A surprise from mom and dad for my ninth birthday, celebrated from a hospital bed.
A little record player inside a suitcase, brown and beige with a handle and a hinged lid, bringing with it the forty-fives, the back-beat that indelibly tattooed my brain, the lyrics that spoke my soul. It brought me rock ‘n roll. During my long convalescence the music became my internal world. It went directly from my ears to a searching childish soul, forming unanswerable questions, sharpening unspoken truths, waking my spirit.
Less than a week before my birthday I was incarcerated in the 8-bed children’s ward, where I would remain for two full weeks. I received painful shots every few hours. My nose bled daily like a fountain and I was terrified......Of the noises, the dark, the blood, the deep pain of the shots. The nurses were too busy to notice me, but periodically appeared, silent and stern at my bed, only to perform duties that humiliated or hurt me. I feared I had done something really bad, hugely wrong, to be punished this horribly. I had seen my dad crying, and felt terrible, crushing guilt.
There was one older boy, maybe eleven, who had a tough swagger to his attitude and was hospitalized with a broken leg. He watched out for me and the rest of us. He alone on the ward wasn’t afraid to yell for the nurse when any one of us needed something. His brash bravado and quick jokes diverted our attentions from the more troubling realities of our collective situation. He incited me to play my new record player loud, which brought the harried, scolding nurses.
In the bed next to mine was a younger boy who was, I thought, even sicker than me. Everyone whispered around his bed and the curtains were always drawn. But I knew he was there and I felt he was aware of me. At night, when the hospital was filled with distant moans and ghostly shadows, I whispered to him through the curtains. In my lonely, quiet terror, his close presence comforted me even though I caught only glimpses of his small pale form in the shrouded bed.
One night there was frantic, brightly lit activity behind the curtains. By morning the curtains were thrown open and the boy had disappeared; bed and equipment and everything shining clean and empty, as though he had never been there. The nurses bustled and blustered in and out of the ward, their sharp smell of antiseptic extra stifling. No eye contact. No music. No jokes and no giggles from the brash boy, who finally told me, in a whisper, that he had died; later I learned it was from leukemia. The finality staggered me. Questions, elusive and unformed, weaved themselves into my memory.
The tortuous shots of a new kind of drug, an antibiotic, Penicillin, which had been first used experimentally to treat WW II soldiers with gonorrhea, finally beat back the infection that was destroying my kidneys. And the death of that child lying in the bed next to mine awakened in me the unshaped but certain revelation that, regardless of whether I was “good’ or “bad”, there were no guarantees; I could be gone tomorrow and it would be like I was never even here.
Rock ‘n roll came from the original music of righteousness, gospel and the blues. There’s a saying ‘the blues had a baby and they named it rock n’ roll’. The beat paved a new route to salvation, one that could vault me over the barricades my parents’ generation had stumbled at: class and race.
For most of us Boomers the hard reality of death arrived with the sixties: the unfolding horrors of the Bay of Pigs Missile Crisis, the murders of our heroes, Viet Nam. Like any middle class American child of the fifties, I had been protected in a bubble of optimism and idealism created by the sheer will of my post-war parents. At school, in the third grade, the duck and cover drills in case of nuclear attack nurtured in me a fertile seed, planted when I was hospitalized, now sprouting tendrils . The deep truth. That I could be struck dead at any moment. At nine I turned a corner. I became edgy and restless. The music spoke my soul.
In 1957 rock ‘n roll was beating down the walls that guarded adolescent libidos all across the country. The music became my soundtrack for questions about death and loss, reality, truth and lies. Parents everywhere tried in vain to preserve innocence, to stuff the genie back in the bottle. That same year, when Elvis made his final appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, he was shown only from the belt up. Mom and dad figured that would solve the problem. But it was already too late; Elvis-the-Pelvis’ gyrations didn’t move me.
I had already fallen for Chuck Berry performing his hit “Rock and Roll Music” on American Bandstand. My favorite was on the flip side of one of his hit 45’s. I wore it out on my record player. It's titled “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man”.
Way back in history three thousand years
In fact ever since the world began
There's been a whole lot of good women sheddin' tears
For a brown eyed handsome man
It's a lot of trouble with a brown eyed handsome man.
Chuck on the TV, loose-jointed and duck-walkin’ in his cream colored suit with his black wavy hair, exuded shrewd worldliness. He was lean and brown and different from anyone I had ever seen and he was singing to me. His masculine energy, restless, exhilarating and vaguely dangerous insinuated itself into the fabric of my slumbering libido.
Then there was Little Richard. In 1957 he was the only man I had ever seen wearing lipstick and eye shadow. He broke all the rules. He couldn’t sit still on the piano bench and I adored him for it. I was mystified, jealous, exhilarated, and wanted more. While Chuck Berry’s image became my abiding romantic fantasy, I wanted to BE Little Richard. He personified the idea that I could be exactly who I was and it was most definitely not who my parents wanted me to be. Electricity sparked from that piano, vibrated up through his body through those big shoulder-pads and down from his pompadour hair to spill from that pencil-thin-mustached mouth as :
Sure Like to Ball
When you rockin-n-rollin
Can’t hear your mama call
I never again heard my mama call.
Ten years later I fell for my own brown-eyed handsome man and soon became one of those “good women sheddin’ tears”. Through the years when I was busy making more than my share of bad decisions in love, rock n’ roll saved me, fortifying my spirit when there was no one and nothing else I could depend on. The soundtrack of my life played on while hard lessons tuned my ear more and more often to the call and response of gospel, the blues, rhythm ‘n blues, torch music; all potently testifying about estrangement and loss, while promising hope for absolution. The music became my church, allowing me to soar only within the safety of its temple.
By the eighties, still feeling edgy and cosmically adrift, I took a sharp turn, went to college, and become a registered nurse. My first job was on a university-based cancer research hospital unit, caring for people suffering from acute leukemia. Jumbled memories began to surface of that hospitalized nine-year-old girl I once was, and of the boy dying in the bed next to mine.
I began to run...... daily long distances on isolated wooded trails with the music in my ears. I pushed myself physically and found release, both subtle and sublime. With endorphins and music lifting and marking the rhythm of each breath, each footfall, clinging death loosened and dissolved. As I ran my eyes and heart opened to the psychedelic vibrancy in Mother Nature, to past and present, life and death irretrievably interwoven.
Today my pace has slowed, a brisk walk, a sloe loping jog, a skip and a beat punching each step. Thanks to the music still in my ears, the back-beat endures, entwining with other rhythms of joy, endless mystery, freedom, and redemption. A gift for my ninth birthday, rock ‘n roll, and death sweetened my life. Made my spirit roll over. Wake up. Dance.
Hail, hail rock and roll
Deliver me from the days of old
Long live rock and roll
The beat of the drums, loud and bold
Rock, rock, rock and roll
The feelin' is there, body and soul.
Susan Odetta
042308
