Tuesday, October 28, 2003

Celestine Dion: Self-Help Through Horrible Music

We are trying to be patient.  W, the young man who lives downstairs with the huge scar over his skull, the heavy gait, the one who never drives, whose voice is thick and loud and poorly articulated - W is a noisy lad, but he is overcoming terrible injuries and challenges.  We try to bend over backwards to accomodate him as tenants and neighbors.  After all, his mom, with whom he lives, is our landlady, and we want to stay on good terms with her.  So when W bellows with sudden rage at 6:30 am or 11:30 pm, we don’t make a fuss.  Same with when he stomps up and down the terrazzo stairs at strange hours, or when he hollers for somebody to get the phone or answer a question for him. 

But the karaoke… the karaoke is getting out of control.  He’s coming home at noon these days and if Kel has a day off as comp time for her weekends and evenings in class - time off which she spends catching up on critical classwork and sleep - at about noon she’ll start to hear his broken ululation as he croons along in chinese to lush instrumental songs of hope and love, and he will not shut up till it’s dark outside.  His boozy vibrato slops all over the range, he can’t hold a note to save his life, and he has, above all, piss-poor pitch and tone.  (Not to mention taste, as the songs to which he sings are uniformly wretched, cloying drek.) As a singer, all he has going for him is volume, which he has in superabundance.  He sings at mariachi-at-the-table loudness, but without their harmony or innate sense of musicality or even rhinestone sombrero style.  It’s music that would suck under the best of circumstances, but with W powering the vocals, it’s like hell.  If No Exit is hell as an uncomfortable sitting room, this is hell as a bad soundtrack. 

With all the new singing he’s doing lately - starting early, keeping on till late, moaning at the top of his lungs every time he’s alone in his flat, which is most days from noon till 6 - Kel’s only asked him once in the past 18 months to shut it down, or at least get quieter.  He may have a learning challenge but he must know he’s loud as hell.  Yet he sings, or does what passes for singing for him, with horrible noisy enthusiasm every goddamn day. 

A few nights ago Kel reminded me of a period when we heard him through our floor, which is his ceiling, listening to simple pronunciation exercises on tape and repeating along with it - we’d hear a standard american voice say something boring and he’d say it back, for hour after hour, night after night.  We realized that it was tape-recorded speech therapy.  It was irritating, but we were glad he was working on it.  Now Kel’s raised the possibility that his karaoke singing might be therapeutic.  Maybe he’s singing to learn voice and mouth control.  Maybe he’s doing it because he has to, to return to his proper place in society.

Now we’ll never be able to tell him to shut up again, on the off (fat) chance that he’s working on a linguistic breakthrough.  In my heart I know he just likes singing along to hideously saccharine love songs, but I’m going to have to act as if it’s therapy until I’m convinced otherwise.  I couldn’t stand the guilt of telling an injured person not to get better because he was bothering me.  So we’ll say nothing and just live with the irritation, like a stone you refuse to remove from your shoe or a wedgie that keeps creeping higher but you won’t let yourself pluck. 

I want to feel noble about this, but I can’t.  That little dysphonia machine is on our last freaking mutual nerve.  I don’t want to be petty but eventually every sound echoes back.  His day is coming.  Whoever wrote that lousy music will eventually hear its death-moans and come back to avenge it.  Till then, may I be granted patience, restraint, and a good seat for the final showdown.