I'm as Caged as a Bird Now

Here it is. It's sort of a long one. Making up for lost time perhaps. So, maybe wait to start it until you have about 10-12 minutes of uninterrupted reading time.

-heatmiser

The last time I was in a talent show I was eight. Three of my cousins and I sang a four-part barber shop Southern Baptist rendering of “Just Like John.” We didn’t win. And it was all my fault. Despite two and a half weeks of rehearsing in my bedroom, the backyard, the shower, and anywhere else I spent my adolescence, when the time came to sing my verse, I blanked. I froze. It was as though someone had stapled my tongue to the roof of my mouth—it was that painful. To this day, I still remember the lyrics (“Now, brother better mind how you step on the cross Walk in Jerusalem, just like John Your feet might slip and your soul get lost Walk in Jerusalem, just like John”). Well, I must have stepped on the cross in a bad way because my soul (and everything attached to it for that matter) was lost on that stage. I stood bleary-eyed and bludgeoned, tamed and trapped, regretting my eight years of life. And in that horrified moment, I swore that I would never show my talent again.

Fast-forward 20 years. Recently, I was approached by a fellow teacher who plays the drums (and hockey, incidentally) and asked if I would be interested in joining his teacher(slash)student band for the upcoming talent show. My tongue immediately felt a staple prick, my eight-year-old self reminded me of our on-stage promise, and I balked but coolly said, “That could be fun.” I didn’t really think it would happen. No students would be interested in playing with their teachers, and so close to the end of the school year, we teachers would be so busy that anything put together would surely fall apart. So you can imagine my surprise when, three weeks and two and a half rehearsals later, I found myself on the school’s Performing Arts Center stage with three other teachers and six students ready to tear into CCR’s “Fortunate Son.” Two drum kits, four guitars (two electric, one acoustic, and one bass), one piano, one keyboard, one bass saxophone, and a tambourine. Straight forward, pure and flawed, the way it should be. The way it used to be.

I had agreed to take part in this nonsense with the strict understanding that I would not be singing, just strumming my rhythm guitar, but since no one else could come quite as close to belting out Fogerty’s diaphanous strains, I was reluctantly forced into the position. With no monitors and the lead guitarist’s amplifier directly behind me, I had no idea what notes I was actually singing, so I tried channeling Fogerty’s pre-Fogerty spirit, howling my best cathartically visceral Joplin meets Plant shriek-sing-scream, which is really the only way to get that high without drugs. Even though I knew the lyrics, have known them since being raised on my father’s cassette tapes, the eight-year-old made me keep them on a security blanket music stand. Perhaps not very rock n’ roll, but neither is staring blank-faced and fat-tongued into oblivion. Our drummer’s adrenaline turned a two and a half minute song into a one minute and forty-two second romp that would make Megadeth proud. I didn’t mind, of course. Just get the damn thing over with. We finished to mild applause and a few catcalls, presumably from our students dotted about the audience. We were the last act, and while the judges were tabulating, we were asked to play an encore, sort of as a filler. We had rehearsed another song, but it was hardly ready for public ingestion. It’s a fairly complicated piece with a number of instruments and a tricky tempo change in the middle, followed by an incendiary guitar solo. The song: Freebird.

Coincidentally, I had heard “Freebird” four days earlier. At prom. I hadn’t planned on going but at the last minute decided it might be fun to help chaperone. I spent most of the evening outside the main ballroom, helping students get checked in, being surprised at how much older they seemed in their tuxedos and dresses, trying to ignore the awful music being played by the DJ. But as “Soulja Boy” faded out and the southern rock anthem of anthems faded in, I couldn’t resist the impulse to peak my head in to see how the dancers were going to handle this one. I reached the dance floor just about the time the ballad turns bawling, and just as I suspected, the kids were a little confused about what to do with their partners in light of the new rhythm. Most simply stopped slow-dancing, slackened their loose-limbed embraces, and stood gaping at each other. Others attempted to transition with the song, maintaining the same slow-dance sway, just speeding it up, so it looked like an old-timey video recording. Still others reverted back to the “Soulja Boy” dance they had butchered five minutes earlier. All in all, it was a pretty awkward scene. And not a humorous one either. I felt their pain. I’ve known public humiliation. But still, I’m grateful for the image—because to me, it’s a great representation of the teenage life.

“Freebird” as an expression of the teenage experience. I’m sure that’s not what Allen Collins and Ronnie Van Zant had in mind when they wrote it. But think about it. It’s a restless tune, the lyrics just as much as the music. (“For I must be travellin’ on, now, ‘Cause there’s too many places I’ve got to see.”) Remember how restless we were at 16? 17? 18? Also, the song really isn’t that good, but it’s iconic. The American pop culture landscape would contain a tremendous musical chasm without it. Likewise, our lives would feel a void if not for our wanting teenage years. (Of course, some might see those years as a spectacular ass-crack dividing an otherwise decent life.) And then there’s the song’s structure. It appears really complicated and erratic, but really it’s terribly simple. Van Zant himself once said, “If you can count to 4, you can play Freebird.” Of course, he also initially rejected the song when Collins brought it to him, saying it “had too many chords.” (It has six total chords by the way.) So maybe it’s actually very complicated and appears to be simple. Confusing? So is life at 17.

I’ve said before that teenagers are dumb. I don’t really mean that. They’re actually pretty smart. Some are ridiculously smart. That’s not to say that they’re without some sort of mental deficiency, however. They’re not. It’s just that it’s hard to pin down exactly what that deficiency is. I suppose in my laziness I’ve used the word dumb, hoping it would suffice. Confusion—like that experienced by the prom dancers—is closer. But even that’s not completely accurate; the real problem lies deeper than confusion. It’s the result of inexperience and immaturity. I think the real problem is that teenagers lack a realistic perspective on life. It’s why they can’t see even two feet into the future. I’m not sure why reality eludes them so. Maybe it is just inexperience. Maybe it’s the illusion of reality that’s peddled out to them by today’s insta-grat mainstream. Or maybe it’s all that self-esteem building, follow your heart crap that’s rammed into their heads during their developmental years. Whatever the reason, I’m convinced that it’s this that makes them appear dumb.

The only reason I mention this foible is because I am often the recipient of the assumptions it breeds. For some reason, my students have a hard time believing I’m an actual human being. They like to ask me how many parties I went to over the weekend or when the last time I smoked pot was, but then they’re shocked to see me drinking a beer at a music festival. Actually, they’re shocked to see me out of school at all, like I’m supposed to be perpetually behind my desk grading their essays. They can’t believe I have a Facebook page, like their generation invented the computer or the internet or something. It’s really a shock when they discover that I listen to “their” music, especially hip-hop, like teachers should only be listening to classical music. The other day, one of my students, apropos of nothing, of course, busted out with the opening line of R. Kelly’s “Bump ‘N Grind” (My mind’s tellin’ me No-oh-oh), so I finished it for him (But my body, my body’s tellin’ me Yeh-eh-ess). And they were baffled that I knew the song. A song that came out when I was in 8th grade and they were 18 months old.

The reality of things—and this is what the kids have difficulty grasping—is that I’m not all that different from them. I berate them constantly for their laziness and procrastination, yet I’ll wait until the last minute to grade their essays. (Some of you know about the time I was at school grading until 3:15 AM because grades were due at 8.) The students don’t know what they want to do when they grow up and neither do I. If they’re excited about an upcoming holiday, it is nothing compared to my own excitement. I’ve been looking forward to summer for two and a half months. But now that we are two days away from it, something strange has happened. I’m not ready for it end. How dumb is that? I’ve been craving a break for so long, and now that it’s here, I don’t want it. Why? At first I thought it was because of the kids, because I would miss them and their antics. And while that’s definitely part of it, I think there’s more to it than that. I’ve always put a high premium on wanderlust, on being able to pack it in and move away if necessary, shunning the sedentary life. A career is not something I’ve ever really been interested in. Even with teaching, I figured it would be a job I could try for a couple of years before moving on to something else. But not a career. My father is a career teacher, 30 years plus, and I always swore when I was younger that I would never be a teacher, especially an English teacher. But here I am. Now, I’m not saying that I’ll teach to retirement; like I say, I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. But for right now, this is what I do. Call it a job or call it a career; it doesn’t really matter. I’m a teacher. And I realize that doesn’t sound very rock n’ roll. Ronnie Van Zant would probably laugh at me and tell me it had too many chords. But that’s okay. I’ve lived the simple life of the freebird too, and all it did was make me a lonely asshole. I’m alright with being a caged bird, as long as the company is good, and there’s plenty of food and water.

Oh, and the talent show? We won it.