Did You Ever See Allegro?
I’m Bruce Peralta, a tenor-baritone voice major at
Cumberland Conservatory. Yes, there are people nerdier, they just all write computer
programs. Which wasn’t an option in the 1960s. My friends were all genre snobs,
and claimed to enjoy classical music and opera more than rock. What a crock. Who
picks up groupies at a Mozart Symphony, and smokes weed and gets his groove on
during Aida?
Anyway, my roommate, Bob, and I decided to start a band.
Bob wasn’t front-man material, and not just because he looked like a nerd. He
was a classic heldentenor, which is great for Wagner but not so useful for the
Beatles. Bob would do something other than being the front man, I figured I’d
let it go. I was better-looking than Bob, proven by the fact that my girlfriend
was hotter than his right hand. Or the pity-sex-do-gooders who would come home
with him occasionally as their good deed for the year.
We didn’t have an official major in beer, but that’s what
it was in Appalachia in the 1960s. Sure, we had weed, but the area was about
49% fundamentalists and 49% white robes and burning crosses, and it was a lot
harder to get than beer. Which, I understood, was legally food in Germany. Cumberland
had some Germans, but they all pretended to be something else.
I tried to minor in sex, but Lydia and I were already
hooked up in high school, so it was like taking the same course over and over.
If I even looked at another woman, she would start screaming at me. One of my
good friends learned her cat had died, and I was comforting her when Lydia
walked in. She took it completely wrong, and called me every name in the book.
She started punching the poor girl, who ran out of the room crying. I tried
reasoning with her, but she wasn’t interested in listening to my explanation
for why I had to remove my pants to properly comfort the young woman.
The big industry was railroads, followed by coal mining. It’s
hard to make money from a train that keeps going straight through your
no-account town on its way to someplace else, so people made money from coalmining.
And preaching. We didn’t have the most churches by population, but it was close.
Which meant that there was a lot of competition among the churches for
attendance. Which left coal mining.
I asked Lydia one day what the cost was for a ticket to
Baltimore. She looked at the bus schedule, and I told her to find the cost to
travel by rail. She said $131, but only if we were a load of anthracite.
Otherwise, there wasn’t any passenger traffic.
In high school we had lived in Southern Maryland, which would
have been part of the Confederacy if it had its way. I dutifully joined the
Junior KKK, which was just like the Boy Scouts but with burning crosses.
Our first black student applied for membership in the
fraternity two years ago, and I blackballed him. Kind of funny when you think
about it, blackballing a colored man. Lydia had forced me into it, and
threatened me within an inch of my life if I didn’t keep him out. I felt bad
about it, looked him up, and we became friends. Last year I sponsored him for
membership. Lydia slapped me, so I told her she was welcome to do it again if
she was ready to replace some teeth.
It was the Summer of Love, Woodstock, Free Sex, Haight-Ashbury and war protests. None of which ever came to visit. Anyway, I’m just a regular guy with some music talent, a horndog
with a new appreciation for my fellow man.
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