The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (6 page)

Walking through Woolworth’s in 1927, he saw a small crowd of shoppers working swiftly with their arms over a table stacked high with phonograph records. He went over to find out what it was all about, and it was a special, new Victor and Brunswick records, five cents each, and a wide choice of titles to choose from. Well, he hadn’t heard the phonograph in months. He might wind it up again and listen to it. The phonograph was pretty much himself. He had gotten into the machine and come out of it, singing, or being a symphony, or a wild jazz composition. For months he hadn’t gone near the phonograph, and it had stood in his room, dusty and mute.

These five-cent records reminded him that he had been silent through the phonograph for a long time, and that he might again enjoy emerging from it.

He selected a half dozen records and took them to his room. He was certain that none of the records could be very good, but he wasn’t seeking anything good and he didn’t mind how trivial or trite the music might be. If a thing is terribly bad, anything, a man or a piece of music, it is a form of exploration to go through the thing. He knew that he could do this with the worst sort of American jazz. The melody could be idiotic, the orchestration noisy, and so on, but somewhere in the racket he would be able, by listening carefully, to hear the noblest weeping or laughter of mortality. Sometimes it would be a sudden and brief bit of counterpoint, several chords of a banjo perhaps, and occasionally it would be the sadness in the voice of some very poor vocalist singing a chorus of a very insipid song. Something largely accidental, something inevitable.

You could not do this with the finer music. The virtues of the finer music were intentional. They were there for everybody, unmistakably.

It was early August, I think. (I am speaking of myself.) For many months he had not listened to himself through the phonograph, and now he was taking these new records home.

In August a young man is apt to feel unspeakably alive: in those days I was an employee of a telegraph company. I used to sit at a table all day, working a teletype machine, sending and receiving telegrams,
and when the day was over I used to feel this unspeakable liveliness, but at the same time I used to feel lost. Absolutely misplaced. I seemed to feel that they had gotten me so deeply into the mechanical idea of the age that I was doomed eventually to become a fragment of a machine myself. It was a way to earn money, this sitting before the machine. I disliked it very much, but it was a way.

He knew that he was lost in it and that they were taking out the insides of him and putting in a complicated mass of wheels and springs and hammers and levers, a piece of junk that worked precisely, doing a specific thing over and over again, precisely.

All day I used to sit at the machine, being a great help to American industry. I used to send important telegrams to important people accurately. The things that were going on had nothing to do with me, but I was sitting there, working for America. What I wanted, I think, was a house. I was living in a cheap rooming house, alone. I had a floor and a roof and a half dozen books. The books I could not read. They were by great writers. I could not read them: I was sitting all day at the table, helping my country to become the most prosperous one in the world. I had a bed. I used to fall asleep sometimes from sheer exhaustion. It would be very late at night or early in the morning. A man cannot sleep anywhere. If a room has no meaning for you, if it is not a part of you, you cannot sleep in it. This room that I was living in was not a part of me. It belonged to anybody
who could afford to pay three dollars a week rent for it. I was there, living. I was almost nineteen, crazy as a bat.

He wanted a house, a place in which to return to himself, a space protected by lumber and glass, under the sun, upon the earth.

He took the six records up to his room. Looking out of the small window of his small room, he saw that he was lost. This amused him. It was a thing to make slurring conversation for entertainment. He walked about in his room, his hat still on his head, talking to the place. Well, here we are at home, he said.

I forget what he ate that night, but I know he cooked it on a small gas-range that was provided by the landlady for cooking as well as suicide. He ate something, washed and wiped the dishes he had used, and then turned to the phonograph.

There was a chance for him to find out what it was all about. There was a chance that the information would be hidden in the jazz music. It was a thought. He had learned something about machinery, American machines working, through jazz. He had been able to picture ten thousand humpback New York women in an enormous room, sewing on machines. He had been able to see machines bigger than mountains, machines that did big things, created power, conserved energy, produced flashlights, locomotives, tin cans, saxophones.

It was a small phonograph, not a portable, but a
small Victor. He had had it for years, and he had taken it with him from place to place. It was very impractical to carry such a phonograph around, and he knew it was impractical, but he always carried it with him when he moved from one room to another, or from one city to another. Even if he hadn’t used the phonograph for months, he would take it away with him. He liked to feel that it was always there and that whenever he liked he could listen to it. It was like having an enormous sum of money in the bank, a sum so large that you were afraid to touch it. He could listen to any music he liked. He had Roumanian folk songs, Negro spirituals, American westerns, American jazz, Grieg, Beethoven, Gershwin, Zez Confrey, Brahms, Schubert, Irving Berlin,
Where the River Shannon’s Flowing, Ave Maria, Vesti La Giubba
, Caruso, Rachmaninoff, Vernon Dalhart, Kreisler, Al Jolson. It was all there, in the records, himself in the music, and for months he had not listened to the phonograph. A silence had come over him and the phonograph, and as time went by, it had become more and more difficult to break the silence.

He had begun to feel lost months ago. One evening, from a moving streetcar, he had suddenly noticed the sky. It was a terrific fact, the existence of the sky. Noticing it, looking up into it, with night coming on, he had realized how lost he had become.

But he hadn’t done anything about the matter. He had begun to want a house of his own, but he hadn’t done anything to get a house.

He stood over his phonograph, thinking of its
silence and his own silence, the fear in himself to make a noise, to declare his existence.

He lifted the phonograph from the floor and placed it on his small eating table. The phonograph was very dusty, and he spent a leisurely ten minutes cleaning it. When he was through cleaning it, greater fear came over him, and he wanted for a moment to put it back again on the floor and let it remain silent. After a while he wound the machine slowly, hoping secretly that something inside of it would break, so that he would not be able, after all, to make a noise in the world.

I remember clearly how amazed I was when nothing in the machine snapped. I thought, after all these months of silence, how strange. In a moment sound will be emerging from the box. I do not know the scientific name for this sort of fright, but I know that I was very frightened. I felt that it would be best if my being lost were to remain a secret. I felt certain that I no longer wanted to make a noise, and at the same time I felt that, since I had brought home these new records, I ought at least to hear them once before putting them away with the other records I had accumulated.

I listened to the six records, to both sides of them, that night. I had purchased soft needles, so that the phonograph should not make too much of a noise and disturb the other dwellers in the rooming house, but after months of silence, the volume of sound that emerged from the phonograph was very great. It was
so great that I had to smoke cigarettes all the time, and I remember the knock at my door.

It was the landlady, Mrs. Liebig. She said, Ah, it is you, Mr. Romano. A little music, is that it? Well . . .

Yes, I said. Several new records. I shall be done with them in a moment.

She hadn’t liked the idea of my playing a phonograph in her rooming house, but I had been with her so long, and I had paid so regularly and kept my room so orderly that she hadn’t wanted to come right out and tell me so. I knew, however.

The records were all dull and a little boring. All except one. There was one passage of syncopation in this record that was tremendously interesting to me. I played this passage three or four times that night in an effort to understand its significance, but I got nowhere. I understood the passage technically, but I could not determine why it moved me so strangely. It was a bit of counterpoint to a rather romantic and therefore insipid melody. It was eight swift chords on the banjo, repeated fourteen times, while the melody grew in emotional intensity, reached a climax, and then dwindled to silence.
One two three four five six seven eight
, swiftly, fourteen times. The sound was wiry. There was something about the dogged persistence of the passage that got into me, something about it that had always been in me, but never before articulated. I won’t mention the name of the composition because I am sure the effect it had on me was largely accidental, largely inevitable for me alone, and that anyone else who might listen to the
passage will not be moved by it the way I was moved. The circumstances would have to be pretty much like the circumstances of my own existence at the time, and you would have to be about nineteen years of age, crazy as a bat, etc.

He put away the records and forgot them. Their music joined all the other music he had ever heard and became lost. A week went by. One evening suddenly, in his silence, he heard the passage again,
one two three four five six seven eight
, fourteen times. Another week went by. Every now and then he would hear the passage. It would be when he felt unspeakably alive, when he seemed to possess strength enough to smash everything in the earth that was ugly.

There was nothing for me to do in the city Sundays, so I used to work. Sitting at the teletype machine had become the major business of my life, so I used to work on Sundays too. But on Sundays business would be very slow, and most of the day I would sit around in the office, moping, dreaming, thinking about the house I wanted to get for myself. The teletype machine sends and receives messages. It is a great mechanical triumph, and it put thousands of old time telegraphers out of work. These men used to get as much as a dollar an hour for their work, but when the teletype machine was perfected and put into use these men lost their jobs and young fellows like me who didn’t know the first thing about regular telegraphy got their jobs. It was a great stroke of efficiency,
the perfection of this machine. It saved the telegraph companies millions of dollars every year. I used to earn about twenty-eight cents an hour, and I used to be able to send and receive twice as many telegrams as the fastest telegraph operator would have been able to receive and send in the same length of time. But on Sundays business would be very slow and the teletype would be silent sometimes for as long as an hour.

One Sunday morning, after a long silence, my machine began to function, so I went over to it to receive and check the message, but it was not a message, not a regular telegram. I read the words,
hello hello hello
. I had never thought of the machine as being related in any way to me. It was there for the messages of other people, and the tapping of this greeting to me seemed very startling. For one thing, it was strictly against company rules to use the machine for anything other than the transmission of regular business. It was a breach of company discipline for a teletype operator, and it was because of this fact that I began to think a great deal of the other operator who had sent me the greeting. I typed the word
hello
, and we began a conversation.

It seemed very strange for me to be using the machine in a way useful to myself. I talked with the other operator for about an hour. It was a girl, and she was working in the operating room at the main office. I was working in one of the numerous branch offices in the city. We did a lot of talking for about an hour, and then suddenly I read the words
wire chief
, so I knew that the big shot had returned to
the room and that we would not be able to go on talking.

Suddenly, in the silence, he began to hear the passage again,
one two three four five six seven eight
, over and over again, and it began to have specific meaning for him: the house, the clean earth around it, the warm sun, and another,
one two three four five six seven eight
, himself and this other and the house and the earth and the sun and clear senses and deep sleep and
one two three four five six seven eight
, and meaning and fullness and no sense of being lost and no feeling of being caught.

I began to try to visualize the girl. I began to wonder if she would go out with me to this house I wanted and help me fill it with our lives, together. After a while the teletype machine began to tap again, and again I read
hello hello, wire chief gone
.