the tenor
i never was but hoped to be. as a boy soprano i looked up to those guys, so clear of note, high of pitch. i fantasized about them in some colorless remote daydream. as aces in the singing game they captivated me exclusively. the kid who sat at the feet of the upper classman tenor disappeared into that voice, sound. i would have done anything he asked (which is safe to say as he would have never asked). at Yale, in the high reverberation stairwells and tiled bathrooms i’d take a stab at Jussi Bjorling, tearing my alcohol bruised vocal chords to shreds but high on the high notes. (poor Jussi died on stage, in a chair, singing his final aria.) something there is that loves a tenor, the Narcissus of singers, squirting mist on an anxious throat. it came to a head at Yale when someone in the class ahead of mine, a Chinese scholar with a phenomenal vocal chops, sang ‘Miss Otis Regrets’ at a ‘rush’ for those of us hoping to join an acapella singing group (where we could drink underage and nurture ‘platonic’ love attachments with the like-minded). I was spellbound. I visited him at Saybrook College in the dark of night. ‘Excalibur’ carved on the armchair i sat in by the fire. he’d play ‘Tristan und Isolde’ and describe how he and his girlfriend would try to simultaneously cum at the peak of Wagner’s arch. he went on to study voice in San Francisco with one of the supposedly great masters. i lost track of him until Orchestra Luna was in the studio and i looked him up in the Manhattan phone book. i wanted him to know that i wrote songs, that i was singing in a band and that i was making a record. i wanted to see how he was doing after the Yale years. i found his apartment on the lower West Side. he opened the door in a frenzy of anxiety. the place was a chaotic pig pen of rooms littered with unwashed clothes and dishes, sheet music scattered all over all floors. he explained that his great teacher and mentor had died and was irreplaceable. he appeared to be insane to a clinical degree. he nervously carried a chrome pitchpipe in one hand. he would blow into it for a high C and struggle to reach it. he failed again and again — a scratchy, flat, awkward sound gagged out of his mouth, eyes aghast. i think he made a clumsy pass at me. he had become totally gay i guess. no more ‘Tristan’. it was crushing to see this great person, this great voice, this precocious student fall so close to the gutter. i backed out of the apartment, took a cab to our bland hotel and left him to, i dunno, rot. maybe we can’t go home again. maybe we shouldn’t even try.
This is an excerpt from my book, The Paragraphs — Cutlass Press
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