Sam was tall and skinny and smart.
And I thought: knowing how to act smart would be cool to know.
One night I sneaked into the bar.
Sam was alone, sipping a bourbon and water.
It wasn’t my style to go right up to people, but since I was trying to be more butch, I figured I had a right to be forward.
Sam gave me a drop dead look, when I said hi, so I scared up something to say:
“That’s a mighty nice ring you got on!”
“Yes…It’s a cat’s eye,” Sam said. “People who wear them are witches.”
I wanted to roll my eyes but instead I said, “Geeee…You’re a witch!?”
“I most certainly am!” Sam said, “That’s how I knew that you were going to traipse over here to disturb my peace!”
I grinned: “You knew I was gonna do that!?”
Sam stuck the finger with the cat’s eye on it into his drink and stirred: “Absolutely.”
It took weeks of persistent niceness on my part to convince Sam that I could use some teaching, but eventually he took me up as a student.
One day Sam sat me down and made me listen to a Symphony.
He said it was by this dude man named Tchaikovsky and that it was called The Pathétique .
It so happened that a movie about this dude was on the classics channel that night.
It was called “The Music Lovers.”
This Tchaikovsky was a miserable little closet queen!
His miserable music was used as the background for scenes of total misery in the movie, and the most miserable: the last movement of the Pathétique Symphony, was saved for the end.
In that scene Tchaikovsky is dying from cholera while his wife gets tied up in a loony bin.
The scene shifts from Tchaikovsky to his wife. Tchaikovsky gets deader, the music gets louder, and his wife gets locked up in a dungeon
I realized that in a way, they both had died, and all of it was timed to the music.
This was the first time I’d ever noticed anything about how a movie was made.
I read the credits and rushed off to tell Sam what I learned.
He stopped me just as I was getting to the part about the dungeon and said: “Superficial! You’ve missed the point of the film, Bobby!”
Then he looked at me as if I’d broken something. “Would you like me to tell you the point of that film?”
I nodded.
“The film is about life’s tragedies. And do you know what the greatest of those tragedies is?”
I shook my head no and watched as Paul placed a record on the turntable and took a swig of bourbon. “It is the destruction of genius by mediocrity.”
And the Pathétique Symphony began.
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