First Person Singular Page 5
She was a beautiful girl. At least, to me then, she looked gorgeous. She wasn’t tall, but she had long black hair, slim legs, and a lovely fragrance. (That could be a false memory, I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t give off any scent at all. But that’s what I remember, as if, when she passed, an enchanting, alluring fragrance wafted in my direction.) She had me under her spell—that beautiful, nameless girl clutching With the Beatles to her chest.
My heart started to pound, I gasped for breath, and it was as if all sound had ceased, as if I’d sunk to the bottom of a pool. All I could hear was a bell ringing faintly, deep in my ears. As if someone were desperately trying to send me a vital message. All this took only ten or fifteen seconds. It was over before I knew it, and the critical message contained there, like the core of all dreams, disappeared. Just like most important things do that happen in life.
A dimly lit hallway in a high school, a beautiful girl, the hem of her skirt swirling, With the Beatles.
That was the only time I saw that girl. In the two years between then and my graduation, we never once crossed paths again. Which is pretty strange if you think about it. The high school I attended was a fairly large public school at the top of a hill in Kobe, with about 650 students in each grade. (We were the so-called Baby Boomer generation, so there were a lot of us.) Not everyone knew one another. In fact, I didn’t know the names or recognize the vast majority of the kids in the school. But, still, since I went to school almost every day, and often used that hallway, it struck me as almost outrageous that I never once saw that beautiful girl again. I looked for her every time I used that hallway.
Had she vanished, like smoke? Or, on that early-autumn afternoon, had I seen not a real person but a vision of some kind? Perhaps I had idealized her in my mind at the instant that we passed each other, to the point where even if I actually saw her again I wouldn’t recognize her? (I think the last possibility is the most likely.)
Later, I got to know a few women, and went out with them. And every time I met a new woman it felt as though I were unconsciously longing to relive that dazzling moment I’d experienced in a dim school hallway back in the fall of 1964. That silent, insistent thrill in my heart, the breathless feeling in my chest, the bell ringing gently in my ears.
Sometimes I was able to recapture this feeling, at other times not. (Unfortunately, the bell didn’t ring enough.) And other times I managed to grab hold of it, only to let it slip through my fingers. In any event, the emotions that surged when this happened came to serve as a kind of gauge I used to measure the intensity of my yearning.
When I couldn’t get that sensation in the real world, I would quietly let my memory of those feelings awaken inside me. In this way, memory became one of my most valued emotional tools, a means of survival, even. Like a warm kitten, softly curled inside an oversized coat pocket, fast asleep.
On to the Beatles.
A year before I saw that girl was when the Beatles first became wildly popular. By April of 1964, they’d captured the top five spots on the American singles charts. Pop music had never seen anything like Beatlemania. These were the five hit songs: (1) “Can’t Buy Me Love”; (2) “Twist and Shout”; (3) “She Loves You”; (4) “I Want to Hold Your Hand”; (5) “Please Please Me.” The single “Can’t Buy Me Love” alone had more than two million preorders, making it double platinum before the actual record went on sale.
The Beatles were, of course, also hugely popular in Japan. Turn on the radio and chances were you’d hear one of their songs. I liked their songs myself and knew all their hits. Ask me to sing them, and I could. At home when I was studying (or pretending to study), most of the time I had the radio blasting away. But, truth be told, I was never a fervent Beatles fan. I never actively sought out their songs. For me, it was passive listening, pop music flowing out of the tiny speakers of my Panasonic transistor radio, in one ear and out the other, barely registering. Background music for my adolescence. Musical wallpaper.
In high school and in college, I didn’t buy a single Beatles record. I was much more into jazz and classical music, and that was what I listened to when I wanted to focus on music. I saved up to buy jazz records, requested tunes by Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk at jazz bars, and went to classical music concerts. It was only much later that I bought my first Beatles record and seriously listened to their music. But that’s a story for another time.
* * *
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This might seem strange, but it wasn’t until I was in my mid-thirties that I sat down and listened to With the Beatles from beginning to end. Despite the fact that the image of the girl carrying that LP in the hallway of our high school had never left me, for the longest time I didn’t feel like actually giving it a listen. I wasn’t particularly interested in knowing what sort of music was etched into the grooves of the vinyl disk she had clutched so tightly.
When I was in my mid-thirties, well past childhood and adolescence, my first impression of the album was that it wasn’t that great, or at least not the kind of music to take your breath away. Of the fourteen tracks on the album, six were covers of other artists’ works. The covers of the Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman” and Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” were well done, and impress me even when I listen to them now, but, still, they were cover versions. And of the eight original songs, apart from Paul’s “All My Loving,” none were amazing. There were no hit singles, and while I applaud their enterprising spirit in putting out albums that included only new material and no recycled singles, to my ears the Beatles’ first album, Please Please Me, recorded basically in one take, was more vibrant and compelling. Even so, likely thanks to Beatles fans’ unquenchable desire for new songs, this second album debuted in the number one spot in the U.K., a position it held for twenty-one weeks. (In the U.S., the title of the album was changed to Meet the Beatles, and included some different tracks, though the cover design stayed almost the same.) What probably accounted for this phenomenal success was their fans’ passionate desire—like travelers’ thirst for water after traversing a desert—for a fresh supply of Beatles music, plus the memorable monochrome cover photo, in half shadow, of the four of them.
* * *
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What pulled me in was the vision of that girl clutching the album as if it were something priceless. Take away the photograph on the album cover and the scene might not have bewitched me as it did. There was the music, for sure. But there was something else, something far bigger. And, in an instant, that tableau was etched in my heart—a kind of spiritual landscape that could be found only there, at a set age, in a set place, and at a set moment in time.
For me, the major event of the following year, 1965, wasn’t President Johnson ordering the bombing of North Vietnam and the escalation of the war, or the discovery of a new species of wildcat on the island of Iriomote, but the fact that I acquired a girlfriend. She had been in the same class as me in freshman year, but it wasn’t until sophomore year that we started going out.
To avoid any misunderstanding, I’d like to preface this by saying that I’m not good-looking and was never a star athlete, and my grades in school were less than stellar. My singing left something to be desired, too, and I didn’t have a way with words. When I was in school, and in the years after that, I never once had girls flocking around me. That’s one of the few things I can say with certainty in this uncertain life. Still, there always seemed to be a girl around who was, for whatever reason, attracted to me. I have no clue why, but I was able to enjoy some pleasant, intimate times with those girls. I got to be good friends with some of them, and occasionally took it to the next level. The girl I’m talking about here was one of these—the first girl I had a really close relationship with.
This first girlfriend of mine was petite and charming. That summer, I went on dates with her once a week. One afternoon I kissed her small yet full lips and touched her breasts throu
gh her bra. She was wearing a sleeveless white dress and her hair had a citrusy shampoo scent.
She had almost no interest in the Beatles. She wasn’t into jazz, either. What she liked to listen to was more mellow music, what you might call middle-class music—the Mantovani Orchestra, Percy Faith, Roger Williams, Andy Williams, Nat King Cole, and the like. (At the time, middle class wasn’t a derogatory term at all.) There were piles of such records at her house—what nowadays is classified as easy listening.
That afternoon, she put a record on the turntable in her living room—her family had a large, impressive stereo system—and we sat on the big, comfy sofa and kissed. Her family had gone out somewhere, and it was just the two of us. Truthfully, in a situation like that I didn’t really care what sort of music was playing.
What I remember about the summer of 1965 was her white dress, the citrusy scent of her shampoo, the formidable feel of her wire bra (a bra back then was more like a fortress than like an item of underwear), and the elegant performance of Max Steiner’s “Theme from A Summer Place” by the Percy Faith Orchestra. Even now, whenever I hear “Theme from A Summer Place,” that large, comfy sofa comes to mind.
Incidentally, several years later—1968, as I recall, around the same time that Robert Kennedy was assassinated—the man who had been our homeroom teacher when we were in the same class hanged himself from the lintel in his house. He’d taught social studies. An ideological impasse was said to be the cause of his suicide.
An ideological impasse?
But it’s true—in the late sixties people sometimes took their own lives because they’d hit a wall, ideologically. Though not all that often.
I get a really strange feeling when I think that on that afternoon, as my girlfriend and I were clumsily making out on the sofa, with Percy Faith’s pretty music in the background, that social studies teacher was, step by step, heading toward his fatal ideological dead end, or, to put it another way, toward that silent, tight knot in the rope. I even feel bad about it sometimes. Among all the teachers I knew, he was one of the best. Whether he was successful or not is another question, but he always tried to treat his students fairly. I never spoke to him outside of class, but that was how I remembered him.
Like 1964, 1965 was the year of the Beatles. They released “Eight Days a Week” in February, “Ticket to Ride” in April, “Help!” in July, and “Yesterday” in September—all of which topped the U.S. charts. It seemed as if we were hearing their music almost all the time. It was everywhere, surrounding us, like wallpaper meticulously applied to every single inch of the walls.
When the Beatles’ music wasn’t playing, it was the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” or the Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man,” or “My Girl” by the Temptations, or the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” or the Beach Boys’ “Help Me, Rhonda.” Diana Ross and the Supremes also had one hit after another. A constant soundtrack of this kind of wonderful, joyful music filtered out through my little Panasonic transistor radio. It was truly an astounding year for pop music, one that took your breath away.
I’ve heard it said that the happiest time in our lives is the period when pop songs really mean something to us, really get to us. It may be true. Or maybe not. Pop songs may, after all, be nothing but pop songs. And perhaps our lives are merely decorative, expendable items, a burst of fleeting color and nothing more.
My girlfriend’s house was near the Kobe radio station that I always tuned in to. I think her father imported, or perhaps exported, medical equipment. I don’t know the details. At any rate, he owned his own company, which seemed to be doing well. Their home was in a pine grove near the sea. I heard that it used to be the summer villa of some businessman and that her family had bought and remodeled it. The pine trees rustled in the sea breeze. It was the perfect place to listen to “Theme from A Summer Place.”
* * *
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Years later, I happened to see a late-night TV broadcast of the 1959 movie A Summer Place. It starred Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee, and was a typical Hollywood film about young love, but nevertheless it held together well. Percy Faith had a hit with a cover version of the Max Steiner theme song of the same title. In the movie, there is a pine grove by the sea, which sways in the summer breeze in time to the horn section. That scene of the pine trees swaying in the wind struck me as a metaphor for the young people’s raging sexual desire. But that may just have been my take on it, my own biased view.
In the movie, Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee are swept up in that kind of overpowering sexual wind and, because of it, encounter all kinds of real-world problems. Misunderstandings are followed by reconciliations, obstacles are cleared up like fog lifting, and in the end the two come together and are married. In Hollywood in the fifties, a happy ending always involved marriage—the creation of an environment in which lovers could have sex legally. My girlfriend and I, of course, didn’t get married. We were still in high school, and all we did was clumsily grope and make out on the sofa with “Theme from A Summer Place” playing in the background.
“You know something?” she said to me on the sofa, in a small voice, as if she were making a confession. “I’m the really jealous type.”
“Seriously?” I said.
“I wanted to make sure you knew that.”
“Okay.”
“Sometimes it hurts a lot to be so jealous.”
I silently stroked her hair. It was beyond me at the time to imagine how burning jealousy felt, what caused it, what it led to. I was too preoccupied with my own emotions.
As a side note, Troy Donahue, that handsome young star, later got caught up in alcohol and drugs, stopped making movies, and was even homeless for a time. Sandra Dee, too, struggled with alcoholism. Donahue married the popular actress Suzanne Pleshette in 1964, but they divorced eight months later. Dee married the singer Bobby Darin in 1960, but they divorced in 1967. This is obviously totally unrelated to the plot of A Summer Place. And unrelated to my and my girlfriend’s fate.
My girlfriend had an older brother and a younger sister. The younger sister was in her second year of junior high but was a good two inches taller than her older sister. She wasn’t particularly cute. Plus, she wore thick glasses. But my girlfriend was very fond of her kid sister. “Her grades in school are really good,” she told me. I think my girlfriend’s grades, by the way, were only fair to middling. Like my own, most likely.
One time, we let her younger sister tag along with us to the movies. There was some reason that we had to. The film was The Sound of Music. The theater was packed, so we had to sit near the front, and I remember that watching that 70 mm wide-screen film so close up made my eyes ache by the end. My girlfriend, though, was crazy about the songs in the film. She bought the soundtrack LP and listened to it endlessly. Me, I was much more into John Coltrane’s magical version of “My Favorite Things,” but I figured that bringing that up with her was pointless, so I never did.
Her younger sister didn’t seem to like me much. Whenever we saw each other she looked at me with strange eyes, totally devoid of emotion—as if she were judging whether some dried fish at the back of the fridge was still edible or not. And, for some reason, that look always left me feeling guilty. When she looked at me, it was as though she were ignoring the outside (granted, it wasn’t much to look at anyway) and could see right through me, down to the depths of my being. I may have felt that way because I really did have shame and guilt in my heart.
My girlfriend’s brother was four years older than she was, so he would have been at least twenty then. She didn’t introduce him to me and hardly ever mentioned him. If he happened to come up in conversation, she deftly changed the subject. I can see now that her attitude was a bit unnatural. Not that I thought much about it. I wasn’t that interested in her family. What drew me to her was something very different, a much more urgen
t impulse.
The first time I met her brother and spoke with him was toward the end of autumn in 1965.
That Sunday, I went to my girlfriend’s house to pick her up. We went on dates pretending we were going to the library to study, so I always put various study-related items in my shoulder bag to keep up the facade. Like a novice criminal making up a flimsy alibi.
I rang the bell over and over, but no one answered. I paused for a while, then rang it again, repeatedly, until I finally heard someone moving slowly toward the door. It was my girlfriend’s older brother.
He was a shade taller than me and a bit on the hefty side. Not flabby, but more like an athlete who, for some reason, can’t exercise for a while and packs on a few extra pounds, just temporary fat. He had broad shoulders but a relatively long, thin neck. His hair was disheveled, sticking out all over the place, as if he’d just woken up. It looked stiff and coarse, and he seemed about two weeks overdue for a haircut. He had on a crew-neck navy-blue sweater, the neck loose, and gray sweats that were baggy around the knees. His look was the complete opposite of my girlfriend’s—she was always neat and clean and well groomed.
He squinted at me for a while, like some scruffy animal that had, after a long hibernation, crawled out into the sunlight.
“I’m guessing you are…Sayoko’s friend?” He said this before I got a word out. He cleared his throat. His voice was sleepy, but I could sense a spark of interest in it.
“That’s right,” I said, and introduced myself. “I was supposed to come here at eleven.”