pigeon

Don’t you miss the slap of the drum heads against your palms?

It’s funny (it’s always funny) that this particular pigeon should pop its little head up right now, because I was just thinking about Tamanduá.

He’s a union CEO now — CEO? is that right? Is that what they call it, or does it have some less intimidating commercial-sounding title? I’ll have to look it up. Or maybe not. Googling people always feels sweaty and creepy. Like they can see you looking at them. Maybe it doesn’t matter anyway, maybe what matters is I thought of him as a CEO, or actually, in the first phrasing that came to mind if I’m being honest (am I?), I thought of him as a “big union boss.” Haha, that sounds almost as bad as “fat cat” or “mover and shaker” or “captain of industry” or — idfk — “CEO”!

Well, he used to be a skater boy. But that was before I knew him. When I knew him, he was just... oh, let’s see...

• someone who had been smart enough and responsible enough with his family’s resources to have bought a house in Riverwest, back when relatively normal people could still do that

• married to a woman who wouldn’t stop drinking coffee even though she was part of a breast milk interchange club or something, and some of the other moms didn’t want her caffeinated milk. She was also basically perfect and humble and earthy. I can feel the subterranean itch of a part of me I would rather hide that resented her — why? — was it just because she was more convincing as a quasi-hippy than my own soon-to-be-wife-at-the-time? Was I just — no, couldn’t be — jealous because she was married to Tamanduá?

• emotionally arrogant. I offered this appraisal one evening after he and I had had a few beers, and he emphatically agreed. Didn’t seem clear if he really wanted to do anything much about it, though

• somebody who had a relatively normal job but definitely a “better” job than I had — oh and two (?) kids already when I was a few months short of my first

• a bit of a conguero — not as, oh, let’s say passionate as I was, but more controlled, in terms of technique and logic and tradition and all that stuff

• see that’s just it — he was a scholar of some kind — always knew more than I did about whatever it was, but seemingly at a kind of intellectual remove. Maybe that’s an advantage in some sense of the word. Maybe that’s why he’s more, by most likely almost anyone’s default definition, successful than I am now, by, like, a lot

• a Capoeirista

It’s this last that formed the borders of the domain I knew him in, to the extent I really knew him at all (see above, re: emotional arrogance; while I on the other hand at the time was passive and wanted an embossed invitation to someone else’s heart, and quietly, politely seethed when I didn’t get one, and that’s why I was so rife for being manipulated, entrapped, and may I go so far as to say abused? — but not by Tamanduà, of course, good lord no, I’m talking about — another pigeon, for another time)

He was always better at Capoeira than I was too — more flexible, more lithe, more mischievous — malandro, you know, all the best Capoeiristas were. He had started a few years before I even knew how to pronounce the name of the game. The dance. The fight. (That it was all three of these things had to be explained to every newcomer, you see.) I only ended up in the class at the Y because Karate was full.

Oh wait. Hold on. I just realized — it happened again. The person who leapt to mind on opening the random pigeon was not actually the person who said the thing. I’m like 500 words in before I realize it. Wandering around a completely different wing of the memory mansion, stopping, muttering, “What the hell’d I come in here for?”

(If nothing else, this little experiment has already proved just how chimerical memory can be.)

So it wasn’t Tamanduà who said “Don’t you miss the slap of the drum heads against your palms?” But that’s OK — I’ll figure out some deft way to bring it back around, bring him back into it before we’re done here. I got all night. Sitting at a grody table in the student union, typing away on my bluetooth keyboard, waiting for L– to be done climbing artificial cliffs a few blocks away. Like I said, even now, even with everything, life can still be good for a few moments at a time.

The person who actually asked me was my drum teacher, DB. He must have been giving me a ride somewhere, because I didn’t have a car when he was my teacher. He was teaching me to play drum set, because all I really knew how to do was whap away at hand drums, mainly congas. He must have asked me if I’d been playing the congas much lately, and I must have said not really, prompting him to get curious as to how I could be OK with that unfortunate state of affairs.

All his other students were little suburban kids. It made things very awkward at recitals. Ha. That whole situation didn’t last very long. But we did play in a “band” together for a while after I stopped being DB’s student. That was fun. Dive bars in Milwaukee, I have played in you and I have worn a flowy gauzy skirt while doing so. (Another pigeon, another time.)

Anyway, whoever said it, it was a good question. Makes me think of how sometimes you get down in a hole and then you can happen to cross paths with someone who says something simple and innocent like that and it can remind you that you love things and know what fresh air tastes like, but it’s been a while because you’ve been in the hole for so long — why did you get down in there in the first place? Because you thought the air was poison? Radiation? Fallout? Sometimes you need someone in your life who, by virtue of being the casual questioner, can let you know the war is over (for now) and it’s safe to come out.

I can think of other people who have dropped, more or less casually, similar questions that made me pause. When I told my girlfriend in Kansas City — hmm, not “girlfriend” exactly, maybe “fury” is a better term? — that it was fine, I didn’t have to go with my first choice of major, I would just be an English teacher or something practical (ha!), and she said, but isn’t that a cop-out?

When an interviewer at a medium-big printing company in Milwaukee waited for me to finish my preprogrammed spiel about why I would be a good customer service rep, and then said (glancing at the completely irrelevant shit I must have failed to not include on my résumé), but don’t you think you might be a bit dissatisfied, not being able to do “something creative” instead? (Didn't get that job.)

Or how about this: any time anyone, even a piece of paper or a bit of text on a screen, asks, “If you could have any job in the world, what would it be?” — First, the instant, ineluctable answer that leaps to mind — an urgent little flame leaping out of the head of a match; then, an instant later, the slow drip of rationalizations for having chosen, over and over again, something else, anything else but that.

Of course, one’s job and the slap of the drum head on the palms need not be one and the same, nor mutually incompossible. I’ve heard it’s sometimes better if whatever it is you truly, unaffectedly love is not what you do for money. I wouldn’t know; I’ve never had to find out.

Oh boy, I said I was going to figure out how to come back to old Tamanduà. I’m basically ready for bed and I haven’t done that yet.

You know I don’t see or talk to or still even really know either of those guys anymore, but in retrospect I’d have to say DB was a better friend. It’s kind of funny how you can have long philosophical discussions with someone and agree about all kinds of intellectual and intellectually spiritual stuff — and still walk away from their acquaintance feeling as if you barely even connected at all. How the one who casts the more dramatic shadow across the proscenium of your memory may not have been the one who played the part and said the line that really moved you.

Usually your best teachers teach you something other than what you signed up for. Example: how not to let your own spurious measures of status and success distract you into denying yourself the humble, visceral feeling of a thing you quietly love. Like drums. Or other people! Or just a little thing like the sound of this keyboard even though tonight I’ve utterly failed to make a cohesive “post” with a “point” or whatever. How someone will always be worse than you, and someone will always be better than you, and literally nobody cares.

Except the pigeons, of course. And the invisible trout.

I’m going to bed. Tomorrow we’ll see what happens, again.