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Book
Review
Choir
Boy
By Charlie Anders
Soft Skull Press
304pp
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the book
Excerpt
From Choir Boy
Wash
me Thoroughly
You can control every move your body makes but not your body itself.
Berry practiced sitting and standing, breathing and projecting every second he wasn't doing anything else. You can practice breathing in the shower, in class, on the bus, while your parents argue beside you, even in your sleep after enough practice. You can carry it with you. He would breathe in pure song vapor and Mr. Allen would scrub away the dead-skin dissonance and replace it with bell sounds. Berry might imagine himself naked from the outside in, and Mr. Allen's eyes probing his lungs for bad breaths. Every time he raised his voice he worried he'd get nodes on his vocal chords, which were like burns or poison ivy on the surface of your voice. The least scream could tear you down.
Berry had recently had a kidney stone, but he hadn't understood what it was except that a pointy object put pressure on his willie from the inside and he hadn't put it there, until Marco explained that Berry had to pee really hard to get it out.
Lord let me know mine end.
Berry felt that same jagged clog, only in his chest, when he imagined that the bellows inside it would gnarl. Every time his voice wavered or his throat felt uncomfortable, Berry worried he was starting to change. He drank lots of water and did voice exercises every day. But he still feared his voice and his self-esteem could shatter at any time.
Berry caught his dad in a good mood. "How did you deal with losing your voice?" Berry asked.
Marco looked startled. "I never lost my voice. See? I'm talking." Marco had shaved his scalp but had a head's worth of hair on his upper lip. Marco had a free-form career as gardener, house painter, spiritual advisor and sometimes stockbroker.
"No, I mean your singing voice. Your treble one. When did you lose it?"
"Dunno. Thirteen. Maybe fourteen. Your age, more or less."
"I don't want to change. I wish there was some way I could keep my voice the way it is."
"Oh no, Berry. You should be excited. It's a rite of passage to have your voice change. It's like when a sumo wrestler reaches four hundred pounds or an opera singer grows horns of her own and no longer needs her helmet." Berry's dad had a way of trying to sound whimsical that came across unbearably heavy. Something dragged Marco's flights of fancy into the muck. Whatever it was, it made Berry cringe even as he knew he was meant to admire his dad's quips. Berry listened to his dad talk endlessly about menstruation and some obscure West Indian tribe that proved manhood by removing one testicle. If the boy didn't scream, that proved he was a man. If not, then wave goodbye to the other ball as well. Actually, Marco said, that was one surefire way to keep your boyish voice, "although I wouldn't recommend it. It's a lot to give up just to sound pretty. But back in Renaissance Europe, they used to have singers called castrati... But anyway, do you have any questions about sex? I've been meaning to have a talk with you about it."
Berry told his dad he had no sex questions. Marco wanted to have the sex talk anyway, using words like "yoni" and "tigerlily," so Berry stalked off and rode the elevator down to street level. It was Saturday, that non-school non-church day where kids with televisions watch cartoons. Berry talked to homeless people for a while, then went back to his apartment.
***
The next morning Berry giggled in rehearsal. It started from something Teddy whispered, but it wouldn't stop even after Mr. Allen's eyes stabbed him. The giggling jolted his insides, guttural like a baritone on nitrous oxide, until the laughter left but the shaking stayed. He couldn't stop. Teddy led Berry outside and pushed him against a chunky wall not too roughly until the motor ran down on Berry's jitters. Teddy told Berry to pull it together like a man. Berry nodded. They went back inside.
The choir stumbled over the same dumb psalm tune over and over, a jerky chant and antiphon that it ought to have learned in its sleep: "The Lord of hosts is with us: the God of Jacob is our stronghold," but the boys straggled and rushed, went up too much or not enough, and made mistakes out of impatience. Mr. Allen first growled and then raged, but by the time the choir got that jingle straight, there were only seconds to brush up Howell's "Like As The Hart," the day's offertory. "I could train monkeys to replace you all -- the choir would improve a million fold," Mr. Allen yelled. Berry hung his head.
In the service, the readings, collects and prayers all blended with Berry's obsessive thoughts of the next winter, from which spring couldn't follow. Bible talk wove with Berry's inner chatter. One reading, from Paul's letter to the Hebrews, said: "In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood."
At one point, Berry could have sworn he heard Canon Moosehead and Dean Jackson whispering from their big chairs. "Do you really think sexuality is a gift from God?" Canon Moosehead asked. Dean Jackson nodded. "Then why did He booby-trap it?" the Canon said.
This week, Dean Jackson gave the sermon. The Dean was the main defender of the Hungry Souls Soup Kitchen and had encouraged Mr. Allen to search the inner city for singers. The Dean used his sermon to defend his pet programs. "When people all praise you, that usually means you're doing something wrong," the Dean said. "Being the person you were meant to be is often the hardest work of all."
The service ended. Organ music purred to silence. Berry hung out with Wilson and the others for a while. Then he found Mr. Allen, who was peeling off his black robe in the empty choir room. Mr. Allen shut the door on himself and Berry, then lit a joint. "Scarlatti always makes me crave weed."
"Sorry we sucked so bad today," Berry said.
"No monumental deal," Mr. Allen said between drags.
Mr. Allen always said most European choral music was written to be sung by boys in the upper registers, not women. Mr. Allen spent hours training each boy to polish his voice like silver, until he could sing more like a bird and less like a reject from a local production of Annie: The Musical.
"Doesn't it piss you off," Berry asked Mr. Allen after a while, "that us boys lose our range just when we've learned enough to be rock steady?"
Mr. Allen shrugged. He looked the most relaxed Berry had seen him, leaning back in his chair with his feet up on the desk in his cubbyhole. His shoes rested on a pile of Elgar anthems.
"I get a few good years out of most of you," Mr. Allen said. "And some of the better kids stay on and use their training as Altos, Tenors or Basses. But I have to admit, it's nice to focus on my organ sometimes -- knowing the pipes won't suddenly relocate on me." Mr. Allen didn't have much to say on the subject of castrati, except that just between him and Berry, he'd gladly have gelded a few of the cockier boys if he hadn't thought he'd get in trouble with the diocese. "You could always train as a Counter Tenor. They're coming back in a big way," said Mr. Allen.
Berry went to the library instead of home that afternoon and found several books on castrati. He couldn't find much on counter tenors, who sounded like tenors faking it as trebles. But the castrati fascinated Berry. They'd lived like pimps, covered with gold jewelry and surrounded by posses. Crowds had massed to hear the strange purity of the castrati's voices. The choir boys had giggled once at stories of eunuchs who'd guarded the harems of the sultans, but these eunuchs had partied like sultans.
Marco had a carrot peeler and was seeing how much skin he could skim off each finger before he drew blood. Judy came home from a study group and had expected Marco to cook dinner. Marco threw the carrot peeler at her. It left a plaster gash in the wall. Berry poured cereal and went to his room.
After his parents had argued themselves to sleep, Berry got up and wandered into the kitchenette of their apartment. City sounds answered each other like psalm verses. He wanted a glass of juice, but a bread knife on the counter caught his eye. He looked at it a long time. The light made its serrations glitter.
Berry pulled down his pajama bottoms and hefted the knife. He found the testicles that he'd first noticed a few months earlier and pulled at their nest. They seemed far from his body. Hatching venom. It would take only a quick slash to cut them loose.
He stood straight and parted his legs a little. His free hand pulled his balls from his thighs. He held the knife to the stringy top of his scrotum and slid it until it jabbed. He imagined a lover's caress instead of metal. Teddy had brought a porn film to the Twelve Step room and the choirboys had watched it with muted on the church TV/VCR. The male porn star's advent candle-sized dick had slid in and out of his costar's vagina.
Berry imitated that motion now with the bread knife over his balls. He fucked himself with the knife. It was the first time Berry'd touched himself down there other than to pee that he could remember. The blade rocked back and forth. Berry sawed until the knife bit skin, then gasped, trying to keep his sobs inaudible to Marco and Judy.
The next pass of the knife seared all the way into Berry's stomach. He felt he'd hit a suspending worm. Blood sprayed his legs and then he couldn't keep the shriek inside. It sounded louder and fiercer because he'd held it in so long.
As he heard his parents stir and dropped the knife, Berry had two thoughts close together. The first: he'd hit that note, way up the windy scaffolding above everything, that nobody could reach at the end of Stanford's Te Deum in C major. The second: Berry had failed the tribal test and wasn't a man.
Copyright © 2004 Charlie Anders
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