Joy by Erin McGraw

Author:Erin McGraw
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781640092099
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2018-12-12T05:00:00+00:00

Nobody Happy

When I was a teenager, I heard a woman propose to a man in the parking lot of Ralphs grocery store. It was spring and they were sitting in a convertible. Next to the cart corral, I stood rooted, my hand clamped around the plastic bar on the cart. “I love you,” she said, her voice stringy with fear. “I want to wake up every morning and see you.”

Asphalt burning through my flip-flops, I held my breath. I didn’t know whether I was pulling for him or her, but I wanted somebody to be happy. He didn’t say anything for a long time, and when he finally did, it was, “Let’s go home.” Nobody happy.

Nobody Happy. That would make a good song title for a good songwriter.

I’m a bad songwriter, so I sing. That’s the way it goes with music. Cole Porter could put a lifetime’s worth of agony into one line that somebody else would deliver, and it would be a funny line. “Cole Porter was a fruit,” Frank Sinatra said, and he then he sang “So in Love” with tears in his eyes.

I don’t cry, but I know how to do tempos and phrasing, how to sound confident when my voice surrounds a note. Give me somebody else’s words and you’ll swear you can hear my heart breaking. Give me a piece of paper, a pencil, and all afternoon, and you’ll get some cartoon cats, a list of words that rhyme with moon, and a hole on the page where I kept erasing the stupid lines, the ones I’m good at. I’ll keep trying until I write one good one. That’s all. One song to make the world remember me. I can’t decide whether that’s asking for a lot or not nearly enough.

Then it’s time to put on my tux and do my show. Sometimes I go onstage with a highball glass of apple juice, pretending it’s whiskey, like Dean Martin. Everything I do is fake—the orchestra arrangements that steal from Nelson Riddle, the soft approach on a note like Mel Tormé, the goddamn lapels on my tux that I tell the tailor to keep slim.

“What do you want to look like, it’s 1956?”

“Bingo.”

The part in my hair is sharp as a razor and my shave is paper clean. I sing at nightclubs that have 1956 wallpaper and 1956 coat-check girls. At every set there’s at least one guy who’s splashed out big money to take his wife—face-lift, heavy diamonds—to hear music the way it’s supposed to be. When I experiment with a tempo, I get summoned by the guy and his wife. “That is not how Tony Bennett sang it. You’re a kid. Don’t try to improve.”

I spent the better part of a month on a song that rhymed improve with disapprove, before I realized that the whole song stank.

I’ve forced myself to finish a few songs that seemed good while I was writing them. The next day I’d see the obvious lines, the predictable progressions.

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