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  SOUNDS LIKE TITANIC

  A Memoir

  Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

  To those with average talents and above-average desires.

  It was as though the scene through which I had just lived had been a monstrous and comic miming for ends I could not conceive and for an audience I could not see but which I knew was leering from the shadow.

  —Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

  Contents

  A Note on This Book

  I.DEPARTURES

  II.ASEA

  III.WATERTIGHT COMPARTMENTS

  IV.THE SOUND

  Epilogue

  Thank You, For Real

  A Note on This Book

  This is a memoir about working as a fake violinist for a famous American composer, referred to in this book as The Composer. While this is a memoir about being a fake, this is not a fake memoir. This is a memoir in earnest, written by a person striving to get at the truth of things that happened in her past.

  On the other hand, there is a kind of sleight of hand necessarily involved in all writing, especially personal narrative. The idea that the word “I” can function as a static entity on the page—instead of a shape-shifting representation of an actual human being who changes her mind, sometimes on a moment-to-moment basis, about everything from what she wants for lunch to what her place is in the universe—is perhaps the biggest fakery of all. It is my belief that the first years of the twenty-first century were boom times for all kinds of fakery, perhaps because suddenly reality didn’t seem very real anymore, and everyone got confused. In the 2000s reality became “reality.” Television critics scoffed at “reality” television, because it wasn’t real, while Karl Rove mocked actual reality (and the “reality-based community”) as a pointless annoyance for people running an empire. America had become so powerful, Rove suggested, that we could make our own facts, like we make our own hamburgers.

  But the difference between the real and the fake does, in fact, matter. This book argues that while determining the difference between the real and the fake can be maddening and ultimately imperfect, it remains a worthy endeavor. (Even if, in some cases, including my own, faking is needed to discover what is real.) As an active member of the reality-based community, I would like to state that even though I have changed the names and identifying features of characters in this book, have consolidated some conversations with multiple people into single conversations with one person, and have fake-fiddled with minor points of chronology, identifying biographical details and quotations from people like fans—and even though other musicians who worked with The Composer may have different experiences, memories, and perspectives—all of the events chronicled here, to the best of my knowledge and memory, are true.

  SOUNDS LIKE TITANIC

  PART I

  Departures

  We live in a nation whose every other impulse is theatrical, but whose every other impulse is to insist upon “authenticity.”

  —Richard Rodriguez,

  Brown: The Last Discovery of America

  How to Become a Famous Violinist

  The space between a violin’s fingerboard and its bridge is about an inch wide. If a bead of sweat from the right hand causes the bow to slip a millimeter to the right or left, the horsehair will crash against the bridge or screech across the fingerboard. The left hand navigates an even narrower plank, approaching the fingerboard at an unnatural angle, with no spatial clues to guide fingers into their correct positions. Pianos, winds, percussion—they have keys waiting to be hit. But to produce a pure sound on a violin is to search for it in a haystack of squeaks, scratches, and sour notes.

  Violinists perform with a ferocious physicality that’s easy to mock: bow hairs break, brows furrow, torsos and legs contort into bizarre poses. Some violinists, like Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, talk to the instrument as they play. Others, like Joshua Bell, slash the instrument as if in battle. Still others seduce it, their fingers encircling, caressing the instrument’s neck. Regardless of the approach, the violinist must hurry each note through a narrow keyhole of time; sustaining sound is a race against the finite length of the bow.

  Many people believe there is only one path to becoming a famous violinist. I am here to report that there are actually two.

  WAYS TO BECOME A FAMOUS VIOLINIST: A COMPREHENSIVE LIST

  By: Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman, Famous Violinist

  Option #1: Be born with prodigious musical talent in or near a city with an excellent music conservatory, such as New York or Moscow or London. Begin lessons early and develop your gift by practicing the violin for at least two to four hours each day under the supervision of a skilled maestro. Win acceptance to a world-class conservatory and practice for at least six to eight hours each day. In a series of hundreds of grueling auditions, master classes, and recitals, beat out hundreds of other violinists. Begin solo career. Be better than the handful of other violinists with major solo careers so they don’t muscle you out of lucrative performances and recording contracts. Continue to practice at an exhausting pace for the rest of your life and/or until your fingers snarl into an arthritic tangle and/or until one day, undone by the pressure of being one of the top musicians in the world, you (a) collapse into a pile of neurotic mush; or (b) begin passive-aggressively pursuing hobbies that conflict with your career as a violinist, such as lumber splitting or knife juggling or sword-smithing; or (c) retire to a life of teaching “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” to the young children of hedge fund managers.

  Option #2: Play very softly in front of a dead microphone while a CD recording of another more talented violinist is blasted toward an unknowing audience. Go on a fifty-four-city tour of America doing this. Go on a six-city tour of China doing this. Appear on national television broadcasts narrated by Hollywood celebrities doing this. Land gigs at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center doing this. Pay your college tuition and New York City rent doing this.

  Notice that even though the music the audience hears is not being produced by you, the audience’s applause for you, their praise, their standing ovations, are real.

  Notice that the inability to distinguish Option #1 from Option #2, the inability to distinguish real from fake, is a classic sign of mental illness.

  God Bless America Tour 2004

  New York City to Philadelphia

  The Composer is broiling himself a cake. None of us—Harriet, Stephen, Patrick, or me—know it is his birthday until he begins mixing batter while our RV inches through traffic in the bowels of the Lincoln Tunnel. The oven isn’t working, so The Composer holds the cake under the broiler’s pilot light. The cabin fills with the smell of oven gas. A pinpoint of light appears in the tunnel and we emerge into the sun-cooked marshes of industrial New Jersey, the entire North American continent spread before us, the Manhattan skyline receding in the rearview mirror.

  A few feet from where The Composer kneels at the oven, I sit in the RV’s dining booth, looking at the tour schedule. It is a bound and laminated book with “God Bless America Tour, August–November, 2004” written on the title page. It is Tour Day One: New York City to Philadelphia. We have 74 days and 54 performances to go before we return to New York City, where we will perform our final concert to a sold-out audience at Carnegie Hall.

  After an hour of kneeling by the broiler, The Composer places the still-liquid cake on the stovetop and spoons on dollops of Cool Whip before arranging whole strawberries on top. While his back is turned, the RV hits a bump in the road and the cake flies off the stovetop, through the air, across the RV, and directly into the trash can by the door. Berry-whipped carnage covers the cabinets, the floor, the sides of the trash can. The Composer retreats to his bedroom in the back of
the RV and closes the door behind him.

  I open the small, cake-splattered kitchen cubby assigned to me. Inside are books that seemed appropriate to bring on a three-month tour across America with The Composer: Kerouac’s On the Road, Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, Twain’s Roughing It, Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Nabokov’s Lolita, and Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran. But instead of a book I take out my journal. Even though the ride is so bumpy I can barely keep the tip of my pen on the paper, I begin to write.

  There is something about The Composer that I need to know, but I’m not sure what it is.

  I look around at the cake-smeared cabin. The Composer is someone who will bake himself a birthday cake in a moving vehicle, with a broken oven, in front of four employees who believe he is doomed to failure, if not death by fiery explosion. The fact that the cake had no chance didn’t stop him from trying to bake it.

  It will be a long time before I understand anything much about what I write in that journal. Many years later, thinking back on this moment, I come across an article asking why so many memoirists are writing in the second person these days. The prevailing theory is that memoirists use second person when they are writing about something traumatic. But I have an additional theory: For many people, myself included, sitting down to write something in the first person feels like the worst type of fakery. There is no way “I” am in front of the live microphone, no way anyone would want to listen to “me,” no way anyone has paid to attend this concert starring “myself,” and so I become “you,” and in faking you, I am finally able to say what I want to say.

  New York City

  1999

  You spend your first night in New York City in Penn Station with an elderly homeless woman named Rose. She eyes you from across the station—an eighteen-year-old girl wearing khakis and a white t-shirt from the Gap, sprawled on the floor between a bare-breasted goddess mural and a McDonalds, pretending to read The Iliad—and decides you are in over your head.

  It is almost two in the morning and the rust-colored concourse is suddenly empty. There is a calamitous noise as the food vendors unroll the floor-to-ceiling security cages in front of their darkened shops. But then the pretzel-scented air falls still, and where thousands of people walked just a few hours before, the footsteps of a single person can now be heard from a long distance.

  Unlike the other names of places on the subway map—125th Street, 72nd Street, Columbus Circle—Penn Station suggests something familiar: a station! Having nowhere else to go for the night, knowing no one in the entire city of eight million people, and not daring to call your parents, you choose Penn Station because you have vague recollections from movies of a beautiful train station in New York City where men in business suits hurry along marble corridors underneath a chapel-like, star-painted ceiling. Penn Station, you think, will be a reasonable place to spend the night. You have yet to learn that even in New York City men in business suits go home after a certain hour. You have yet to learn that in the dead of night, another, slower-moving civilization—the city’s homeless, many suffering from mental illness—pace the station’s dingy, labyrinthine corridors. You have yet to learn that the beautiful train station in the movies is Grand Central, and that Penn Station has all the charm of a crime scene.

  Rose sidles up to you, asking if you have missed your train. She appears to be in her sixties or seventies and wears her graying hair in a tight, greasy bun. Her t-shirt and jeans are worn and she carries a large grocery bag brimming with clothing and household items. You aren’t waiting for a train, you say, you are spending the night. She tells you that you should come sit with her in the passenger waiting area. But the sign says it’s for ticketed Amtrak passengers. You don’t want to get into trouble. Rose points out that you’ll get into plenty more trouble once the group of men lingering around a nearby trash can notices you are alone. Okay, you say. And so you sit with Rose in the Amtrak waiting area, and she teaches you how to tie your suitcase to your leg with a plastic bag so it won’t get stolen if you fall asleep.

  You are spending the night in Penn Station because you have gone AWOL from the Air Force. Eighteen hours before Rose introduces herself to you in Penn Station, you took a plane then a bus and then a subway and then walked to Manhattan College (located in the Bronx) where you changed into an ROTC uniform and followed a drill sergeant into the swampy mid-August heat to run laps around a glass-strewn track. In those few hours you completed many pushups for your country.

  After an hour of exercise in the muggy Bronx air, you and the other recruits are marched into a lecture room where you listen to a presentation about the U.S. Air Force winning the war in Kosovo. “We killed everyone we needed to kill from the air,” the drill sergeant says, as if this fact should fill you with pride, instead of surprise. You’ve never heard someone brag about killing people before. He adds that the era of “real wars” is over, but the Air Force will still be the first to respond if the United States needs to “bomb someone.”

  After the lecture you are marched outside for an orientation session. You sit with a small group of your fellow ROTC recruits on a grassy hill. The sergeant asks everyone to go around the circle: State your name, where you will be attending college, and what you’ll be studying.

  Hi, I’m Marcus, and I’ll be a freshman at the Queens School of Aeronautics where I’m going to study aviation and I want to be a pilot . . .

  Hi, I’m Javier, and I’ll be a freshman at the Queens School of Aeronautics where I’m going to study aviation and engineering so I can be a pilot or an engineer . . .

  Hi, I’m Tyrell, and I’ll be a freshman at the Queens School of Aeronautics . . .

  Hi, I’m Jessica, and in a few weeks I’ll be a freshman at Columbia University where I’m planning to major in music—I play the violin! My parents can’t pay the tuition, so, uh, here I am! If music doesn’t work out, maybe I’ll major in anthropology or history . . . maybe art history! I have a lot of interests! Apart from a violinist, I’d like to be a journalist, but apparently Columbia thinks journalism is vocational, so, you know, I can’t major in it. But maybe music will work out . . . um, so, yeah, that’s me! Hi! Thanks!

  It is the first time you have ever introduced yourself as a music major, and in saying it out loud it now occurs to you that it is true. This isn’t some faraway dream. You are eighteen years old and have arrived in the big city, THE big city, to study music. And as you listen to the other kids talk about their life goals, you realize something else: You are someone whose upbringing was upper class enough to make you believe you could make music for a living, but lower class enough to provide no knowledge of how to do it. As for the money, your parents abide by the prevailing cultural notions of rural Appalachia, where you grew up: Any tuition shortfall can be remedied by signing up for the military.

  Later that night—your first in the city where you will live for the next ten years but one that you have no idea how to navigate—as you wonder where you will sleep (Penn Station sounds like a safe bet!) and how many subway tokens it will take to get there, you write a note to your drill sergeant:

  Dear Drill Sergeant,

  I have decided that ROTC is not for me. My mom made me sign up to pay for college, but I never wanted to do this. I want to be a violinist, and though I know very little about the Air Force (as you could probably tell!), I’m pretty sure there isn’t a great need for string players. As a patriotic American, believe me when I tell you I am doing my country a service by quitting.

  Sincerely,

  Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

  PS: I am eighteen years old—a legal adult. Please do not contact my parents.

  You leave the note on the desk in the dormitory room you’d been assigned a few hours earlier, your ROTC uniform folded on the bed. Carrying your suitcase in both arms so it won’t make noise on the floor, you sneak past a security guard and out a side door that opens onto a dark alley. Once you are a block away, you
set down your suitcase and race into the hot Bronx night.

  God Bless America Tour 2004

  Philadelphia

  ACT I: WHAT IS UNSEEN

  The Composer runs laps around the PBS station parking lot. He wears his concert clothes—black pants, blue dress shirt—and his running shoes. Harriet, Stephen, and I watch him from inside the RV, where we change into our concert clothes while dancing to Out-Kast. When he finishes his run, The Composer asks us to come outside, where Patrick is unloading the sound equipment for our first concert on the God Bless America Tour. Patrick is a retired union contract negotiator who loves The Composer’s music so much that he has negotiated himself into a contract to drive the The Composer’s Ensemble across America for no money. He has never driven an RV before but seems content in his role, so long as he can listen to The Composer’s music while driving.

  Harriet, Stephen, and I file out of the air-conditioned RV onto the sticky asphalt. Stephen, a flutist, wears an all-black suit and tie. A tall, thin, bespectacled man in his midthirties, Stephen has one of those kind, encouraging faces that induces calm in others. Harriet and I wear long black dresses with stockings and heels. Harriet is in her early thirties but looks much younger. She has short black hair that emphasizes her high cheekbones and big brown eyes. She’s tall and beautiful in a flawless, preppy way, like a J. Crew model, and also plays violin. I stand beside her, a much shorter, twenty-three-year-old woman, my rhinestone concert barrettes restraining waves of long, thick, unruly black hair.

  “Hey, um, you guys, could you give us a hand?” The Composer asks.

  The Composer refers to us as “you guys” because, despite the fact that I have worked for him for over two years, despite the fact that he is supposed to announce my name at every concert on the God Bless America Tour for the next three months, he still does not know that my name is Jessica. When he needs my attention, he calls me Melissa.