Quiet Room - Lori Schiller [48]
I never thought the songs or singers were speaking directly to me the way back in high school I thought Walter Cronkite was. Nonetheless, my moods sharpened the words and tunes like a knife, so they seemed to cut directly to my brain. The songs talked to my experience, shared my feelings. It was as if through music the world outside became a mirror image of my own inner world. The borders between the music and my mind would fade. As I became engrossed in the words and melodies, I often became captive to the mercy of the music.
One of Pink Floyd's songs seemed to be about my own obsession with time. I kept clock after clock in my room, and was always preoccupied with figuring out exactly what time it was. The song began with the clang of dozens of different alarm clocks, then the repeated sound of a heartbeat, then the din of drums and chimes. It felt just as I would feel when I would compulsively compare the analog dial on my watch with the digital clock and then, trusting neither, call 976-1616 to hear the comforting electronic voice intone the correct time, down to the right second.
I would hear Billy Joel's driving beat. Sometimes as he sang, he asked questions in his lyrics and then answered them himself. It seemed to me a lot like the conversations my Voices would have with each other when they were being relatively tranquil. Sometimes when Billy Joel sang about madness, depression or exhilaration he seemed to share my terrifying inner chaos. When he sang about loneliness, he seemed to understand the isolation I felt.
When the group Steely Dan sang “Any Major Dude,” I could hear the song speaking to me, speaking of a woman, maybe me, hovering on the edge of a breakdown, trying to pull the pieces together again. Everyone seemed to live in a world of madness.
Crosby, Stills & Nash knew all about the terror I felt when a private reality consumed and became more real than the outside reality:
Now I'm standing on the grave of a soldier that died in 1799,
And the day he died it was a birthday, and I noticed it was mine.
And my head didn't know just who I was, and I was spinning back in time…
How wonderful it was in my depression to pop in a Jackson Browne tape, and roll around in his preoccupation with suicide. My own obsession became his obsession, and his became mine. I could internalize and heighten my feelings with his. I could feel someone else's suicide as if it were mine.
Though Adam was a friend of mine,
I did not know him well.
He was alone into his distance,
He was deep into his well.
I could guess what he was laughing at,
But I couldn't really tell
Now the story's told that Adam jumped,
But I'm thinking that he fell …
Toward the end of that first summer at home, I began to look for a job. I realized I needed something to do. Much as I loved music, I couldn't sit at the other end of my headset forever. I couldn't lie around the pool for the rest of my life. So I began scouring the papers for something I could do. Late in the summer, I saw an advertisement in a local newspaper for a new restaurant opening in Scarsdale. They needed waitresses and bartenders. I decided to apply. My parents were very encouraging. “It's a great way to meet people,” my father said.
I was determined to land the job and I did. With all my waitressing experience with Tara and Lori at Mug ’N Muffin in Harvard Square, I thought I'd be perfect in the job.
So much had changed since then. For one thing, this was a much more complicated restaurant than Mug ’N Muffin, which was little more than a two-coffees-one-black-with-Sweet-’n-Low-one-extra-light-with-sugar-and-two-blueberry-muffins little breakfast bar. This restaurant was one of those darkly lit trendy places where working people stopped by for lunch, yuppies dropped in in droves to hang out with their friends after work, and older people—people in their thirties—went out for prime rib in