(To Pink Floyd's, “The Great Gig in the Sky”)
The piano begins solemnly, shyly, and desolately. The dull pain evoked brews in my stomach and slowly rises to brim and burn my eyes.
From the scattered bits and pieces he’s told me, I’ve puzzled together a fairly detailed portrait of a meek, melancholy boy.
He is a skinny blond boy of about five sitting at the dining room table with his family, but instead of casual chatter, he listens to the pin drop silence and turns the mushy green peas on his plate into courageous army men. When he gags on them, he is forced to sit in the dirtiest room in the tiny two-bedroom apartment until they have all miraculously disappeared. He might try to flush them down the grimy, cracked toilet, but that won’t work. He is trained. They’d hear and he’d have to start all over again.
     A year or so later, he mutters something slightly wrong and his father turns so quickly that every bone in the old man’s neck cracks. The child would then take two shots of Tabasco, endure 10 slaps with a ping-pong paddle to the behind and sit in his closet-sized, smoky, bedroom for the rest of the evening. Though threats of a sob or two distort his small face, he never lets one escape.
When he is about eight, he crouches down by the Christmas tree staring with huge doe eyes at the people who should have been role models. They are belligerently drunk, they are fighting, and they are getting arrested on Christmas Eve. This year Santa did not bring the usual one, poorly wrapped gift. He didn’t come at all. After he walks out of his room, bouncing eagerly with expectation, his body distorts and he struggles to mask the profound sadness that claws at his face.
The tempo increases. The melody gains a minimal amount of hope. The piano begins to lift him out of the dark shadow of that hazy, yellow bedroom.
As the few white kids in the ghetto they created their own sort of brotherhood. Together they rushed into their teenage years. Now, they pump their adrenaline by sneaking clumsily across the roofs of apartment buildings. They embark on rescue missions to save poor Luigi who is constantly hung by his underwear from the baseball backstop. They stealthily chain-smoke cigarettes in the dark, dingy alley behind The Webster Theatre after the heavy metal shows. When they were 12 they passed their first joint in the same spot. He spoke of that alley with such bitter sweet nostalgia.
Apart from the shoulder length blond locks, the band t-shirt, washed out ripped jeans and the forced hardened expression, the 16 year old looks exactly like the eight-year-old version that I had imagined. With his new brothers behind him, he stands tall, shoulders back and looks people in the eyes. A new glimmer appears.
As the notes become fuller and more gripping, he too wants to live life to the fullest...A life of no fear and of few worries.
But he never learned how to properly go about doing so.
         Instead, as Clair Torry’s voice cuts through the instrumental increasingly jovial with each note, he boards a Greyhound bus for three days and ends up in LA. Unlike the stars, he had no specific dream other than to be better than he knew how to be. On day one, he finds a motel to stay at for a week and heads directly to the liquor store to spend half of his miniscule, paper boy savings. On day two, he uses the second half on a Big Mac and the best California weed he could find. He wasn’t home and that was success enough.
         On day eight homeless, he paces up and down Hollywood Boulevard for hours. He stands, slightly dazed with a disappointed slump. A fancy man in a big-city car slows down and offers a nice place for him to stay only if he would play by the rules. Â
         As Torry’s voice spirals downward and screams out of control, he actually considers leaving with the man. He hesitantly chooses to rough the street for another week and when he ran out of resources, I can only imagine the few words that his tiny, defeated voice spoke when he had to ask his father for a few bucks to come back home. He still stood tall, but the second he had to rely on his father, he began to break.  Â
         Back home, his mother is gone and his father is moving and he has the not so difficult teenage rebel choice to stay or to live with his dad far from the people that had become his family. As he opened the newspaper to find an apartment of his own, his hope must have been diminishing slowly… but he didn’t acknowledge that. He is invincible.
        At 20, he paces the same route, back and forth through the delivery room. He bites the fingernails on his numb, colorless hands which are still recovering from his girlfriend’s desperate grasp. He looks down at his daughter, mesmerized by her mere existence. Her minute hands, adorably small toes, helpless cry and big brown eyes are nothing short of beautiful, innocent, and perfect. His eyes gloss over and refuse to look away. His breath deepens and his heart flutters as his world flip flops upside down. The young man and the narrating, melodic voice regain the control that they had lost. He must have been uncomfortable surrounded in such a warming happiness, though. It should have been a gruesome war, but rather than fighting for this relationship, for his daughter, for what was his, the cycle continued. He ran from it like his own parents did.
         As young love goes, he soon falls into what felt like the real kind of love with a different woman. As he stands on the secluded beach exchanging vows and rings, he stares into her emerald eyes, which reflected the utmost peace, serenity and comfort. He brushes her windblown hair back behind her ears, and the wedding party becomes a swirling blur: she is the only thing he can see. Over the next few years, he paces the delivery room four more times. A twisting knot of ecstasy rises in his throat each time he remembers that a new life will come to rely on him. With a smile so wide and dimples so pronounced, his laugh lines grow deeper with each birth.Â
         Some weeks he brings home his check, most weeks the money is gone by eight o’ clock on payday. Sometimes he comes home and brings the children to soccer. Most times he comes home late reeking of Budweiser. Sometimes he wakes up early on Sunday mornings and fills the house with the long lingering smell of fried eggs and bacon. Most times he lays grumbling on the couch, not angry at us like it may have seemed, but simply defending himself from his own overwhelmingly defeated disappointment. The air is heavy and a quiet sadness permeates the house on those mornings. A tension filled silence takes the place of talk about the famous pink elephant in the room because we understand.
         To an outsider though, he is a nobody, a nothing, a bad father with nothing to offer. Similar to Torry’s voice, I think the instability ingrained in his heart since the time of the small city apartment allowed him to float up and down, in and out… but I could just be making up excuses.Â
         He sits alone in a different room every night vacantly looking in the direction a cooking show. His expressionless eyes and an unmoving mouth mask any personality that might sneak through. He appears completely empty. The phone rings, his face brightens and his melody peaks. Startled, he snaps back into reality, hoping desperately that it might be his family. Once he’s leaped over the bed, tripped on his scattered shoes, and picked himself up, he only finds that it’s a prank call. His muscles relax; he slouches on the dirty, motel floor, crushed. To redeem himself, he calls the little ones who also wait eagerly at home for breath taking ring of the telephone. When their giggles greet his hopeful ears he can finally call it a night.
          Every weekend, I would wait expectantly in the third floor window of our apartment, searching the empty street for his car for hours. I would imagine all of the fun things that we would get to do together just because he promised that we would be together. No call, no show. He was gone. Nowhere to be found. But one day, his beaten, blue, Oldsmobile started appearing in my drive way and I could finally look at him the way that every daddy’s little girl should. I somehow overlooked the way that he had forgotten me. I blamed it on the peas, the Tabasco and his terrible absence of a Santa Claus.
          When you look down at your baby, I’ve heard that it’s the most heart-wrenching moment of your lifetime. Once that responsibility of raising another human being falls on your shoulders, nothing in the world could ever be more important, right? He lovingly smiles at me in the most unique way. His hands tenderly touch me like no one else’s do. Those disappointments only happen because like any father, he can never say no to his baby girl, even if he can’t always follow through with his promise (no matter how badly he wishes he would). It’s just the disease, right? He has such a big heart…he can’t possible know that he’s hurting me, right? I go day to day on my own. I work better on my own. I’m okay by myself, right? I’m okay… right?
         Eventually, the wails in “The Great Gig in the Sky” calm. As the places he could be and the danger he might be in cloud my vision, I wait for the phone to ring and I too begin to break.
         Underneath the ending note’s quiet uncertainty and despite the perilous ups and downs in the journey that she so precisely describes, there lies a small ounce of hope buried, indisputably there in the melody…right?Â
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