Living with Legends

There are a lot of musicians living at the Chelsea, good as well as bad.  They practice all the time, day and night, and most any type of music is tolerated, from jazz, to classical, to rock and roll.
     Even so, there are limits.  One holiday season, the person living directly above me acquired The Willie Nelson Christmas Album.  This album involved Willie singing the same old standards—Jingle Bells, Silent Night, what have you–only with a guitar and a country twang.  It was a little bit interesting, maybe, the first couple of times.  But it got old really fast.  Like the traditional holiday season, the playing of this album began around Thanksgiving and went on from there—not just once or twice a day, but repeatedly, morning, noon and night.

It was a young guy named William who was playing it.  I could tell by his voice, as he often sang along.  Apparently, he was really trying to get into the Christmas spirit, psyching himself up.  A rich kid who fancied himself a poet, William was the kind of guy who went from one fad to the next, and didn’t do things in half measures, but really went all out.  As soon as one side of the album would finish, he would flip it to the other, over and over again.  The pauses between sides were maddening: maybe this will be the end, I prayed each time.

But I had only been in New York a year or so, and I still had plenty of patience.  Knowing William, I knew that sooner or later he would get sick of the album, and then he would never play it again.  In the meantime I tried to keep my window closed.
         Come to find out, I wasn’t the only one who was annoyed.  When I came out of my room to go to the bathroom one afternoon, I saw Ray standing in the open door of his tiny room.  I had become accustomed to thinking of Ray as the archetypal New Yorker, I guess because of his gruffness, though it turns out he was from Minnesota.  Ray had been working on a canvas, and he wore his paint-spattered work clothes.  His long black hair, too, was speckled with paint.
       “Who in God’s name is making that infernal racket?” he asked, crossly.  “How in the hell am I supposed to work?  I have my art to do, my painting.  How can I maintain inspiration with this insipid garbage echoing through my brain.  Who is doing it?” he demanded.  “Who!?”  He acted almost like I was responsible.

“I think it’s William,” I said.

“That figures!  I’d like to go up there and wring his scrawny neck!  It’s driving me fucking crazy.  It’s like cats yowling!  What is his problem?  Asshole!  Listen to it once, then give it a rest.  And turn down the fucking volume, for Christ’s sake.  Jesus.  Has he got the record player in the window or something?”  Ray gestured toward his window.

Ray’s window, I could see, was wide open.  He had to keep it open when he was working to avoid being asphyxiated by the paint fumes.  In general, there was too much heat in the back of the building anyway.  In the brief pause in our conversation, we heard strains of Willie’s guitar, as he crooned, “Have a holly, jolly Christmas…”       

“Who the hell wants to hear that shit?!” Ray said.  “Nobody could!  It’s inconceivable!”

He seemed to be implying that William was doing it purposely, to drive him crazy.  “Yeah, it is kind of annoying,” I said, chuckling.

Ray scowled at my levity.  “I’d like to tear his head off and shit down his neck!” he said, like some kind of demented bohemian drill sergeant.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” I said.

“Yeah, but you’re from Tennessee, right?”
         “Uh, yeah,” I said.  Close enough, I figured, for the sake of argument.

“For you it’s different,” Ray proclaimed.  “For you, that music is a way of life.”

It made me wonder what sort of misconceptions he was harboring: of southerners in general, and of myself in particular.  Like most of my friends, I had grown up listening to the Beatles and Led Zeppelin.

“You mean Christmas music?” I asked. (Copyright Ed Hamilton 2006)