A Guitar and a Pen Read online

  Career Day

  Robbie Fulks

  A feeling of greatness just around the corner has been a constant in my life. It tends to peak—I’ve noticed it only afterward—just as I am about to go traipsing into a nest of armed criminals or fall into an open manhole. It is a signal, in other words, a malign light blinking a yellow warning, dear dull old Mother Nature’s way of portending calamity by inculcating cheer. I have come to rely on it, though a little late. The conviction that “This is going to be great!” plunged me blindly into marriage in the midnineties, and a short while later into the high-tech market. Since the (suspiciously closely timed) collapse of both, I have paid careful attention to all premonitions of personal glory, making sure to stop my ears and run the other way.

  Who knows why the emergency systems were down the day my wife, a classically attractive ice sculptress of Mitteleuropean stock, broke the news that she had committed me to appear at a school function in a distant town, to talk at length about the life of a professional musician. Not that I didn’t resist such a sickening idea instinctively and immediately—I did. But for my failure to fight the current of positive thinking that later picked me up and buffeted me to an all-too-predictable doom, I can only point feebly to the universally compromised condition of man in these postlapsarian times. The school in question was Prairie Butte High of District 47 in Wheatstraw, Illinois, just over an hour’s drive from our place on the north shore of Chicago. One of the deans there was an old family friend, and my wife’s giddy tone implied that my own career, rather than those of the upperclassmen, would be the clear beneficiary of my effort and time. She was the soul of salesmanship.

  “You’ll talk about making records,” she said, “and traveling from town to town to perform. You’ll explain how the business is structured and how you combine your various income streams—royalties, Web site sales, et cetera.”

  “I’ll do no such thing,” I asserted.“You seem to think of my income stream as a freestanding ecological structure, something I can blithely walk away from for hours on end with no effect on the family purse . . .”

  “And you’ll be a good role model. The successful, happy, articulate man of the arts.”

  “Me no like talking in public,” I said, trying a new tack.“And I doubt that I have anything of interest to offer teenagers.”

  “You are a very interesting person,” she assured me.

  “To you, evidently. To high schoolers, maybe not so much. Have you looked in the trades lately? Fringe country isn’t soundscanning with exurban youths, by and large. It seems to appeal exclusively to fifty-something fanzine editors with big stomachs. Mainstream record consumers—‘kids’ for short—are more interested in . . . starlets, and black guys with handguns yelling about pussy and that.”

  “You have songs about pussy,” she purred.“Talk about that if you want to. Obliquely. This is the kind of thing I needed but never got when I was in high school.” Dropping her hands into the pockets of her work pants, she began a slow rhythmic jiggling of coins and die grinder bits.“I never had the opportunity to talk to the great ice artists. I had never heard of the Inuit Free-Range Quarries, the National League of Bachelorettes, the Greenland Carnivale. Never thought about the storing or transporting of large blocks of ice, much less simple heartbreak. All I knew was the lust for fame.” She brought her eyes down from Polaris and fastened them firmly on me.“No one told me that it would probably never come—and that it didn’t matter. No one told me that artists can earn the respect of their peers and a living income without ever gaining an ounce of celebrity. You can work and work and work, all your life, and never be—”

  “Okay, stop,” I said.“So I’ll do a little talk. I’ll take some questions. I’ll make a pie chart. How long does the presentation need to be?”

  “Forty minutes. But you have to do the forty minutes seriatim for five consecutive groups. It’s kind of an all-day thing.”

  To conceal from your wife that your professional life involves doing not very much all day long is a challenge few men can crack. Once the secret is out, it’s almost impossible to weasel out of any worthy commitments she might drum up on your behalf. But the real reason I caved was that Career Day appealed to my vanity. Lives there a nearsighted, saggy-jowled old fool who does not flatter himself to suppose that his example might lead some grateful novice to the light? Add to that the prospect of a captive audience of delighted adolescents, which holds a dizzying, archetypal power for any musician, and you have a potent cocktail. When Career Day dawned, my pie chart was in the back of the car. Cheer was regnant.

  Prairie Butte High was a drab cuboid situated on a gently raised stretch of cow country, thirty miles northwest of Chicago’s farthest bedroom suburb. Inside, the sights and smells of my own high school rose immediately from the dead. There it all was again, the fierce mammal energy, the gray hallways vibrating with the metal echo of locker doors and bells, the smell of something like potted meat, the provocatively attired girls a guy like me could never bed, though now with added disincentives to try. The boys were dressed casually in jeans and khaki, as in my day, but with far more stylish cuts and colors than the Jimmy Carter School for Slobs used to allow. Whether or not high school fashion is destiny, the look stuck to me; I was wearing frayed Levi’s and a flannel shirt.

  Terry, the dean, had a red lapel sticker ready for me, reading MUSICIAN.

  “We are so thrilled to have you here!” She beamed behind slim-framed eyeglasses, a cordwood-stack of binders balanced in the crook of her arm.“Mr. Legg, our social studies teacher, is such a fan—he has an alternative country band too! He wants to meet you, if you can spare a moment after fifth period. Now, we have you set up in room 1355, down this hall, last door on the left. Oh—Mr. Stritch, your name tag and packet!” A muscled figure in pinstripes, about my age, stopped in passing. He gamely accepted and applied his INVESTMENT BANKER tag.“You’re in 1580 today, just down—oh, by the way, meet our famous musician, Robbie Fulks!”

  Stritch pumped my hand briskly. He glanced down at my sticker and up at me, quickly and without pleasure.“Pleased,” he grunted, and power-fled down the corridor.

  “Well, banking.” I smiled conspiratorially at Terry.“That should be quite the draw with the young ’uns. I always forget—was it Roth IRAs or grunge that was big in Seattle fifteen years ago?”

  “You’re so different!” She smiled back in encouragement.“We’re delighted you made time in your busy schedule to join us.”

  Heading down the hall, I caught some other name tags: exterminator, systems analyst, patent attorney, hairdresser. My wife was right. There was a rich lode of useful experience on tap here at Prairie Butte. To see it given up freely to those still damp from the chrysalis swelled my heart, and spurred my self-confidence. I was going to come alive in 1355! For mine was a story with a moral to gladden young adults everywhere: a life goal didn’t need to be a life sentence. Patent attorney? Personally, I’d take Leavenworth.

  I had intended to make a splashy entrance: throwing open the classroom door, raising a fist, bellowing, “For those about to Rock . . . I salute you!” But on entering the room, something in the air, a wetly palpable anomie, struck me hard. A big empty desk, a blackboard, an open window, and near it a computer-generated image of a branching tree festooned with photos of chefs, medical professionals, sleekly dressed businessmen. Twenty or so kids sat in neat rows, compliantly frozen.

  “You’re here for the musician?” I said. A few doleful nods. I crossed briskly to center front and clasped my hands together.“So.” Letting my gaze fall meaningfully around the rows—connecting, connecting—I leaned casually against the desk. Like the tuned-in TV and movie teachers of the seventies (Conrack, the White Knight), I strove with body language to express a jazzy informality, a wideness of spirit.

  “So. My name’s Robbie, and I’m here to tell you what could happen if you decide to pursue music as a career. I’ve done it for twenty-one years now—written it, recorded it
, performed it. You might ask: what notable successes have I enjoyed?” If I knew my youngsters, they were asking themselves just this.

  “It all depends on how you define ‘success,’ ” I continued.“Though none of you has ever heard of me, by certain measures I am successful. I own my house. I have a nice family. Sales of my records are modest but sustaining. I have made a lot of them, and will continue to.

  “Granted, some of my colleagues here at Career Day make more money, have better cars and houses, and so on. They may not get to travel all over the country and jump around onstage and play hot guitar solos—but they may not want to. Doing music on a lower-than-celebrity level is tough work. It can test the spirit. For better or worse, though, that’s the level where ninety percent of us in the business find ourselves. Making your living at music makes for an awfully strange journey. But I am here to tell you, it can be done!”

  A couple soft coughs. Two boys sitting close to me, wearing identical black shirts with a picture of something like an arachnid corkscrewed around a spear, were wide-eyed with respect.

  “I can’t help but remember when I was at your age.” That sentence, delivered into the rearview mirror on the drive here, seemed de rigueur for a Career Day address.“I had no goals. I never thought of sacrificing or building for the future. All I thought about was playing the guitar. Okay, meeting girls and getting high, those might have been tied for second. Ha, ha, ha. But mostly, guitar. The chord was my shepherd—ha!” The “getting high” part was a risky move, but the White Knight would have taken it. The arachnid twins showed approval, bouncing their legs and nodding.

  “Now, the music I do is—hold your applause—country. That was the family tradition I was raised in, and in the South, it wasn’t necessarily an uncool thing to pick fiddle tunes and sing about the old homestead. My folks started me off and I got the rest from record albums.

  “Today, things are very different. For one thing, young people have access to many, many more resources. A recent New Yorker article used the phrase ‘platform agnostic.’ It means that, of all the numerous distribution outlets available today—podcasts, satellite, iTunes—kids are content to go anywhere and everywhere. There is no single, socially anointed outlet for learning about new music. Which is wonderful. Where do you guys find out about new music?”

  The direct question stimulated nervous shuffling. Then a girl said meekly, “The radio.” Others murmured assent.“Ninety-eight point four,” someone said, and a few chuckled in recognition.

  “All right,” I said.“Theoretically, anyway, you have choices, whether or not you choose to exercise them. Now, this new game, with its proliferation of outlets, is a threat to some of the players, such as record corporations and the upper elite of brand-name performers. Just as with the TV business since the advent of cable and Fox and pay-per-view, the democratization of the music business means less centralized control, and probably most of us will earn a bit less on average for our work. But it also means more consumer choice, and it means that people like me, niche artists who ride around in a van performing for one or two hundred people at a time, have a better shot at expanding and prolonging their careers, as long as they’re willing to do a little extra work to promote themselves.”

  “You go around in a van?” said a young man, his head loaded with curly brown hair and his voice with acidulous disbelief.

  “I do. It’s not that bad!”

  “And you play country music. In . . .”

  “Bars. To put it bluntly. And at weddings, and other places too. Hey, I brought a pie chart!” I lifted the posterboard up onto the chalk tray. It showed that marvel of nature, my income stream, split into categories.“When most ‘normal’ people—my neighbors or my auditors—find out I’m a musician, the first thing they want to know is: How? How is it possible to have an income when you’re not on TV, or ninety-eight point four? I mean, sure, I’ve been on TV and radio some, but that kind of thing is almost completely irrelevant to making a living. So how do you support—”

  “You were on TV?” Curly again. His eyebrows were raised, but they exerted no lift on his lids.“Like what TV?”

  “TV shows that routinely promote music released by big labels,” I said a little testily.“I was on one, briefly. A label, I mean.”

  “What was your big hit?” he said.

  “As I said, nothing you’d have heard. And now, we return to our pie chart. Here you see performance royalties. BMI and ASCAP are the names of organizations that collect statutory . . .” And, having dispensed with Curly Pubeskull, I was off on a roll. Like most men, I confess, I am a pushover for a curve, a graph, a vector, anything that converts complex realities into cute 2D shapes, no matter how fundamentally inaccurate. I picked over each pie slice with analytical rigor and care. I laid out the economics of touring. I spoke of the value of commercial work and the relevant unions. I described the publishing industry, touching briefly on the knotted area of digital rights and the as-yet-unknown media of the future. I was Conrack on steroids. When I had finished, I looked at my watch. Since I had walked into the room, eleven minutes had passed.

  “Okay, and now I . . . guess I’ll open the floor to questions. Questions? Anyone?” Overhead a ceiling fan whirred. I tapped the desk behind me, to ward off the yawning silence opened by my invitation. Gently, through the open window, there drifted in the idiotic barking of dogs. As the second hand cycled sluggishly, I reflected that a lifetime’s experience can be summed up in minutes, easily. You could also do it in a couple of days, with plenty of colorful digressions and character development, and some lively back-and-forth with your listeners. But a forty-minute oral autobiography with only a sprinkling of hostile interruptions turns out to be a tall order.

  A brunette sitting toward the back was tugging abjectly at her hair. Other students sat with heads and hands in every possible conjoinment except the one signaling thought. One, the size of an adult dockworker, slept openly. Even the arachnids looked flummoxed.

  “Come on,” I said.“There must be something about my chart or my job that interests someone. Is anyone curious to hear more about getting a record deal? Demoing songs? Scoring an independent movie? Anything at all?” I snuck another look at my watch. Eleven minutes and forty seconds. I was anxiously thinking of ways to fill the rest of the period—doughnuts perhaps, a folk song—and coming to grips with the realization that the content of my story and my White Knight tactics had not gone over as hoped. In fact, I had quite comprehensively bored these people. Had there been fundamental changes in the teen outlook since Jimmy Carter? Or was the thing that had absorbed me for the last two decades considerably less romantic than I had assumed?

  But hark: a voice from the gallery! It belonged to the brunette, who had been regarding me with a dim but growing curiosity. Evidently she was fishing for the right words. They now rose to her lips.“What are you going to do . . . when you’re sixty?”

  As a moment, it would have felt more complete punctuated by a burst of group laughter and some pointing. But the girl was patently sincere, and she had expressed a general mood of perplexity in the room.

  “Yeah,” amplified another girl, “do you think you’ll have a big hit by then, or will you still be playing weddings and bars?” The dogs in the distant field had fallen still. I studied the blue lines on the backs of my hands.

  “The same thing,” I said.“Music in bars. Career Day appearances.”

  “Oh, you’re being sarcastic,” Curly observed.

  “No, I’m having the time of my life,” I said.“I’m just not sure we’re getting anywhere. Is anyone here remotely thinking about going into music after graduation?” To my relief, the arachnids’ hands shot up.“I thought we had two musicians here! Guitar?”

  “Yeah,” said one.

  “What kind of music?”

  “Um,” said the other.“I don’t know what you’d—you know . . . just . . .” They looked at each other and put their heads together, trying to come up with a word to describ
e the kind of music they played.“It’s just, normal music. He plays lead. I just started last year.”

  “This is some species of rock we’re talking about?”

  The one on the right thought of a helpful referent.“Like Breakbone Fever, or Chimps in Aspic. Just, music. How important is practicing?”

  “Very. I mean, I don’t know. It depends. I don’t know anything about that kind of music. Maybe it’s important never to practice.”

  “How do you write songs?”

  “I don’t know. Please don’t go into music, guys.”

  “What TV shows have you been on?”

  “Normal TV shows.”

  “Like, what shows?”

  “The Today show, Conan . . .”

  Curly slouched forward, ever so slightly.“You were on Conan?” He sounded like David Spade. A less-excited David Spade.

  “Yes, I appeared on Conan one time when somebody canceled last-minute.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Conan? He was . . . I don’t know, I talked to him for all of thirty seconds.”

  “How tall was he?” the brunette wanted to know. The class was now hanging on my every word. I wished they were not.

  “Tall. My height. Listen, being on a show like that, it’s not really as big a deal as you’d think.”

  “Being on TV is cool,” observed Arachnid One.

  “Sure,” I admitted.“It’s cool for your friends and family, a cool thing to watch someone they know. But to do, not as much. You’re standing around in a little room for hours on end. It’s not that big a deal. Donald Sutherland was the guest the day I was on.”

  “You don’t like Donald Sutherland?” said Curly.“Donald Sutherland isn’t good enough? I think Donald Sutherland is pretty cool.”

  “Donald Sutherland is cool. Forget Donald Sutherland. I’m talking about the romance of TV. It’s an illusion. A guy in my band played on Saturday Night Live in the nineties. I asked him what it was like. He said it was cold, and people in the cast were mean. There’s your TV for you.”