12:50 a.m. - 2012-01-02
George Gershwin
I was eighteen or nineteen years old, going to music school in Boston. I was studying to become an orchestral percussionist. After a couple of months it began to dawn on me that this profession wasn’t one I was cut out for, both because the process bored me and because it became evident that I would never be very good at it. Whether the boredom caused my suckitude or vice versa I don’t now remember, but the two complimented each other quite well, so I felt that I had achieved an equilibrium and I was reasonably content. So, instead of doing boring shit like standing around in a tiny closet of a practice room making cymbal crashes and snare drum rolls, I spent hour upon hour with my friends sitting in someone’s room drinking whiskey and listening to Coltrane and wondering what it would have been like to hear him live, since he died before most of us were born. As it happens, I grew up around the corner from a man who had grown up with Elvin Jones and who heard Coltrane numerous times. The man was at one time my mother’s boss and I went to school with his daughter. But that’s a different story.
The story I want to tell you now is about being in Boston when I was young. It was toward the end of the Cold War. At the time our American President, the most powerful person on earth, was a brain-addled old man whose idea of hilarity was to make jokes about obliterating millions of human beings with nuclear warheads. Thanks to the generous spirit and policies of this senile politician and his handlers, there had been an epidemic of homelessness in a lot of American cities. Boston had a gigantic homeless population, and probably still does. If you went out strolling in the middle of a chilly, damp night, you would see dozens of people crashed out on every outdoor heating grate, in every alcove, in the 24-hour indoor ATM machine booths, huddled together for warmth, in plain sight and yet strangely invisible.
Charles Bukowski wrote something once to the effect that there are lucky cities and the other kind. I tend to disagree. I think all cities are neither lucky nor unlucky, but they all contain elements of desperation and possibility. The ratio varies from place to place, but Boston in the late eighties seemed to contain both in equal measure.
Here’s a thing: I would often drag my marimba into the subway stops or to some street corner or public square and play for spare change. Most likely I really sucked, but I was trying to learn. Sometimes I was accompanied by my friend Milo Jones or my girlfriend at the time, a hornist. Once the hornist and I were playing outside, maybe in Cambridge, maybe in Boston Common, I don’t remember. We were largely ignored. We had some sort of receptacle for collecting change. It wasn’t exactly overflowing as we played on. People who seemed affluent would walk by, ignoring us or occasionally pausing to make some sort of insult. I never understood why someone would take time out of their busy day to stop and insult a street musician. There are a lot of aspects of human behavior that some of us will never comprehend.
A couple of people stopped and listened, however. They seemed to appreciate what we were trying to do. One of these was an older woman who was possibly homeless and definitely not prosperous. In spite of the no doubt harrowing circumstances of her daily life, she radiated an incredible amount of joy. I seem to remember that she listened to whatever we were playing (possibly Thelonious Monk tunes) for quite some time. And then at some point she dropped maybe fifty cents into our change receptacle. Fifty cents to this woman was probably a huge expenditure, relative to whatever income she was able to generate. I never learned her name, but twenty-some years later, I still remember her as one of the sweetest and most generous people I’ve ever come across.
I don’t say this to romanticize the poor. There are people on every step of the social/financial ladder who are complete jagoffs, to be sure. But in my experience, at that time and ever since, it seems that the most generous people are those who have the least. After all, you don’t get to be a billionaire by giving money away. You get to be a billionaire by figuring out how to wring money or labor or resources from those who have less than you.
BUT, that’s not the story I’m here to tell. I’m here to tell you the George Gershwin story. The George Gershwin story goes like this:
It takes place in the afore-mentioned city of Boston, circa the late eighties. It was late on a weekday night. It was at a pizza place, a dimly-lit, kind of dreary environment. I was one of two customers in the place. I was eating a slice. Maybe it was plain, maybe there was pepperoni involved. It doesn’t matter. What matters is, there was this guy, this one other customer. He seemed agitated. He had a couple of plastic shopping bags full of something or other sitting on a table. He was pacing around the place and the staff behind the counter seemed to be ignoring him. Maybe he was always hanging around this pizza place and they were used to him. Maybe they were used to any kind of random goings on and didn’t bother to notice unless it caused disorder or violence. But so this guy, possibly homeless, definitely off-kilter, was pacing around this barely-inhabited pizza place. He would occasionally pull something out of one of his bags, maybe a shopping receipt or a piece of cloth, then pace some more, I was eating my pizza, wondering if something would happen, wondering how close this guy was to The Edge, wondering at how the pizza guys behind the counter seemed to not be acknowledging someone so animate.
Desperation and possibility. Anything could happen.
SO, after several minutes of this, the guy stopped pacing. He quit futzing with the stuff in his bags on the table. He took a stand near the door, facing the counter. And he said these words. He said these words that are indelibly seared into my memory. These are the words he said. The words he said were:
“All us OLD motherfuckers will be DEAD before anyone understands GEORGE GERSHWIN!”
And then he was gone.
Leaving his bags behind, he was out the door, maybe to never return. And where did he go? Did he go to another pizza place where he thought he might have more luck promoting the true Gershwin Meaning? Or had he given up and decided that we would never understand about George Gershwin? That it was a lost cause?
So, he was gone. He left his bags full of stuff sitting on the table. Maybe he eventually retrieved them, maybe not. I can only hope that wherever he went, he promoted greater understanding of George Gershwin and that his lessons weren’t lost on whomever they were bestowed. Because, let’s face it, we could ALL stand to understand George Gershwin better, just as we could all stand to understand anything better. Because understanding leads away from ignorance, and ignorance eventually leads to the whole crummy mindset of creating the afore-mentioned policies that create poverty domestically and endless war abroad.
So let’s all hope that all of us old motherfuckers WON’T be dead before anyone understands George Gershwin. If so, the world could be a much better place.
