Palouse - 17. Chapter 17

Chapter 17

Southern Nights – Late Spring 1990

Micah, a Year Later

“Mom, I’ll be okay,” Micah said. He was sitting across from his mother at the kitchen table, drumming his fingers on his thigh where she couldn’t see his frustration.

“I realize it’s an honor to be asked to solo at the National Youth Festival Orchestra, but this will be your first time out on your own.”

“That’s not true, Mom! I’ve gone to Seattle many times on my own!”

“That’s different. There was someone to take care of you there. I still worried about you, even so.”

“Somebody will be there for me in Charleston. God…”

“You watch your language, young man. I don’t know this person in Charleston.”

“Mom, I appreciate what you’ve done for my career, but at some time you have to let me go – even a little. I’m 15. Cut me some slack.”

“I’ll talk to this chaperone and tell him what I want.”

“Okay,” Micah said, rolling his eyes when he saw his mother wasn’t looking. Deeper down, he wasn’t sure his mother realized the difference between mothering and smothering. He realized maybe he really needed to break away from her total dominance.

This was the first solo performance that his mother was unable to attend. She had commitments that she was simply unable to avoid. Reluctantly, she decided to let Micah go on his own.

* * * * *

The Charleston night was abnormally hot – southern, moist, humid hot – with sounds and flower-fragrances outside drifting lazily through the heavy, dark air into the soft light of walkways and commons. Micah stood at the front door of an imposing house surrounded by huge shade trees. Behind him was the chaperone waiting for him to be let in. He would return at midnight – a compromise between 11 p.m. that he wanted and 1 a.m. that Micah wanted. The house was owned by one of the sponsoring families of the festival, and two of their teen children played in the orchestra. It was those facts that convinced the chaperone to extend his curfew till midnight.

The large, heavy door of the Charleston house swung open for Micah, and a very uncertain boy from Eastern Washington stepped through to greetings from Naomi and Trish, two teenagers who played in the National Youth Festival Orchestra that was to accompany him the next day. Micah’s uncertainty lasted only a few seconds before he was quickly welcomed and hustled down to the basement, where a party was in full swing. On one table there was a red punch; on another was a lemonade-green punch. At another table were snacks, ranging from potato chips to barbecued chicken and ribs to piles of shrimp. The lights had been turned low, colored lamps shone in the corners, and several young people were dancing to some popular music – rather closely, Micah noted.

Naomi and Trish introduced him around the room, but, really, the introductions were all one-sided because nearly all of them knew who this phenom – Micah – was. The picture of this half-native-American boy with sleek black hair and a pony tail had been displayed on the front page of the festival program, along with excerpts from some of the rave reviews he had gotten. He was the superstar, and these were mere players – some players probably hoping that Micah was not as good as advertised.

Naomi and Trish guided him to a large couch and asked if they could get him some food. Besides normal, teenager hunger, he was starved from the long day of preparation for the festival. In no time, a heaping plate of food was set on the coffee table in front of him, and he was offered his choice of punch.

“I’ll take the red one,” Micah said. Trish handed him the lemonade-colored one. “No, the red one.” But Trish held the other in front of him.

“I think you’ll like this one better,” she said, winking.

What the heck, Micah thought, and took it. He began to dive into his plate of food with relish. Naomi and Trish sat on either side of him, identifying what he was eating as Micah asked. He recognized the barbecued chicken, but there was so much that he didn’t know: Hush puppies. Okra. Hot links. Brisket of beef. He took a drink of lemonade and practically choked. “What’s in this?” he asked.

“Oh, it’s a secret recipe,” Naomi said with a wink as she reached across with a napkin and dabbed at Micah’s lips to remove some of the barbecue sauce that had clung to them. “Just drink it slowly, and you’ll grow to like it.”

Micah took several more sips and realized that, for the first time in his life, he was drinking alcohol – except for the tiny sips of wine at Robbie and Jake’s in Seattle. He didn’t like the taste particularly, but in a short while he began to feel a warm buzz in his head. After he finished his plate and had his “lemonade” refreshed, the girls took him through the crowd of teenagers, where they talked of music – everything from classical to rock – but also where they came from, and what their home towns were like. It was pretty clear to Micah after a while that nobody else came from a place even remotely like Endicott, Washington.

The lemonades kept coming, and soon Micah was asked to dance. It was as if the others just wanted to touch him, as if he was a boy model from Paris instead of a musician from some small town in the West.

Naomi and Trish were never far away. A while later, they led him up the basement stairs and into the backyard. There were kids there as well, some that he had not seen at the party downstairs. There was also the glow of cigarettes and the smell of weeds burning. Someone put one in front of him and asked if he wanted a “hit.” Micah didn’t know what a “hit” was, but he was feeling fairly loose.

“What do I do?” he asked.

“You inhale some smoke and hold it in your lungs as long as you can.”

Micah tried some, but his efforts ended in a coughing fit, which he and the others thought was funny.

“Try it again, but slowly.”

Micah did, and he felt the warmth and euphoric feeling coursing through his body. “Whew,” he said. “My head is really spinning. I need to sit down.”

“Come on, sweetheart,” he heard Trish say. “I know just the place.”

From then on, the evening was a fog. Micah recalled being led to a bedroom and sitting on the bed. He recalled the kisses from Naomi and Trish and the unbuttoning of his shirt and then his pants. He recalled the hands on his crotch and the erection that followed. He recalled being naked. He recalled the pubic hair of Naomi in his face and him instinctively lifting his tongue to lick the juices that were forming around the vaginal opening. He recalled the hands on his erection, pulling and stretching.

At some time in the evening, he recalled looking down at his crotch and seeing a boy looking back at him with his mouth wrapped around his cock. He recalled feeling a cross between guilt and ecstasy, with an unforgettable (he would realize) snapshot of that boy’s face in his mind. As the boy moved his mouth up and down, Micah became harder and harder, and the richness of the experience with sex, alcohol and marijuana struck him.

The next thing he realized was that Rachel was astride his penis, and he was thrusting instinctively toward her and toward the oblivion of orgasm. And there were feelings of hands on his legs and his chest, rubbing his nipples and sensing the wire of the hair on his legs.

It was a revelation, as startling as a religious revelation. Was this what other, normal kids did? Micah asked himself. It was certainly what the kids in Endicott talked about in the halls of the school. He began to fully realize how much he was missing during all the years of isolation necessitated by his music, by the relentless schedule his mother set for him. He was missing the wondrous teenage experiences that were now causing such joy and feelings inside him. He was realizing how much he had forsaken for his talent and drive to maximize it. He vowed to make his life more “normal” when he got home.

Somehow, with the help of Trish and Naomi he had become dressed again. Then, he was at the buffet table eating ravenously. And then, midnight came, and the chariot or the pumpkin became the rental car of his chaperone, ready to take him back to the hotel. He begged to be allowed to stay, but his chaperone was insistent that Micah’s evening was at an end.

Micah slid the card into the door of his hotel room. The boy who had been assigned to share the room with him was in bed, his lump illuminated by the small lamp in the corner of the room. Micah stripped, threw his clothes on the floor next to his bed and slipped under the covers – sleeping naked for the first time in his life. He began to feel the letdown of the high he had been on and fell into a light, fitful sleep.

The next morning belonged to the piper. Micah had never felt such pain as what hammered in his head. He realized the cost of how much he had drunk and smoked, but he also remembered the pleasure of all that had been new: of the high, of the food and of the sex. For his head, he reached into his shaving kit to retrieve a bottle of aspirin and took two, washing them down with a glass of water from the bathroom sink.

His orchestra mate had disappeared from the hotel room, so Micah left his clothes on the floor as he went to the bathroom for a long shower, washing off all the sweat and smoke of the evening before. As he washed his genitals, the pleasure-memory of the time in bed kept coming back to him, causing a stirring, intense as a moth seeking light. He put his hand around his rising erection and stroked himself to orgasm, with flashes of the night being reawakened by the joy he was experiencing.

The concert was a triumph. Somehow, drawing on the hours and hours of daily practice, Micah was able to overcome his hangover. But that wasn’t all: the physical and emotional experiences from the night entered the music, making it richer and deeper. As he pulled his bow away for the last time, the audience erupted in loud applause. Micah turned and shook the hand of the director. He turned further and applauded the orchestra, spying Naomi and Rachel in their chairs. Then, in the percussion, he spied the boy whose eyes had sought his across his naked torso, and Micah’s cheeks turned red.

What he couldn’t get out of his head over the next few months and years were snapshots of that night in Charleston, among them the image of that boy’s face, deep on his erection, staring with his blue eyes and long blond hair into Micah’s dark-brown eyes. That was supposed to be so wrong, but it felt so good. Maybe that was what his brother and Sam did – and what David probably wanted. He knew he had lost his virginity to Rachel, and then to Naomi, but he wondered if he had lost it to that boy as well. Should he write a letter to Robert and Sam and ask them? The fog of his evening was too intense for him to sort out what had happened. He didn’t feel any regrets – something his mother certainly would have expected of him.

The social evening in South Carolina with his peers was the last that Micah would experience for some time. Micah’s world was changing; no longer playing with youth symphonies, he was entering a world of adults – music patrons, other professional orchestra musicians, the press.

After that evening, there was a difference in Micah, something that later his mother noticed and thought needed watching. There was an increasing confidence in his voice and manner – confidence, verging on cockiness. At the after-concert receptions for the patrons of the concerts that were on his schedule during the next year, Micah noticed how constantly he was surrounded by admirers dressed in their concert-going finery – almost always adults – plying him with hors d’oeuvres, soft drinks and inadvertent light touches on his arms, cheeks, and hair – as if the nearness to this part-native-American phenomenon gave them additional cachet.

And there were the advances of the women – and a few men, he realized later – who wanted to bed him. Some of the patrons wanted to come to his hotel room after the receptions, but he was fifteen, and he knew he wasn’t ready for that kind of life, tempting as it was. Besides, he was afraid of disease and being embarrassed about not knowing exactly what to do. He found, though, that if he gave the impression that he was bedding these patrons – winks, touches, innuendo, flirting – that other women would flock to him.

* * * * *

“It turns me on when I flirt like that. It’s like a game.” Micah spoke across the bedroom to Greg when the lights were out and they were talking. They both were lying on their backs, hands behind their heads, the moon outside passing a soft glow through the window.

“You’ve got it made, so what’s holding you back? It’s the dream of every teenage boy.”

“I’m not ready. I’m only fifteen. I’m afraid I could get addicted to this fame – to all the attention I get and the power that I have. I could have a new – well, older – woman every night on the road; I could have alcohol; I could have drugs. I like to look at it – from the outside – but Greg, that’s not me. If that’s what fame is all about, I’m not sure I really want it. That’s not the Palouse upbringing that I’d had. That’s not our family, our friends here. It’s kind of the opposite. Emotionally, I’m not sure I’m ready for that. My right hand is better for the time being than older woman after older woman. I just want something more normal, whatever that is.”

“God, I wish I had your problems,” Greg said. “I wish I even had the option to have your problems. I get so fucking horny.”

“Good night, Greg.” Micah laughed, knowing that Greg would solve the immediate problem soon.

“Good night, Micah.”

* * * * *

Outside of school hours, Micah’s contacts with other teenagers became virtually nonexistent over the next year despite his vow to himself to be more “normal.” He saw his siblings only at meal times. He saw his fellow students during classes and at lunch, but then only during the half hour in the cafeteria line and tables. He was by far the best-known person in Endicott, but only when he sat with a group of fellow teenagers, his concert-band classmates – he still played the trumpet in the band – that he could be laid back, could be just another schoolmate, just another teenager in the vast expanse of the Palouse.

Micah realized, too, how artificial his life was becoming outside of Endicott. He felt forced into a persona on the road that felt more and more contrived the more often he played the role of half-Navaho violin prodigy. He knew how to smile and accept the accolades, but it became more and more difficult to make the effort, though he knew that was part of the “job.”

But the road was taking its toll. Micah was beginning to resent the pressures of his schedule – or rather, his mother’s schedule for him. He had been traveling to engagements now for over a year, almost always accompanied by his mother. It seemed as if every weekend he was in a different city, with hotels that looked all the same and patrons’ parties populated by cardboard-cutout wealth. He was living in a world of adults that he didn’t really enjoy despite the money that was going into his college fund.

There was no time for relaxation, no time to be a teenager with all the angst and joy of being 15. He had had sex with people his age, he had had alcohol and marijuana, and those experiences became more memorable as time passed. The fact that they seemed unattainable now made them more desirable. The tight schedule and the lack of free time left the experiences embers of memory that would not die out. He could relieve himself sexually, which he did, but he could not experience the full sensuality of that night in Charlotte. True, he was the star of that teenager party as he was the star of the fancier soirées of the arts patrons, but there was a kinship with people his own age that he didn’t feel with the jewelry-bedecked and cumberbunded patrons of the arts.

One crystal of Micah’s world had shattered that night in Charlotte. The next year would see his passion turning from music and the constricted life he led in pursuing his musical goals to recovering what he had physically and personally lost through the years.

Betty saw none of Micah’s frustrations, none of the changes he was on the brink of making. She was wrapped up in his career – his brilliant career as she called it. The fancy soirees, the hobnobbing with the arts patrons – these were what she had missed with her own career in music when she was forced to get married. Through Micah, she was able to live some of her own dream. In a way, she was so wrapped up in her surrogate career that she missed the signs of Micah’s growing restlessness.