Me Talk Pretty One Day (4 page)

Mr. Mancini had a singular talent for making me uncomfortable. He forced me to consider things I’d rather not think about
— the sex of my guitar, for instance. If I honestly wanted to put my hands on a woman, would that automatically mean I could
play? Gretchen’s teacher never told her to think of her piano as a boy. Neither did Lisa’s flute teacher, though in that case
the analogy was fairly obvious. On the off chance that sexual desire was all it took, I steered clear of Lisa’s instrument,
fearing I might be labeled a prodigy. The best solution was to become a singer and leave the instruments to other people.
A song stylist — that was what I wanted to be.

I was at the mall with my mother one afternoon when I spotted Mister Mancini ordering a hamburger at Scotty’s Chuck Wagon,
a fast-food restaurant located a few doors down from the music shop. He sometimes mentioned having lunch with a salesgirl
from Jolly’s Jewelers, “a real looker,” but on this day he was alone. Mister Mancini had to stand on his tiptoes to ask for
his hamburger, and even then his head failed to reach the counter. The passing adults politely looked away, but their children
were decidedly more vocal. A toddler ambled up on his chubby bowed legs, attempting to embrace my teacher with ketchup-smeared
fingers, while a party of elementary-school students openly stared in wonder. Even worse was the group of adolescents, boys
my own age, who sat gathered around a large table. “Go back to Oz, munchkin,” one of them said, and his friends shook with
laughter. Tray in hand, Mister Mancini took a seat and pretended not to notice. The boys weren’t yelling, but anyone could
tell that they were making fun of him. “Honestly, Mother,” I said, “do they have to be such monsters?” Beneath my moral outrage
was a strong sense of possessiveness, a fury that other people were sinking their hooks into my own personal midget. What
did they know about this man? I was the one who lit his cigarettes and listened as he denounced the careers of so-called pretty
boys such as Glen Campbell and Bobby Goldsboro. It was I who had suffered through six weeks’ worth of lessons and was still
struggling to master “Yellow Bird.” If anyone was going to give him a hard time, I figured that I should be first in line.

I’d always thought of Mister Mancini as a blowhard, a pocket playboy, but watching him dip his hamburger into a sad puddle
of mayonnaise, I broadened my view and came to see him as a wee outsider, a misfit whose take-it-or-leave-it attitude had
left him all alone. This was a persona I’d been tinkering with myself: the outcast, the rebel. It occurred to me that, with
the exception of the guitar, he and I actually had quite a bit in common. We were each a man trapped inside a boy’s body.
Each of us was talented in his own way, and we both hated twelve-year-old males, a demographic group second to none in terms
of cruelty. All things considered, there was no reason I shouldn’t address him not as a teacher but as an artistic brother.
Maybe then we could drop the pretense of Joan and get down to work. If things worked out the way I hoped, I’d someday mention
in interviews that my accompanist was both my best friend and a midget.

I wore a tie to my next lesson and this time when asked if I’d practiced, I told the truth, saying in a matter-of-fact tone
of voice that no, I hadn’t laid a finger on my guitar since our last get-together. I told him that Joan was my cousin’s name
and that I had no idea how stacked she was.

“That’s okay,” Mister Mancini said. “You can call your guitar whatever you want, just as long as you practice.”

My voice shaking, I told him that I had absolutely no interest in mastering the guitar. What I really wanted was to sing in
the voice of Billie Holiday. “Mainly commercials, but not for any banks or car dealerships, because those are usually choral
arrangements.”

The color ebbed from my teacher’s face.

I told him I’d been working up an act and could use a little accompaniment. Did he know the jingle for the new Sara Lee campaign?

“You want me to do what?” He wasn’t angry, just confused.

I felt certain he was lying when he denied knowing the tune. Doublemint gum, Ritz crackers, the theme songs for Alka-Seltzer
and Kenmore appliances: he claimed ignorance on all counts. I knew that it was queer to sing in front of someone, but greater
than my discomfort was the hope that he might recognize what I thought of as my great talent, the one musical trick I was
able to pull off. I started in on an a cappella version of the latest Oscar Mayer commercial, hoping he might join in once
the spirit moved him. It looked bad, I knew, but in order to sustain the proper mood, I needed to disregard his company and
sing the way I did at home alone in my bedroom, my eyes shut tight and my hands dangling like pointless, empty gloves.

I sang that my bologna had a first name.

I added that my bologna had a second name.

And concluded: Oh,
I love to eat it every day

And if you ask me why, I’ll say

Thaaaat Os-carrr May-errr has a way, with B-Oooo-L-Oooo-G-N-A

I reached the end of my tune thinking he might take this as an opportunity to applaud or maybe even apologize for underestimating
me. Mild amusement would have been an acceptable response. But instead, he held up his hands, as if to stop an advancing car.
“
Hey, guy
,” he said. “You can hold it right there. I’m not into that scene.”

A scene? What scene? I thought I was being original.

“There were plenty of screwballs like you back in Atlanta, but me, I don’t swing that way — you got it? This might be your
‘thing’ or whatever, but you can definitely count me out.” He reached for his conch shell and stubbed out his cigarette. “I
mean, come on now. For God’s sake, kid, pull yourself together.”

I knew then why I’d never before sung in front of anyone, and why I shouldn’t have done it in front of Mister Mancini. He’d
used the word screwball, but I knew what he really meant. He meant I should have named my guitar Doug or Brian, or better
yet, taken up the flute. He meant that if we’re defined by our desires, I was in for a lifetime of trouble.

The remainder of the hour was spent awkwardly watching the clock as we silently pretended to tune our guitars.

My father was disappointed when I told him I wouldn’t be returning for any more lessons. “He told me not to come back,” I
said. “He told me I have the wrong kind of fingers.”

Seeing that it had worked for me, my sisters invented similar stories, and together we announced that the Sedaris Trio had
officially disbanded. Our father offered to find us better teachers, adding that if we were unhappy with our instruments,
we could trade them in for something more suitable. “The trumpet or the saxophone, or hey, how about the vibes?” He reached
for a Lionel Hampton album, saying, “I want you to sit down and give this a good listen. Just get a load of this cat and tell
me he’s not an inspiration.”

There was a time when I could listen to such a record and imagine myself as the headline act at some magnificent New York
nightclub, but that’s what fantasies are for: they allow you to skip the degradation and head straight to the top. I’d done
my solo and would now move on to pursue other equally unsuccessful ways of getting attention. I’d try every art form there
was, and with each disappointment I’d picture Mister Mancini holding his conch shell and saying, “For God’s sake, kid, pull
yourself together.”

We told our father, no, don’t bother playing us any more of your records, but still he persisted. “I’m telling you that this
album is going to change your lives, and if it doesn’t, I’ll give each one of you a five-dollar bill. What do you think of
that?”

It was a tough call — five dollars for listening to a Lionel Hampton record. The offer was tempting, but even on the off chance
he’d actually come through with the money, there would certainly be strings attached. We looked at one another, my sisters
and I, and then we left the room, ignoring his cry of “Hey, where do you think you’re going? Get back in here and listen.”

We joined our mother at the TV and never looked back. A life in music was his great passion, not ours, and our lessons had
taught us that without the passion, the best one could hope for was an occasional engagement at some hippie wedding where,
if we were lucky, the guests would be too stoned to realize just how bad we really were. That night, as was his habit, our
father fell asleep in front of the stereo, the record making its pointless, silent rounds as he lay back against the sofa
cushions, dreaming.

M
Y FATHER ALWAYS STRUCK ME
as the sort of man who, under the right circumstances, might have invented the microwave oven or the transistor radio. You
wouldn’t seek him out for advice on a personal problem, but he’d be the first one you’d call when the dishwasher broke or
someone flushed a hairpiece down your toilet. As children, we placed a great deal of faith in his ability but learned to steer
clear while he was working. The experience of watching was ruined, time and time again, by an interminable explanation of
how things were put together. Faced with an exciting question, science tended to provide the dullest possible answer. Ions
might charge the air, but they fell flat when it came to charging the imagination — my imagination, anyway. To this day, I
prefer to believe that inside every television there lives a community of versatile, thumb-size actors trained to portray
everything from a thoughtful newscaster to the wife of a millionaire stranded on a desert island. Fickle gnomes control the
weather, and an air conditioner is powered by a team of squirrels, their cheeks packed with ice cubes.

Once, while rifling through the toolshed, I came across a poster advertising an IBM computer the size of a refrigerator. Sitting
at the control board was my dad the engineer, years younger, examining a printout no larger than a grocery receipt. When I
asked about it, he explained that he had worked with a team devising a memory chip capable of storing up to fifteen pages’
worth of information. Out came the notepad and pencil, and I was trapped for hours as he answered every question except the
one I had asked: “Were you allowed to wear makeup and run through a variety of different poses, or did they get the picture
on the first take?”

To me, the greatest mystery of science continues to be that a man could father six children who shared absolutely none of
his interests. We certainly expressed enthusiasm for our mother’s hobbies, from smoking and napping to the writings of Sidney
Sheldon. (Ask my mother how the radio worked and her answer was simple: “Turn it on and pull out the goddamn antenna.”) I
once visited my father’s office, and walked away comforted to find that at least there he had a few people he could talk to.
We’d gone, my sister Amy and I, to settle a bet. She thought that my father’s secretary had a sharp, protruding chin and long
blond hair, while I imagined that the woman might more closely resemble a tortoise — chinless, with a beaky nose and a loose,
sagging neck. The correct answer was somewhere in between. I was right about the nose and the neck, but Amy won on the chin
and the hair color. The bet had been the sole reason for our visit, and the resulting insufferable tour of Buildings A through
D taught us never again to express an interest in our father’s workplace.

My own scientific curiosity eventually blossomed, but I knew enough to keep my freakish experiments to myself. When my father
discovered my colony of frozen slugs in the basement freezer, I chose not to explain my complex theories of suspended animation.
Why was I filling the hamster’s water beaker with vodka? “Oh, no reason.” If my experiment failed, and the drunken hamster
passed out, I’d just put her in the deep freeze, alongside the slugs. She’d rest on ice for a few months and, once thawed
and fully revived, would remember nothing of her previous life as an alcoholic. I also took to repairing my own record-player
and was astonished by my ingenuity for up to ten minutes at a time — until the rubber band snapped or the handful of change
came unglued from the arm, and the damned thing broke all over again.

During the first week of September, it was my family’s habit to rent a beach house on Ocean Isle, a thin strip of land off
the coast of North Carolina. As youngsters, we participated in all the usual seaside activities — which were fun, until my
father got involved and systematically chipped away at our pleasure. Miniature golf was ruined with a lengthy dissertation
on impact, trajectory, and wind velocity, and our sand castles were critiqued with stifling lectures on the dynamics of the
vaulted ceiling. We enjoyed swimming, until the mystery of tides was explained in such a way that the ocean seemed nothing
more than an enormous saltwater toilet, flushing itself on a sad and predictable basis.

By the time we reached our teens, we were exhausted. No longer interested in the water, we joined our mother on the beach
blanket and dedicated ourselves to the higher art of tanning. Under her guidance, we learned which lotions to start off with,
and what worked best for various weather conditions and times of day. She taught us that the combination of false confidence
and Hawaiian Tropic could result in a painful and unsightly burn, certain to subtract valuable points when, on the final night
of vacation, contestants gathered for the annual Miss Emollient Pageant. This was a contest judged by our mother, in which
the holder of the darkest tan was awarded a crown, a sash, and a scepter.

Technically, the prize could go to either a male or a female, but the sash read
MISS EMOLLIENT
because it was always assumed that my sister Gretchen would once again sweep the title. For her, tanning had moved from an
intense hobby to something more closely resembling a psychological dysfunction. She was what we called a tanorexic: someone
who simply could not get enough. Year after year she arrived at the beach with a base coat that the rest of us could only
dream of achieving as our final product. With a mixture of awe and envy, we watched her broiling away on her aluminum blanket.
The spaces between her toes were tanned, as were her palms and even the backs of her ears. Her method involved baby oil and
a series of poses that tended to draw crowds, the mothers shielding their children’s eyes with sand-covered fingers.