I had always watched single working moms with awe, wondering how on earth they did this with no one on standby to help or even cheer them on. Now I was learning. The key is something called "multitasking." You figure out how to combine compatible chores: phone consultations with your editor and washing the breakfast dishes. Writing a novel in the pediatrician's waiting room. Grocery shopping and teaching your child to read. Balancing the budget in the hardware store. Sleeping and worrying. Sobbing and driving.
The notion of a little bus jaunt down the East Coast pretending to be a rock star seemed not so compatible with the other tasks on my list. No way could I do it.
My fellow band members felt otherwise. Ridley Pearson and Dave Barry (bass and lead guitar, respectively), Kathi Goldmark, Tad Bartimus and Amy Tan (vocalists and clotheshorses par excellence) all called up to advise me I needed to have some fun. Steve King (rhythm guitar) sent so many mailgrams I became a cult figure at my post office. Roy Blount (band member whose exact contribution remains a mystery) offered to write my novel for me. Throughout that very dreary winter and spring I felt a steady tide of peer pressure and moral support from the Rock Bottom Remainders. In April, when I came home from a long hike on my birthday, my message blinker was having a seizure: every member of the band, I think, had called up to sing "Happy Birthday" into my answering machine. Al Kooper, our musical director and bona fide God of Rock, sang it to the tune of "The Star-Spangled Banner": "Happy Birthday to You, from A-al Koo-per..." When he ran low on lyrics, he worked in "and our flag was still there..." Believe me, I have this tape in a safe place.
Just as a mental exercise, I started working out which friends I would ask to cover the bases at home, if I should ever need to leave for two whole weeks.
In May, I showed up in Boston for the tour.
I'm never nervous at author appearances, I don't care how big the crowd is. I always say, What's the worst that could happen, you're going to forget how to read? Fellow author Richard Nelson once replied in a fierce falsetto, just before we both walked out on stage: "No, you could wet your pants!"
I apologize for my hubris, for I've now known stage fright. The first day I rehearsed with the band in Anaheim I was a case of loose nerve endings in a roomful of people who seemed laced up tight with confidence. In Boston my insecurities were back again with interest. I wanted to play well. Or at least in the right key.
So did everyone else; and it turns out writers are rarely so confident as they seem. Never mind that we created a band persona out of self-ridicule, identifying ourselves publicly as "rhythmically challenged." The truth is, in rehearsal we all paid attention. The famously facetious Dave Barry frowned into space a lot when he played. Ridley sweated and wrote things down. Amy paced. Tad stayed wide-eyed and quiet. Steve made personal breakthroughs. (The second day of rehearsal I told him I thought he was sounding much better. His face lit up like a carnival ride, and he said, "You know what I discovered? When I'm not sure what chord to play, I don't touch the guitar, I just do this--air strumming!")
I tried to be dependable and invisible and watch my little synthesizer buttons so I wouldn't come in sounding like a horn section when I was supposed to be an organ, or vice versa. I didn't want Al Kooper to roll his eyes at me. (I've found out since, he rolls his eyes even when he likes you.) I wanted to belong to this gang, and I wasn't going to do it by being the class clown or the silver tongue. We were a whole class of clowns, a league of quick wits, but so what? Can a good pig fly? When we got on stage, we were going to have to be a band.
Everybody else developed at least a song or two that was his or her own moment in the spot--Amy had her glorious black-leather "Boots Are Made for Walkin'," Tad embraced "Chain of Fools" with her soul, Ridley committed a righteous "Nadine," Steve excelled (of course) at teenage death songs, and Dave endowed the sixties standard "Gloria" with a new attitude. I supposed I ought to brave center stage too, but the keyboard grows where you plant it, like a tree. It's more of a workhorse than a dance-around-the-stage-and-bite-things type of instrument. Think of one single rock band with a flashy, standout player on boards, if you can. For reasons partly beyond my control, it was very easy for me to fade into oblivion behind Roy Blount's Hawaiian shirt. (In our video, there's no appreciable evidence that I was there.) But bowing to peer pressure, I rashly volunteered to step away from my synthesizer and sing "Dock of the Bay." I regretted it instantly.
"Dock of the Bay," Otis Redding version, is my favorite song. To my mind, it speaks to the universal human theme of being washed up somewhere with dashed hopes and poor employment prospects and nobody to hold your hand. I've sung it nine million times in private places, mostly tiled and wet. But I don't sing with my clothes on; it's the principle of the thing. I know my limitations. Or should.
The first time we went through "Dock of the Bay" in rehearsal, my throat was the size of one of those tiny plastic straws they put in your margarita. The guys faithfully played their chords behind my soulfully inaudible rendition, but they examined their sneakers closely when it was over, and I scooted back behind my keyboard like a hermit crab into its shell after a brief interlude of nakedness.
I kind of hoped that song would go away. But Al made me do it again, every day. (He pulled me aside one day and advised that I learn the words. I said, "I know the words, I just can't sing!") In time I got the volume up, but not to the point of feeling entitled to sing in front of an audience that had actually paid, in cash, to be there.
This entitlement may or may not have been an issue. The band was philosophically divided on the subject of music. In rehearsal we worked much harder than any of the guys are ever going to admit. We didn't want to embarrass ourselves utterly. But in interviews we knocked each other down in the scramble for the title of Lowest Musical Self-Esteem. It's a face saver. We all knew no amount of rehearsal could ever make us into a first-rate, or even cut-rate, or irate, or reprobate, rock-and-roll band; in that case it's better to pretend you're not trying very hard than to let on that this is really your best effort.
So what was the point, exactly? I found myself brooding a lot, those first early mornings in my Boston hotel room. Why go public with something you know perfectly well you're not doing all that well? Why should good writers play mediocre music? If this is multitasking, I might as well go home and sing "Dock of the Bay" while doing something useful, like banging on the washer.
My rationale, which came to me long after the fact, has to do with a desire to jump fences and graze a lot of pastures, both greener and thornier than the one where I supposedly belong. It looked as if we could raise a huge amount of money to promote literacy, and also I did need a break from an unhappy, hardscrabble time in my life. But those aren't reasons enough. I did it because I want to be exactly what I am--a writer who does other things. Not just a soup-of-the-day double-tasker, Breadwinner Mom; that's the default option. If I can also be, for one brief moment, Literary Rock Goddess, why not go for broke?
I've spent my life hiding a closetful of other lives. When I entered graduate school in biology in my early twenties, my committee looked long and hard down their noses at my interest in creative writing. And now that I make my way mostly as a writer, it's considered comical or suspect that I have degrees in science. When I speak in public, I'm frequently introduced by someone who will make a point of revealing my checkered past: archaeologist, typesetter, medical technician, translator, biological field researcher, artist's model. The audience generally laughs, and I do too. It seems ridiculous to add music to the list, but it's on there. In 1973, I went to college on a music scholarship. I studied classical piano performance, music theory, and composition at DePauw University for two years, until it occurred to me that all the classical pianists in the U.S. were going to have a shot at, maybe, eleven good jobs, and the rest of us would wind up tinkling through "The Shadow of Your Smile" in a hotel lobby. So I switched to zoology. It seemed practical. I could just as happily have gone over to literature or anthropology or botany.
I'm in awe of those people who seem bent from early childhood upon a passionate vocational path. My father, the M.D., tells me that as a first grader he blew up his toy soldiers for the sole purpose of patching them back together. When I was a child, if anyone asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would reply first of all that I didn't think I would grow up, but on the off chance it happened, I planned to be a farmer and a ballerina and a writer and a doctor and a musician and a zookeeper.
This is not the right answer. I know that now. "Philosopher-king," you might as well say. "Sword swallower--stockbroker. Wrestler-art historian." A business card that lists more than one profession does not go down well in the grown-up set. We're supposed to have one main thing we do well, and it's okay to have hobbies if they are victimless and don't get out of hand, but to confess to disparate passions is generally taken in our society as a sign of attention deficit disorder.
For all the years I studied and worked as a scientist, I wrote poems in the margins of my chemistry texts and field notebooks. But I never identified myself as a poet, not even to myself. It would have seemed self-indulgent. Thoreau was unabashedly both scientific and literary; so was Darwin. But something has happened since then. Life is faster and more streamlined, and there is too much we have to know, just to get the job done right. To get one job done right, let alone seven or eight. And certainly we are supposed to get it right.
For all the years I've worked as a writer, I've also played at keyboards and the odd wind instrument, and lately even conga drums. I have sung in the shower. (I sound great in the shower.) I have howled backup to Annie Lennox and Randy Travis and Rory Block in my car. I've played in garage bands and jammed informally with musician friends, and with them have even written and recorded a few original songs. But I've never called myself a musician. It's not the one thing I do best.
As I get comfortable with the middle stretch of my life, though, it's occurred to me that this is the only one I'm going to get. I'd better open the closet door and invite my other selves to the table, even if it looks undignified or flaky. Possibly this is what's regarded as midlife crisis, but I'm not looking for a new me, just owning up to all the old ones. I like playing music. The music I make has not so far been nominated as a significant contribution to our planet, but it's fun.
I've seen those books on multigenre genius: paintings by Henry James, poetry by Picasso. But I'm not talking about them, I mean the rest of us. I'd like to think it's okay to do a lot of different kinds of things, even if we're not operating at the genius level in every case. I'd like to think we're allowed to have particolored days and renaissance lives, without a constant worry over quality control. If the Rock Bottom Remainders were a role model of any kind, I think that was our department: we went on record as half-bad musicians having wholehearted lives.
Thursday night, before our opening show at Shooters Waterfront Cafe, I bore well in mind the Richard Nelson scenario of What Is the Worst That Could Happen. But that doesn't begin to cover it. You have to picture the whole thing: in our jitters, the men have turned to alcohol and the women to makeup. We have regressed to Girls in the Bathroom mode--sharing hair stuff, asking if this looks okay, relying heavily on each other for fashion advice and kind oversight. This, I imagine, is what other girls did in high school before a big date. I didn't. I skipped the Junior Prom and read Flannery O'Connor. In 1972 I was into blue jeans and defiance, having found that the best defense, where an uninspiring social life was concerned, was a good offense.
My position in this band is ideal: I'm not a Remainder-ette, so I don't do gold lame and I don't have to be called upon by Al, in rehearsal, as "Girls!" At sound check I always tune up with the guys. But on the bus and in the hotel and right now in the dressing room I am definitely girls. Lorraine Battle (wardrobe roadie) is giving me a lesson in remedial makeup. I look in the mirror, blink twice as my glamorous big sister smiles back at me. Finally we leave this war-torn dressing room and crowd out onto the backstage bridge, and the guys all hoot at us. I find out what I was missing, in 1972, while I had my nose in a book.
We line up and wait for Roy to introduce us, so that one by one we can run out on the blinding-bright stage and be socked with a roar of cheers. I am invulnerable and supremely transformed: I take the stairs by twos, land onstage in my black lace leggings and long black no-finger gloves, and blow a kiss to the audience. I can't wait to sing "Dock of the Bay." I could dance on a table tonight, or roll the Big Boy down the street with impunity. I feel overtly beloved. I lean into my piano and lead out on "Money," and when the bass and guitar kick in I am moving dead center with the In Crowd. I am a river in spring flood season. I may not stop this, ever.
Listen, I could have stayed home and read a book, or plugged earphones into my synthesizer and played "Nadine" to myself, after I put my kid to bed. I almost did. But how many times in your life do you get to be audacious? And really, if you were a kid, would you mind so much if your Girl Scout of a Mom just once ran off to be a rock star for two weeks, as long as you got to see the pictures? Think of the ammunition you'd have against her, when your time came.
My daughter thinks it's way cool that I did it. And now that it's over, so do I. The thrill of the Rock Bottom Remainders, for me, was that a crew of mild-mannered writers were audacious together. We loved each other for the risks we took, and liked ourselves all right too. I must have sought it out in the middle of my winter, like a seedling straining for sun, because somewhere in my heart's damp basement I knew it's what I needed: Tad's enormous eyes, wide and starry with mascara, smiling at mine in the dressing-room mirror as we prayed we'd hit our notes. Amy in her leather, chin tipped up, glancing over at me for her cue. Steve's little wink when he takes over the whistle reprise on "Dock of the Bay." Dave's grin and Ridley's smiling nod as we look at each other and move, smooth as silk, from A major into the F sharp minor bridge that we always screwed up in rehearsal.
Look at us, we are saying to each other. This is really happening. This amazing and joyful noise that has got all those people jammed together and sweating and howling and bumping and grinding is coming from us. We are here, right now. We are the ones.
STONE SOUP
In the catalog of family values, where do we rank an occasion like this? A curly-haired boy who wanted to run before he walked, age seven now, a soccer player scoring a winning goal. He turns to the bleachers with his fists in the air and a smile wide as a gap-toothed galaxy. His own cheering section of grown-ups and kids all leap to their feet and hug each other, delirious with love for this boy. He's Andy, my best friend's son. The cheering section includes his mother and her friends, his brother, his father and stepmother, a stepbrother and stepsister, and a grandparent. Lucky is the child with this many relatives on hand to hail a proud accomplishment. I'm there too, witnessing a family fortune. But in spite of myself, defensive words take shape in my head. I am thinking: I dare anybody to call this a broken home.
Families change, and remain the same. Why are our names for home so slow to catch up to the truth of where we live?
When I was a child, I had two parents who loved me without cease. One of them attended every excuse for attention I ever contrived, and the other made it to the ones with higher production values, like piano recitals and appendicitis. So I was a lucky child too. I played with a set of paper dolls called "The Family of Dolls," four in number, who came with the factory-assigned names of Dad, Mom, Sis, and Junior. I think you know what they looked like, at least before I loved them to death and their heads fell off.
Now I've replaced the dolls with a life. I knit my days around my daughter's survival and happiness, and am proud to say her head is still on. But we aren't the Family of Dolls. Maybe you're not, either. And if not, even though you are statistically no oddity, it's probably been suggested to you in a hundred ways that yours isn't exactly a real family, but an impostor family, a harbinger of cultural ruin, a slapdash substitute--something like counterfeit money. Here at the tail end of our century,
most of us are up to our ears in the noisy business of trying to support and love a thing called family. But there's a current in the air with ferocious moral force that finds its way even into political campaigns, claiming there is only one right way to do it, the Way It Has Always Been.
In the face of a thriving, particolored world, this narrow view is so pickled and absurd I'm astonished that it gets airplay. And I'm astonished that it still stings.
Every parent has endured the arrogance of a child-unfriendly grump sitting in judgment, explaining what those kids of ours really need (for example, "a good licking"). If we're polite, we move our crew to another bench in the park. If we're forthright (as I am in my mind, only, for the rest of the day), we fix them with a sweet imperious stare and say, "Come back and let's talk about it after you've changed a thousand diapers."
But it's harder somehow to shrug off the Family-of-Dolls Family Values crew when they judge (from their safe distance) that divorced people, blended families, gay families, and single parents are failures. That our children are at risk, and the whole arrangement is messy and embarrassing. A marriage that ends is not called "finished," it's called failed. The children of this family may have been born to a happy union, but now they are called the children of divorce.