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TELL THE WIND NOT TO BLOW

For Libby for all the right reasons

by Derrick Harrison Hurd

June 2011

The winter is coming on strong in Virginia and soon there will be snow as I contemplate my vacation from homelessness in a much kinder place than I fled to come here. My LA life had become so grim that even the thought of being on an airplane (something I dread) made a kind of sense.

 “This is your idea of a solution,” my friend Kirk said to me when I announced the move to Virginia, “why can’t you just fail locally?”

 “Done that,” I said and I had.

 The night before I had spent my last fifty bucks on my third cheesy dive of the week, THE GILMORE in Hollywood, which featured a virtual carnival of bed bugs and a bathroom that only hardy dared enter. “You got a better idea?” I ask and to which his silence spoke volumes.

 Some people just outlive themselves, I thought, how weird though that I would be one of them.

 In college I had come into my own, no longer afraid to shine a little, to experiment with who I really was and find out what kind of man I could become. I had taken some risks, made some good friends (traversing the same path as mine), and had discovered talents that, up until then, I only fantasized that I might have. I could sing, it turned out, and this opened some very interesting doors.

 In my second year at UCSD I had become the lead tenor in a world-class choir that toured a great deal and won some prestigious awards. Our instructor and choirmaster, Ron Jeffers, had taken me on as a private vocal student and I was introduced to Bach, Brahms, Schutz, Schein, and music became my consuming passion.

 I remember one concert in particular that took place at CASA DE MANANA (The House of Tomorrow) which we all thought was a funny name for a retirement facility. I was twenty and immortal and beautiful and I had the solo in a piece written by one of the graduate students in composition. It was always the last piece in our program.

 “Elegy for two part Chorus,” was an atonal masterpiece of discordant themes that built gradually and then crescendoed to a thunderous chord, which was held for two measures by the whole chorus, and then, one by one, the sopranos, the altos, the bases all dropped out, until only the tenors were holding their note.

 Then the other tenors dropped out and only I held the note.

 The ballroom we were singing in was on a bluff in La Jolla overlooking the ocean, you could hear the waves in the background and the breeze kept the floor-to ceiling sheer drapes flaring in a haunting ironic kind of choreographed dance behind the choir.

 The composer’s notes to the score said simply that I was to hold the note as long as I could and then to let it trail off as subtly as possible. I had done it a dozen times and I was secure about doing it, but it was a vocal strain and I was never really sure if I was doing the concept justice.

 That day, though, at this one concert looking out at a sea of hospital gowns and those stands that hold intravenous drips, I stood tall and proud and took a breath and sang my note…like I always did. But…something completely unexpected happened. Something that would mark me in a way, stamp me…I had become a vessel.

 I don’t know how it happened or why, but the note was purer than any note I had ever heard. It required no breath it could expand or contract to any nuance that came to my mind and it rang…it literally rang disembodied and infinite…like light made into sound.

 I felt like I had merely set it free and that it could last forever. I even sensed the other members of the choir turning their heads to see where that sound was coming from.

 My single voiced filled the vacuum of all the other voices and pulsed with some divine resonance. Then…as if I could command the wind…the note raced around the room and disappeared out the window through the undulating sheer drapes and mixed with the sound of the sea below.

 There was silence for a good minute or so, a very long time, it seemed to me, and then rather than the expected applause I was greeted with the sight of streaming tears in the eyes of a hundred (what appeared to be) children’s eyes. I don’t remember if they even clapped at all.

 On the way home on the bus no one spoke to me, it was as if everyone knew what had happened had nothing to do with me. That was God’s voice we all heard and taking or giving credit for it seemed crass and ungrateful. Only Ron made a comment later to the whole choir, “we all made a miracle today,” he said, and none of us ever talked about it again.

 I felt that day like an agent of the lord…but somehow I knew there was a price to be paid for it, and I think…no, I knew…there would be a sacrifice one day. I even knew what it would be, and I as I headed for Skid Row I remembered that concert at The House of Tomorrow…and realized that the day had indeed come.

I tell this story for no other reason than to partially explain as best I can why I met my fate with patience and resolve, trusted in destiny and put resentment out of my mind.”I can do this,” I said out loud, “If this is what God has in mind for me now...I can do this.”

 Kirk’s magnificent apartment two blocks from the apartment I had left behind had become a bastion of sanity for me. It was here that I came with what was left of my belongings in luggage he had provided for me. “What have got in here lead collectibles?” he asks as we trudge up the stairs for a brief respite before facing the transition to Skid Row.

 He had offered to drive me to the subway at Vine Street which was as close to downtown as he was willing to go in his Mercedes, the hood ornament of which he had replaced twice as a result of visits to what was to become my new neighborhood. They would have gotten the wheel covers too if a passing police cruiser hadn’t discouraged them.

 We tried to pretend it was just another visit, like we had spent together practically every night at the end of our very different days. Kirk had a great job and had asserted a convincing mastery over his life. I was resigning myself to powerlessness by degrees and living life like a leaf in the wind desperately seeking a safe place to hide.

 In my last fifteen days in my apartment I had finally taken some good advice and filed for General Relief with the California Department of Public Services which had provided me with food stamps and two hundred dollars in cash and a voucher for fifteen days of SRO housing…and the worst headshot of me ever taken.

 I happened to see it on some computer screen as I was being processed out of the eight hour debacle that securing all of this had taken; “I certainly look the part,” I said to myself as I lumbered off to the subway,” I wonder what my pals back in the chorus would think of what became of their lead tenor…the one with the miraculous high “C.”