works by william pham, 2005-present
Listen To Me Goddammit
Laura said something to me with a wry smile but I couldn't hear what she was saying so I smiled back and I hoped that she would mistake my confused expression for ironic wit. Then she asked me what I was drinking and I answered. What are you drinking, I asked back, and she answered, the same thing you're drinking, so, Cheers, I said, Cheers, she said, and we clinked our glasses together. The music was too loud to hold a normal conversation so we shouted at each other.
"What is she doing?" I shouted.
She laughed then pointed at someone in the crowd: "Look at him!" I had no idea who she was pointing at but I laughed. This was a fun game.
Then there was a lull in the music and we talked about other people. It was always easier to talk about other people, though mostly she talked and I listened. I could listen for hours but speak for only seconds or minutes at a time. I had never confessed, neither in the religious nor secular sense of the word. It was always easier to bear witness than to testify. Sometimes after having been on the phone for three, four, or even five hours, my voice would crack when I spoke merely from disuse, like an instrument in need of tuning or a pipe rusted through. It was always easier to listen than to speak.
"I'm going to look for --" and here she said the name of our mutual friend. I smiled and raised my glass, which now only held ice and melted ice and a very miserable-looking piece of lime. She walked away. I listened to the music that one band or another had been playing the entire time. The room, a bar and floor and stage, was small, but not crowded. The music was good but not great.
"Terrible showmanship!" someone shouted. I looked at the voice. He was wearing a sports jacket, dress shirt, jeans, and polished black leather shoes. He was tall and clean and loud.
"What?" I asked. I shouldn't have asked.
"Terrible showmanship! You're Will, right? You don't start out with an amazing first song and then immediately mellow out! You just don't!" he shouted.
"Yeah," I said, but before I had even finished the one word of noncommittal listening, the word that translates to "Yes I understand that you are saying things and I have heard them but I may or may not be actually paying attention to the content of the things that you are saying," he barreled on to further explain his thesis.
"You have to ride the momentum! Terrible showmanship! Way too mellow!" he shouted. "Ride the wave!"
I looked at my glass. It was still empty. Instead of responding to him I waved to get the attention of the bartender and ordered another drink and when she gave it to me I tipped her two dollars. In tipping her two dollars, I was sending out a distress signal, an emergency flare, as if to say: "Please get me the hell out of here, this man is tall and clean and loud, where are my friends who are interesting people?"
An hour passed. She returned. By this time we both had new drinks and the live music was over.
"The bassist is always at the bottom of the totem pole!" he shouted. Our mutual friend was talking to a bassist about ten feet away. Laura and I had been talking to a roadie, a very nice guy named Lenny, until the loud man interrupted and I was almost positive he had never seen an actual totem pole in his entire life.
"No way," Laura said.
"Totally! It goes like this: lead singer, then lead guitarist, but they're gimmicks anyway, then the drummer, then the bassist!" he shouted.
"No way," I said.
"Do you know what the very first instrument invented by mankind was?" he shouted.
I shook my head.
"Drums! Drums were the very first instrument invented by mankind! Percussion is in the soul! That's why girls love drummers!" he shouted.
"What," I said. I looked at Laura. She looked at me.
"Now, if you wanted to win the argument, if you wanted to prove me wrong, you would've said, no, the human voice was actually the first instrument invented by mankind! But you didn't! You didn't say that!" he shouted.
"What," I said. I looked at my glass. It was half-full. "I'm going to get something to drink," I said.
"Me too," Laura said.
He shouted something at our backs and it could have been anything at all really, probably he was just asking us to get something for him, but in my head he was shouting, "Listen to me goddammit!" and in my head I was shouting the exact same thing all the time to everyone.
copyright (c) 2007 by william pham