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Obit

A t-shirt ripper with a rock star

Copyrighted © December 16, 2025
by Joel Selmeier

A sixteen-year-old-boy who had spent his youth haranguing his parents to get him the music lessons he would need to become a rock star, and a thirty-four-year-old nurse who had spent her youth haranguing other children into playing hospital with her because none of them ever would do it a second time, met in a three-year-old medical clinic founded and run by three doctors. It was the eighth place Nurse Sarah had worked, and the first place where they did not suggest she find work elsewhere in medicine. It was the first place Mark Miricle ever had been persuaded to go for medical help.

Approaching its entrance, he wondered why there isn’t an inscription above these modern gates to hell, as he hopped, on one sandaled foot, to the double wooden doors. The reflection of the California sun in one of the tall narrow windows by the handles practically burned his eyes. Once inside, the place still smelled new, with vaulted ceilings, Ficus trees, and upscale carpet.

He dreaded, truly dreaded, anything having to do with health care. It was his feeling that we are but guppies in a tank who are allowed to live until someone in medicine is hungry and eats us. “Take serial killers in medicine for example.” But his friends had scoffed saying, “If a serial killer were discovered 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 wrong, 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 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 do that wrong.” This went on until finally they wore him down to where he was here, warily hopping into a medical facility, because he had been persuaded that he would burn in ankle-hell forever if he didn’t. He scanned everyone and everything in the lobby as the receptionist asked if he had an appointment. A bit ahead of schedule, he hopped behind her as she led him to an exam room where he sat for a long while before Nurse Sarah arrived.

Nurse Sarah was rounder than she believed she was. Her nurse’s uniform pulled tight in the wrong places because she was incapable of understanding that she needed a larger size. Reading the questions on a clipboard she asked. “It’s pronounced the same?”

“Yes. Miricle.”

“Just replace the a with an i?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Where do you go to school?”

“I don’t.”

“You don’t go to school?”

“No.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a singer/songwriter.”

As is common with people who are face to face with patients every day, she habitually appeared understanding and compassionate and did not dig uncomfortably deeply with this young man while asking only, “Anything I might know about?”

“Do you know about John Fogerty?”

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

“I’m about to meet him on a beach. So, I am here to get crutches so I can make it across the sand.”

Not wanting to sound skeptical, even though she and knew Fogerty was the composer/singer/brains behind Credence Clearwater Revival, one of the biggest bands in the world, gently she asked, “And how is it you are meeting John Fogerty on a beach?”

“I was talking to David Crosby and he said I should tell Fogerty what I told him.”

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

“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 created three albums. One became the largest selling jazz album in history.

“Crosby told me I should tell that to Fogerty. So, to see how that might work for Fogerty, I went to the library and got out-of-copyright poetry and music and, with some changes, in an hour I composed three songs. 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.”

Nurse Sarah, almost gasping, said, “This is the most interesting thing I have ever heard. Here you are, talking in the first person, about the magic rock stars I listen to. I wish I could keep you here forever talking about this.”

Someone leaned in the door saying they were ready to x-ray him. She had to let him go for now.

Miricle had wanted to be a rock music composer his whole life, even before a morning years earlier, when he woke up in the middle of a recurring dream he had about being in Los Angeles, young and “in the industry” composing music, like he always had wanted to, but never had gotten to. The dream was interrupted by the bird sounds he used to wake up to as a child in Ohio, back when no one had air conditioning and so windows were open all night. But now he did have air conditioning, so he thought he still was dreaming when he opened his eyes and saw the bedroom in which he had grown up. It seemed like the most real dream that ever could be dreamed, birds and all. Until he sat up. His body was tiny, like a child’s. To himself he said, “What? What? Was last night when I was dreaming?” Last night there had been lights in his eyes, people looking at him, and was old. Had that been the dream? Because this was real. When he went to get out of the bed, he had to slide down to get his tiny feet to the floor. “What the hell?”

He ran to his parents’ room and stood in the doorway. There they were, asleep, just like so many years ago. . . “Jesus Christ,” he thought. “Is this how it starts? Do we go back to the beginning and for a brief moment remember our past lives and then 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. 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 without a guardian hired by you or related to you watching. Never.”

He was about to write why, which would take several pages, but he wanted to make sure he first squeezed out 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 was he going 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 know how long you are going to live? Stop telling your friends you’re going to divorce him because you never are going to? 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, while he still remembered this, 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 Cheerios. Too bad they are bad for you because sugar and whole milk bound together by the toasted “Oh” shaped grain sure was going down easy, he thought as he read the ingredients on the box.

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. Already he had 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.”

He wanted to tell them everything he knew about the future, but he imagined getting dragged to some child psychologist and force-fed prescriptions to bring him back to reality. So, after breakfast, since he did not yet know how to get away with reading a newspaper, he tried to pretend to care about toys. How was he going to deal with other children? He suspected this rare moment of this awareness was going to be too brief for this to be a worry for long anyway and 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 this 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.

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 was saying, “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, 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. Little did she know that as soon as he got piano lessons, he was going to ask that teacher where he could get voice lessons. Pavarotti, in an interview a long time ago, said 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. That would be perfect for rock and roll, which was where he wanted to be. He was going to do whatever he could while he still had these thoughts about getting on that path.

With his piano teacher, he was as persistent as he had been with his mother, and finally 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 that day), 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 that 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 was long past remembering how he knew these things; he just 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 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. 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 might 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 repeated some of what he had said to the teacher.

“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 whatever the ruling class is comfortable believing about itself. Like us in medicine where their records record almost nothing uncomfortable for them. 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. “Just be careful not to let someone 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 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.”

Miricle had not thought of that. If he got really desperate for money, say after running away . . . And then he wondered if people in a bar would laugh at his 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 that?” It disturbed him to have thought of that. Christ. How long could he survive without female companionship? 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, he were 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 he saw 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 see enough to be a good story in a bar . . . unless I dramatized what I saw. Hmmmm.”

After getting the 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.

Other children were childish. Instead, he read. In his small, local branch library, he would read an aspersion about medicine, and through an interlibrary loan get the book listed in its 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 another 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 it aside. That was the problem he was trying to figure out how to solve until he turned seven and his father told him he was old enough to take over mowing the lawn. A light bulb turned on.

To achieve his dream of becoming a composer, he was going to need money. This made 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 do 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 by complaining about his work and didn’t want to get involved. So, Miricle retrieved an old typewriter from the attic and mailed the typed quotes. 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 removal and snow removal?

Lawn tractors were advertised in the newspaper! They cut grass, collect leaves, and push snow all with one engine. He showed his father his expected income and how long it would take to pay off the equipment if his father lent him the money. The blank expression on his father’s face worried him. Later he would overhear his father telling a friend that, in fact, he 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 rather than earning money. But Miricle did not know that yet and did not want to have to overcome an initial disinclination if he wasn’t 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 telling stories about it later. Although, even to him, this did seem better than reading about nurses who year after year murdered children. The sailing the next summer was kind of cool too.

Miricle got the equipment, got more business, and eventually got Jake, an employee. Then within a year a bookkeeper because the taxes and government forms had been so time-consuming, they got in the way of practicing music for as many hours per day as he had before all the sports and yard jobs. Unfortunately, there were things Jake could not do for him. 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. The most time-consuming part of it 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 he was 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 key. When allowed to think about it for a while, too many of them stopped thinking about it. It had to be 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 that gave him the strongest sense of déjà vu. The building had water on both sides. Its back was on the intercoastal waterway where there were docks for the residents. Its front was on the road, but immediately across the road was the beach and the Atlantic 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, but now 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 negotiate, 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 any documents anyway. He could not get the lawyer past that. No creativity there. So, Miricle went to the builder. The builder couldn’t 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 it. Miricle’s let the real estate lawyer believe that there would be an adult co-signer as he 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 for a song no one ever would hear. He was not at all confident about 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 were 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. Much later it 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 $25,000 to buy one. It hadn’t been even a year and they had doubled in value. He hesitated wondering how long and how fast they might continue to appreciate if he held them, but Florida real estate had a history of being one of the worst long-term investments you could make. He sold it and then the realtor sold 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 did have 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 what he said 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, 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.

He had so many feelings that he didn’t understand. Like he had no idea of what caused him to refuse to go to a doctor. The first time he caught a cold, his parents tried to take him to a doctor. Nothing could get him to go. But still, even after having read enough about medicine to be able to quote authorities to bolster his arguments about what a lawless and unaccountable place medicine was, no one was persuaded. He told them, “There was a nurse who kept an empty, used hypodermic needle in a glasses case in her purse for when she was inclined to pump air into a patient’s vein in order 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.

“What would people think

“What will you turn into

“When before in history

“Name somebody else who”

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

“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.”

Not yet confident enough to show his lyrics to anyone else, to him they seemed only to recite the verbiage surrounding the feelings. They didn’t make you feel the feelings. Lyrics had to take you someplace. Sometimes his displeasure with his lyrics made him worry that running this lawncare business might be 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 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, would bugle-playing help? Instead of taking lessons with these 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 was brilliant. It got so he could hear a song and play it without seeing music. And these wind instruments did so much to help connect him to his diaphragm for singing. He wished he could figure out something similar to get better with lyrics, but if he didn’t, learning everything he could about instruments and voice and music he hoped would help him get somewhere anyway.

And then testosterone kicked in. Wow. 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 prove to be, he started doing pushups and pullups and curls and sit-ups, etc.

“Oh testosterone

“Greatest gift I’ve ever known

“Got me smiling ear to ear

“What’s going to happen

“With another year?”

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 so that he could figure out how to put together a career as a composer. 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.”

It was another of the kind of negotiations in which one party merely was defeated. 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. One morning he woke up having laid down in the dark on an ant hill. But there was no dew. It was dry in LA. That made sense but never had crossed his mind. It was a more comfortable place to sleep outside than the Midwest. He had not expected this. And he was surprised he saw no lightning bugs in LA (which, of course, became a lyric). Paying for normal travel-with-lodging would shorten his stay and not give him this kind of ground-level information about his new habitat.

For days he walked 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.

In discouragement, one morning he gave up and walked away from the campus. After a couple of hours of meandering, he did not know where he was, but there was a note on a café window 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. 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.

Miricle said, “On weekend nights, I imagine the jazz would be loud in 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, 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. Without a towel he took a shower in the clawfoot bathtub that had a shower curtain encircling it. The peppermint in Dr. Bronners was wonderful at times like these. He wrote to his parents giving them the address to which to ship a few of his instruments and walked outside in search of sheets and eggs. It felt like it had taken a life and a half to get there.

The plan had been to arrange music lessons before anything else. 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 a witty 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 hadn’t occurred to him that exercising might have been valuable for that too, but on the bus on the way back, a gorgeous blonde, who got on right after him, sat next to him. 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, he would learn, with the way girls talk, that while growing up Lil’s friends usually had crushes on various celebrities – actors, singers, and such. Once in a while, just to fit in, she would pick one just 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 the usual banter with friends as they watched the people near them playing volleyball. When the ball rolled out of bounds, down a grade, onto a dock, and ran the entire length of it before rolling off the end of it into the water, Miricle became the subject of their running commentary as he ran and followed it off the dock. When he stopped to pull off his shorts before diving into the water to get it, his bathing suit had been white and there was a gasp from a few girls momentarily thinking it was his underwear. After climbing back out and kicking the ball 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.

They said that as usual, Lil only listened and watched. Later she had seen two other girls get in a canoe with him. After that, she saw he also knew how to sail. Eventually, her friends learned 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. Later, Lil was on a stone ledge sitting next to Ben when Miricle did that to Ben, walked up to him and said, “You just made an air-guitar gesture. Do you play?” The two of them 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 to Lil, “Hi.” She said “Hi.” And he smiled and left. He didn’t remember doing that. The rest of the afternoon, no matter how far away he was, she always was aware of where he was. Without making any effort to pay attention, she just knew. So, when the buses showed up 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. As she sat down next to him, he was unfolding a map and she asked, “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.”

Her friends had pointed out to her that he didn’t brag. He asked her about herself. When he heard about this, he knew this wasn’t because he was a precocious charmer. It just happened that on the earlier bus, he had seen what happened when he let the conversation become about himself. That took over and he didn’t get to learn what he wanted to know about them. So, that day he started steering conversations straight into finding out if others played an instrument. That newly formed habit put him on the path of asking her about herself instead of talking about himself, a very lucky happenstance that she said she liked.

On the bus he had listened to her answers until he needed to ask the driver if she could let him off at the next light. That is when he finally asked Lil if he could have her phone number, another habit he had formed that day with the few musicians with whom it seemed worth keeping in touch. As the bus pulled away, she said she saw him standing on the sidewalk looking at her number. After that, every time the phone rang at her house, she listened to see if whoever answered it said it was for her.

Hearing about all this made it clear to him that this was dumb luck, just lucky circumstances that keep two people from saying or doing anything off-putting for long enough to find each other. Neither of them felt lightning bolts the first time they saw each other. She had heard the right kind of gossip. And he took the chance of asking for her phone number. As she recited it, he had struggled to write it on the front of the open map. 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 up the map.

When he was having trouble writing on the unfolded map, instead of repeating her number again, she had slid her hand inside his to take the pen saying, “Let me.” Her hand sliding inside his, and then pressing down on his thigh to have something on which to write. . . And when the paper curled, using her left hand to smooth it flat. . .  Watching her do that as he felt the point of the pen dragging on his thigh. That was when he looked at her face and her arms as they reached across her own lap to reach his. Her calmly wanting to do what would keep them in touch. It was the first time he had asked a girl for her phone number. The way he received the answer stirred him in ways he never before had been stirred.

After that, even though wanting to be careful not to call too soon, he wasn’t disciplined enough to wait for more than two days before breaking down and calling. She commented on the traffic noise in the background. He said he had only the 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 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 are like this no matter who you are. It was the first time for him too. When they hung up, holding the map still folded open to her number, he skipped down the street. He would keep that map folded open 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 just didn’t do it. If words didn’t do it, could music? “What rhythm feels like skipping? Do you need a tune to create the feeling of skipping? 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 could 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 to an advocate about the futility of trying to report anything that happens in medicine where no one makes records and no one will testify about anything. He did not know where his he got this obsession with the darkness that was so foundational to the medical profession, but he could not help but zero in on references to such and follow them. It kept turning into the lyrics he wrote as warnings (the monster spider with its web spread across the whole country) while the entire rest of the country stupidly swallowed the self-serving perspective of the spider. But how dark does anyone want music to be? Skipping was better.

Skipping was what he continued feeling like singing about until he found himself with her and a group that included people one- and two-years younger, hanging out in someone’s backyard while he was trying to find 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. He woke up thinking about her. She was in his mind even when he was thinking about something else. It was calming. It made sense. 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. It wasn’t appealing. And, already thinking she and he were a solid thing, had thought that with Miricle she was going to be competing 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 thought perhaps he 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 who might play instruments for all he knew. The guitar player had expensive equipment. That didn’t really matter, but 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?”

“How would we get from place to place?”

“Cab?”

“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 his 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 make any sense 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, 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. He would get 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 to stand it.

As time went on, 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 wrote pitches to new addresses provided by Jake. There were a number of complications with this, but Miricle remembered his father distressing his mom by complaining about work. Miricle 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. Fogerty proved that worked. But Brian Wilson slipped a glockenspiel into a song and George Harrison was playing a sitar. Since it didn’t have to be guitars, Miricle began collecting cheap, used instruments to get other sounds: a double bell euphonium, that he fixed, from a pawn shop; a flute, a recorder, a lyre, a circular digeridoo of which he never before had heard, 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 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 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.

Employing the 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. That was 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 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. If other instruments were going to be added, that could be figured out later. He got on the phone. Someone said she could bring a tambourine. Another could bring maracas. Bongos, congas. He wasn’t sure he wanted any of those but he didn’t want to say “no” to anyone. He also wasn’t sure this many people were going to fit on the stage. He mailed tape recordings of the new drum pieces he was composing to as many people as he could stand to pay for. He rationalized paying for the tapes and 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.

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 a valuable experience seeing which of his songs got chosen for that. But no one could cover these drum compositions. Still, so many wanted to be part of them. Especially 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. 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 violin sometime.” For them he was the 15-year-old trained monkey they hoped people might come to see – though Miricle had not 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 and he met and then returned to take her back 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.”

After that, the gossipy explanations would intersperse other discussions for a long time about how she and he came to be together, from his chasing the volley ball to calling from a pay phone. He slid his hand up her back under her top and 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 under a raised deck in someone’s backyard, shadows of friends could be seen in the darkness on the lawn beyond them, when he said, “I walked here.”

“You didn’t hitch?”

“Last week, when I had my hands on your back under your blouse, it was like opening a parenthesis that I would spend the week thinking about 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 coming to see you. I had to start walking toward you not knowing, never expecting, 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.”

“One of us had to do it.”

“You made the journey worth it.”

“How long did it take?”

“I measured the distance on the map. I knew 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.”

That line was straight off the page of a lyric he was working on. She tightened her hug around him. With their arms wrapped around each other, him leaning on a post, she leaning on him, she asked, “When are you going to get a car?” And he knew her question was going to become the last line of that verse.

“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.”

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?”

He could not imagine being without her. She was the best thing of all the things that there were – words that first would try to become lyrics, but felt as though words wouldn’t do it. What if he held a megaphone to his heart, and held that to a frame drum; he would find out the next time he woke up in his studio.

It was almost all guys with electric instruments who were coming to “his” stage until he introduced frame drums. He moved his tape decks to the stage for these sessions. When he sent recordings of pieces on which he and Lil hummed into drums with a few unusual (to them) instruments accenting it, 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, but his 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 fine. Miricle bought more than the rest of them combined and let kids 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. They had heard Lil’s humming on the tape. 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 they could sing into drums in a chorus that made a different sound than they had ever 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.

The guys who now 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 an 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 miked 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 and violin 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 with that and 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 they 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 were a mattress in the back. There wasn’t. 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 arm around him in a deep hug.

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.”

“You could be right about that.” It was a statement that 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 was the best I could come up with. 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 said the 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 smokey café with a stage. It never would have happened if I had been living in a suburban house playing in the 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?”

“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 she said, “No way!”

“He didn’t tell you?

“No.”

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

“First I’m hearing.”

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

Lil said she said, “He’s such a rock star.”

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

“No.”

Lil said she said, “Then can I live with him?” But they pretended they didn’t hear that.

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

Worn out stairway leading up to my apartment

Where you’d never even been to where I do dream

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

Restless traffic out my window singing to us

A few hours later, he wrote a note on the side of that first page, perpendicular to the rest of it, before he put that page back underneath the subsequent ones, that this verse had been “The first of many discarded 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, and embezzled money from them, had inspired a rougher vernacular that sometimes had to be written without rhyming. Tonight, for these darker lyrics, that felt right. It could be heard even in this vertical note on the side of the page and not rhyming became a new part of his repertoire.

One time previously he had written a lyric that was a list of names of the nurses and doctors who were killers who were inept enough or flamboyant enough to get caught. And that didn’t rhyme. What if he wrote a song that was a list of all the things he knew about love, perhaps about what it would feel like if he couldn’t see her again?

It kept him up late that night.

The first place he drove Lil without someone else along was the next day to a tire store. When he picked her up at her house, she came out of her front door before he had made it from his microbus to it. They went to opposite sides of the van, climbed in their own doors and drove away. When they reached the parking lot, she climbed out of 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 long night of writing such sad songs about what life would be like without her. As he stood quietly hugging her even after she asked if everything was alright, he said, “It is now.” She hugged back and they leaned there for a while.

In the lobby, as a salesman was showing him tire choices, she looked at car magazines. 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 take gelatin tablets, as he did, to increase the strength of them. His could do drum rolls. Or do 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 stay in key. 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 looking at him smiling.  He guessed she might be smiling about 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, soulful music that felt like that quiet hug by the van.

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 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, some with frame drums with lyrics along with normal melody and normal instruments, as well as pieces with nothing but drums or 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 a rumor he had heard about Fogerty’s vowing never to write another song. Miricle said it would be a tragedy that could not be allowed to happen and told Crosby what he thought Fogerty should do. Crosby called Fogerty.

If Miricle had not sprained his ankle, he would have talked to Fogerty already. He mentioned 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 say to 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 you can’t argue with faith. But limping made mentioning it unavoidable. 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 a warning about medicine, but now it had to compete with Lil. 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. 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.

As soon as he 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 busses 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 bus.

On the buses, they screamed when they heard. And applying 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 busses 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 correctly. 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 and the stage lights rose, Miricle hobbled to his position and stood motionless for a moment. Then he gave a signal and everyone, on beat, made a solitary crash that glided into a deep hum from the frame drums that slowly became melodic as the players rose and turned around. About a hundred unmiked performers filled the place with the warmest sound. After one of the movements, there was a quiet moment during which Miricle held a mic to a frame drum as he hummed into it to let the audience hear the sound that could be made with just one performer with amplification. Then belted the transition to the next movement with his voice unmiked to show he could.

They went through half of the different sounds and rhythms they knew, showing off many of the odd instruments, the sections with voices only, two of which had only one or two singers, and the fact that it all was original compositions.

They got a standing ovation. Mort beckoned Miricle backstage again. He said, “It’s unbelievable. It’s all happening. 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 setting up appointments for during the week.”

Miricle didn’t have time for anyone to try to get him 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 went to the front door where he stopped and had the three of them turn back and begin “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. But when the three of them at the front door started the triplets, they became useful.

Immediately, a dozen kids joined and within just several claps a hundred were facing Miricle making that unified drum roll, all of which stopped on one beat in response to his slight chin rise followed by a quick nod. The audience had become silent to watch. Paul already had already gone to get the busses. 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 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 busses to parents in cars to tell them what just had happened.

The day after that is where we started, with the sixteen-year-old boy and the thirty-four-year-old nurse arriving in the same exam room. When he was back from getting x-rayed, he was answering yet another question from Nurse Sarah about Fogerty and Crosby when Dr. Shiver came in. Again, Sarah wanted more time listening to Miricle talk about rock stars. He just wanted to hear what the x-ray revealed and get out of there.

She told Dr. Shiver that it appeared to be 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.”

The doctor became competitive. He was used to being the rock star himself in his nurses’ eyes in his own exam room as he said, “Is that so?” He assumed Miricle to be a young wanna-be whose talk was bigger than his accomplishments. To diminish him in his nurse’s eyes, 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 night 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 here with us.”

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

Miricle said, “I wouldn’t count on that. When I think of all the things that went wrong this year.”

Someone came in with the x-rays. As the doctor looked at them, he said, “I guess in your field you get attention from lots of young women.” It was said so dismissively, almost derisively, that Miricle did not know how to respond as he was thinking about how adamantly people in medicine protest that there is no competition, no conflicts of interest, between doctors and patients. With this doctor there was even just for the attention of a nurse.

Dr. Shiver did not feel like being helpful. He didn’t tell him to stay off his ankle, or to ice it, or to take aspirin to reduce the swelling. The only thing Miricle had come to find out was whether it was fractured. But the doctor was not in the mood to be helpful. And Sarah did not look at the x-ray. After Dr. Shiver already was in the hallway, as the door was closing, almost whispering he told Sarah to administer a tetanus shot. Miricle heard that, but by the time he thought to ask “Why that shot?” she had gone to get it. 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 it several times, “Cancer. Dancer. Prancer. Shmancer,” he was giving up and was 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 to answer her string of questions. Glowing from feeling as though she were inside that world with him, she listened.

This was the first time he had gotten a shot. Afterall, he only was a sixteen-year-old in the hands of an authority, and one who treated him like she was his biggest fan. So, 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 on the needle. When he began to slump, the last thing he saw was her guiding him into a resting position on the exam table.

When his parents saw the autopsy, 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. No tetanus was mentioned. No needle had been taken from inventory.

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 track her down and send them to her. They had met Lil and her parents at his funeral. She never got over him.

He was part Nurse Sarah’s collection now.