We Are Still Married (6 page)

A: No, that was my tenth. That was after “Eleven Restaurants You'll Remember the Rest of Your Life,” “Ten All-Time Greatest Half & Halfs,” “My Ten All-Time Favorite Racquetball Partners,” “Ten Ways to Lose Four Pounds in Two Days,” “Ten Celebrities Show Off Their Basements,” “Eight Methods of Beating a Midlife Slump,” “Seven Terrific Marriages,” “Six Meaner Dogs Than You Ever Saw Before,” and “Five Kids Who Make Your Kids Look Sick.”

Q: What happened, Jim? Why couldn't you quit then? You knew it was wrong.

A: I know, but look at it my way. First of all, I think that—

Q: “Thirty People Who'd Like to Be Your Friend,” “Ten Famous People's Breakfasts,” “Eighteen Best Red Things,” “Six Best Tops of Things,” “Twelve Biggest Unnoticed Things,” “Twenty-one Places Where Famous People Were Seen Doing One of Two Things”—the list goes on, Jim.

A: I had a house, I was married, we had two children, pets, a summer place, a boat, a membership in a health club, and a good investment program. But more than that, I found it satisfying. I was a child of the forties, and through the fifties, sixties, seventies, and into the eighties my life seemed confused, purposeless, ill defined. Lists helped to center me a little, calm me down. I took out a clean sheet of paper, numbered it from one to fifteen or twenty—I got a feeling of accomplishment.

Q: You went crazy, Jim. You wrote for sixty-eight different lifestyle magazines, including
Des Moines, The Boisean, The Orlandan, The Albuquerquer, The Wichitan, Los Angel, The Quad Citian, The Bethesdan, The Hobokener, The Duluthist, The Renoite, Oakland, The Queenser, Bismarck, The Baton Rougist, The Omahite, The Pittsburghast
, and you wrote lists of best artists, best music videos, best hamburgers, quiet restaurants, noisy restaurants, bourbons, aluminum foils, dining-room sets, wallets, American novels, cheese snacks, hotel lobbies, movies, women named Diane, burritos, “Ten Most Exciting Elevators,” “Ten Cures for Winter Arghhhs,” “Ten People Who Have Something You'll Never Have,” “Ten Things That Look Very Unusual but Really Aren't,” “Ten Things You Don't Need to Worry About,” “Ten Places Nearby That You Ought to Drop Everything and Go Look At Immediately,” “The Thirty-nine Most Successful, Restless, Desperately Unhappy People in West Virginia,” “Fifty Top U.S. Businesses Run by Methodists”—surely, Jim, there must have come a point when you thought, That is enough. I can't do this anymore.

A: I had filled up sixty-one floppy discs by then. I wanted to reach a hundred.

Q: So you filled your hundredth disc, and you collected everything in a book,
The Fatal List,
and it reached No. 8 on the
Times
list, and then—?

A: I was ready to retire, but the editor of
Milwaukee
told me to cough up ten more, otherwise he would include me in “Fifty People Who Were Once Hot and Aren't Anymore for One Reason or Another.” So I did them.

Q: Do you have any idea what damage you've done, Jim? You've made people more stupid. Some of your readers now find it hard to read paragraphs that aren't numbered.

A: How many? A lot?

Q: Jim, we're going to have to put you in a little room by yourself for a while, I think.

A: Will I ever write again?

Q: No.

T
O EACH PERSON God gives some talent, such as writing, just to name one, and to many persons He has given musical talent, though not as many as think so. For the young Lutheran, the question must be: Do I have a genuine God-given musical talent or do I only seem gifted in comparison to other young Lutherans?

If your talent is choir or organ, there's no problem. Choir members and organists can be sure their gift is from God because who else but God would be interested. Just like nobody gets fat on celery, nobody goes into church music for the wrong motives.

But for a Lutheran who feels led to play in an orchestra, the first question must be: Are you kidding? An
orchestra?

In the Bible, we read about people singing and playing musical instruments, the harp, trumpet, psaltery, but always in praise of the Lord, not for amusement. We do not read that our Lord Himself ever played an instrument or enjoyed hearing others play theirs. The apostles did not attend concerts, or go to dances.
Are you sure this is what you want?
Do you know what you're getting into? Opera. Is that anyplace for a Christian? Don Juan and Mephistopheles and Wagner and all his pagan goddesses hooting and hollering, and the immorality—I mean, is anybody in opera married? You play in an orchestra, you're going to wind up in opera, and the next thing you know, you're going to be skipping Sunday mornings.

If you steer clear of opera and stick to orchestral concert music, where are the Christian composers? Modern ones are existentialists, the Romantics were secular humanists, the eighteenth century was all rationalists, and the seventeenth was Italians, except for Bach, and you can't make a living playing Bach. You go in an orchestra, you're going to be devoting your life to a lot of music that sort of swirls around in spiritual mystery searching for answers that people could find in the Bible if someone showed them where to look.

But if you're determined to play in an orchestra, then you ought to ask yourself: Which instrument is the best one for a Lutheran to play? If our Lord had played an instrument, which one would He have chosen? Probably not a
French horn.
It takes too much of a person's life. French-horn players hardly have time to marry and have children. The French horn is practically a religion all by itself. Should a Lutheran play the
bassoon?
Not if you want to be taken seriously. The name says it all:
bassoon.
Maybe you'd do it for a hobby (“Let's go bassooning this weekend, honey!”) but not as your life occupation.

Many Lutherans start out playing
clarinets
in marching band and think of the clarinet as a Christian instrument, clear and strong and almost human, but a symphonic clarinet is different from the band clarinet: it's sardonic, skeptical, and definitely worldly. The
English horn
sounds Christian, maybe because we think of it as the Anglican horn, but it's so mournful, so plaintive. And so are English-horn players. They all have incredibly complicated problems, they're all depressed, especially at night, which is when concerts are. The
oboe
is the sensualist of the woodwind section, and if there's one wind a Lutheran should avoid, it's this one. In movie soundtracks, you tend to hear the oboe when the woman is taking her clothes off, or else later, when she asks the man for a cigarette. The
flute
is the big shot of the wind section. Jean-Pierre Rampal, James Galway, both millionaires (how many millionaire bassoonists are there?), because everybody knows it's the hardest to play. To spend your life blowing across a tiny hole—it's not really normal, is it. The flute is a temptation to pride. Avoid it. The last member of the woodwind family is the flakiest, and that's the
piccolo.
No Salvation Army band ever included a piccolo and no piccolo virtuoso ever did an album of gospel songs. This is not a devotional instrument.

We come now to the string section. Strings are mentioned in Scripture and therefore some Lutherans are tempted to become string players, but be careful.
Bass,
for example. An extremely slow instrument, the plowhorse of the orchestra, and bass players tend to be a little methodical, not inventive, not quick, not witty or brilliant, but reliable. This makes the instrument very tempting to German Lutherans. And yet, bass notes have a darkness and depth to them that, let's face it, is sexual. And when bass players pick up their bows, I don't think there's any doubt what's going on in their minds back there. The
cello
section seems so normal, and cellists seem like such
nice
people. The way they put their arms around their instruments, they look like parents zipping up a child's snowsuit. They seem like us: comfortable, middle-range. And yet there is something too comfortable, maybe too sensual, about the cello. The way they hold the instrument between their legs: why can't they hold it across their laps or alongside themselves? The
viola
section is not a place for a Lutheran and here you'll have to take my word for it. I know violists and they are fine people until, late at night, they start drinking a few bottles of cheap red wine and roasting chickens over a pit in a vacant lot and talk about going to Yucatan with a woman named Rita. Don't be part of this crowd. The
violin
is a problem for any Christian because it's a solo instrument, a virtuoso instrument, and we're not solo people. We believe in taking a back seat and being helpful. So Christians think about becoming
second violinists.
They're steady, humble, supportive. But who do they support?
First violins.
You want to get involved with them? The
first violins
are natural egotists. The conductor looks to them first, and most first violinists believe that the conductor secretly takes his cue from them, that he, a simple foreign person, gets carried away by listening to the violins and falls into a romantic, emotional reverie and forgets where in the score he is and looks to the concertmaster, the No. 1 first violin, to find out what's going on: this is what violinists believe in their hearts. If the conductor dropped dead, the rest of the orchestra would simply follow the violin section, while the maestro's body was carried away, and nobody would notice the difference. Is this a place for a Lutheran to be? In the biggest collection of gold-plated narcissists ever gathered on one stage? No.

Let's be clear about the brass section. First of all, the rest of the orchestra wishes the brass were playing in another room, and so does the conductor. His back is toward the audience, so they can't see what he's saying to the brass section; he's saying: You're too damn loud, shut the fuck up (in Italian, this doesn't sound coarse at all). The brass section is made up of men who were at one time in the construction trades and went into music because the hours were better. They are heavy dudes, and that's why composers wrote so few notes for them: because they're juveniles. The
tuba
player, for example, is a stocky, bearded guy who has a day job as a plumber. He's the only member of the orchestra who bowls and goes deer hunting. It's not an instrument for a sensitive Lutheran, and anyway there's only one tuba and he's it. The
trombonist
is a humorist. He carries a water spray gun to keep his slide moist and often uses it against other members of the orchestra. A Shriner at heart, he knows more Speedy Gonzalez jokes than you thought existed. The
trumpet
is the brass instrument you imagine as Christian, thinking of Gideon and of the Psalms, but then you meet a real-life trumpet player and realize how militaristic these people are. They don't want to wear black tie and play Bach, they want tight uniforms with shiny buttons, and they want to play as loud as they possibly can. Most of the people who keel over dead at concerts are killed by trumpets.

There are two places in the orchestra for a Lutheran, and one is
percussion.
It's the most Lutheran instrument there is. Percussionists are endlessly patient, because they don't get to play much. Pages and pages of music go by where the violins are sawing away and the winds are tooting and the brass is blasting but the percussionist sits and counts the bars, like a hunter waiting for the quail to appear. A percussionist may have to wait for twenty minutes just to play a few beats, but those beats have to be exact and they have to be passionate and climactic. All that the epistles of Paul say a Christian should be—faithful, waiting, trusting, filled with fervor—are the qualities of the percussionist. The other Lutheran instrument, of course, is the
harp.
It is the perfect instrument for a Christian because it keeps you humble. You can't gallivant around with a harp. Having one is like living with an elderly parent in poor health—it's hard to get them in and out of cars, impossible to satisfy them. A harp takes fourteen hours to tune and remains in tune for twenty minutes or until somebody opens a door. It's an instrument for a saint. If a harpist could find a good percussionist, they wouldn't need an orchestra at all; they could settle down and make wonderful music, just the two of them.

J
ANICE JOHNSON WAS THINKING COMPUTER SOFTWARE when she woke up last Wednesday morning, and when Bob and the kids came down to the kitchen she had scribbled three or four things on an envelope and was thinking some more. “I don't know what came over me!” she cried. “It's like a dream or something!” And two hours later she cashed in an insurance policy and started Janico. They make computer skirts. Cotton skirts with an elastic band to fit any console. “I saw computers in this dream,” Janice explained, “and they seemed sort of
stark.
So I thought of dressing them up a little bit.” A little bit! Janico was worth $2.3 million at noon today, and now she's bringing in a top management team from San Francisco “to handle the bills and checking account and all that stuff.” They're due to arrive in fifteen minutes.

That's how fast things are moving nowadays—in computers, communications, quality control, the incentives field, all the hot spots in the economy. Friends of yours may be on their way to incredible first-quarter earnings—old chums you saw
last night!
You went out together to a little Australian restaurant for creamed onions and baked emu and sat around talking idle talk, and suddenly this morning, while you drank orange juice and read the funny pages, she was saying to him, “Earl, I had an idea about transceivers. Why not turn that little U-shaped gizmo around and put the little red things in from the other end?”