Fiction

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Miricle

A T-shirt ripping romance with rock stars

Copyrighted © May 25, 2026

by Joel Selmeier

This is fiction. I might use real places and real events, but no real people. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely the result of my imagination not being as wicked as my reality.

About 19,655 words

Without being able to explain why, Mark Miricle dreaded, truly dreaded, anything having to do with health care. It was his feeling that we are but guppies with lives until some fish in medicine eats us. “Take serial killers, for instance,” he said. But his friends scoffed saying, “If a serial killer were in medicine, they would call the police.”

It was his sprained ankle that had brought this to a head and put him together with Nurse Sarah. He was a sixteen-year-old boy who had spent his youth haranguing his parents to get him music lessons. She was a thirty-four-year-old nurse who had spent her youth haranguing other kids into playing hospital because no one wanted to with her a second time.

They met in a three-year-old medical clinic that was founded and run by three doctors, and was the first place the sixteen-year-old Miricle’s friends finally managed to persuade him to go to for medical help. It was the eighth place Nurse Sarah had worked, and the only place where they had not soon suggested that she find work elsewhere in medicine. Her appearance didn’t help. She was rounder than she believed. Her nurse’s uniform pulled tight in the wrong places because she was incapable of recognizing what her shape really was. Miricle was the opposite, slender in the blue jeans and indigo work shirt that were in style at the time.

It had not been easy to get him to go there. When his friends said, “If a serial killer were in medicine, they would call the police,” Miricle blasted back with, “That is the last thing they do. They don’t make a record of anything bad, let alone call the police. With serial killers, if they notice them at all, they might quietly encourage them to get work elsewhere in medicine so that it happens on someone else’s watch, but only if. . .”

They interrupted again saying, “It’s an ankle,” and “Even a quack would have trouble messing up an ankle.”

“Quacks are worse. At least there is a limit on serial killers. If you murder a hundred patients a year, someone might finally say something. But if you are a quack only ruining lives, you can injure every patient you see for your entire career without anyone. . .”

The interrupting became tinged with scorn as they said, “Where do you read these things?” But his ankle wasn’t getting better, or if it was, it was so slowly he could not tell. They said, “If your ankle is fractured, you could suffer for the rest of your life if you don’t get it looked at.” And “It’s just an x-ray. Even a quack couldn’t make that injurious.” Finally, they wore him down to where he warily hopped into a medical facility, persuaded that he could burn in ankle-hell forever if he didn’t, and was answering the questions on Nurse Sarah’s clipboard. “It’s pronounced the same?”

“Yes,” he replied. “Miricle.”

“Just replace the a with an i?”

“Yes.”

“Where do you go to school?”

“I don’t.” As soon as he said that he looked as though he had just said the wrong thing again.

“You don’t go to school?”

“No.”

“What do you do?”

What else could he say now but, “I’m a singer/songwriter.”

As is common with people who see patients every day, she habitually appeared understanding and let it slide asking only, “Anything I might know about?”

Something needed to be said to legitimize what he claimed but wanted it to be low key and not take over the conversation. Someone her age probably would not know much about rock music, so maybe mentioning one name would do it. “Do you know about John Fogerty?”

Her response was a very slow “Yeeeeees,” ending on an up note like a question.

Uh oh. She might know more than expected. Normally he asked others questions first, and kept asking them to keep them talking about themselves, but asking questions was her job. He tried to cut it short by saying only, “I’m about to meet him on a beach. So, I am here to get crutches so I can make it across the sand.”

Gently she asked, “How is it you are meeting the composer/singer/brains behind one of the biggest bands in the world on a beach?”

She knew a lot more than he expected. Sounding as though he were about to sigh, he said, “Well, I was talking to David Crosby and he said I should tell Fogerty what I told him,” And then wanted to slap his own forehead for having said that.

“Okaaay. And what did you tell David Crosby?”

Letting out the sigh at last, he tried to start off slowly, but could not help it and soon was off and running as he said. “Okay. Well, I told Crosby that Fogerty had vowed never to write another song again, ever, because he finally read the contract he had signed with Zaentz. It said he owed Zaentz two hundred songs. He hated Zaentz so much that he vowed never to write another song again, ever.

“I told Crosby that Fogerty should do what Miles Davis did. Miles Davis wanted to get out of a contract that said he owed three albums. So, he got some friends to jam with him until they covered three albums. One became the largest selling jazz album in history. I told Crosby that Fogerty should get together with friends and crank out as many songs a day as they can until they have two hundred. Fogerty could not write two hundred songs without creating some hits.”

“Crosby told me I should tell that to Fogerty. So, to see how that might work, I went to the library and got out-of-copyright poetry and music and, with some changes, in an hour I composed three songs. Good God. A team of us could crank out thirty songs a day. We’d be done in a week. It doesn’t say they have to be good, only that there have to be two hundred. I’d help if he wants. Crosby said he’d help and was sure others would and called Fogerty.”

Another nurse opened the door, said they were ready to x-ray him, and held the door open for him. Nurse Sarah said to her, “You’re interrupting a first-person narrative about the rock gods I dream about.” The other nurse smiled and tilted her head to the side to wave Miricle to come. Sarah watched the door close behind them and stood silently immersed in her dream.

In fact, Fogerty’s contract with Zaentz requiring 200 songs was a false rumor. The contract was onerous enough to have caused Fogerty to make that pledge, but the true problem was more up Miricle’s alley anyway. He would be in his element facing Zaentz down, pounding on him as long as necessary to wear him out with, “You’re never going to get another song out of him. Not a single single. But right now, his friends have been persuaded to make one more album with him if that will satisfy the contract. You know his friends: Joni Mitchell, Steven Stills, Mama Cass, David Crosby, maybe even Neil Young. You’re never gonna get a dream team like this again. But it’s shaky. If you don’t say Yes right now, it will fall apart. Say Yes, reserve a studio and promise you won’t drop in to see how it’s going cause that will kill it. They hate you. They don’t want to see you. But right now you can make this happen. Get the best thing – the only thing – you ever are going to get from this contract by saying Yes. Right now say Yes.”

There was a morning, years earlier, when Miricle woke up in the middle of a recurring dream he had about being in Los Angeles, young and “in the industry” composing the music he always wanted to, but never had gotten to because he never had gotten music lessons, not even piano lessons. The dream was interrupted by the bird sounds he used to wake up to in Ohio when he was a child, back when no one had air conditioning and windows were open all night. The birds were loud. But now, he was a senior citizen with air conditioning, so he opened his eyes and thought he still was dreaming when he saw the bedroom in which he had grown up. It looked like the most real dream that ever could be dreamed.

The last thing he remembered from the night before was Dr. Holy changing a bag connected to his IV. A nurse had just whispered to him, “We have to get you out of here. You have to start refusing treatment before it is too late.” It was clear he was confused. She said, “You never had cancer in the first place. Two years of chemo and organ removals were of no benefit to anyone but Dr. Holy.” He appeared even more confused, so she continued, “Dr. Holy never ordered lab tests. I finally did myself. You never had cancer. Not then and not now. But if anyone finds out I told you, I’ll never be able to work in medicine again. And the sick thing is, how much Dr. Holy enjoys what he is doing.” She heard a noise, saw Dr. Holy in the doorway and ran. Miricle wondered how much Dr. Holy might have heard as he watched him switch out one of the bags connected to his IV. The sounds of beepers, footsteps and a cart passing in the hallway, and the voices of other nurses far away faded out. Then there were only birds. He opened his eyes in the room in which he had grown up.

Whatever Dr. Holy put in his IV must have induced this dream about this room, is what he thought until he sat up. “Holy crap.” His body was tiny, like a child’s. “Was last night the dream?” How could it not have been when this was real? When he went to get out of bed, he had to slide down to get his tiny feet to the floor. All he could do was gasp in disbelief.

He ran to his parents’ room and stood in the doorway. There they were, asleep, just like so many years ago. “Is this how it starts? Do we go back to the beginning and start over?” He had no memory of this happening before. If that meant he was about to lose all memory of his previous life again, there were a few things he would like to tell his future self.

On his short legs he ran back to his room, searched for paper, found only drawing paper and a crayon, and tried to write. But how to express what needed to be known by his future self and everyone else? Maybe start with some simple advice? This tiny hand did not have the coordination for letters to come easily. Still, he managed to scrawl, “Never ever take anything, or do anything, anyone in medicine tells you to without getting a second and a third opinion first. Even then, be wary. Do research. And never submit yourself for treatment in any medical facility for anything without a guardian hired by you, or at least related to you, watching. Never.”

Writing why would take pages and he wanted to make sure he first squeezed in a shorter note he did not want to forget. “Buy Polaroid at its IPO. And Bell & Howell the moment Charles Percy becomes its CEO or you will end up selling insurance. And IBM with the profits from that. And put everything you have in Bitcoins the minute that becomes possible.”

He heard someone stirring. Where to hide this note? Was he still going to know how to read when he found it? He stuffed it between the box spring and mattress thinking he would continue writing it later.

“You’re already up? Get ready for breakfast,” said his mother looking like a tall giant in the doorway when seen from this height. Silently he stared at her. What should he say? I was murdered by a larcenous doctor to keep me from telling what I’d just learned? Or, you might as well stop telling your friends you’re going to divorce Dad because you’re never going to? Or how about, when are you fucking going to get me piano lessons? That should be what he says right now, in case he reverts to being a normal four-year-old and forgets all this. He never got lessons last time and so he never got to be a composer. That is what he would devote himself to as long as he still had this bizarre awareness of never having gotten them last time. Even if last time only was a dream, and it already was beginning to seem like it was, he said, “I want piano lessons.”

“Okay,” she said turning and leaving. If he had said that the earth is going to blow up in an hour, he would have gotten the same reply. How was he going to play this so people would not write him off like that?

Sitting at that same old kitchen table, but when it was new, with those same plates and the cereal bowl, a bottle of whole milk retrieved from the insulated milk box outside the kitchen door where the milkman put it. Not milk person. Milk man. And it was the good milk from that one company, was it Borden’s, that the government decided had too many customers making it a monopoly and so broke it up. Milk was worse forever after that.

But this was the good milk. While looking at the ingredients on the box he was thinking that it was too bad Cheerios are bad for you because the toasted oh-shaped-grain cereal floating in this bath of sugar-milk sure was going down easy.

His mother said, “What are you doing?”

“What are we talking about?” His voice felt so high and small.

“Can you read that?”

Oh, right. He must be too young to read. Had he just played this badly? “Just a few words. Cause it is English. I’m better at Russian. I’m a spy.” His father laughed. His mom smiled.

“What words do you know in English?” asked his father.

“The. I know the word The.”

What would be wrong with just telling them everything he knew, except for possibly getting dragged to some child psychologist and force-fed primitive, mind-numbing prescriptions to bring him back to what they regarded as reality. So, after breakfast, since apparently it might be a problem if he knew how to read a newspaper, he tried to pretend to care about toys. How was he going to deal with other children? The moment of this awareness, he suspected, was going to be too brief for this to be a worry for long anyway and he tried not to worry about it.

Despite being in awe staring at this world, the day was half tedious, half miraculous, and frustrating. Cleavage in a magazine stopped him cold. How could a four-year-old exploit his young age to get that?

He was so powerless and uncoordinated. What if he pretended to be precocious? What if he pretended he could learn rapidly? He tried pointing at words in magazines and asking what they meant. In a few weeks he had done it enough for it to be reasonable for them to believe he could read a few hundred words. And, like a senior citizen who not only no longer remembered wanting to cut loose when finally old enough to drive, let alone what happened when they did, it was not long before Miricle had no remembrance of almost anything prior to that first time he asked for piano lessons; nothing but a certain dread.

On the grocery list that his mom was compiling he wrote, “PIANO LESSONS.” His mom said, “You can write?” but still didn’t get them for him. He brought it up every day. After a few more weeks she said, “Okay. Okay. I got the message. I’m going to get you piano lessons. Stop going on about it.” But she still didn’t.

After more weeks of pestering her anyway, he looked up piano lessons in the yellow pages wondering if there was a way to learn which teachers might be young, gorgeous women. Might a four-year-old benefit from sitting on her lap while learning to play? He wrote a note with the addresses and phone numbers of where he could get lessons. When that didn’t work, finally he dialed one of the numbers and handed the phone to his mom. She looked as though she was doing it just to get him to shut up about it. So, after that experience, rather than bother her with additional lessons, he was just as relentless with asking the piano teacher where he could get voice lessons. He had a dim awareness of Pavarotti, in an interview, saying that he had begun when he was three. When asked what can be taught to a three-year-old, he explained that they begin by teaching you how to scream without hurting your voice. Even though no longer remembering how he knew that, he knew that would be perfect for rock and roll.

With his piano teacher, his persistent eventually paid off and got voice lessons. But before that, they sent him to first grade (it turned out he was five). He asked about voice lessons there too that first day. Somehow, he got through most of the day before reaching the point at which he could not keep this up. He told the teacher that he already knew how to read and count. She said she was sure she would be able to help him get better at those things.

“I also can multiply and divide. I know fractions. I know a bit of trigonometry.”

“And how did you learn all that?”

“I have a library card. I can read as well as you. I bet I can cold-read out loud better than you.” He unfolded the newspaper under his arm and, with impressive emphasis (enabled by already having read the paragraph earlier), he read about the war in Korea, communism and the domino theory, and stopped to explain to her why the domino theory was misguided madness and why Fulbright was the worst thing that had happened to American foreign policy since the war.

“Do you know where the principal’s office is?” she asked.

He didn’t know how he knew, but he did. “Should I talk to him about Communism?”

She nodded.

It was a long walk on tiny legs. In the empty hall, the smell of floor polish, the echoes of his own steps, the voices of the lecturing teachers and the clicking of their shoes on the hard floors coming through the open doors he passed, stopped him once to ogle a teacher until she looked at him. When passing a closed door on which was written “Nurse’s Office,” reflexively he broke into a sprint that did not last even ten feet before he stopped, perplexed, and looked back, still feeling the dread but not understanding why.

The secretary had him sit on a hard wooden chair to wait until the principal had a minute. When the secretary caught him checking her out, he thought, “I gotta get a girlfriend. And how is that going to happen?” It depressed him to think how long that wait would be.

When he sat down with the principal, the principal asked Miricle why he had been sent to his office.

Still depressed, he said, “You’ve got me in first grade,” and told him about reading to the teacher about Korea and communism.

“What do you know about communism?”

With a snort, Miricle said, “Karl Marx. Dialectical materialism. Stalin. Where would you like me to start?”

“Okay. Begin with Marx.”

“His father was African, but Karl was born in a German-speaking part of Russia. He co-wrote The Communist Manifesto with Engels. This is fresh in my mind only because of Engels. He has been of interest to me lately because of his thoughts about false consciousness. Although his turn out to be only about people not recognizing their own interests instead of swallowing uncritically whatever the ruling class wants to believe about itself. Like us in medicine where they record almost nothing that could be uncomfortable for them, in order to believe themselves what they want everyone to believe about them, and we uncritically do. Just like Engels said. But that doesn’t help me understand who and what I am. How am I here being what I am? So, I am reading about awareness. What it is. Where it comes from.”

“Okay. Okay. You don’t belong in the first grade. We will figure out what grade you belong in.”

“What grade? Do you think the smartest senior in this school could understand what I just said? I do not belong here. . . at all. You have nothing for me. Even if you did, putting me in classes with people who are a dozen years older than me makes sense in what way? I cannot play on a team with them. I cannot socialize with them. Perhaps I should get a GED instead.”

“What is twenty times forty?”

“Eight hundred.”

“Divide seven by zero.”

“You can’t divide by zero.”

“Who is Charles Darwin?”

“He’s the guy who said more people like me don’t crawl out of the muck because they would go crazy being trapped in such tiny, helpless bodies at the mercy of grownups who have complete control over them. I don’t know that I’m fit enough to survive that.”

“Okay. Okay,” said the principal suppressing a chuckle, although a grin did sneak through. “Just be careful not to let anyone turn you into a circus act that does nothing but amuse people with you, a child, making quips like that. Next thing you know they’ll have you being sassy while smoking cigarettes and chugging shots in a bar because that would be amusing too. There is a bar not far from here where they have a trained monkey that smokes and drinks and people go there to give it a cigarette and chug a shot with it.”

“Really?” thought Miricle. “If I got desperate for money, say after running away, would people in a bar laugh at my trying to pick up women? ‘Hey, baby. How about one less button buttoned on that blouse? I could help you. Who would buy her a drink to watch me do that?’” It disturbed him to have thought of that. “Christ,” he thought. “How long do I have to survive without a female in my life?” This hunger was twisting him in a way that caused him, on his way out of the principal’s office, to imagine slapping a nickel on the secretary’s desk and saying, “Buy yourself something pretty,” because that might make a funny story to tell in a bar.

“What if, instead of being a trained monkey, I was the child crooner in a bar singing:

“Heeeeeeeey, there baby

“Your blouse is so pretty

“One less button would be more so

“Who would buy her a drink for that floor show?”

His mom had a drop-stack large hole record player with 45s of Perry Como, Dean Martin and their gang. Like everyone else, he pictured Sinatra in a bar, “Set ‘em up Joe.” So, crooning started to roll off Miricle’s tongue.

Walking through a department store with his mom, he saw a row of changing booths created out of curtains that stopped a foot from the floor, and saw an opportunity to get a story. A female of an age he could not determine was changing in one. The woman standing next to it could be her mother. If she was, then the woman inside might be only a teenager. Judging that he could play the “I’m only an innocent five-year-old” card, he separated from his mom, knelt down, and tried to look up inside of it. The woman standing next to it laughed and explained to him that he shouldn’t do that. Embarrassed, his mom called out his name and, trying to sync with the laughter of the other woman, apologized. The other woman laughed and said it was okay.

He thought, “Didn’t get to see enough to make a good story in a bar . . . But they wouldn’t know that. I could dramatize it. Hmmmm.”

After getting voice lessons, he began lobbying for violin lessons and got them within a year. But Little Stevie Wonder had torn up the airwaves playing harmonica when about his age. His own lessons were not leading him there. He got a harmonica, saw a child on TV doing soft-shoe and asked for dance lessons. His parents were terrified he was a homosexual. They didn’t want him in show business. They tried to discourage so much of his time being spent on non-social things like reading and practicing. He said, “But dance lessons are social, aren’t they?” They wanted him to go outside and play with other children.

He couldn’t. Just couldn’t. Instead, he read. In his small, local branch library, he would read something dark about medicine, and through an interlibrary loan get the book listed in the bibliography as its source, which led to getting more books per week than anyone else got per year in that small library. He wasn’t reading entire books – just the sections that elaborated on what he read in some other book. Like about Dr. William Palmer, the physician in the mid-1800s who murdered people for money. He was one in a long succession of doctors, nurses, dentists, and other health care providers who, earlier and later in history than Palmer, murdered patients for a variety of reasons without anyone in medicine ever doing anything but sweeping these things aside like anomalies signifying nothing. It didn’t feel like an anomaly to him. Still, he didn’t know why, when other boys his age were fascinated with dinosaurs, this was what he was driven to focus on.

These were the main things he read, but not the only things. Poetry had a much larger presence in the culture for centuries, some could argue for millennia, than it does now. There were phrases in common parlance, and quoted in what he read, that were from poems. Sometimes he followed the footnotes to those and read snatches of Poe, Pound, Frost, Auden, Ginsberg the Beat poets, etc., and loved Oscar Wilde. After all, his goal was to become a composer. Being able to write lyrics belonged in that mix, so he read some poetry. Other links lead to documents of the founding fathers that could not have felt more relevant, like Paine’s “a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right.” How better to explain the thinking of people in medicine? But then, he turned seven, and his father said he was old enough to take over mowing the lawn. A light bulb switched on.

Money. To achieve his dream of becoming a composer, he was going to need money. This made so much more sense than crooning in a bar. To get the capital to buy Polaroid at its IPO (he could not have told you where that thought came from) and turn that into enough money to escape to Los Angeles, become a composer and start to live, he needed money. Mowing lawns was a respectable way to get that. Unfortunately, when he went door to door quoting on mowing lawns, they thought he was too little. His dad frequently could be heard distressing his mom with complaints about his work and didn’t want more to complain about. So, he was not going to help. Miricle retrieved an old typewriter from the attic and tried mailing typed quotes for mowing lawns. That way no one would see how old he was. That worked frequently enough to result in his mowing a lawn every day and wondering what he could do to keep these customers through fall and winter. Leaf raking and snow shoveling?

Instead of history and poetry, he now searched for business solutions and discovered lawn tractors. They cut grass, collect leaves, and push snow, all with one engine. He showed his father his expected income with the increased number of yards he could tend with power equipment, and how long it would take to pay off the equipment, if his father lent him the money. When he finished his pitch, the blank expression on his father’s face worried him. Later he would overhear his father telling a friend that, in fact, he had thought this was a much better direction for his son to go than getting another instrument for more lessons that were going to cost more money for something that never would earn any. But Miricle did not know that yet and did not want to have to overcome a vocalized disinclination if his father was not in favor of it. So, he asked, “Didn’t you want me to spend less time in the library and more time outdoors? And have something more practical to think about than dance lessons? It might not be as good as going to school, but it would be learning to run a business.”

His mom stepped in from the other room to add her own thoughts. She would be for it if he would take tennis lessons too. In the end, with those being seasonal, that turned into volleyball indoors that winter. To which she added water polo which required swimming lessons. Which led to people who earn their livings by teaching sports to kids, persuading his mom he needed to learn the J-stroke for canoeing and a list of things that seemed to have no end. Even camping, for Christ’s sake, with scouts who put amphibians in others’ sleeping bags and farted into their faces when they were asleep and laughed when talking about it later. Although, the sailing the next summer was kind of cool. And he did become the go-to person for scary stories around the campfire. He always had one, and they always were about real predators he had read about in medicine, like the two nurses who worked together, year after year, murdering children and, when finally caught, were not reported to the police, but merely helped to find work murdering children someplace else in medicine. . . “They still are out there. . . someplace. . . possibly the next place your parents take you.”

Miricle got the equipment and enough new business that eventually he needed help and got Jake, an employee. With that came the government forms and taxes that were so time-consuming that within a year he had to contract with a bookkeeper or else he never again would have time to practice music for as many hours per day as he had before all the sports and yard jobs. Through it all, his parents continued to pay for his music and sports lessons, which he now could have paid for easily – something he never mentioned lest they change their minds.

Jake worked full time, so a lot more business was needed. Unfortunately, there were things Jake could not do. Like dealing with attrition. Jake wasn’t a salesman. Miricle had to be the one soliciting new work to keep Jake busy, and that took time. One time-consuming aspect was when potential customers checked with neighbors who already were customers and found they were paying less than Miricle now was quoting. Learning to negotiate this was like learning to play an instrument. You had to discover the right chord and how to strike it. It required visiting them in person, with Jake by his side, inside their front doors explaining that in the beginning, when figuring out how much to charge, he was doing all the work himself, and his parents paid his bills. But Jake had a family, etc. Eventually he learned to close by saying he still was figuring how much he needed to charge. It might have to go up some, but they could lock in this price for a whole year while he was figuring that out, if they decided right now. Requiring them to decide right now turned out to be the key. When allowed to think about it for a while, too many stopped thinking about it. They had to commit now.

After a few years of accumulating cash, he was on spring break in Florida with his parents and paternal grandparents as they were driving past an eight-story condominium under construction. It gave him the strongest sense of déjà vu. The building had water on both sides. Its back was on the intercoastal with docks for the residents. Its front was on the Atlantic Ocean. There was a road between it and the beach, but the view out the front windows was of the beach and ocean.

There could not be many pieces of property like this in the world which would make it quite valuable. It felt like he had said that out loud before. Now he was going to again. As they were riding past it in the car, his grandmother said she had read about it in the paper. It had two penthouses for which they were asking $12,500 each, a jaw dropping price at the time. He knew, he just knew, they were going to go up in value. From the back seat, he leaned forward so everyone could hear him say, “We should buy one.” They laughed.

For the rest of the vacation, this was his consuming interest, making the vacation less fun for everyone. He would not shut up about it, but they were not budging. Since they would not even talk about it, letting them think he was going out for a walk on the beach, he took a cab to a real estate lawyer’s office. Banks, he was told, did not loan money to ten-year-olds no matter what his income was. And his dad would have to co-sign the documents anyway. He could not get the lawyer past that. No creativity there. So, Miricle went to the builder. The builder could not have been more dismissive about discussing this with a child. “Let me talk to your father” was a line he heard frequently in his lawn business too. He was used to it and ignored it saying, “Without trying to negotiate a better price, which I know you would with an adult, and without a real estate agent taking a percentage out of what you will get, I’ll put down twenty percent. If I default, you get the whole twenty percent and the property back. You can’t lose. But this is a one-time offer. You have to decide right now because I’m being taken back to Ohio.”

“How do you have that much money?”

“You wanna call my broker and see if the check will clear?”

“Why two condos? What are you going to do with two condos?”

He didn’t want this to fall apart because a builder might not like a child speculating with his property. So, Miricle said, “They’re gifts. One for my parents and one for my grandparents.”

“What are you? Some kind of precocious tycoon in the making?”

“From what I’ve read, kids like me just get started sooner. We don’t go further. We end up being clerks in a post office.”

Twenty percent had been the right chord. The builder couldn’t refuse. Miricle let his real estate lawyer believe that there would be an adult co-signer as his lawyer reminded him that a child’s signature would be worth nothing if the builder did not abide by the contract. Miricle said he understood, took it to the builder, shook hands, and got it done: both penthouse condos, still under construction, with no payments due till they were ready for occupancy. When he told his parents, unlike other times when they had laughed at his working things out, this time there was no laughter. His grandfather said it was madness. Miricle reminded them that if he had not demanded and fought for so many things before, like music lessons and a lawn tractor, he would be a bored broke kid sitting in a classroom learning nothing. He almost included “while leering at Bethany,” which was part of a lyric he had written about an evil nurse who used her looks to entice patients into stupidly trusting her long enough for her to ruin their lives, a song no one ever would hear, other than as spoken words for another scary story around a campfire, because he was not confident enough in the quality of his lyric writing.

This did make him wonder if a lyric about striking the right chord in a negotiation might be something he understood well enough to write about with some depth. What if the negotiation turned out, in the end, to be with a woman who finally said Yes? Depth was one of the things missing from his lyrics. Unfortunately, the only thing concerning love and its facsimiles that he had much experience with was leering at models in magazines. So far, every lyric he wrote about that seemed creepy to him. Later they would prove not to seem so to others.

Ten months later, when the units were ready for occupancy, by phone he arranged with a realtor in Florida to offer them for rent. She came back with an offer of $18,000 to buy one. He almost said Yes on the spot, but stopped to think. She said he should take it now before the purchaser changed his mind, exactly the way he would pitch it. How much did he know about this realtor? She knew he was a child. And her pitch was not about return on investment or comparisons to other condos. It was a common sales pitch.

“I need to think about it.”

Renting them out as they appreciated had been his plan. How long and how fast might they continue to appreciate if he held them? The next day she called back saying the buyer really wanted one and was offering $20,000 now. So, he had been right. You cannot trust anyone. Wasn’t she supposed to be his advocate? Shouldn’t she have negotiated more to find this additional value in them in the beginning?

“I still think I’d be better off renting them out and letting them appreciate for a while.”

The buyer finally offered $25,000. In the original arguments with his parents and grandparents, one of their arguments had been that Florida real estate had a history of being one of the worst long-term investments you could make. Now, at $25,000, this was his condo doubling its value in less than a year. Could that kind of growth be the harbinger of a crash? He accepted the offer. Within days the realtor came back with the same offer for the second one. That gave him a net worth great enough to begin watching the stock market.

Polaroid’s IPO had long since passed, so his hunch about that was moot, but they were coming out with an unusual camera called the Swinger. He had a feeling about that similar to the feeling he had about the condos and wanted to put everything he had into it, but finding a broker who would do that was nearly impossible. Everyone he called wanted to protect his money with a conservative long view. Weeks were spent calling one after another while figuring out what chord to strike with them. “I’m not going to wait for you to think about it. I can afford to lose everything because I live with my parents. This is how I got this money. It’s my Goddamn money! Right now, say you’ll do this or I’m hanging up.” His Polaroid stock went up and up and up (to the relief but continued consternation of his grandparents, but growing amusement of his parents), but he knew it couldn’t forever. As the excitement over the Swinger was tapering off, they were coming out with a new product, but it did not strike him in the same way. So, he got out.

There were so many feelings that he didn’t understand. Like the first time he caught a cold and his parents tried to take him to a doctor. Nothing could get him to go. But even after having read enough about medicine to be able to explain to them that there isn’t anything they can do about a cold, and when that didn’t work, to be able to quote authorities to bolster his arguments about what a lawless and unaccountable place medicine is, no one was convinced. “There was the nurse who kept an empty, used, unsterilized hypodermic needle in a glasses case in her purse for when she was inclined to pump air into a patient to ‘add him to her collection’.” They were not persuaded, but were defeated, which he was beginning to recognize as the common end of many family negotiations.

In spite of what he said in his lyrics, even he knew that what he had read about medicine did not justify the level of dread he felt. It was a continuing theme for him as he wrote:

“Just one leg for balance

“’Gainst their faith in nonsense

“There is no winning here

“Just stall another year

“When even all I read

“Can’t justify the dread.”

To him his lyrics still seemed only to recite the verbiage surrounding the feelings. They didn’t give you the feeling. Lyrics had to take you someplace, not just enable you to understand something. Sometimes his displeasure with his lyrics made him worry that running this lawncare business might become the “clerk in the post office job” he would have for the rest of his life, which only increased his determination to make sure nothing got in the way of continuing to practice, practice, practice: piano, violin, voice, harmonica, guitar (it had been ukulele until his hands got big enough), and percussion.

The percussion was a thought a voice teacher had. Miricle had asked every teacher he had what he could do to get more tuned into rhythm. He still couldn’t rock like Little Stevie Wonder. Most of his teachers didn’t get it. But his voice teacher asked someone who suggested percussion and also suggested that he listen to songs on the radio while imitating what those drummers were doing instead of just taking lessons based on reading sheet music, which turned out to be brilliant. All he had done until now was classical sheet music training.

Now he added bugle. America always seemed to be at war and when he turned eighteen, he was unlikely to have a college deferment. Maybe his singing could get him into a military chorus, but if it didn’t (after all, he wasn’t getting any choral experience), would bugle-playing help? Instead of taking lessons with the simple instruments, like harmonica and bugle, that felt so fundamental to be able to play, he now listened to the radio and played along. This had been such good advice. It got so he could hear a song and play it without seeing music. And jam and improvise to it too. And these wind instruments did so much to help connect his voice to his diaphragm for singing. He wished he could figure out something similar to get better writing lyrics.

And then, practically overnight:

“Oh testosterone

“Greatest gift I’ve ever known

“Got me smiling ear to ear

“What’s going to happen

“With another year?”

His fingers got stronger. Everything got stronger. It helped with playing instruments. It helped with singing. His vocal coach was shocked and told him he really had “the instrument” for singing. For whatever additional help exercise might be, he started doing pushups and pullups and curls and sit-ups, etc.

Previously he could not imagine going to Los Angeles on his own. After a year of these changes to his voice and his body, he was less child-size and had no misgivings now. He also had the money and believed he might have just enough talent for what he now was referring to as LA. He pictured being there, still taking lessons and practicing, but doing it where he could learn the ropes and make contacts. His parents said, “Absolutely not. You are 14, not even old enough to drive. How would you even get around?” But he was negotiating from a position of strength. If they woke up some morning and he was gone, they could have him arrested and brought back, but he could just leave again. He did not say that. It was inherent in his attitude, which they did not like. With quiet confidence, he reminded them of all the things they told him not to do, things that had gotten him to where he was now, and that enabled him to do this.

“Nothing is going to happen for me here. I have to be there.”

Half a year later he sold his business to Jake, who would be sending him payments, and packed for LA. He was taking only a poncho and a cotton blanket (a bedroll), a toothbrush, deodorant, some shirts, a sweater, a windbreaker, a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint soap, and a few envelopes and stamps and paper. He would be wearing blue jeans on the trip, but carrying a pair of khaki slacks that almost never would be put on. The only instrument he was carrying with him was a C harmonica. He was going to attempt to live on the interest from his investments and the payments from Jake without touching his capital for as long as possible. As long as he did not burn through his capital, he could stay there.

In LA, with his bag over his shoulder, he walked around looking for where to “land.” The first few nights he slept on the grass in peoples’ side yards, getting up before light so no one would see, except for one morning. He had spent the days walking the perimeter of UCLA, moving a block out and walking around it again, then moving another block out, getting further and further away a block at a time. There were “For Rent” signs he asked about – too expensive. Returning to where he started, closer to the university, he tore the phone numbers off notes stapled to phone poles by students seeking roommates. Student apartments were so filled with tobacco, grass, and beer. How did they learn anything? And there was no room for instruments.

It was not the exertion of walking all day as much as the lack of sleep, getting only about five hours a night, that caused him finally to oversleep one morning. In a crowded neighborhood of small houses with small yards, it already was light, and lights were on inside houses, when he woke up and discovered he had laid down in the dark on an ant hill. Everything, including him, was covered with tiny ants that didn’t bite and swept off easily, but required disrobing to brush them off and shake out clothes and the cotton blanket and everything else. If early risers saw, there was no indication.

After several nights without it, he realized that having no dew was normal here. It made sense but never had crossed his mind. This made it a more comfortable place to sleep outdoors than the Midwest. He had not expected this. And he was surprised he saw no lightning bugs. There were flying bugs, but they did not light. Eventually he would learn they were the same kind of bugs as in Ohio, but just a variety that did not light. Paying for normal travel-with-lodging not only would shorten his stay, but also not provide this kind of ground-level information about his new environment – ants that don’t bite, bugs that don’t light, in a desert with no dew – was a song writing itself, but people were awake. He had to put some clothes on and get out of there.

In the early morning, already six or seven blocks away from the campus, there did not seem to be any point in continuing to comb the area close to it and so he circled away, but then finally just wandered onto any road that looked interesting. After a couple of hours, he stopped to make notes on the lyric rumbling through his mind. It was not finished but just needed to be noted to get it out of his head so he could more completely focus on the task at hand. At the top of the page, to keep track of it, he wrote, as a possible title, “To whom I am concerned” while shrugging his own confusion with it.

“Ants that don’t bite

“Bugs that don’t light

“In a desert with no dew.”

“Naked at dawn

“Scraping ants onto lawn

“Some line ending with do.”

“Walking alone

“Looking for home

“Can’t stop till I’m through.”

“Once there alone

“To quietly moan

“Where out there are you?”

“Ants that don’t bite

“Bugs that don’t light

“In a desert with no you.”

It did not feel like a keeper. It had some components that might be, but this was not the day he wanted to have his mind occupied with that instead of searching for opportunities. So he got it off of his mind by jotting that much down and resumed wandering. Hours later, he did not know where he was, but there was a note in the window of a bar/café about an upstairs studio for rent. The handwritten note was next to a typeset sign with artwork advertising that jazz was played there on weekend nights. So, it was living quarters in a place that was about music. Interesting thought. Inside, below a tin ceiling with ceiling fans, was a tiny stage with an upright piano and a simple drum set. He asked about the studio and Mal wordlessly nodded, came out from behind the bar in the empty café, and led him up a flight of creaky, deeply worn, wooden steps to see it.

Knowing to mention faults at the beginning of a negotiation, Miricle said, “On weekend nights, I imagine the jazz would be loud up here?”

Mal just shrugged. When they came back down, Miricle asked if it would be okay if he played the piano on the stage. Mal shrugged again and went back to washing and sterilizing glasses behind the bar. After half an hour of demonstrating how well he could play, Miricle stopped and asked if he could play to pay the rent.

“How do you figure your playing is worth anything?”

It was a bar, but it had a menu. Nothing cooked – just sandwiches made on a cutting board. But that was enough for underage kids to come in. It was four in the afternoon and no one was there. “What if I played when school lets out and kids started coming here at this time of day?”

“Right. You go ahead and play piano until kids flock here spending enough to cover your rent and we can talk.”

“Is that a promise?”

With a wordless eyeroll, shrug and half of a nod, Mal turned back to washing glasses.

In five minutes, Miricle was moved in. For a bit, he just watched the traffic on the street below. It had been so long since he had a shower that, even though he had no towel, he showered in the clawfoot bathtub that had a shower curtain encircling it. The peppermint in Dr. Bronners was wonderful at times like these. In the same way he had scraped off the ants, standing in the tub he scraped off the water as best he could to hasten dryness. After drying his hands on his bedroll, while waiting for the rest of himself to airdry, he wrote to his parents giving them the address to which to ship a few of his instruments, and then, after managing to pull clothes onto his still damp body, walked outside in search of sheets and eggs feeling like it had taken a life and a half to get there.

The plan had been to arrange music lessons before anything else. He had wanted to be close to the university where there would be music lessons. But now, first he had a different temporary goal. Get free rent by playing music that draws kids. But how would they know about it? What if he got some kids to come jam with him? They would tell their friends. He got maps and looked up high schools and churches trying to figure out how to connect with musicians his own age. On a bulletin board in a community center, he found a flyer for a social event in a park with canoes and volleyball in a week. He bought a bathing suit and a pair of shorts and got on their bus with the bathing suit on under the shorts. In those days, men’s bathing suits were skin tight and as short as they could be without having to rise at an angle from the center, so it easily could be worn under shorts. On the bus, when another teenager asked where he went to school, he wished he had thought ahead and had come up with an evasive response, but said he didn’t go to school right now.

“Huh? What? How can you not go to school?”

“I tested out.” It wasn’t totally untrue, but felt egotistical. It did turn out to be a decent conversation starter, but one that generated too many questions from people in other seats leaning to listen and ask. It wasn’t as much conversation as interrogation. It took most of the bus ride for him to figure out how turn it around and get them talking about themselves so he could try to find out if any of them played instruments.

However, soon he was playing volleyball (thanks, Mom) with girls in bikinis. . . in California. Such a short time ago, he had been practicing scales in Ohio. Later he learned that when he climbed out of the water on a dock and took off his soaked shirt to wring it out, several girls fell in love with him. “Finally,” he thought. “Thank you, Jesus.”

Prior to this, it had not occurred to him that exercising might have been valuable for that too, but on the bus on the way back a gorgeous blonde sat next to him as soon as he sat down. He came to this event hoping to connect with students who could jam with him afternoons on the tiny stage in the café, but this happened. Her name was Lil. He got her phone number. When he got off the bus, he stood still looking at it for a bit wondering what he was going to do with it. He couldn’t drive. She lived in the suburbs. And, oh yeah, he didn’t have a phone.

Walking while holding the map, he quietly sang,

“I cannot drive

“She is far away

“I wanna say Hi

“But I cannot today.”

Eventually, a little bit at a time, he would learn, with the way her friends talk, that while growing up, her friends normally had crushes on various celebrities – actors, singers, and such. Once in a while, just to fit in, Lil would pick one to be part of the group, but she never wrote to one or dreamed about one or had much to say about one. She just didn’t follow celebrities. Similarly, she didn’t have anything to say midst their usual banter as they commentated as the volley-ball rolled off the dock and into the water. As he ran after it, Miricle became their subject. When he pulled off his shorts before diving into the water, his bathing suit had been white and there were gasps from the girls momentarily thinking it was underwear. After kicking the ball back to the game, as he took off his shirt and was wringing it out, Lil’s friend Barbara said, “Holy shit.”

“Who is he?” asked Alice.

“Anyone ever seen him before?” chimed in Cathy.

Lil later told him that through all this she only listened and watched. She later saw two other girls get in a canoe with him. She saw he also knew how to sail. One of her friends reported that she had heard that he didn’t live with his parents. He had his own place. And, “They say he hitchhiked to the community center.” Someone had seen him walk up to people he didn’t know and talk to them, which happened to Lil. She told him that she was on a stone ledge sitting next to Ben when he walked up to Ben and said, “You just made an air-guitar gesture. Do you play?” They talked music until he said, “I’m Mark Miricle. People just call me Miricle.”

“Miracle?”

“Yeah. It’s what I answer to.”

“I’m Ben.”

After a few more sentences, Miricle said Hi to Lil. He didn’t remember any of this. She told him she said Hi back, and he smiled and left. Eventually, she would confide that for the rest of that afternoon, no matter how far away he was, she always knew where he was. Without making any effort to pay attention, she just knew. So, when the buses arrived to take them back, without consciously deciding to go there, she found herself in line for the same bus as him, almost right behind him. By the time he was stepping up to board, she was right behind him.

Until he heard all these things, all he had known was that he had been unfolding the map when she sat next to him asking, “What do you need a map for?”

“If I get off the bus halfway back, it will be a shorter distance back.”

“Back where?”

“Back to where I live. Do you live far from the Community Center?”

“Yeah. My mom’s picking me up.”

When she told her friends about that they had said to her, “So he didn’t brag?” No. He asked her about herself. When she repeated that to him, he knew it only was because earlier on the bus he learned what happens when he lets the conversation become about himself. It gets away from him. So, it was only that day that he started steering conversations straight into finding out about others. He wasn’t some precocious charmer. It only was a newly formed habit that caused him to ask her about herself instead of making an ass of himself by talking about himself.

On the bus, while listening to her, he had to interrupt to get up to ask the driver if she could let him off at the next light. When he returned to the seat, she moved over so that he would be on the outside when he had to get off. That is when his newly formed habit of asking for phone numbers kicked in. So, it was just dumb luck that kept two people from saying or doing anything off-putting long enough to get to know each other. Neither of them felt lightning bolts the first time they saw each other. She had heard the right gossip. And, for the first time, he now asked for phone numbers.

As she recited it to him, he struggled to write it on the front of the open map on his lap. On the back of the map was the contact information for guys he had spoken to that afternoon. It had been easier to write on the folded map. Seeing the problem he was having with writing, instead of repeating her number again, she slid her hand inside his taking the pen and saying, “Let me.” Her hand sliding inside his, and then pressing down on his thigh to have something on which to write, and then when the paper curled, using her left hand to smooth it flat … on his thigh … was when he looked at her face and her arms as they reached across her own lap to reach his. Her calmness. Her wanting to do the thing that would keep them in touch. The physical way he received that information stirred him in ways he did not know he could be stirred as she dragged the pen on him.

Later she told him that as the bus pulled away, she saw him standing on the sidewalk looking at her number and, after that, every time the phone rang, listened to see if anyone said it was for her.

He did not want to call too soon, but wasn’t disciplined enough to wait for more than two days. When he called, she commented on the traffic noise in the background.

“I’ve only got this payphone,” which to her made him even more exotic. Lil was cute, cute, cute is what he was thinking as he asked when they might be able to be in the same place at the same time again. “Is there another social event coming up that you will be at?” She wasn’t sure. He was about to give her his address so she could write to him when she was sure, but the event could be over by the time a post card reached him. He said, “I’ll get a phone. I’ll give you the number. We will talk. When you have a plan, like even if you are just getting together with friends, if you tell me when and where, I will get there.” Was that too much too fast? It just came out. But he could tell she was elated. He loved that. It almost inflated his ego, but he knew this was the first time she was being asked on a date and first dates must be like this no matter who you are. It was the first time for him too. When they hung up, holding the map still folded to her number in her handwriting, he skipped down the street. He would keep that map folded to that number for the rest of his life.

“What rhymes with skipping?” he thought as he tried to turn the feeling into verse. The verses he wrote didn’t do it. If words didn’t, could wordless music? “What rhythm feels like skipping? Is a tune necessary to create the feeling? Is it a song if it doesn’t have a tune? What if an instrument makes the first note and a drum is tuned to the second note and the vocal is the third note making the chord? And what if they are not played simultaneously, but in a rhythm that feels like skipping? Maybe that only would be the intro, or the refrain.” Even if it didn’t turn into anything, at least it was squeezing off his page the verse he had been working on about waiting in line at the rape crisis center to speak with an advocate about what could be done about the futility of trying to report anything that happens in medicine where there are no witnesses, no matter how many people saw it, and no one makes records and no one will testify about anything. That felt like the chorus to his whole life, this sense of medicine as this huge beast in which people had complete faith while it picked them off one by one without anyone paying attention to that. He could not help but follow references to the under belly of medicine. The slightest mention would take over his thinking. Most of the lyrics he wrote were warnings about that, sometimes calling it the monster spider with its web spread across the entire landscape, while everyone stupidly nodded in agreement with the self-serving perspective of the spider. How established would a composer have to be to sing about that?

Fortunately, at this moment, skipping was what he felt like singing, at least until he found himself with Lil and a group that included people one- and two-years younger, hanging out in someone’s backyard while he was trying to find the musicians among them. The fact that he was living on his own, and in town, made him something like a Martian or a rock star to them. What made it survivable was sitting next to Lil while she and he asked others about garage bands. That took so much more time and produced so much less good than anticipated. It wasn’t as cut and dried as pitching mowing lawns.

There had been only a few phone calls and that one date with her, but things happen so fast when you are almost fifteen. There was no one else in his mind. The cleavage on magazine covers didn’t become songs anymore. He fell asleep thinking about Lil. Sometimes he woke up thinking about her. He wished he woke up that way all the time. Even when he didn’t, she was somewhere in his mind even when he woke up imaging what it would have been like to be the nurse who poisoned patients, some say hundreds of them, before a mortician smelled cyanide and mentioned it to someone who happened to be asked on camera, by a reporter who was trying to find something to write about, if there was any thought that the nurse might have killed more than that one. The question was not answered, but a nurse heard it and started a ball rolling. Otherwise, it would have kept going on. Other nurses knew it was going on but said nothing, year after year after year. Why? What were they thinking all that time? This was in the background of Miricle’s thinking all the time, this feeling that he had to figure out what was going on in the minds of those people, to better warn patients. How did he get saddled with this? Like knowing where the principal’s office was, it was one of those things he couldn’t explain.

Fortunately, now there was Lil, which was calming. And made sense. That and the desire to get free rent. So, when he began pursuing another way of connecting with high school cover bands, his first thought was of her. If she could find where they were playing on Friday and Saturday nights, he would meet her at those places.

Lil had seen the girlfriends of band members hanging out where their bands were playing. That didn’t appeal to her. That looked like having to compete with the music for his time, he was so involved in that. But this made her part of it. She filled up their schedule.

The first time was a Friday in a gymnasium that echoed and muddied the sound so much it was difficult to hear anything. The drummer apparently had learned to play in a marching band and did not know how to do anything but hit every stroke as hard as he could. Miricle suggested that maybe they should arrive at these things ahead of time so he could talk to musicians while they were warming up. This band had three girls singing into a cheap mic. The guitar player had expensive equipment. That was nice so, between songs, Miricle told him that he was looking for people to jam with on weekday afternoons after school on a stage in a club not far from the university and got his number.

“This is too slow,” he told Lil. “How many places like this could we hit in one night?”

She asked, “How would we get from place to place?”

He suggested, “Cab?”

She said, “Okay.”

Saturday morning, she called a friend who was dating a guy who played an instrument and was old enough to drive. That guy suggested their going to where bands were practicing. Between him and the two girls, they knew where enough people were practicing in garages to skip crowded weekend nights. Could he have asked for a better girlfriend? The problem turned out to be having to invite whole bands. It didn’t work when you tried to invite just a certain individual from one of them.

It did result in making friends who could be asked who they would pick from everyone they knew. But people showing up cold wasn’t any good. Giving sheet music to them didn’t work either. They were used to listening to albums and copying what they heard. This gave Miricle the idea that he could get some experience with composing.

Overdubbing was relatively new. He dipped into his capital and bought two good reel to reel tape decks and composed music by playing all the instruments and singing all the voices. He taped copies for the musicians to practice to before coming to his stage (an extremely time-consuming project). This would enable him to see which compositions stuck and which didn’t with this crowd and get better at composing from that. Now when they arrived, they had practiced the same tunes as the other musicians and knew what to play. The problem was getting them to turn their amps down enough for Mal, the bartender/landlord, to stand it.

As time went on, still more things dragged Miricle’s time and energy away from this project that, itself, was preventing him from resuming music lessons. One was the fact that Jake was having trouble making payments. There was attrition and Jake was not good at getting new business. Miricle had his parents ship the family manual typewriter that had become his, and established a routine in which he sent typed quotes to new addresses provided by Jake. There were a number of complications with this, but Miricle remembered his father distressing his mom with complaints about work and did not want to do that to Lil. So, he never complained about business to Lil.

Miricle may not have been practicing instruments, but he was learning about how to make music. The Ventures had shown what could be done with nothing but guitars. Adding voices, Fogerty proved that that worked even without all the musicality of the Ventures. But Brian Wilson slipped a glockenspiel into a song and George Harrison was playing a sitar. Maybe it didn’t have to be guitars.

Miricle began collecting cheap, used instruments to explore other sounds: a double bell euphonium, that he fixed, from a pawn shop; a flute, a recorder, a lyre, a digeridoo that was circular, a Chinese guqin (was this the precursor to the steel slide guitar of American country music?), an ocarina, a kazoo, a four note xylophone, a toy xylophone, a real one broken in so many places he might never finish working on it, an accordion, an mbira (pronounced “em beer ah” and referred to as an African thumb piano but that sounded like a weak cross between a steel drum and a chime), three frame drums of different sizes, a partial set of chimes, odd whistles including slide whistles, a gong. The gong was a departure. It wasn’t second hand and wasn’t cheap. He used the gong in a recording as soon as he got it. He wanted an organ – someday, but right now he was working on a kazoo chorus.

Since offering time on a stage was a draw for so many people, maybe a kazoo chorus would enable more people to be involved? He tried overdubbing himself doing two parts, then five parts, then ten parts on a kazoo. Maybe . . with work . . maybe. He tried several approaches and added other simple instruments. Maybe it was never going to be a good idea. He started over and tried adding his largest frame drum. He worked with that more, eventually overdubbing it to sound like five people playing frame drums. There was something there. He added five more. And then another five. He dropped the kazoos and sprang for audiophile quality headphones to hear it better. There definitely was something there. He wanted enough frame drums to try that live.

He searched the classifieds and scoured the LA pawnshops by phone. Then other cities. A woman in a distant shop, a major fan of frame drums, gave him advice, including letting him hear what happens when you hold your cheek against the inside back of the drum while humming with your mouth open or closed. Oh, my god. This was so interesting. She asked him what kind of frame drum he already had. Answering her questions about it he discovered he had a Renaissance, and that is a type, not a brand. Eventually this long-distance call cost as much as a drum but was so worth it.

Humming into it, like the woman had explained, took it to another level. He overdubbed it to sound like a chorus. Whoa. It really did feel like what it might have sounded like hearing a mother’s heartbeat while in the womb. This was deep, really deep, finally. He had to hear this live.

This sea change started with the two tape decks. Now it was a habit. The original idea had been to attract musicians in order to attract their friends in order get free rent. But with the sound he was getting from these singing frame drums and the overdubbing, he was making art. Almost any sacrifice feels worth the time and money when in the throes of creating art, no matter what the original budget was.

Singers and percussionists were what he wanted now. He got on the phone asking people if they had frame drums. They had tambourines, bongos, and congas. He wasn’t sure he wanted any of those but he didn’t want to say “no” to anyone.

He and Lil overdubbed themselves singing into the drums. Writing for a drum chorus was fascinating. He didn’t have experience directing a chorus, but it wasn’t exactly a chorus. The tapes he had made previously, of his rock and roll compositions, were still being copied and passed around by cover bands wanting to pepper their evenings with tunes they could pitch as being original. It was valuable seeing which of his songs got chosen for that. But no one would be able to cover these singing-drum compositions.

Still, he mailed tape recordings of them to as many people as he could stand to pay for. Bookstores carried two-inch in diameter tapes in small mailing containers for people who had reel to reel decks (he soon learned that the cheapest brands of those stretched and became unusable with repeated listening). But they also had similar arrangements with cassette tapes. He rationalized paying for all that plus the postage by hoping that the more people he put on stage, the more of their friends would show up to watch. It didn’t work that way. What did work out eventually was having so many people in the show that there almost wasn’t room for friends to come watch, what with Lil beating the bushes inviting people.

She came every time, usually getting rides with older students, but sometimes with younger students being driven by their mothers. Frequently, she and he talked on the phone, her calling as often as he did. Posters of him playing with “his” musicians she wanted to hang on her wall at home and in her locker at school, if he ever would make any. He muttered he wished they never had to be apart. However, not every weekend evening could be spent together. Sometimes he was busy doing what he could to get noticed by the jazz group on his stage, which eventually worked. A few specific songs they played he practiced and practiced and practiced so that some time he could “happen” to be playing one of them when they arrived. He wanted to sound as though he might be competent enough to play with them, for a fifteen-year-old anyway. Finally, one time when the bass player was first to arrive, Miricle kept playing and the bass player, a large black man named Pope, joined him. Another time their keyboard player and Pope arrived at the same time. So, Miricle moved to the drums. After jamming a bit, Pope asked, “What else do you play?”

“Harp, violin, been tinkering with an old squeeze box. . .”

“Bring your harp sometime,” referring to his harmonica. For them he was the 15-year-old trained monkey they hoped people might come to see – though Miricle had not yet caught on to the fact that he was that to them.

So, there were some weekend nights when he was with them and not wherever Lil was. He didn’t know where some important contact was going to come from, and he thought these professional musicians were his best hope. But he promised he would take her to her prom on its night no matter what else might arise. Hitchhiking was the normal way for him to get to the different places he joined her. That meant her parents drove her to where she was and took her home, which limited them in ways her parents were very glad about.

Her friends got used to how they clung to each other. In a place like someone’s rec room with the parents in some other part of the house, but no privacy while surrounded by other kids, they would sit with their arms around each other. Sometimes he would kiss her forehead or bend her over backwards and pretend to be putting a hickey on her neck. One such time “Be My Baby,” by The Ronettes was playing as they were horizontal on someone’s couch with her face buried in his neck when someone asked how they met. Lil said she cut in line as he was getting on a bus so that she would be right behind him so she could be the one to sit down beside him. Anne said, “And she pushed out of the way two other girls who were trying to do the same thing. It was a fucking cat fight.”

Miricle said, “This is the first I’m hearing this.”

Lil said, “I didn’t want you to know you had options.”

Thus began the comments that, overtime, filled Miricle in on their watching him chase the volley ball, etc. He slid his hand up her back under her top and, on top of her bra strap, spread his fingers out halfway around her ribs on one side. She sank all the deeper into the hug.

The next week they were in the semi-dark, alone standing with their arms around each other under a raised deck in someone’s backyard where shadows of friends could be seen in the darkness on the lawn beyond them, when he said, “In Ohio right now, this would be wet with dew. Instead, I’m in this desert with my arms around you.” It had rhyme and meter. Another lyric, she wondered as she kissed him in the middle of his chest and then laid her head back down on him.

He said, “I had to walk here today.”

“No one stopped? You couldn’t hitch a ride?”

“Last week, when I had my hands on your back, it was like opening a parenthesis that I would spend the week wondering how to fill the space between to close.”

She said, “I don’t know what that means.”

Spending so much time trying to turn feelings into lyrics made him loquacious in ways he would not otherwise have been. When there was fodder for putting immediate experience into lyrics, that vocabulary was on his tongue for so many hours each day that it was just there as he said, “It means that yesterday and last night, I was able to write lyrics that belonged inside those parentheses. But this morning I could not. I could not think about anything but the fact that I was going to see you today. I had to be on my way. I could not do anything today but be on my way to you. So, I started walking, never dreaming you were going to have nothing on under your top, or that you were going to pull it off and throw it on the ground and then help pull off mine and wrap your arms around me.”

“You were never going to do it.”

“I thought about you every step of the way.”

“How long did it take?”

“I measured the distance on the map. I know how fast I walk. I allowed time for eating what I would carry and then packed it. It was five hours walking. Another hour and a half eating and examining the map.”

“You didn’t get bored or tired?”

“Not when every step was taking me closer to you,” a line straight out of a lyric on which he was working. She tightened her hug around him. With their arms still wrapped around each other, him leaning on a post and her leaning on him, she asked, “When are you going to get a car?” And he thought that question should be the last line of the verse. Or perhaps it could be the eight-word hook spoken, not sung, after a stanza.

“Love is blue” was playing in the house. He listened to that while she listened to his heart as they held each other. After a while he said, “It doesn’t matter if nothing else good comes of having come to LA. It was all worth it to have met you.”

That obviously was a new thought off-the-cuff. She practically squeezed all the air out of him saying, “How am I ever going to let you go when you say things like that?”

A Rebecca West line of which he had a dim recollection said, “You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.” The line had laid like a question mark in his mind for what seemed like forever. The answer now was that music could not suggest a life as extraordinary as what life was with Lil, although he was doing his best to make it so. She was the best thing of all the things that were – thoughts that had tried to become lyrics that measured up, but didn’t, at least not yet. Thinking about how to convey it with music, he considered holding his heart to a megaphone, and the megaphone to a frame drum, and combining that with what else he didn’t know, but he would try.

It was almost all guys with electric instruments who were coming to “his” stage until he introduced frame drums. He now brought a tape deck to the stage to record these sessions. When he mailed the recordings, the more open-minded ones could see that this could be interesting. Others were too self-conscious to embrace it until a group of their peers had. Now most who came were older than him. Being on his own, and sometimes sitting in with that jazz band, gave him credibility.

Some bought their own frame drums – sixteen- or eighteen-inch Renaissance frame drums (with synthetic heads at his direction). Although some found different ones that also worked out. Miricle bought several times more than the rest of them combined and let them take them home to practice. He also bought kazoos by the dozen for a future session. Now, for the first time, more girls were showing up. Miricle stopped scheduling bands at different times and invited everyone to come at the same time. Nearly forty people came including four new girls who were not connected with any band. They had heard tapes of other girls singing into drums in a chorus that made a different sound than they ever had heard before. One-at-a-time, he showed them how to do it. Then the fifth girl he went to, as though to instruct, though she didn’t need that, was Lil and he leaned to her ear as though to whisper, but kissed her on the cheek and thanked her for making this happen. “It wouldn’t have without you.” She got tears in her eyes she was so happy.

Those who already were used to singing into drums found a chord in sync with the new girls’ humming. Miricle dead clapped (called Kah) in the middle of his drum to establish a rhythm that others followed. He crossed to someone who was holding a tambourine and flicked a single jingle in an intermittent beat on which the bearer picked up. He gave another a timpani stick and a longer interval on which quietly to touch a chime. Someone else he put on the four-note xylophone. Everyone else automatically slid their voices to be in tune with it. Then he played the mbira into a microphone (that instrument was so quiet it had to be mic’d to be heard with all that sound).

After a while of getting comfortable with that sequence, he stopped it and put together another sequence, a new movement. After they got comfortable with that, they worked on stopping dead simultaneously with a foot stomp, hand clap, breathy chord bridge to flute coming in on top of the resumption of another arrangement. Then he introduced what happens if you hold the membrane hole of a kazoo against the back of the drumhead and place your lips around its mouthpiece sideways to hum into it. Now that was rock and roll. Everyone took a kazoo home to work on that. He asked them to figure out other things that could be done like that. When they did, they felt all the more connected when their thoughts were tried out.

Now, every time they came, either he or someone else had something new to try. Talk about this reached enough of their friends that more people came. One time someone’s mother, after dropping people off, came to him and said this was the first thing her son ever connected with in a way that mattered. She said Miricle should do this for a living. “There is a need.”

 

 

“Dear Mom & Dad,

“You always wanted me to play with other kids. About sixty came this time, and more girls than boys now. Mal ran out of sandwich fixings last time. He had more this time in addition finally to having individual bags of potato chips, corn chips and the other things my friends wanted to buy, like cheese doodles and popcorn puffs.

“We meet Monday afternoons after school and on Saturdays before the jazz starts now. Mal is worried someday we might exceed the legal capacity of the club.”

 

 

After a couple of months of adding instruments and voices and sequences that bumped into other sequences with completely different sounds, one Saturday they “happened” still to be playing when the jazz group showed up and stood wide eyed watching. When the music stopped, Pope caught Miricle’s eye and nodded an impressed Yes. Miricle wasn’t a trained monkey anymore. He and Lil sat down with friends and ate Mal’s sandwiches (Mal waved Miricle off when he tried to pay this time) before getting in an older guy’s car to join friends elsewhere.

As soon as he was old enough, he took drivers education classes from a commercial school so he could get a car. He wasn’t quite sixteen when he bought a VW microbus, which terrified her parents. For a while he could drive it only with older kids who had licenses, so Lil and he were never alone in it. But the first day he finally would be able to drive it alone, Lil’s parents invited him to dinner. It was the first time he wore his khakis. When he arrived, all three of them came out to the driveway to look at the microbus. It was purple and, for the back section, had swinging side doors on both sides. Her father, Mr. Williams, guessed that must be so the doors were on the correct sides in both America and England when pulling up to a curb. No one mentioned the bald tires. What they really had wanted to see was if there was a mattress in the back. There wasn’t. And there couldn’t be because the engine was in the rear making the back half of the rear section almost as high as the dashboard. Later, when Lil asked why he chose a vehicle with that configuration, he said it was so that her parents would not have nervous breakdowns about what could go on back there and yet she and he would have something better than a back seat. She slid her arms around him thinking, “I love this man.”

At dinner her parents made an amazing offer. After getting to know him this year, they thought he should finish high school and offered to be his legal guardians in Los Angeles. He could live with them and go to high school like other teenagers. He was trying to imagine living in the same house with their daughter without getting in trouble (would they be sharing a shower on the second floor?). Gratefully and politely, he pretended it was a thought worth considering. After dinner he asked if he and Mr. Williams could take a walk.  Outside her father asked, “I guess having your own apartment at this age makes you popular?”

“It’s the stage below it that is popular. That and your daughter. They come to play on the stage, but it is because she invites them. Any guy wants to accept any invitation that comes from your daughter. Now girls are coming, sometimes without any invitation. We never tell anyone “No” so when people hear about it, they just come. My apartment is not the draw. I have never let anyone in my apartment.”

“No one?”

“What parent would let their teenagers play music there if an unsupervised party in another teenager’s apartment might be part of it? If I let anyone else in, I’d have to let Lil in. Then you might never let us see each other again.”

Mr. Williams said, “You could be right about that.” It was stated quietly, but that reality shook Miricle to his core. “And you didn’t want to do that on the sly?”

“Oh. We wanted to, but you’d have found out.”

“How?”

“Our social skills aren’t good enough to keep you from figuring out a secret that big.”

“And now you have a van.”

“I haul instruments.”

There were so many retorts Mr. Williams could have made, but he said only, “You could park it in our drive and practice here.”

Miricle said, “I came to LA to figure out how to position myself to get in whatever loop you need to be in to get noticed. Living above a stage in a smokey bar…” (He almost had said ‘a monkey bar’ he was so shaken by the thought of not being allowed to see Lil again that, for a second, it threw him back to how helpless he had felt all the way back in the principal’s office). “It was the best place that I could come up with to be taken seriously. I ended up playing only with high school kids. But there was this guy, Paul, who was driven there by his mom. No one wants to be seen with a parent, but Paul’s mother came in and watched. She spoke to his father and he came. He turned out to be an entertainment lawyer who gave his son’s copies of my tapes to an agent who came to listen unbeknownst to me. When the agent spoke to me, he told me that Miricle was the best name he ever heard for a rock star and these singing frame drum pieces sounded like what the Moody Blues might have done if they had discovered those instead of symphonies. As much as I wasn’t in a good position to do it, I wrangled about certain clauses in the contract he wanted me to sign. I had a small business back home. I got a little experience with contracts. And I’d read about what other bands hated about contracts they’d signed. Thankfully, he still wanted to work with me.

“This happened only because I’m living above a monkey . . . I mean, a smokey café with a stage. It never would have happened if I had been living in a suburban house playing in a garage even with your daughter beating the bushes.”

Mr. Williams said, “She talks about it all the time.”

Miricle continued. “I’m lucky to have met her. And I could not be more impressed by your generous offer, but I have to stay where I am doing what I’m doing.”

Mr. Williams said, “I didn’t know you had an agent. So, you are on your way.”

“I wouldn’t go that far. I haven’t had any paying work. But it is a nice step.”

The next day in his van, Lil told Miricle that after he left last night, when her mother asked how the walk had gone, her father said, “I am amazed and frightened.”

Her mother asked, “What’s he going to do?”

Her father said, “I told him his parents wouldn’t have to pay his bills if he lived with us. But they don’t.”

Her mother said, “Then . . how . .”

“He’s here on his own money.”

Lil said, “No way!”

Her father asked, “He didn’t tell you?

“No.”

“He had a yard care business and speculated in real estate.”

“First I’m hearing.”

Her father asked, “What guy wouldn’t brag about that to his girlfriend?”

Lil said, “He’s such a rock star.”

Her mom said, “Then he’s not going to live with us?”

“No.”

Lil said, “Then can I live with him?”

Her parents pretended they didn’t hear that.

That night, back at his studio, the sadness of the thought of her father possibly never allowing him to see her again, affected him so deeply that he wrote:

“Worn out stairway leading up to my apartment

“Where you’d never even been. Where I do dream

“About you. When it’s okay for us to be here

“Restless traffic out my window singing to us.”

After a few hours of more writing, he wrote a note on the side of that first page, perpendicular to the rest of it, before putting it back underneath the subsequent ones, that this had been “The first of many discarded verses while irresistibly closing verbal fingers around the hurt to squeeze its juice onto a page where others could feel and sing it. Re-rewriting. Re-rethinking. Kept me up so late.” Previous lyrics about medical professionals, like Linda Hazzard, the physician who starved patients to death, and ruined the health of many who didn’t die, while embezzling money from them, required a rougher vernacular. How could embezzling from the patients being starved to death be felt in words using the same form as limericks? There were poets who felt that the sound of the words was more important than the sense of them. He dropped rhyming. Then dropped meter. And then adopted a rougher vocabulary. The smoothness of “Quoth the Raven, Nevermore” was not lost on him, but neither was the turbulence of Pound’s “Souls out of Erebus, cadaverous dead, of brides / Of youths and of the old who had borne much.” Parked long-term visibly on a corner of his desk was the line from Ginsberg, “the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies.” That felt right that night. It could be heard even in the vertical note on the side of the page. No meter. No rhyme. The sound of the words. The rawness of the images.

Previously he had written a lyric that was a list of the names of the nurses and doctors who were killers who either were inept enough or flamboyant enough to get caught. That didn’t rhyme. What if he wrote a song that was a list of all the things he knew about love, but perhaps from the vantage of what it would feel like if he couldn’t see her again – which was a thought that would keep him up late another night as he wrote words that some later described as “out there.” Most of the voices in his new musical pieces were humming inside drums now. When any weren’t, “out there” accurately described the lyrics he had them speak or sing. For instance, the verses a song he separated the abrupt stop of the music for the spoken “When’re you gonna to get a car?” with music abruptly resuming. This progressed to incomplete phrases and even single words sewn into the music, seemingly randomly sometimes.

The first place he drove Lil, without someone else along, was to a tire store in the sunny early afternoon the day after dinner with her parents. When he arrived at her house, she bounded out her front door as he was pulling in the driveway. Without having had time to turn the engine off, he leaned across to reach from inside to open her door for her as he smiled for the first time that day. When they reached the parking lot, she jumped out her door as quickly as he got out of his, but he took her by the hand, led her back to her side of the van, leaned her against it and put his arms around her. It had been a such long night of writing lyrics and tunes about life without her like, finally, a wordless one called “Postponing my accidental death till she finds someone else.” When she asked if everything was alright, she looked up at his face as he said, “This is helping. . . so much.” She tucked the side of her face into his neck. They stayed there quite a while.

In the lobby, as a salesman was showing him tires, she looked at car magazines, or tried to. When done choosing tires, he looked at the displays of the expensive cast rims popular with muscle car owners and found they hummed when tapped with a fingernail. People with classical guitar training have well-kept fingernails of a certain length on their right hands for “picking,” and often swallow gelatin tablets, as he did, to increase the strength of them. His could do drum rolls. Or the opposite and create soft melodies by moving from rim to rim. Tapping in different places produced different pitches. He learned the locations of the pitches of one rim, moved to the next, and then the next until he knew where to hit each one to get which notes. Their amazingly long sustain was working for him as he struck notes far enough apart to need only slow steps between rims. When he happened to look up at Lil, she was smiling at him.  He guessed that might be because of having a boyfriend who, in the presence of fancy car parts, thought only about how to use them to make music, and in this case, a soulful sound that he hoped to her would feel like that quiet hug by the van had felt to him.

Miricle’s agent, Mort, got him a day in a studio to get professional overdubbing and then sent a copy of it to Harry Nilsson among others, one of whom shared it with David Crosby who came to hear this percussive event live.  Afterwards Mort and Miricle and Crosby talked. Crosby told Miricle they would talk again.

Mort arranged a gig on a weeknight. It didn’t pay, but it was with Harry Nilsson and a few of the other known musicians. Harry Nilsson was living on his compositions and vocals and had sung on commercials and sold songs to the Monkees. Miricle wanted to meet him. And also wanted to know how Mort got him to play live. It was known Nilsson suffered from debilitating stage fright. But he would be a draw for industry people who could book them as a group for paying gigs. So, Miricle went that night without any of his friends. Nilsson arrived drunk and high and couldn’t stay in key or on beat. Miricle guessed Nilsson must have accepted the gig when he was too high to know what he was doing. It was known he had substance abuse problems. Put that together with stage fright and you can get a disaster like this. Everyone knew why it was, but still it was a disaster. Nothing came of it. Who was going to book a group prone to this kind of disaster?

Mort also found people who were looking for compositions. Sometimes the ones Miricle wrote for them went into a stack where they floated around indefinitely. One group recorded one and then broke up. Someone else took one saying he was going to use it in a lounge act on the Holiday Inn circuit. Would that ever turn into money? There were jingle submissions. And then there were the compositions no one would even look at, the ones with nothing but frame drums and lyrics, as well as pieces with nothing but voices, sometimes with unusual instruments.

A year after their previous conversation, Crosby called to see if Miricle had any new compositions. “Of course.” So, they got together and picked for a while and then got to talking. On Miricle’s mind was the rumor he had heard about Fogerty’s vowing never to write another song and what he thought Fogerty should do.

If Miricle had not sprained his ankle, he would have talked to Fogerty already. He mentioned that to friends who said he should get it looked at. He responded that he was writing a song about a fourteenth century barber in France, back when barbers pulled teeth and administered cures. They were the neighborhood medical clinics of their day. One got caught turning patients into meat pies. “That’s where you have to start. To understand medicine, you have to start there.”

His friends said, “Really? With meat pies?” and “That is what you are writing songs about?” and “Not exactly top forty, is it?” He told them they were proof of how right Engels was. They said, “At least get crutches,” and “Fogerty’s not going to wait forever,”

He almost never talked about meat pie medicine. He tried not to tell Lil too often that there wasn’t enough honest information in medicine for anyone to be able to have anything but faith in it. And people love faith. And, you can’t argue with faith, making it too frustrating even to mention. But limping made mentioning it unavoidable. Now it creeped into his songs even when he wasn’t limping. It felt like it was supposed to, like he had been put on this earth to sing that warning. But it had to compete with Lil now. And love songs are what you want to sing.

Suddenly, everything had to be put on hold. Mort telephoned to say there was a cancellation on Monday night at the Troubadour. Could Miricle put something together in time? Damn straight he could. That was the usual night for his crowd. He did not mention his ankle. Mort started suggesting name performers he thought he could get, but Miricle refused. Other performers could not possibly synchronize with what his group had been doing. He did not want another opportunity blown by name performers. In Mort’s silence, you could feel his frustration.

As soon as Miricle hung up, he called Lil and Paul. They agreed to be his crutches and help him get around. The trickiest part of this was how to tell the musicians. If they knew where they were going, all of their parents would want to come, and that would make them look like suburban amateurs putting on the equivalent of a high school play in a gymnasium. It would have to appear to the kids that they were going to a normal night at the café, except for expecting it to be too crowded for friends or family to come. They were to sit in the audience when they arrived to make sure no one else got in. He did not tell them that two buses would pull up to take them and their instruments away. On board, they would be told.

Still, they were going to look like high school kids. How could that be changed? One of the ideas he and Lil tossed around was having everyone wear collarless tee shirts, but with neckties and hats. But having them bring costumes from home would draw too much interest from people he didn’t want to have thinking about this. In the end, they got clown white makeup for everyone’s lips and eyebrows. The kids could put it on each other on the buses. They screamed when they heard where the buses were taking them. And applying the makeup to each other turned out to be almost a miracle for the way it unified them and got them tuned into each other. By the end of the ride, spontaneously they were warming up playing their music on the bus.

At the Troubadour, the kids filled the stage and spilled over onto the floor where they stood in front of it. They worked this out on their own while Lil and Paul helped Miricle get around outside arranging where the buses would wait and how the buses would know when to come back. By the time Miricle got back inside, the kids had everything setup up well enough. They even had done the sound check. While the audience trickled in, he had all the kids face the back of the stage, told them it was okay to whisper to each other if they could do it motionlessly without turning their heads, but he would rather there were no instrument sounds.

Mort caught Miricle’s eye and motioned for him to come backstage. Miricle managed to limp through everyone to get there. Mort said people were saying it seemed as though someone must have purposely been keeping anyone from finding out about whatever this was with so many people involved and no one knowing anything about it. Mort said that was good gossip.

After the house lights lowered, Miricle hobbled to his position next to Lil at a microphone and stood motionless in the dark. When the stage lights rose, he gave a signal and everyone, on beat, made a solitary crash that glided into a deep drum-hum from a hundred performers that slowly became melodic as the players rose and turned to face the audience filling the place with the warmest sound. During one of the movements, on top of the drum-humming there was an accent from a brief flute duet between Miricle and one of the girls. There was a similar duet underneath the louder main theme from Miricle and one of the guys on violins. And then, of course, there were the “out there” lyrics interlacing some pieces.

Taking center stage more often than he ever did in rehearsals, the bridge between two of the movements was a quiet one in which Miricle and Lil hummed harmonies into mic’d drums to let the audience hear the sound that could be made with just two performers with amplification. Then, above her continued drum humming, he belted an unmic’d vocal to show he could as part of the transition to the next movement.

They went through half of the different sounds and rhythms they knew, showing off some of the odd instruments, the sections with voices only, one of which had only one singer, and a few of the more outlandish of the compositions. There is so much you can feel about an audience without looking at it, but with these original compositions, there were times when he could not resist looking to see how they were going over. There was enough spill-light to see some of the audience, but when the music stops is when, in that next moment, you best can tell if you had an affect on anyone. If it is quiet at that moment, if they are not whispering or reaching in pockets, but just quiet, it can be because you reached them deeply enough to have put them in that moment.

However, there was not such a moment at the very end because the audience leaped into a standing ovation. Mort beckoned Miricle backstage again and said, “It’s unbelievable. It’s all happening. Your taking that moment to show what just two of you can do with drum-humming and a mic, and then your voice unmic’d, was a very smart move. Industry people want to talk to you. I didn’t dream you would strike like this. You hit some chord and they want to talk. Don’t let anyone talk you into signing anything tonight. I’m making appointments for during the week.”

Miricle didn’t have time to sign anything. It was a school night and the parents of about a hundred kids were going to be pulling up to the empty bar in which they had been told their kids would be waiting. With Lil and Paul on either side of him being his crutches, they were working their way to the front door when a man gripped Paul’s elbow to stop them. He said his name. None of them recognized it. He said he made movies and would it be possible for all hundred of them to work on a sound track with him? Miricle pointed to the doorway off-stage and told him to ask his agent, Mort. When the three of them reached the front door, Miricle stopped and the three of them turned to face everyone else and began “the triplets.”

When as many as fifty people had become the number showing up at the café, he gave them, and every new person who came after that, one of six beats on which to clap in order to make triplets by clapping. Most had one of the two emphasized claps. The other four claps were quieter. With practice it became as fast and as crisp as triplets performed by a drummer with sticks on a tom-tom, but coming from all over the room gave it a stereo effect. It was Miricle’s thought that sooner or later it would become part of some composition, just like other sounds they had practiced in this same way without knowing if they ever would be useful. When the three of them at the front door started the triplets, they became useful.

Immediately, a dozen kids joined and within just several more claps a hundred were facing Miricle making that unified drum roll. After a bit, in response to his slight chin rise followed by a quick nod, everyone stopped on the same beat. The audience had become silent to watch. Paul already had already gone to get the buses. With a sweep of one hand, Miricle directed the kids out the door and, without another word, they picked up their instruments and quietly began filing out when someone in the audience clapped and the rest of the audience joined in. It was as impressive as anything else that night. For the kids, it was just a normal thing they were used to doing, only this time going out the door instead of into a musical movement. But this was the first time they were being applauded for it. They didn’t know if it was okay to show emotion, but they beamed.

The real jubilation though, was watching kids, when they got back, running from buses to parents in cars to tell them what just had happened.

 

 

It was the next day that the sixteen-year-old boy and the thirty-four-year-old nurse were in the exam room with his answering yet another of her questions about Fogerty and Crosby when Dr. Shiver entered. Miricle watched her respond to this as she had to that x-ray nurse. While hearing first-person accounts of the rock stars she dreams about, she appeared to be displeased when being interrupted again. Miricle appeared just to want to learn what the x-rays showed and get out of there.

Sarah told Dr. Shiver that it looked like a sprained ankle. As he examined it, he asked Miricle what school he went to. Sarah said, “He doesn’t go to school. He’s a rock star.” It was as though someone had poked Dr. Shiver with something sharp, he became competitive so quickly. “Is that so?” he almost growled. Recovering, but still pointedly, he asked, “And where are you playing right now?”

The most accurate answer Miricle could give was to shrug quietly that last night he had performed at the Troubadour.

“No way! No fucking way!” said Sarah putting a hand to her mouth to apologize for her language.

Dismissively the doctor asked, “What’s the Troubadour?”

“Oh my god,” she continued. “It’s where on Sunday night no one has heard of you, but by Tuesday everyone has. It’s where everyone gets their start. Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Linda Ronstadt, Billy Joel, Tom Waits, Neil Diamond. Jesus Christ, everybody. And today is his Tuesday. And he’s right here with us!”

“I guess you’ve got a fan,” said the doctor as though it was a bother to have to acknowledge it. “So, I’ll be able to tell my kids I knew you when?”

As someone handed the x-rays to Dr. Shiver, Miricle said, “I wouldn’t count on that. When I think of all the things that went wrong this year…”

While looking at the x-rays, Dr. Shiver said, “I guess in your field you get attention from lots of young women.” It was said so dismissively, almost derisively, that Miricle appeared not know how to respond.

Dr. Shiver did not say anything about staying off his ankle, or icing it, or taking aspirin to reduce the swelling. The only thing Miricle had come to find out was whether it was fractured. But the doctor did not tell him. And Sarah did not look at the x-ray. Dr. Shiver already was in the hallway when, as the door was closing, almost whispering he told her to “give him the tetanus shot.” She nodded and was gone. Waiting, he mumbled another tune and lyric:

“No skin had been broken

“So, what is the shot for

“When he tried to ask her

“She just closed the door.

“But when she comes back in

“He wants an answer

“What could cause tetanus

“And that rhymes with answer”

Backing up to try to fix the last line several times, “Cancer, Dancer, Prancer,” he was giving up and rewriting out loud to change the rhyme when she opened the door asking if he was singing one of the songs from the Troubadour. The question “Why this shot?” was postponed while answering that and then another string of questions that had her glowing at hearing about her rock stars again.

This would be the first shot he ever had gotten. Afterall, he was only a sixteen-year-old in the hands of an authority, and one who treated him like she was his biggest fan. So, in spite of all that he had read, and in spite of all of his dread, submissively, he merely watched as she held her left hand in a way that hid the syringe from his view. What he could see only was the needle being inserted and then the motion of her other hand as she pushed the air in the needle into him, putting back into his heart all the air Lil had squeezed out of it. When he began to slump, the last thing he was aware of was her guiding him into a resting position on the exam table.

When his parents saw the death certificate, it showed only that Dr. Shiver had listed the cause of death as “cardiopulmonary arrest,” one of the most frequently cited causes of death in medicine. It means that the heart stopped, which it does whenever someone dies no matter what the cause. Nothing else having to do with this was in the record, nothing about a tetanus shot was written down and no needle was taken from inventory. Just as there was nothing in the record, other than the omission of a lab test, when that first nurse told Miricle he never had cancer in the first place. That nurse discovered that not getting lab tests and treating patients almost to death when they never had cancer in the first place was routine for that surgeon. When she tried to notify the hospital, explaining that’s why he had such a high success rate and so much income, the hospital, for trying to sully the reputation of one of their most highly respected physicians, drummed her out of the industry. She never was able to work in medicine again. However, Nurse Sarah stayed where she was for the rest of her career.

John Fogerty didn’t write another song for fifty years. Sweeny Todd, based on that same fourteenth century serial about a barber, but without drawing the same parallels, opened on Broadway some years later. The sheet music and tape recordings of Miricle’s songs landed in his parents’ attic in boxes that were not opened for a long time. When they were opened, the songs about Lil made them wonder if they should try to find her and send them to her. They had met Lil and her parents at his funeral. She never got over him.

He was part of Nurse Sarah’s collection now.

 

Considering how he got here, wouldn’t a person with this much drive wake up someplace again?