TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 98

[Tobie Shapiro]

December 23, 20000000000006

Dearly Beloved,

	The sun isn't up yet, but Î am.  It's 
this circadian rhythm thing that's going all 
wrong with me.  Suddenly, I'm off kilter, getting 
up early, even though I'm going to sleep late. 
And I've got to say that it's not happy that I 
get up on a Shabbos morning, a day when I could 
sleep in until I darn well felt like it.  Well, 
pretty soon, the drugs will kick in and I won't 
feel so tired.  (This was meant as a joke).

	My mother gave me some thermal pajamas 
for Channukah.  They're really quite pretty: pink 
with deep blue, orange, and red flowers dotting 
the material.  The material is velourish and is 
cross hatched with grooves.  I hadn't worn them 
yet until last night.  Last night I thought I 
would surprise my mother and put them on.  We 
were about to watch a movie, and wouldn't it be 
nice to show up in my new pajamas?  So I open the 
drawer and hear a knock on the door.  I close the 
drawer.  "Can I come in?" asks my mother. 
"Sure!" I say.  She stands by the door and says, 
"When are you going to wear the pajamas I gave 
you?"  "Rats!"  I sigh.  "I was just about to put 
them on.  You ruined it."  She got a little 
flustered and then told me that what I should 
have done was to have said, "I'll get around to 
it," and then wear them to surprise her.  "Well, 
it's too late for that, now," I groan.   Then I 
think of what she'd told me to do, fake that I'm 
not going to wear them, and then wear them.  So I 
say, "Well, I can't wear them now."  She got all 
huffy and snarled, "Well of all the . . ." and 
slammed the door.  I got into my usual pajamas: 
an oversized XXL men's undershirt and long 
flannel pants, and decided not to watch a movie 
after all.  I'd just write in my journal and then 
read forever, and then sleep for however long my 
body would let me.  Then I heard my mother out in 
the hallway sounding cheerful.  "Are we going to 
watch a movie?"  "But you screamed at me and 
slammed the door for no reason at all.  You hurt 
my feelings and made me mad."  She sounded meek, 
then.  "Can I apologize?  Can we be nice to each 
other?  I'm sorry."

	So I went downstairs and watched the 
movie, a depressing thing with Gabriel Byrne 
about a vermisht family in Swaziland right at the 
time of independence.  The parents split up.  The 
mother runs away with someone else's husband. 
The father becomes an alcoholic.  A BAD 
alcoholic.  The kid is dealing with abandonment 
and alcoholism, and you can see the trouble this 
is causing him.  The father sends the boy off to 
boarding school.  When he comes back, his father 
has remarried to an American woman he met three 
weeks ago.  He's now a raging alcoholic.  Two 
personalities.  Oh it gets complicated.

	The American wife finally leaves because 
of the alcoholism after the father gets good and 
snockered again and gets violent, attempts to 
shoot his son.  Then he goes off to the doctor 
who prescribes him pills that he can take that 
will make him dead sick if he touches a spot of 
alcohol (well, isn't he dead sick anyway when he 
takes a spot of alcohol?).  He is miraculously 
cured.

	Then the mother comes back, but it turns 
out she's just come back only because her new 
husband was shipped off to Peru.  So she's out of 
the picture again.  The American comes back. 
She's a good egg.  No pomp and a good antidote to 
all the British formality and social climbing, 
stiff etiquette and toadying to nobility.  There 
are several idyllic scenes where the little 
family unit is happy together: the no alcohol 
daddy, the happy son, the American wife in love 
with her British husband in dear old Swaziland. 
Then, of course, the father develops a brain 
tumour.  They operate, but he only has two months 
to live.  He dies, and everyone cries and the 
last shot is of the boy, now 14, standing near 
the gaping hole of the freshly buried coffin, 
with two friends on either side of him.  The 
camera pans up, sad music plays, and you wonder 
why you watched it.  It's called Wah-Wah, for 
those of you who are ready for that kind of 
movie.  I wasn't.

	Now, it's morning, and I did put on the 
new pajamas.  I'm sitting here in front of my 
computer.  My mother will get up at 8:00, as 
usual, and come into the room.  Maybe she'll 
notice the pajamas under the robe, maybe not. 
But I'm giving this a shot.  It's worth a shot.



 
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Doing the Right Thing

	In my rudderless voyage chasing the music 
business, I met many celebrated people and got 
used to standing in the same room with fame and 
fortune.  It was not hard.  For some reason, I 
was just not affected by the glimmer or 
notoriety.  I've never followed the National 
Enquirer, or People Magazine, or even the front 
page of the local rag to get the latest on which 
famous person is doing what with whom, and where. 
The famous people in the music business can be 
delightful or shitheads.  The fame has little to 
do with it.  I just treated them as I would treat 
any complete stranger: with kindness respect and 
amicability.  This worked well.  Sometimes it 
caught them off guard, because they were used to 
nervously quaking oblati hanging on their every 
word, mesmerized and overwhelmed by their very 
presence.

	I got advice from people who had moved 
around in the biz that I should make a 
demonstration tape of something like four songs, 
and then take this tape around to as many big 
wigs and A & R directors in record companies as I 
could.  What was my goal?  Well, I thought my 
goal was to get a recording contract.  I 
envisioned becoming famous myself, lifted 
suddenly out of my anonymity and victimhood in my 
family unit, to untouchable stardom.  No one 
would abuse me any more.  My father, who was 
excruciatingly affected by fame and status, would 
be rendered impotent.  And my mother would be 
proud.  I didn't contemplate what sort of life I 
wanted to live, nor whether I was suited to the 
pressures of composing on demand, pleasing 
audiences, or keeping up appearances.  In my 
mind, my life would go on exactly as it had, but 
I would be famous and rich.  So, I thought I 
wanted a recording  contract.  Maybe I did. 
Maybe there was some way to write music without 
having to tour and perform it, or without having 
to pay the dues of poverty and rejection before 
my sudden rise to fame.  The advice was to make a 
demonstration tape.  I asked the same woman who 
advised me, how to do that, and she gave me a 
name, David Litwin, to contact.  See what he can 
do for you.

	David Litwin was a full time composer who 
worked at Different Fur recording studios in San 
Francisco.  He was about five years my senior, 
and he had his degree in music from a prominent 
university.  His job was to arrange songs, do the 
boss's bidding, musically, bring business to the 
studio and get paid peanuts for it.  I met him 
there at Different Fur and brought my guitar.  I 
played a few songs for him.  He was impressed. 
He said that we should select four songs from my 
repertoire and work on arranging them for a demo 
tape.  We would work together.  I came into the 
city several times, just to sing more of my 
repertoire for him.  He was a New Yorker, and 
smart as a whip, clever, and oozing with 
sensuality.  We joked around well together, 
worked well together, stirred up a large mess of 
hormones.  Our flirting was stellar.  It was too 
long before I found out that he was married.  I'd 
already fallen for him in a big way, and couldn't 
go back on that.  It didn't seem to affect him 
that he was married, and from what he said, he 
was not a very faithful husband.  That frightened 
me.  If he were not a faithful husband, then our 
flirtation was not safe.  It could erupt into a 
love affair.  I had never had an affair with a 
married man, and I didn't want to start.  In my 
mind, he was off limits.  But we still flirted 
outrageously.

	We selected the four songs and went into 
the studio to make them real.  If anything, they 
were overproduced: great concussions of 
percussion, sweeping teams of string instruments, 
lots of synthesizer, which was a new tool back 
then.  There was the Moog synthesizer, the ones 
that are in museums now, which required miles of 
wires looping from this jack to that one, a 
tangle of spaghetti.

	When the tape was finished, we 
transferred it to cassette and started notifying 
whomever we knew.  David Litwin had been hanging 
around at a decent recording studio for years 
now, and knew many people.  And these people knew 
people who knew people.  We were on our way.

	A year earlier, I had flown down to Los 
Angeles to knock on doors and play my music for A 
& R personnel.  While I was there, I called Frank 
Zappa's record company, just on the off chance 
that I could get a hearing with him.  The 
secretary told me that maybe I should write Frank 
a nice postcard telling him about my desire to 
play for him.  She gave me the address that would 
get the card to him.  So, I wrote a five page 
letter instead.  Evidently that captured his 
attention, and he called me where I was staying. 
We had a brief conversation on the phone and made 
an appointment for me to come in and show him 
what I was about.

	At the time that I met Frank Zappa, he 
was finishing up a rehearsal with his band.  Some 
of them gathered around to hear this stranger 
sing and play.  I was not nervous.  Is this 
because I am crazy, or because I don't have the 
nervous gene?  I played the weirdest song I had, 
called "Für Harry", homage to Harry Lum, my 
Chinese quasi-husband who was in exile from 
Berkeley, teaching art near San Diego.

Friday, Friday, Friday,
Well she floated down the clouds
With sausage and some duckies under foot
With pesto enough for both of us
And duckies drawn and quartered,
And sausage overstuffed with bloody carcasses fresh slaurghtered

Friday, Friday, Friday
Well, she cruised to the big SD
With a head so full of clouds she'd saved to share.

Opening her scalp for him
Releasing several latches
Pulling back the skull flaps
By tugging at her catches
The clouds poured out from steamy brains in grey matter sauteed
But still she ever smiled though her synapses were frayed.

'Twas then that wrapping up the gifts in plastic wrap and tin
Her true devotion struck the man, since she had given t'him
And all too late he grabbed her curls to close her open mind
But quite forgot to close within her head a gift in kind.

It didn't matter though,
No, No, No,
For she had got for what she come.
To hug and gift and sweetly fill
The arms of Harry Lum.

	Frank Zappa loved this.  He told me he 
had to consult the accountants because, "I don't 
know what's commercial.  I just know what's good. 
And you're good."  This was heady stuff for me. 
Imagine a wild dream sounding like it might come 
true.  But in the end, the accountants thought 
that I was too risky.  Zappa had just started his 
new label,  Barking Pumpkin Records, and they 
figured they'd have to sink their whole hopes in 
me.  Couldn't do it.  He called me and apologized 
again telling me I was good, and I should keep in 
touch.

	In the intervening year, I moved down to 
Los Angeles, rented a house in El Segundo, right 
between the airport and the oil refinery, and 
found myself travelling up to the bay area to 
make the tape with David Litwin.  Ironic, 
actually.  Moved out to risk it all and had to 
come back home to do it.  So when David Litwin 
and I found ourselves with this tape of four 
songs, I thought of recontacting Frank Zappa to 
see whether the fully realized versions of my 
music would inspire his accountants.

	David flew down to Los Angeles for our 
meeting with Zappa.  Frank showed us into his 
sound room where all the engineers pulled and 
pushed dials and turned knobs.  He put on the 
cassette.  We listened.  After a few minutes, he 
turned off the tape and said he wanted one of the 
accountants to hear this.  When the man came in, 
Frank wobbled his eyebrows at him and said, 
"Think you'll have any trouble selling this?"  He 
played the tape for him.  The accountant said 
nothing.  And we were instructed to wait to hear 
their verdict the next day.  So we were going to 
stay overnight in Los Angeles, in El Segundo. 
This put us in a predicament.  With all the wild 
flirting that we'd carried on, here was the 
perfect opportunity to consummate our passions. 
All the joking stopped dead, as we drove down to 
El Segundo from Los Angeles proper.  It was night 
now, dark, and we said very little.  I just drove 
my little car until we pulled up into my driveway.

	"Well, this is it,"  I said, and bolted 
from the car as if it were on fire.  David got 
out slowly and approached the front door with 
exquisite caution.  Now I was nervous.

	I went into my purse for my keys.  But I 
didn't find them.  No keys.  I went through my 
coat pockets.  No keys.  I searched the car.  No 
keys.  Here it was, an opportunity to consummate 
and for the first time in my life, I had locked 
myself out of my house.  It was a sign.

	The surge of hormones popped and backed 
off.  Reason set in.  Did I really want to get 
between this man and his wife?  No.  I liked her. 
And even if I hadn't, did I really want to be 
involved with a married man?  No.  I didn't. 
While we broke into my house by climbing through 
the bathroom window, David remembered some 
friends he had off of Mullholland Drive.  He 
could stay with them, actually.  All he needed 
was a ride all the way back to Los Angeles.  And 
as I found my keys stuck on the inside keyhole of 
the front door, I agreed to drive him.  It was an 
hour's trip each way.  And by the time I 
returned, I was dead tired.  In fact, so tired 
was I that I ran a red light.  Not that it 
mattered in the middle of the night in El 
Segundo, but I was the walking comatose.  I have 
never locked myself out of my own house since. 
It was the right thing to have done.


 
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Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net