#60 - Sour Notes

Sour Notes

5/4/05 (#60)

In Bangor, Maine circa 1984, the singing telegram was either a throwback to a fondly recalled Gene Kelly movie or an effort to define the future of romantic communication using nostalgic means. Whatever the case, the embrace from the community was platonic at best. I had several friends who delivered telegrams for the lone local telegram firm, and I don't recall any of them ever saying, "Hey, let me pay for the beers, it's been a boon week for telegrams." But such a service is unfairly measured by frequency---as the adage goes, it's about quality, not quantity, and in Bangor, they were always delivered with class.

If you are unfamiliar, the process works this way: The customer calls the office and explains to the owner the goal of the telegram; owner creates a "personalized" message set to the tried and true melody of an old standard, the lyrics adjusted to fit this particular romantic overture; the script is approved by the customer, the credit card processed, and on the prescribed day and time, a tuxedo or gown clad singer or two arrived at the door and delivered the corny message to a (hopefully) thrilled and astonished recipient. Proof of delivery was never required, as the gesture was always outlandish enough to elicit at least a phone call from recipient to sender. (Who would receive a singing telegram and not respond?)

And that was how it was going to work on this particular Friday night. Jim and I donned our black tuxedos, hopped into his little blue pick-up truck, and headed toward the very rural locale where we would be delivering the message to a gone-but-not-forgotten girlfriend. Jim would deliver the yearbook-signature-worthy drivel in his rich tenor, I'd strum the guitar, and 5 minutes later we'd be back on the road, each about $15 richer for the effort. We drove to the destination in a fidgety mood, tweaked on too much 7-11 coffee as Rubber Soul crackled from the 4" speakers mounted on the truck doors. We reached the rural road written on our instructions, pulled up a bit short of the house, and got out to tune the guitar and make sure our tuxes were befitting of a singing telegram.

As quiet as the road was, we were nervous when a car pulled up behind us and doused their lights. We were in our late teens, had watched our share of horror movies, and immediately had independent visions of the next day's Bangor Daily News headline screaming, "Two Tuxedoed Youths Beaten with Guitar". (Had we been there in blue jeans, we'd have seemed like suspicious characters, but in tuxedos, ANY story would be plausible---after all, who would wear a tux on a robbery?) The car door opened, and a slight, mustachioed man emerged, loudly whispering "good evening". As he got nearer, we could make him out more clearly---imagine Woody Allen if he had grown up in Nebraska instead of Manhattan. He quickly explained that he was the customer and he wanted to be there when the message was delivered. This was highly unorthodox by singing telegram standards, and Jim did his professional best to explain exactly that, but the man had planned ahead: he went to his car and returned with a small chalkboard and what appeared to be a cherub mask, baby-esque in a grotesque way, sort of how Curly from The Three Stooges would look if he had wanted to look like a baby. This was my first singing telegram, but I had seen a few Gene Kelly movies, and even I recognized that this was highly unorthodox.

The customer's plan was simple---he'd don the mask, kneel down next to us as we sang and played, holding up the little slate that added an exclamation point to the lyrics. I cannot recall the exact verbiage (remember, I had previously repressed this entire memory), but the gist of it was, "Tom misses you and wants you back." He was so earnest in his enthusiasm---and he was, after all, the customer---we acquiesced.

We walked though the pine needles that covered the recipient's dirt yard and took our places just off the stoop, bathed in the harsh glow of a bare, 100-watt porch light. Jim reached over and rang the doorbell.

There was no immediate answer, but we could hear a scramble occurring inside the house, a clatter that was unmistakably the soundtrack to an unexpected interruption of a sexual conquest. A woman's voice called out, "hang on, I'm coming" (we assumed she was speaking to us, though we did not try to interpret the precise meaning of her words) while we stared at the front door, afraid to look at anything else lest our eyes have to meet the man beside us. Unless he was deaf, he possessed the same sense of dread that I did.

Now if you're the kind of person who wears a bathrobe, you know exactly how long it takes you to put on that robe. It's not a conscious measurement of time, more of a reflex, and with one arm snug within the terrycloth, you know you can start a new task with that hand while your other finishes donning the robe. The woman in this house had that timing down, and feeling as though she had already taken too long to get to the door (which she had if she was planning to come up with any viable excuse like "sorry, I was frosting a cake"), she reached for the door handle with her left hand as her right prepared to slip into the other sleeve.

Except that the sleeve was apparently inside out, so her timing was broken. As the door swung open, she should have been safely within the confines of her robe, but instead she was standing in her negligee, struggling like Houdini in reverse to get herself covered, and her eyes met not a kind neighbor who had knocked to tell her that her car lights were on, but instead two dashingly dressed gentlemen and their personal circus midget.

We could see a lot through the open door---not just what the negligee failed to cover, but the bare-chested man sitting on the couch behind her. I'm certain he had intended to remain seated, but having a scene from Twin Peaks arriving at his girlfriend's door, he quickly struggled into his pants and joined her at the door. He was a handsome guy, tall and muscular, likely described by the girlfriend as "Tom Selleck-esque" (these were the days of Magnum PI, mind you), and that was pretty accurate. Despite this ridiculous romantic gesture that was about to unfold, it was clear that between the two men, she had traded up.

We started the song, and every line rang with the wrong tone---what had seemed like an overture to a lost love was now a cruel bit of mockery pointed directly at the little man crouched at the side of the stoop. Like a clandestine valentine taken from a fifth-grader's clutch and read aloud to the class, each line seemed to be punctuated with the laughter of children, the baying of dogs, and the sound of a human soul being stomped into a bed of pine needles.

She smiled courteously, unaware that the man who concocted this ill-fated venture also had the best seat in the house (so to speak) to see it backfire. Crouched in a submissive pose, already two steps lower than the man whose giant hands gently rubbed the now-fully-robed shoulders, I can honestly not imagine his misery; in his world, the song must have lasted longer than most Spielberg movies. Heck, in MY world it was that long.

Later that night when we finally finished the three-verse song (there are no choruses in a singing telegram), we smiled and bade the couple goodnight. We quietly loped over the burnt-orange front yard, their view of us eventually blocked by the long evergreen hedge that established the property border, and said nothing until we got back to the cars. The client was clearly eager to escape, but was completely courteous, shaking our hands urgently, thanking us for the great job even as his feet continued, seemingly involuntarily, to propel him toward his car.

Jim and I were mostly silent in the truck, other than disconnected utterances of "faaaahhhhk" and "oh my god, that was horrible." We imagined him in his car, turning on the radio to be mocked my love songs but unable to bear the silence of his thoughts. I have no doubt that he and a stiff drink were going to be meeting as soon as possible; even if he wasn't a drinker, what else can one do in that situation? His mind racing at unimaginable speeds, visions of her negligee and that man's bare chest, the melody of that cursed telegram repeating in his head, the pine-scented air flowing through his open window keeping the excruciating event active and alive in his senses. As for us, we both hit deeply from Jim's deer-antler pipe, wishing we could share a bit of the pleasant numbness with our now-departed cherub.

During that long drive home we were mostly quiet, except for one conversation that I vaguely recall---as brutal as it was, we were selfishly grateful that he had been witness to this event, because I would have hated getting back to the office to drop of the tuxes to find him there, eager as a dog anticipating the ribeye leftovers, hopefully asking, "So how'd it go?" We would have told the simplest of truths---she was home, she was smiling, and we played the song well. That wouldn't have been a lie---but it certainly wouldn't have been the truth, either.

©2005 wpreagan