Knight in Tie-Dye -- PART 2 [the piano]

The piano was rolled out of the big practice room at the beginning of the night, before the house was open, while the halls were still empty save for a few hippies and hobbits. Men's choir wheeled it down the hall to a corner by the auditorium doors, in front of the windows, with a ledge to sit at and play.

Tommy Marcus is the most talented pianist at the school. I wouldn't call him one of the prodigies, like the violinist who serenades the stage during lunch, or the Harvard to-be graduate, but he's got a way with the stand-up box of strings. It becomes him. As good as his is with the piano, the voice alongside it beats all else, and I knew before I ever saw him he was, if not prodigy, an extremely talented kid.

He's accepted as if a prodigy, though. The other talented pianists wordlessly regard him as their superior, making room at the center of the ledge for his choice of song, the same way the other musicians let the violinist own the stage whenever she so desires. It's out of respect for the song, and all songs, and music everywhere -- the better musician plays first.

So, as the audience members began to file in, standing in line and getting their tickets marked, Tommy played and he sang and his friends circled around the piano, leaning on their elbows (like bicycles), and sang with him, entertaining themselves before showtime, eventually abandoning the piano in the hallway before the curtain rose.

After the concert was over, and after the terrifying but good-natured hug, Thomas (the cellist) and I were looking for my costume in the band room. It was easier then, after all the other bags had been picked up and gone home, but all we found was an empty floor. To greet us when we left, a song floated down the hallway, just around the bend where the borrowed piano rested.

By this time, Thomas was beginning to notice my entire demeanor becoming substantially less like myself and more like Martensen. I glided instead of slouched, I twirled instead of turned. I no longer had to worry about being too shy or too awkward or too much like myself, watching things happen and recording them for later. In the tie-dye and Levis, beads and bandanna, I was now a performer, a participant, and a part of the world around me. By wearing his clothes, I took on his place in the world, wore his masks, and could no longer stand to observe without participating.

And I knew this song.

I knew it from Lyssa, who, during a passing period before science one day, decided to rock me back and forth and sing it to me like a lullaby. Lyssa is shorter than me by a little under a foot, and has a very powerful and passionate voice with a habit of changing keys at unplanned bars. She sang "Hallelujah," the Leonard Cohen one. After a few lines, I noted that the song had obviously touched her in some way, so I went home that night and listened to it 36 times before I went to sleep.

I knew this song.

As this fact slowly clicked within, I ran barefoot down the hallway as it neared the first chorus, which timed my arrival so perfectly I (Martensen) could not help but meet it halfway. I belted the word as loud as I could, before realizing I (Shady) cannot sing very well. 

I sing like a cellist, which means I hear notes and can mimic them eventually, but my voice is not well-trained enough to hit on the notes right away. I did not hit a single syllable correctly at the hallelujah I slid in singing with all I had. The singers turned and looked at me, all dressed in black, Tommy and his friend at the piano, a couple leaning against the lid and two girls at the other end, sitting or standing by the windows. They had obviously rehearsed this, with well-planned harmonies and practiced melodies. Or they were just naturally talented.

The song continued, and I, in an effort to save face, continued singing. I, Shady, dressed in brightly colored seventies-themed apparel, still smelling like a gay boy, continued singing, reaching pitch and holding it best I could as the chorus rose. They smiled at me, considerably amused, and a few of the smiles stitched themselves into giggles between notes, and I joined the ensemble.

I couldn't leave.

I knew this song, and no one was coming to save me, and there was no way I could leave. So I just kept going. There were instances in the song when some kids forgot the words, or didn't know them, or couldn't see them from the phone Tommy's friend was reading off of from the music rack. The two girls left halfway through the song, a bass vocalist joined at one point and hummed harmonies, and I sat down on the ledge and sang with all I had (which is not as much as Martensen does).

By the time it ended, and it began to sink in what exactly I had done, Tommy leaned across his friend, looked me in the eye, and gave me a fist-bump. Which was exactly the moment I realized I was still myself and had just accomplished a horrendous thing, and succeeded. The pros to wearing a choir boy's clothes had evened out alongside the cons.

Before another song started and I embarrassed myself all over again, my phone rang, and Roonie saved me.

"Shady."
"Yes?"
"Did your mom come to pick you up yet?"
"No, I think her phone is turned off..."
"Oh. Sorry. You're still at the school though?"
"Yeah, participating in the experience of life. Why?"
"I left my makeup bag in the choir room, by the water fountain. Is there any way you could get it for me, and bring it to school tomorrow?"
"Yes! I'll go do that now."
"Oh thank you! Thank you so much!"
"No problem."

Just before I hung up, like a nostalgic afterthought of a dream in the morning right as you forget it, she said, "Wait. Shady. Shady."

"Yes?"

"Thank you for being my knight in tie-dye."

Thank you for being my knight in tie-dye.

So I found Roonie's bag and didn't find mine, and sat and listened to Tommy's piano as I quietly thanked Brady for the hug and Martensen for the clothes and Lyssa for the song and Roonie for the phone call, like prayers to humans I know cannot hear me, and I showered twice that night and still smelled like sweat and sunrise the next morning.

MORAL: It is best not to ask about the four-minute hallway exchange of rolled-up Levis and a single sock which took place the morning after, and sometimes losing things makes for good memories.

Knight in Tie-Dye -- PART 1 [the hug]

[This is a pretty long post, so, sorry about that, and if you don't have time to read it, I'll just tell you now, it involves high school theatricals,  borrowed disguises, and an uncomfortably lust-filled hug with a gay boy. A different gay boy. There's probably a bunch of over-used hyphens and self-diagnosis, too.]

Every year, the high school throws a huge four-night concert sometime in May.

It's the only time of the year people actually pay to see band and orchestra perform, though choir still takes up most of the night, and rightly so. There aren't really televised competitions about how well you can play the trombone, or violin. People get bored with it.

I'm a cellist, but most of my friends are in choir. There's a significant and noteworthy difference between the two cultures, that of the instrument being within and without the musician's self. Both are harshly competitive, with a warm family atmosphere. And, during Pops week, both band and choir rooms are full of half-naked teenagers every night.

Pops concerts are purely for entertainment, which means school funding. The performance tries so desperately to sell tickets, it really doesn't even matter what it sounds like at a certain point as long as the costumes are ridiculous enough, the songs popular enough, and the dancing as embarrassing as possible. It is the funnest week of the year.

Because of my being a cellist, I only played in two numbers each night. One of them was a Lord of the Rings medley, and the other was Purple Haze, by Jimi Hendrix. I do not know the plot or theme of Lord of the Rings, but based on my knowledge mainly from tumblr gifs, I pieced together a makeshift hobbit costume without knowing it was a hobbit costume, and a dress from the actual sixties I found in my grandmother's closet for Purple Haze. Neither blended in very well, but I chose to ignore this fact.

During performances, band kids are not allowed out of the band room, and choir kids are not allowed out of the choir room. It slows down transitions in the hall. Typically, the two have zero inclination to intermingle anyway, and this wouldn't be a problem if it weren't for the missing 60's costume.

The floor of the band room during the performances is littered with backpacks and grocery bags full of costumes and cellphones. Because it was my first year, I hadn't quite predicted just how many bags there would be, and how easily a costume could be lost, until the Lord of the Rings number had ended and everyone else was getting into tie-dye and bell-bottoms.

It took me about two minutes of wandering to realize mine would not be found. I approached Pen and Thomas (fellow cellists) and asked them if they had seen my stuff anywhere. It took about two seconds of worried stares to realize we were going on stage soon and help would have to be sought elsewhere.

Because Murderer's Row was made up primarily of choir kids, I knew the numbers that would be sung, and the order of which they would be sung in, and actually knew many of the songs by heart. I spend more time with voices than I do with instrumentals. Age of Aquarius (a 70's number) had just ended when I hurriedly snuck out of the band room (still dressed as an accidental hobbit) and into the choir room.

Roonie (musicals girl), and Lyssa (marine biology girl), had just resurfaced from the stage in peace signs and bandannas when I desperately asked them for the shirts off their backs. (A decade in musical history matters very little when in danger of playing Jimi Hendrix as a hobbit.) Just before they started stripping, Martensen emerged from one of the dressing rooms, fully tuxed for his next number.

"Do you need my hippie costume?" he asked graciously. (Martensen's personality depends heavily upon his clothes, and when he wears his tuxedo, he wears his teaching-children-ballroom-dancing mask, which is one of his best.) And, still attempting to make up for the paper towels incident, as well as other things, he scooped up his entire costume from Aquarius and pushed it into my arms right as Lyssa clapped her bandanna over my forehead and Roonie tucked Martensen's sunglasses into my shirt pocket and I was shoved back into the hallway with a whispered "Thank you!" and a "Make us proud!"

Martensen's clothes smelled like a mixture of boy sweat, boy deodorant, and gay boy. I only realized this after putting them on. We have similar enough body types, but it was still fairly obvious the clothes did not belong to me as I skirted back into the band room unnoticed in tie-dye, bandanna, rolled-up Levis and reflective sunglasses, noisy beads rubbing against each other in a clatter around my neck.

The performance went well enough -- I didn't get stabbed in the foot with an end-pin. I blended in as easily as my mother said I would, and danced as well as a cellist could, which is, you know, not at all, but I was wearing the skin of Martensen Entenman. It was a lot easier to be on a stage while smelling like him than smelling like me.

It was only after the concert I realized Martensen's boyfriend had been in the audience all night. I thought it would be a funny story, having to explain the exact same outfit, the exact same glasses and beads, which Martensen told me to give back the next day. After the concert, we asked how his boyfriend liked the performances, me still dressed as a makeshift hippie, and I waited for him to ask for the inevitable explanation.

It did not come.

Martensen is dating a very kind and good-natured boy, Brady, who talks a little like a cross between Winnie-the-Pooh and Lumpy Space Princess. He dresses like a sailor and shakes hands like a soldier and I can imagine him looking and acting like Santa Claus when he gets old. He is either really oblivious, or was too busy noticing the person to notice the clothes, which is understandable. But either way, he never noticed the cross-dressing.

After Martensen went home, I stood there and continued talking with Brady.

It was the most confusing unspoken interaction I have ever had.

The longer we stood there talking, the more apparent the smell of Martensen became. I watched it slowly register in Brady's subconscious long before he realized what was happening. I hadn't had time to notice it all night, but by now it was seeping into my skin. It arose into the air around us like a terribly embarrassing secret (which Brady doesn't know), bittersweet and horrifically uncomfortable to still be wearing. As I waited for him to click and say, "Hey, you smell like my boyfriend!" or, "Hey, you're wearing my boyfriend's clothes!" he instead just gradually softened his shoulders and turned his head to one side, slowly and shamelessly dripping with lust, comfortably conflicted at the person in front of him, without cognitively processing the correlation. I couldn't say anything at this point, he just smiled dopey-eyed and furrowed his brow carefully and said, "I think I'd like a hug."

[I was going to draw a picture, but he might read this one day.]

And I just stood there, like, "This is not the first time this has happened to me. Oh my god. There's no way this is happening again."

If you remember reading about my problem with touching, you'll remember I have a condition which was later diagnosed to me as being "overly empathetic" when it comes to physical contact. Too much of the other person's honest feeling is internalized through their touch. Which means when a kid with pent-up anger taps my shoulder, it hurts, and when someone happens to feel very attracted when they hug me, I totally know and can feel every inclination and motive.

This is a very dangerous and uncomfortable condition.

This means that I felt every feeling meant for Martensen while drenched in the smell of him as his boyfriend hugged me goodbye.

I cannot describe the discomfort.

Puzzled and happy, he waved goodbye at the entrance and I shuddered and walked back to the band room to find my original costume, deciding if I didn't get out of the godforsaken tie-dye soon I was going to have to tear it from my body whether or not I made it home in time.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

a conversation with my mother

Her: "You have a really sexy tummy."

Me: "You have really bad word choice."

5 G6T A NEW 2EYB6ARD

WHAT

A3r5ght, that's --  swear. 2ay. He336? ? Oh. Numbers. Got it.

So, I have a new keyboard!

Expect better stories soon. I haven't been posting them because of the technical issues, and also finals. But soon. Soon.

tunnels

It is often hard to notice when you choose to hold your breath.

When playing hide and seek, or lifting something heavy, or watching a movie with an underwater scene, we find ourselves doing it without conscious decision - fists clenched, shoulders tensed, we freeze. Not that holding our breath is at all helpful for our survival, unless a predator with very good ears is looking for us.

Mostly it just presses pause.

A couple weeks ago I was on a sort of field trip for an orchestra competition, and we rode charter buses up through the mountains. The first tunnel we drove through, people were talking and laughing above the muffled rumble of the machine, and as the walls grew close and the sun went out I stopped talking. The conversation sort of halted.

There was only one sigh at the end of that tunnel.

"You hold your breath too?" my bus buddy asked. "My dad taught me! So weird!"

"I wonder why people do that," I said.

We passed through many, many tunnels, winding and straight, broad and narrow, short and long. The strangest part is, the longer we drove, the quieter it would get in the bus through each tunnel, and the greater the sigh at the end. The habit was spreading. It was like we were coming alive again, growing nearer to our roots with each concrete tunnel and incrementally understanding the human of the cave.

It was less superstition and more reverence for life. Things would stop. No movement, no noise, no birds or beasts. No laughter. Above us loomed a mountain older than anything we knew and heavier than anything we've touched. In the tunnel, there is no heaven above, or hell below, or glass to see them through. We are foreigners of a land in which we are not welcome, we are digging through the soul of a rock more sacred than ourselves, we are miners buried with dead canaries and waiting for our lungs to collapse.

Each breath we breathe is stolen.

We are frozen in time as we hurtle through space we ought not occupy.

And then there comes the light we are racing towards, running for our lives, trying desperately to escape the limbo which holds us prisoners, hoping with all we do not have it will set us free and it does. It falls across the roof of the bus like a halo, like a set of wings, and as soon as we touch it we're breathing again.

The last tunnel we passed through on the way back was unimaginably long. There was no way we were holding our breath through this one, we knew. But, gradually, the bus quieted. Movement steadied. No one spoke any longer, we just watched ahead of us for the light we were no longer sure would come. Air was used sparingly. Lungs clenched, eyes darted, feet of percussionists tapped anxiously. Then, after a seeming eternity of darkness, there came the dot of streaming hope, the light of day rushing towards us, and the second we escaped the belly of the mountain the entire bus exhaled and inhaled like we had just resurfaced from an ocean floor. Together. Someone laughed and someone shouted and someone in the front began to applaud until the contagious relief of a limitless sky spread throughout the entire bus.

We had made it.

We laughed and applauded like fish cast from the fishing boat, like birds transcending from the net, because we were alive and we were breathing.

Some things give us our human back.

But I didn't say that, and I didn't say the thing about death either because if words are all I've got to share there are some things saved for people who are sometimes not there. And there are words better whispered than typed.

thoughts on affection, and the strangeness of showing it

     I don't know if this is how teenagers have always been, or if it's just the ones I know, but it seems to me we sure have a starvation for meaningful physical contact. In a weird, unhealthy, my-parents-never-held-me way. The generation holding hands and searching in the dark. People may think, with technology, we've lost our touch, but stick us in a room together and it's HOLD ME HOLD ME HOLD ME.

     Or I just hang out in the theater room too often.

     I gradually got over my tactile defensiveness through the art of holding hands, but that took a lot of analytical thinking, which is still required for me to make sense of the strangeness of human comradeship.

     I went to see one-acts at my school the other night, and ran into Sally before the show started. We sat together in the second row and watched the empty stage.

     Meanwhile, Martensen and his boyfriend snuck out for a minute through one of the stage exits, the hallway one that turns to the left after a few feet. They walked through, directly beside each other, and they didn't hold hands. Not even after it was safe and no one could see. Sally nudged me and pointed at them and said, "Isn't that cute?" and I mentioned the strangeness of their distance, but assumed they got closer eventually.

     I've known Sally since we were kids, and so when we sat together during the play I found myself muffling my laughter in her shoulder without thinking about it. A kind of head-nudge of acknowledgement and comfortable togetherness. And, when I did, she would rest her head on mine.

     There were four or five kissing scenes in the performance. And I just thought, wow, that's a lot of wasted meaning. I mean a kiss is a special thing, and these scenes are awful, except for the first one. They don't know what to do most of the time, they're kids. They bump noses and pull away too soon, clumsy and grimacing and much too much themselves to be anyone else. So they think about someone they love and look at someone they don't and they pretend, because they are acting. I wonder then, if ones who love them watch them from the audience as they kiss a stranger, and if they are saddened at this stolen piece of sacred togetherness meant to be shared with them.

     I'm laughing at a scene about a balloon, I mean really falling apart kind of laughing, and Sally's got her head resting on my head and I'm thinking, that's a really powerful gesture. And then I think about Sally's girlfriend, who lives far away, and I wonder what it's like to want to hold hands and not be able to, because of the whole time and space thing. And I wonder how many times, when people show affection, they mean it for someone else.

     Afterwards, when the audience filed into the crowded hallway, I ran into Martensen, who was surprised to see me at a public event. He had smudges under his eyes and panic around his shoulders.  He smiled desperately and, strangely enough, held out a crooked pinky. I linked mine around his, surprised at such untimely sentimentality, and he used his other arm to pull me into a hug. Hugs from Martensen are strange, because he is one of the only people in my hug circle who is taller than me. My mouth kind of gets pushed into the indent between his collarbone and shoulder, and it is from this position I asked him what was wrong. Most people don't need a hug so badly immediately after a date.

     "Nothing," he said. "I've just needed that for a while."

     His boyfriend had gone home.

     So I stood outside and thought about the strangeness of stages and intimacy, and decided it was okay to be given the affection meant for a girl who happens to live far away and a boy whose hands happen to belong to someone else, because the initial outlet and inward manifestation of affection don't always align. And it's okay that the love I receive is stolen because maybe one of those false kisses on the stage was meant for me, but given to someone else. In theory, at least. Probably not.

     And then I thought, wow, most of the physical contact I receive is from gay kids and actors. No wonder I'm so confused.

--an angsty teenage tree monster rant, from coffee and an essay due tomorrow--