Sweet Spot (creative writing exercise)

Part 1: Sweet Spot

Yesterday was so boring.

I hate Sundays and I hate going to church. Daddy doesn’t have to go at all. I already go on Tuesdays at school so that makes it two times a week instead of just one time like most go.

TV on Sunday is really boring too. Daddy watched Star Trek and, when I said it was a stupid show, he told me to go play. So I played with the record cabinet.

I love the way the inside smells and there’s a ditch thing cut into the doors to make a design. The dent part is painted black and the flat part is just wood colored. The dent is the exact same size of my pointer finger and I pretended it was a road and raced my fingers around and made tire squeal noised at the curves. Then I played with the magnets that keep the doors shut. I like the clicking sound they make when doors gets sucked closed.

Daddy told me to quiet down, so I made up a game where I piled of my 5 favorites record covers, then my 4 favorites, and then down to my absolute favorite favorite.

I like the ladies in purple underwear on Ferrante and Teicher. We have lots of Ferrante and Teicher but we never play those records.
The John Denver record is good too and Mama listens to that one a lot. I like the pictures of his family on the inside. I think I’d like to live on a farm.
Johnny Mathis has really big eyebrows and is wearing skiing clothes. I’ve never gone skiing but I have gone ice skating. We only listen to that one at Christmastime.
Neil Diamond looks like he’s in the middle of a big sneeze on Hot August Night. Mama loves Neil Diamond and has gone to see him at Pine Knob a bunch of times.
Cheech & Chong is my favorite though. That one belongs to Daddy. There’s a flap that is the outside of a car and you can open it up to see the insides of the door. Not inside the car, the inside the actual door. Cheech & Chong both look like Sonny.

Mama came by and said I was going to scratch the records and made me put them away. I asked her if I could listen to the radio with the headphones. I love the headphones. They’re like having fly eyes on the side of your head. I like plugging the headphones into the round hole in the front of the stereo, especially if it is already turned on. When you do that, you can hear a loud ZZZAPPPPP noise but Mama told me not to do that. The curly cord to the headphones isn’t very long and, when Daddy uses them, he sits in the green Lazy-Boy chair right in front of the stereo. But I crawled behind the chair and stretched my feet up the wall over the heating vent. Heating vents are fun too, if you yell into them it makes and echo.

When I put headphones on I can hear myself breathing inside my head.

Hello. (Hello)
Can. You. Hear. me? (Can. You. Hear. me?)

I held my breath and pinched my nose to see what would happen. Nothing. I turned the knob on the radio and could see it light up inside. First there was a hum and then the music came on. I closed my eyes and thought about what side of my head the different parts of the music came from. I usually picked the voices to follow.

Right side. Left side.
Both.
Left side. Right side.
Both.

Headphone music is so much different than speaker music. It’s like all of outer space is swirling around inside my head and there is nothing outside of me. Behind my eyelids, my eyeballs darted back & forth, up & down, and all around as if I’m watching billions of falling stars. But the rest of me is completely frozen like in Statue Maker. I felt really happy and floaty.


Part 2: The Man Who Sold the World
If I could go back in time to the day I discovered how it felt to have music inside my head, I wouldn’t do anything different. I’d still just lie there on the floor and feel as big as the universe.

Not long after that, my dad moved out of our house and into an apartment with the lady who would become his second wife. He took the stereo, the headphones and the Cheech & Chong album. My mom bought an inexpensive, used stereo from our neighbor, who owned a radio and TV repair business. The new one didn’t have headphones but it did have an 8-track player. For a long time we only had four 8-track tapes though: Neil Diamond’s Greatest Hits, John Denver’s Greatest Hits, The Mamas and the Papas Greatest Hits and a god-awful Star Wars soundtrack played on a Wurlitzer. None of them had good cover art.

At the time, that day with the headphones didn’t seem special; I didn’t even think about it after it happened. As soon as there were friends to play with and cartoons to watch, I didn’t give the music or what went on inside my head a second thought. But I must have tucked the memory away somewhere, because I rediscovered the shooting stars and sense of calm several years later. By that time, I desperately wanted a place to retreat. An escape from a step-father I hated and the horrifying, catty world of teenage girls.

To be honest, I can’t even be sure that the memory is real and all of that really happened in a single afternoon. I’ve probably combined a lot of days and small memories. I do know that it feels like a real memory and that I’ve believed in it for a long time now. The first time I really listened to The Man Who Sold the World and Life on Mars, I was convinced that I must have heard David Bowie that day. But at other times I've thought that about Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and a half dozen other songs too. And I thought about that day when I stood in the “sweet spot” of a boyfriend's basement recording studio. He had spent weeks putting together a system of itchy fiberglass panels and a wall of PVC pipes to get the effect he was after. When it was all done and he invited me down to listen, I actually felt Led Zeppelin bounce off the walls, dance around me and jump inside my ears.

A lot has changed since that afternoon. I don’t hate Sundays anymore and don’t go to church. There are a lot more options for Sunday afternoon TV but I actually do like to watch all generations of Star Trek. I haven’t seen or talked to my dad in close to 20 years and I’m not sure what my mom and step-dad did with the record cabinet when they moved but, I do have my own stereo now. It has glowing orange tubes that hum when I turn it on and bug-eye headphones. When I use them, I still lie on my back with my feet up the wall, close my eyes and watch the shooting stars.