the tenor

the tenor

i never was but hoped to be. even as a boy soprano i looked up to these guys. i even fantasized about them in some colorless disturbing way, they are so clear of note and high of pitch. as aces in the singing game they captivated me exclusively until Aretha Franklin took over when i saw her sing Natural Woman on Johnny Carson. but that was way later. the boy who sits at the feet of the upper classman tenor disappears into that voice as he does the young guy who belts it out. i would have done anything he asked (which is safe to say as he would have undoubtedly never asked). at Yale, in the high reverberation stairwells and tiled bathrooms i'd take a stab at Jussi Bjorling, tearing my alcohol bruised vocal chords to shreds but got high on the high sound. (poor Jussi died on stage, in a chair, singing his final aria.) something there is that loves a tenor, perhaps the Narcissus of singers, squirting mist on an anxious throat. it came to a head at Yale when someone in the class ahead of mine, a Chinese scholar with a phenomenal singer, sang 'Miss Otis Regrets' at a 'rush' for those of us who wanted to join acapella singing groups (where we could drink underage and nurture 'platonic' love attachments with the like-minded). I was lost in his voice. I would visit him at Saybrook College in the dark of night. 'Excalibur' was carved on the armchair i would sit in by the fire. he would play 'Tristan und Isolde' and describe to me how he and his girlfriend would try to simultaneously climax at the peak of Wagner's arch. he went on to study voice in San Francisco with one of the supposedly great masters of voice. i lost track of him until Orchestra Luna was in the studio and i looked him up in the Manhattan phone book. i wanted him to know that i wrote songs, that i was singing in a band and that i was making a record. i wanted to see how he was doing after the Yale years. i found his apartment on the lower West Side. he opened the door in a frenzy of anxiety. the place was a chaotic pig pen of rooms littered with unwashed clothes and dishes, with sheet music scattered all over all floors. he explained that his great teacher and mentor had died and was irreplaceable. he appeared to be insane to a clinical degree. he nervously carried a chrome pitchpipe in one hand. he would blow into it for a high C and struggle to reach it. he failed again and again and a scratchy, flat, awkward sound gagged out of his mouth, his eyes aghast. i think he made a clumsy pass at me. he had become totally gay i guess. no more 'Tristan'. it was crushing to see this great person, this great voice, this precocious student fall so close to the gutter. i backed out of the apartment, took a cab to our bland hotel and left him to, i dunno, rot. maybe we can't go home again. maybe we shouldn't even try.