Hal Patterson has a shiny forehead and a cowlick, which he tugs at as he speaks. "Got any patter?" he asked.
"I don't talk," I said. "I just sing."
He seemed to accept that and my hopes rose, but then he had called that morning to say that my singing was lyrical but he needed more, uh, personality. So sorry.
The guy in the tam finished his sandwich, wiped his hands on his jeans, and reached into an inner pocket of his pea jacket. He took out binoculars with a broken strap and looked across the water. "Nothing happening," he said. I hadn't been sure he could talk. "You think they gave us a bum steer?" He tapped his stubbled chin meditatively, as if pondering the mysteries of other people's plans. He himself didn't look like he'd kept a very strict schedule of late.
"I hope not," I said with a fervor that surprised even me. "I mean, I want to see a huge, fiery, loud explosion that rocks our hearts." It occurred to me that audiences are looking for hope even more than for music. Maybe they want to watch the singer unfold herself, see her reach for them and grab hold.
The bridge in the midday sun had become a shiny line across the bay. My early life had been laid out on that span. In high school, I drove back and forth twice a week for my singing lessons, and it was on the long, monotonous stretch of the Dumbarton that I thought about my first, quiet boyfriends and how different they were from the loud men who took out my mother and my aunt. I made up songs as I drove, and I devised big plans for my future. All my past seemed laced onto the bridge, waiting now to be blown up.
At two o'clock I got up quietly. My legs were stiff and unsteady. The black guy's head was sunk so low in his high blue collar that I couldn't tell if he was asleep or not. I blew him a kiss and trotted over the gravel and weeds to my Volvo, which was salmon pink from years of oxidation.
Later that evening, I lay on my bed listening to my tape of Sticky Fingers play over and over. Finally reaching over to click it off, I dozed.
At three o'clock in the morning I awoke. The room had cooled and was as dark as the deep, rich center of a perfect black note.
By feel, I put on a flannel shirt for bed and got under the quilt. It was my aunt Celia who first took up with the Tacky Brothers, as I called them. She moved in with the one who sold vacuum cleaners, and then my mother started seeing his brother. When I was seventeen, my mother suddenly went on vacation with the one who said he owned a ranch in Texas. She left a note telling me to spend the week at Celia's. I drove across the Dumbarton to my aunt's new place in the hills, but neither she nor her Tacky Brother was there. Celia said later that they had gone to an Elvis sound-alike contest in L.A. and decided to stay a few nights. It was never clear whether she had forgotten I was coming or had just not been told. In a wink, I was alone. I drove back to my mother's apartment.
Finally, on Sunday, my mother came into the kitchen with a suitcase in hand. She smelled of alcohol and looked surprised to see me. When she heard about Celia, she shrugged. "You can take care of yourself for a week, I guess."
"Doesn't it matter to you what happens to me?"
"It matters." She swayed. The brother came in the door and put his thick arms around her waist. "But obviously you're all right," she said.
"I'm not all right," I shouted. Those were my last words to my mother for a year. At first, my mind was blank and I couldn't name my emotions. Then I realized I felt expendable. Speech was pointless. Nothing I said would keep my mother from her next Tacky adventure. My silence deepened. At school I hardly spoke. The final months of my senior year I cut chorus a few times, then gave up my music altogether. It was an act of spite, but of course it hurt only me. I took the clerical job at Compu Corporation and didn't tell anyone when I got an apartment. I just moved out.
Next morning, the same guy was sitting in the same spot wearing his pea jacket and the tam. I wasn't even sure he had moved. "Hi," I said.
We exchanged names. He said he was called Roy, as in the French for king. He gave an amused snort. He took out the binoculars and looked at the distant span, though we both knew this was more a matter of form than any real expectation of new developments. He put the binoculars down on his thigh. "After the explosion, they'll turn the stub ends into fishing piers," he said.
"Oh?" A sea tern circled us. "Do you fish?"
"Not anymore." He wound the strap around the binoculars. "The last fish I caught was when I helped some guys with a sturgeon on the Rogue River, border of Oregon. The sturgeon lays at the bottom, see, and waits. You raise him with grappling hooks. That fish was three hundred pounds. Took us two hours."
"Did you work on a boat for a living?"
He snorted as if that were funny too. The deep creases from his broad nose to his chin spread as he smiled. "Not for a living," he said, with an inflection that mocked my politeness.
"Do you have a family?" I figured sitting on a pipe together for two mornings entitled me to some questions.
A short sigh. A moving of the binoculars from one thigh to another. He looked at me. This day was sunny but no warmer than the previous one. His black-gray hair shone beneath the hat, whether from oil he'd put on that morning or from sweat, I couldn't tell.
He raised his eyebrows. "Can you keep a secret?"
I hadn't been expecting secrets, though I sensed he was an outsider. Was he a spy? Did he murder someone? He didn't seem violent. But I shrugged. I didn't plan to be bound by his secrets.
He spoke anyway. His tone was low but clear, each word pronounced separately and distinctly. "I like men," he said.
His meaning was just dawning on me when he continued, his voice slightly higher and faster. "In my day, someone like me didn't get much of a chance. Double trouble. My own brother caught me with a friend of his and tried to drown me with a garden hose. He turned it on flat out and held my nose. He crammed the hose to the back of my throat while he called me names I won't repeat to you. The water ripped into my lungs, into my sinuses." He sighed, shifted position. "So mostly I lay low. There were a couple of years when I thought I'd shake my low-profile habit, but with AIDS most everyone either has someone already or is waiting things out."
I was stunned by his story. I thought of his brother, my mother. Did the most important people always turn away in the end? Moments passed. I realized Roy was watching my face for a response. He didn't seem the kind who trusted his tale to just anyone. It must have come out because we were the only two people sitting on a pipe with miles of marsh and bay stretching away from us. What could I say?
"Did you drown?" I asked.
He smiled. He adjusted his hat so that it barely skimmed his left eyebrow. "Yeah," he said. "Went to heaven and guess what I came back as — since I was so good at it?"
I looked at him uncertainly.
He pointed at himself and whooped. "The same — exactly the same."
We laughed and let it die, and then laughed some more. Then he sobered. His face was wet. "So my job is a little of this, a little of that." He turned his eyes back to me. "What's yours?"
At first I didn't have an answer, then I smiled as I thought about the singing. "My job is just to be adored," I said. "Right now I'm unemployed."
He chuckled. "Actually that's my job too."
We waited. We waited some more. A few people came, faced the bridge for a while, and left, shaking their heads. The bridge was an act that never came on. I felt restless, like an audience that has bought tickets in good faith and is about to turn ugly. Roy was deep in his prelunch nap.
The hot noon sun warmed the pipe. My mother and aunt were both in Texas now. I couldn't tell which brother they were living with. They sent me postcards, as if they were permanently on vacation, which is different from being unemployed.
I tried to think of patter. Hi! I'm Candace Dillinger and I'm going to sing for you an old Scottish ballad called "The Raggle-Taggle Gypsies, O!" The first version of this song was called "Johnny Faa" after the Johnny Faa who was hanged in 1624 for disobeying the government decree banishing gypsies from Scotland.
No, too historical. Too gloomy. The audience is out for a good time. Not hangings.
Hi! I'm Candace Dillinger and I'm going to sing a Billie Holiday song for you, "What a Little Moonlight Can Do." This is a song from the depression about love and happiness, kisses and heaven.
Who do I think I'm kidding? Schmaltz, even good schmaltz, isn't exactly what they want these days. Need something more updated, more punchy, more now.
Hi! I'm Helen Reddy and I'm going to sing for you "I Am Woman." (Pause.) Stand back.
I wished I had my harmonica to help me think. I bought it the day I quit my job, the day I started singing again. Hal said not to use the harmonica at the club. Too sixties. Looks funny in front of a pretty girl's face.
Hi! I'm Candace Dillinger and I'm going to sing "Cockles and Mussels." This is an old Irish folk ballad about a girl who sells seafood. It isn't funny. It isn't upbeat. It isn't twentieth century. I just like the tune.
Blah. Everyone falls asleep.
Roy opened his eyes. He took out his sandwich. I took out mine. (I had made it that morning.) He smiled. I smiled. He loaned me the binoculars for a look.
By three I couldn't stand it any longer. I told Roy I had an errand and I'd be back. He said there was no need — even the army wouldn't blow up a bridge at rush hour. His indifference to whether I returned or not hit me hard. I had thought we were friends.
"I'll be back," I said. "You never know what the armed forces will do." I planned to check my answering machine, get a paper, buy a candy bar, and return quickly to our vigil.
He shrugged.
Was there some small pleasure in my loyalty? I couldn't tell.
In Palo Alto, I called home out of vague hope, not really expecting anything. Hal's voice was on my machine. The regular singer at the club (he and his guitarist called themselves Danny and the Night Dog) had a sore throat. Could I fill in that night?
I put the receiver in its small silver cradle, and the tone device back in my purse. The top of my head was stretching upward, pulling my ears into an alert position. I could hear every tiny rustle of the people walking outside and the whispers of the bay breezes skulking about town. I opened the phone booth and listened to the peeps and scrapes, grunts and murmurs of my world.
I forgot about the newspaper, I forgot about the candy bar, I forgot about Roy and the explosion. I drove home wildly. I threw all my clothes on the bed and tried to put together the sexiest, most lyrical outfit in the world.
In the dark of the nightclub, I stood in front of the audience in a shimmering dress with tiers of sequins at the hips. My moussed hair looked like it had been swept back by a fierce wind. I wore shiny sandals with narrow straps. Very eighties, very punchy.
The big middle-aged man at the table to my left was telling a joke about a porpoise to a young woman who dipped her long fingers into a glass and dragged miniature ice cubes out to suck on. Five women in their forties sat at two round tables pushed together. Their heads were turned toward me but their eyes darted all over the room. It was possible that no one except me knew I was there.
Perching on the very tall stool in the middle of the stage, I tapped the microphone. The sound, so alive and startling to me, didn't faze the audience. My guitar felt slippery, its cord snaking across my foot. Sooner or later I was going to have to say something.
"Hi," I said. "I'm Candace Dillinger and I'm not Danny and the Night Dog. As perhaps you can see."
No laughter. Not even a smile. I turned cold inside. Various joints in my body lost their connection with one another and I expected my fingers to fall off, my kneecaps to roll into the aisle, my ears to plop onto the dusty pink floor.
"Actually," I said, lowering my voice, which had been reaching supersonic levels. "I'm Cyndi Lauper and I just wanna have fun."
The noise hardly abated. The bored young woman continued sucking. The five older ones continued looking and murmuring among themselves. A boy with slick short hair and a girl in a long sweater stood at the bar and vibrated to each other.
"That was a joke," I said, smiling madly at them all.
"Are you going to keep this up all night?" asked the big man. He wore a shirt so thin I could see his nipples.
I sang. My voice wobbled at first, then grew stronger for a couple of songs. No one seemed to notice. I tried to smooth them on out with some B. B. King. The big man rolled his eyes. I attempted to warm him up with the sweet melodrama of the Everly Brothers' "Take a Message to Mary." During the song he discussed Scotch loudly with the waitress — which brand was available and which one was the best.
Halfway into the set, I rested my guitar across my lap. I looked out from the spotlight to the dimness of the audience. "I want to sing for you Janis Joplin's little masterpiece 'Mercedes-Benz,' but I have to tell you that the most important part of the song comes when it's over, when Janis Joplin giggles." I was so confused I could have said anything. "I mean, it's that giggle that flips the song over and makes it even funnier — or rather, sadder — what I mean is that Janis Joplin didn't want a Mercedes exactly. She wanted …"
Someone turned up the stage light so I sat in a glow. Why was I trying to explain what Janis Joplin wanted? "She wanted …" A few in the audience leaned forward, including the big man. "Something." I dropped my head in embarrassment. They were being entertained by an idiot.
The room became quieter. They were waiting for me. I smiled — what else? — and tried again. "But I can't do the giggle, I mean here, Janis Joplin's giggle — you know, throaty, wise, happy for a moment no matter what." My voice died, came back. "So some of you could do the giggle. I mean, if you've ever wanted something beyond a Mercedes." I stopped there. Certainly I'd said enough.
Janis knew when to quit talking and sing. "Oh Lord, won't you buy me / A Mercedes-Benz?" I loved that song. "My friends all drive Porsches / I must make amends."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Breathe at Every Other Stroke by Pamela Gullard. Copyright © 1996 Pamela Gullard. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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