The Stuttering Jock's Opera

The

Stuttering

Jock’s

Opera

a novel

Bill Sevald

Copyright 2016 by Bill Sevald

This is a work of fiction. All incidents, dialogue, and characters are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical or by any information or storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the author.

Four accented pinyin Mandarin vowels did not convert to eBook format.  They read as a, i, o, and u in the text.

Cover designed by nzgraphics.com

Interior designed by Debbi Stocco

Table of Contents

Chapter One. Smooth Talker

Chapter Two. One Hundred Feet Higher than the Acapulco Cliffs

Chapter Three. Shuffling, Not to Buffalo

Chapter Four. Roll Bones and Rattle Keys

Chapter Five. Unmasked

Chapter Six. Auditioned

Chapter Seven. So Many Square Pegs, So Few Round Holes

Chapter Eight. All the News That’s Fit to Eat.

Chapter Nine. It’s Only an Opera … Only an …

Chapter Ten. A Velvet Poke in the Eye.

Chapter Eleven. Two Unexpected Job Offers

Chapter Twelve. Running is the Easy Part

Chapter Thirteen. A Revealing Repast in Windsor

Chapter Fourteen. … and in Toronto

Chapter Fifteen. Away We Go

Chapter Sixteen. Hang Your Clothes on a Hickory Limb, but …

Chapter Seventeen. Expect the Unexpected

Chapter Eighteen. Not So Merrily Down the Stream

Chapter Nineteen. Busy in Beijing

Chapter Twenty. That’s Entertainment

Chapter Twenty-One. Hope for the Best

Chapter Twenty-Two. Minutia Maven

Chapter Twenty-Three. Logistics

Chapter Twenty-Four. Primers

Chapter Twenty-Five. Ethnic Politics

Chapter Twenty-Six. More than a Modest Proposal

Chapter Twenty-Seven. No Shoes, No Rice, No Sweat

Chapter Twenty-Eight. Blowup and Sweet Dreams

Chapter Twenty-Nine. Showtime

Chapter Thirty. Who Needs James Earl Jones?

Chapter Thirty-One. Downhill to Conclusion

Chapter Thirty-Two. Coda Time

Chapter Thirty-Three. Much More to Do

Endnotes

Not all fairy tales begin: Once Upon a Time.

Chapter One. Smooth Talker

H*¹ awakes with two things on his mind: getting a rhyme for blueberries and racing the Chinatown 10K that starts a half mile from his studio apartment. As is normal for February in San Francisco, it is raining—a cold hard rain, not the month’s usual tepid showers. It’s weather unfitting the sunny bridesmaid procession he is translating from an early 19th century opera. He ponders rhymes as he stretches, feeling free to go with whatever works in the 8, 7, 8, 7 beat stanza. The first stab is clumsy.

We bring our Naskapi maiden

A wreath of fresh blueberries

Her morning repast to sweeten

On the day that she marries.

Repast? Who says repast? Before he can rework the line, white noise from a W. S. Gilbert libretto interrupts. Worse, it is accompanied by Arthur Sullivan’s music.

When a merry maiden marries,²

Sorrow goes and pleasure tarries…

He’s been here before; it’s pointless to press on. Awed by Gilbert’s ability to create rhymes that seem inevitable, he wonders if prompters take the night off when G&S operettas are performed. He hadn’t consciously memorized the Englishman’s lyrics, yet they flow so well that he can’t forget them, and he would give his left nut to spin such singable verse in his own voice.

Better to retain his privates and clear his head because the race brings an issue of its own: the dread of picking up his race number. I’ll have to say my name to claim it. Following stutterer best practice, he registered late to ensure the speaking situation. That decision does not now comfort his queasy stomach. It is mildly twisted that his familiarity with G&S came from scouting out patter songs ³ that, when he’s alone, he can sing at a good clip.

Waiting until a half hour before race-start, and then using apartment building overhangs as an umbrella, he jogs to the registration area. It’s set up under a large tent in the playground across from the Chinatown YMCA, which is closed for renovation and expansion. The signage to the H-to-L pre-registered table is clearly marked, and he queues up. Most of those in line are wearing some sort of rain gear: ponchos, raincoats, plastic garbage bags with head and armholes, and assorted varieties of head covering: visors, baseball caps, and wide-brimmed rain hats. He is the only person clad solely in shorts, singlet, socks, and shoes.

Slowing his breathing, he silently practices saying his name, mouthing in rhythm with his exhales. The line moves rapidly, and he is soon standing in front of a young Asian woman, seated, doling out race bibs. Her face is cute in a cuddly, cartoon-animal way, and, cliché aside, her dimples look deep enough for q-tip cleaning.

Name? asks the woman, looking down to rearrange the pile of numbers on the table. He breathes slowly, starts—and nothing comes out. A block! Looking away, he struggles to force the word out, his shoulders heaving and face contorting as if he were suffocating. Hearing silence, she continues to shuffle paper, and repeats the question in Cantonese. On his strangled gasp, she looks up with an irritated frown, recognizes him, and smiles.

Oh, you won last year, didn’t you? What’s your name, H, H +, something like that, right? He nods as she rifles through the appropriate pile. Oh, here it is. H*, right?

Forcing a smile, he accepts the number.

I’d offer you good luck, but you won’t need it, will you?

Not attempting an answer, he mouths a weak thank you and turns from the table, number in hand. Why, oh, why? Perhaps it was because she kept her head down, reducing him to a phone call response; he couldn’t smile, laugh, or employ other ice-breakers. A stutterer’s name is the most difficult thing for him to say. His miseries saying Hello crowned him a master of the heavy-breath phone call in high school when circumstances forced him to dial classmates for homework assignments or teammates for away-game departure times.

Who says repast? He does, or rather, he did to derision during a low point in junior high, blocking on D and S, in addition to the always-faithful M, which made dinner, supper, and meal as difficult to say as his name. At least they had synonyms. The problem with a person’s name, besides the obvious self-identity baggage, is that its specificity renders a stutterer’s expansive, evasion-based vocabulary useless. Not that the substitution has to be a single word: he once goofily tried the name on my driver’s license, only to block on the. He understands that avoidance makes things worse and that difficult-to-say words are best met head-on, but the good intention angels don’t always have your back.

He completes his pre-race routine under the tent before walking the wind-shielded south side of Sacramento Street down to the starting line on Grant Avenue. The elite racers are doing low-tempo sprints to warm up, and he sees two men and one woman wearing the red and yellow of the national team from the People’s Republic of China. The team is on the last leg of a mini-tour of the United States, having visited New York and Houston prior to Baghdad by the Bay⁴. The contingent is flying home this afternoon, and the nonstop rains have tempered its frustration over lack of tourist time.

He was invited to a reception in their honor at the Chinatown Holiday Inn last night. He begged off to work on the opera project, his temp job having required overtime during the week, leaving little time for artistic pursuits. Had he cheated on sleep like a serious writer, he could have made time; however, as a stick–in-the-mud jock, he tries to get at least seven hours of z’s a night. He feels like business-casual road kill when he doesn’t.

Joining the hotshots in thirty-yard mini-sprints, he feels the full force of the rain for the first time, his black-on-white Excelsior Running Club singlet soaked on toeing the line. Given the conditions, the starter’s remarks over the loudspeaker are brief and limited to welcoming everyone to 2009, the Year of the Brown Ox⁵. The start is clean: two teenage runners sprinting to the lead, their breathing forced and loud. They are reduced to jogging after three blocks.

The Chinese men, exhibiting the precision of a finely tuned sports car, move to the front and slowly separate from a pack of six, which includes H*. After the Stockton Street downhill to Bay Street, he passes the first mile in 4:58, sees the PRC men ahead, calculates that they must have cruised through under 4:45, and knows there is no way short of hopping on a motor scooter that he is going to overtake them.

The four-mile stretch from Bay to Aquatic Park to the Embarcadero has cross winds, and he bulls to a No Man’s Land of solo racing. The Chinese widen their lead on him as he lengthens the distance on the pack of five, and he is two minutes behind bending into the turnaround past the Ferry Building. The fifth mile is a grind, and he snorts as fatigue and pain set in. Heading into the last mile, he has paced properly: his body wants to quit; his mind will whip it to finish. The left turn onto Pacific Avenue brings the first headwind and visibility issues, with rain whipping directly into his face as he hyperventilates to force air out so he can suck wet air back in. The route ahead has left and right turns a block in length, and the PRCs are now out of sight.

He hangs a right onto California Street’s long straightaway, his head down, eyes focused on the yellow line between the cable car tracks, and lungs pumping like a blacksmith’s bellows. Looking up, he sees the Chinese runners only thirty yards ahead. One is vomiting near the right curb, the other walking as if he has already upchucked.

Ah, he thinks, been there, done that. Remembering the words of a grizzled running sage to drive that last nail—hard coming on superior runners with late-in-race problems, he up-shifts into a sprint and blows by his staggering adversaries, gliding for a few seconds to catch his breath before reducing stride to work the gradual incline to Kearny Street. Nearing the last right turn, a peek back locates the regurgitateurs⁶ far behind. The pack is moving up on them. Coasting to the finish line, he crosses in 30:51. Same old, same old. Just under a five-minute pace.

The waterlogged spectators cheer loudly; for a moment he fears for their sanity. However delusional it might be to run six-plus miles in cold rain, at least he is warm from the effort. Yet these soaked and chilled lemmings beam wide grins and whoop infectious laughs while awaiting loved ones who will be much longer in coming, the last ones almost requiring a calendar instead of a stopwatch.

The Chinese men jog across the finish line in seventh and eighth place, their red jerseys displaying traces of orange barf. The other racers give them wide berth in the chute, and the men sheepishly walk to their stone-faced coach, who stands on the sidewalk holding an umbrella. To H*’s eye, he is tall, over six feet, with white hair and a broad forehead, and looks like nobody’s fool. Better to have his charges screw up at a nothing race than at an international meet, their country’s glory and his job on the line. Going forward, the miscreants will hang on his whisper.

Ducking under the cover of a nearby hospitality tent, the surprise winner calls, What happened to them? over to the race director, a burly Filipino-American standing under a golf umbrella by the right curb. The man’s reply, Looks like they overdid the vodka screwdrivers last night. I thought they were poundin’ ‘em down pretty hard, is interrupted by the loudspeaker. And here comes the first woman—Ma Ju. Wow, and in the top ten overall. Give her a big hand.

Ms. Ma sprints to a tape hastily erected for the first woman, finishing in 32:39, a 5:15 pace. Squeezing water from her thoroughly drenched short black hair, she waves to the crowd as she navigates the chute, the race director skipping to her side to hold his umbrella over her. Spying her coach and teammates to the right, she immediately turns left and walks to the tent under which H* stands. The director says, to no one in particular, Well, here are our two winners. A woman volunteer relays the comment to her in Mandarin.

Shaking her head in surprise, she smiles up at H* as he retreats to make room for her. Another woman places an aluminum foil-like wrap over her shoulders, calling in Mandarin to the coach what probably translates as Where the #$@&* is her jacket? The silver-haired one, never breaking poker face, leaves his hung-over men, jogs to his distaff charge’s side, and, looking above her head to make eye contact with H*, silently hands her a plastic bag containing her warm ups.

Jeez, man, at least congratulate her. She beat some decent male runners.

The American can’t see her reaction, but guesses from her drooped shoulders that it is not positive. The coach turns to stare back at his shamefaced men on the sidewalk, and without a word to his champion, leaves to tend to them.

So much for team spirit.

The coach’s silence aside, this is easily the most Mandarin H* has heard on Kearny Street. Chinatown’s residents are overwhelmingly Cantonese speakers, and while he knows neither language, the Mandarin shuh sound sticks out. Not that the area’s East Asians speak either language. He once trailed a lost Chinese tourist who entered the Chinatown YMCA to ask directions. The oriental-looking young woman behind the counter responded to his Cantonese, between gum-chews, in singsong valley girl English, I don’t speak Chinese. The gentleman gazed at the hanzi character signage⁷ above the desk, then at her, and uttered an exasperated sigh before returning to the street.

Calling, I’ll be back to the director, H* exits the tent to jog home for a shower and dry clothing, hugging the buildings on the right side of the street for cover before turning on east-west Pine for the six-block climb. Midway to Grant, he hears a shout from a female voice, and looking back, sees Ms. Ma, plastic bag in hand, jogging up to him. He tucks into the doorway of a business building, and assuming that she is disoriented, slowly says Holiday Inn, pointing back to the PRC contingent’s hotel, located fifty yards from the tent they just vacated. She shakes her head.

What’s with these people? The men get hammered before a race and the women follow you home after it’s over.

He starts back up the hill, again staying as close to apartment buildings as possible. At a loss to explain her actions, he resorts to self-mockery: Say Holiday Inn fluently and they shadow you home.

Not necessarily. You saw her coach. What a jerk. And what about her the-bar-is-open teammates? She just wants to get away from them for a while.

Yeah, right. Why would you follow a woman home, assuming you had the guts to do it? Walk her back, NOW.

OK, OK. Will do—after I get dry and warm.

Having mirrored his building tuck technique, she joins him in the alcove outside his residence, waiting silently for him to untie his left shoe and remove the tiny key that opens the mailbox storing the house keys. Opening the front door, he walks to his apartment in the back of the ground floor, his chilled fingers fitting the freed keys into the door’s locks with difficulty. Although he would normally restring the mailbox key once inside, he dumps all the metal on the small table that secures the landline telephone.

He moves to the open bathroom door, intending to point out the location of the shower, but before he can turn back, hands grab his buttocks, moving as if reading Braille to the front of his sopped shorts until they cradle his member, which responds immediately. Emitting a nervous giggle, the unexpected guest strokes his shaft in rhythmic pumps.

Eeee yow! Cold foreplay never felt so bad. Her fingers warm as she holds fast to maneuver him to the unmade bed in the corner of the room. Stridently, louder than intended, he gasps, Wait, wait, I don’t want wet sheets. He breaks free to retrieve towels from the bathroom, thinking you should have walked her back when you had the chance, a resolve that extinguishes on her stripping to dry off. The sight of her powerful buttocks, smooth muscular thighs and calves, and small breasts with large, firm nipples stifles his usual caution and reticence.

The act is missionary and quick, delayed by condom retrieval from the bathroom. Her fidgeting afterward rules out a quick nap, and after she rejects an offer to bathe first, he walks to the shower, keeping the bathroom door open. Although he usually takes Navy showers (get wet, water off, soap up, water on, rinse), he stands a good minute under the warm drizzle before reaching for the soap.

Just as he’s about to lather up, the curtain parts, revealing Ms. Ma holding a fresh condom; he hadn’t heard her open the medicine cabinet. He moves aside so spray can fall directly on her, and after making a 360-turn to wet herself all over, she reaches for his peter, strokes it until it maxes, rolls on the condom, and, turning her back, maneuvers for rear vaginal entry. Reaching around to grab a small, full breast in each hand, he draws her close, slowly moving his erection in and out, her fanny syncopating with his thrusts. As with the sex on the bed, the act is mechanical and brief.

After dropping the sticky rubber on the bathroom floor, he wets the bar soap and turns off the water. When they are both covered in suds, he restarts the flow to rinse in silence. She towels off after he leaves, dressing in dry sweats from the plastic bag left on the tile floor.

On her emergence from the bathroom, he tosses her a red, hooded rain shell from the back of the closet door. Smiling shyly, eyes down, she pulls the slicker over her sweats, and gestures that she is ready, the signal for the impromptu couple to retrace their steps back to the registration playground, exchanging neither word nor look on the way. Despite huddling under a large promotional golf umbrella, they do not touch. Two brief sex acts are the extent of their intimacy.

They are back in plenty of time for the award ceremony, which is perfunctory, given that the PRC men are not present. The prize for finishing first overall is a 12 nonstick frying pan with wok-like sides, with the first female receiving an 8 version of the same pan. The women present grumble over the inequity and tone down their complaints only after Ms. Ma demonstrates that the pan is the perfect size for her travel bag. Just as he’s about to leave, the race winner is hailed by an elderly Chinese gentleman, who asks if he’d like to join a group hosting the visitors for breakfast in Chinatown. Since jook, Cantonese rice porridge, is a morning favorite, he readily answers yes, and the invitation bearer replies that the coach and runners will meet them at the restaurant.

Joining four ancient men for the walk down Waverly Place to a bistro past Clay Street, he separates from them to avoid getting poked in the eye by their umbrellas. The seniors enter the restaurant to find the coach, his three runners, the race director, and a middle-aged female Mandarin interpreter at a round table seating six. The odd man out, H* settles in with the movers and shakers at the adjoining six-seater. The conversation is humdrum until one of the men, pointing at the empty seat, asks him an innocent question.

Will your wife be joining us?

I’m not … … … … … married.

Not married? How old are you?

Ah, uh, … … thirty-six.

To a man, the patriarchs shake their heads. The oldest, his ink black hair and eyebrows inconsistent with his sagging eyes and age-blemished skin, malevolently eyes H* and asks, What is your profession?

Starting to perspire, the interrogee responds, fluently for once, I work temporary jobs.

The man pounces. So you can jog?

Although he has an answer, the racer limits his reply. Hesitating, tightening his lips, he says simply, … … No.

Trying to head off a confrontation, the diner beside him sympathetically interjects, You lack education?

Seeing where this is going, the runner winces. No. I’m a … a … a college grad.

His dyed-hair nemesis smiles widely, puffs up his chest, and announces, loud enough for the entire restaurant to hear, "I read my great-granddaughter the story of the Ant and the Grasshopper last night. Now I can tell her I ate breakfast with a grasshopper."

The round-eyed one struggles to respond, and the man, clearly enjoying himself, cuts him off.

You are weak, WEAK! And lazy! I stuttered when I was young, but worked, WORKED, to overcome it. It was hard, but I did it.

The runner is silent. Here we go again. If I only had a dollar for every clown who’s told me he stuttered as a kid.

The others tune out as the chastiser continues. Apparently it doesn’t take much to get him going, from the noble to the not, such as losing a bet on the PRC men to win the just-completed race.

If you had self-respect, you would not show your face in public until you could talk like a man. Instead, he pauses, his hands mimicking a flitting running motion, you waste time trying to be a champion jogger.

H*’s face is crimson from embarrassment, his neck redder from anger. He’s nobody’s punching bag. But even if fluent, he wouldn’t be able to get a word in.

Before I was sixteen, I worked two jobs to support my family. Two jobs! And I went to school at night. My English was terrible. TERRIBLE! But I worked at it. WORKED! How can you, a grown man, stomach—

H* cuts him off with, Where’s the … … m … the m … … … … the restroom? It’s a stuttering no-no to substitute for a problem word, in this case men’s room, but he’s desperate.

The bathroom has one toilet with a wash-basin and mirror, and he is urinating with his back to the door when it opens, a man from his table entering. The gentleman, as old as the fulminator, although slighter and white-haired, looks at him and says softly in lightly Cantonese-accented English, If you please, permit me to apologize for my colleague.

The man’s sincerity and understated dignity melt H*’s anger, and he nods a thank you, gesturing that he is ready to go back. The men return to find the accuser’s seat empty, a table mate volunteering, after seeing the runner’s relieved expression, He left. On business.

The honchos resume their conversation in Cantonese, and his bathroom mate, once seated, asks in English, Is there a reason why you are a temporary worker? If it is only to jog, then our friend had a point.

H* haltingly explains that he held a regular job for a few years, quitting after annual reviews cited his speech as the factor limiting advancement. He wanted to write, and since stuttering hampers his success with the speaker sex⁸, temp work is sufficient to support one person living alone.

Can you make money writing?

C … computer manuals and self-help books are supposedly where the … … … money is. He struggles in silence and focuses his eyes above the listener’s head to avoid seeing his reaction. Unfortunately, … I … I … I write short stories.

Have they been published?

Two, in a literary journal. … … The pay covered postage. He chuckles. Oh, and an ink cartridge.

Are you working on anything that will make money?

The question is posed in a friendly, nonjudgmental manner that prompts a halting response. He explains that he’s reworking the libretto of an opera that is very popular in Germany and rarely performed in the United States. The music is wonderful, but the story line is creaky, and there’s too much talking throughout. So he’s removed almost all the dialogue and reworked lyrics to cover for information lost with the excisions. Oh, and he’s changed the setting to Quebec a few years before European encroachment.

Sounds like an exercise in futility, replies the old man, with a gentle shake of the head to connote commiseration rather than condemnation. The fledgling librettist counters that he’s enthused by the challenge and likes what he’s completed so far. The original work deals with, among other things, Christian reaction to the supernatural, which he has completely removed; his devils are humans acting as devils, their miracles the result of human staging.

Have you shown it to anyone?

H* blocks on the reply. The septuagenarian places his right hand on the struggling mute’s fidgety left in a supportive gesture. Head down, the song cribber tries again.

"I gave a narrative outline to the critic and founder⁹ of the San Francisco Classical Voice." He struggles in silence again, blocking on H. … … … He’s well known for championing new works.

What did he think of it?

"That it might work as a novel, but that the thought of costumed Indians singing idiosyncratic German … … music … made … … … … his skin crawl. I’d agree with … him except that I’ve heard German recordings, including one by Furtwängler¹⁰, which are pretty savage and raucous."

Getting a blank look, he apologizes for name-dropping.

Stroking his chin, the old man offers, One of my granddaughters is a classically trained singer, although I know nothing about what she sings.

Brightening at the revelation, the runner fluently explains that the growing number of Asian singers influenced his decision to start the project. The public no longer accepts swarthy Europeans and body-waxed Middle Easterners as Indians, and an Asian cast might look sufficiently indigenous to make his version work.

Well, good luck, says the man, rising slowly from the table. The others break off their conversation to bid him good-bye. One of them retrieves his umbrella from a nearby trashcan, waiting until he has put on his raincoat before handing it to him. The power brokers return to their powwow. H* slurps the last of his rice porridge before motioning to a waiter for a doggie bag to store his partially eaten chicken chow fun. He talked so much he didn’t finish his breakfast.

The men give passing notice when he moves to the adjoining table for a handshake with the coach, a nod to his men, and an offer of a twenty-dollar bill to the race director as payment for the meal. The no-neck shakes him off, saying the Y will cover it. Ms. Ma, wedged between the director and the interpreter, doesn’t look up as she presses forward the rain shell he gave her, neatly folded. The director comments on the number of non-stick frying pans he must own courtesy of the Chinatown race, prompting the skillet hoarder to reply, … … can never … … … have too many.

Walking home, he softly wails, she never calls, she never writes, before moving on to a familiar testosterone anthem:

Wham, bam,

Thank you, ma’am.

What would a distaff AA, A¹¹ version sound like? He shakes his head when it comes too easily. If only his opera rhymes fell as trippingly¹².

Hump, dump,

Thank you, chump.

Who would have thought his name and gratuitous would appear in the same sentence? Had he been, what’s the word, a surrogate, a way for her to get back at the coach, or had she been moonstruck by his smooth talk? After all, he didn’t block in her presence, even saying Holiday fluently. And she wasn’t freaked out by the caked soap and mildew on the shower wall. A non-inane question follows on his insertion of the key in the front door lock: Are my condoms past their expiration date? He hasn’t had sex in a while. Well, make that more than a while.

Opening the medicine cabinet and glancing at the package, he breathes a sigh of relief: three months to spare, his last sex memorable and not in a positive way. The woman, also a temporary worker and ten years younger, was a two pack-a-day smoker. Her breathing before climaxing was so forced, non-rhythmic, and jagged that he feared she was having a heart attack. To top it off, she smelled enough like an ashtray to rule out another ask out. His reaction was hardly one-sided; she was less than thrilled with his cramped apartment, stuttering, and Spartan lifestyle.

He looks around his less-than-tidy studio. The single room has a closet, a shower-only bathroom, and a tiny kitchen. His bed and desk take up the space that is left. From front door to kitchen is probably ten paces.

I should have brought the guy who asked, Will your wife be joining us back here. And asked him, "What do you think?"

Chapter Two. One Hundred Feet Higher than the Acapulco Cliffs

The week following the race is work, write, and train. Awaking around five each day, he is on the road fifteen minutes later, jogging slowly in lieu of stretching, and not running until ten minutes into the workout. He sticks to routes with even cambers and a modicum of potholes, his mid-six minute pace fast enough for a wee hour effort. The run to the Golden Gate Bridge and back is a tad short of ten miles, with dicey footing in the dark on the dirt promenade leading to the Fort Point turnaround. The Golden Gate Park Rose Garden roundtrip is nine and a half miles and well-lit throughout.

The week’s work-for-money, an assignment at a legal firm a twenty-minute walk from his apartment, is humdrum and does not involve overtime. He relishes the short commute, a far cry from early temping jobs on the peninsula south of the city that required trains or buses. The tyranny of the clock felt sinister, with public transportation timetables as inflexible as job start-times. Knowing that he now has work in town, no matter how numbing the task, calms him.

Using pilfered copier cover sheets as scratch paper, he works on the opera libretto in the evenings at his dining table/desk, waiting until the weekend to enter the accumulated jottings into his desktop computer, revising as he goes. In his version of Weber’s Der Freischütz¹³, he has figured out how to substitute man-made actions for the opera’s supernatural business, except for the framed painting falling on the heroine’s head in the first act. In his treatment, the culprit is snowshoes. He is stumped on how to synchronize their plummet with the hero’s downing of an eagle presented as a bait-and-switch con. For now, he’ll leave the head bashing to coincidence; one can never trust snowshoes. Although he toyed with making Agathe a stumblebum, he couldn’t justify her clumsiness over the length of the opera.

He came to Freischütz by chance in college. One of the boys in his freshman dormitory had a CD of German opera overtures, and he found Weber’s music stirring even though his ears were oriented to heavy metal and shred guitar. More than that, he was intrigued by the accompanying booklet’s illustration of Kaspar standing in the Wolf’s Glen encircled by human skulls. It would be a few years until he heard a complete recording of the opera, which sold him completely.

The masculine songs were immediately appealing: the taunting opening mixed chorus, Kaspar’s putdown of Max and his revenge screed, Max’s terror-stricken aria above the Wolf’s Glen, Samiel’s mischief-making demons, the last act hunters’ chorus. Later, he was astounded to read that the work was revered for its women’s songs. After giving them a concentrated hearing, he found that he agreed. The melodrama had everything except a remotely believable plot, and while that hadn’t stopped warhorses like Il Trovatore¹⁴, the story and the difficulty mounting it seemed to be the reason why Freischütz was rarely performed in North America, despite having been adapted by other artists.

For example, in 1990, William Burroughs¹⁵, despite still dealing with having accidentally shot his wife while drunkenly enacting William Tell at a party, collaborated with Robert Wilson and Tom Waits in the avant-garde The Black Rider: the Casting of the Magic Bullets. Later, a Hungarian woman film director¹⁶ updated the story to modern-day Budapest, portraying Max as a police sniper who loses confidence after shooting a hostage he is assigned to protect.

The roots of H*’s interpretation came by accident. Roaming the stacks of The Mechanics’ Institute Library¹⁷, he happened on a book about the Indians of Labrador written at the turn of the 20th century. The beginning passage described an archery contest among the Montagnais that reminded him of the opera’s opening scene, in which the loser is teased by onlookers.

Further reading revealed that the Montagnais and Naskapi, today one people known as the Innu, considered themselves latecomers to Labrador. Legend placed them originally in lower Quebec, before the Iroquois chased them to the barren Atlantic coast. Innu mothers forever after warned their misbehaving children that the Iroquois bogeymen would get them if they didn’t shape up. This made the neighboring Mohawks natural candidates to play Samiel and his demons. He constructed a story line that had an Innu band migrating back to Quebec during an Iroquois absence, only to become targets of a renegade Mohawk’s vendetta.

Naskapi body-length coats are prized by museums the world over, and, combined with the tribe’s ornamented red caps, guarantee that his protagonists will be a wardrobe designer’s dream. The demon Mohawks are restricted to big hair, leggings, and loincloths.

Still, the newspaper critic had a point about the music, and he doesn’t have a solution. So he piles on excuses. If Peter Sellars¹⁸ can relocate Don Giovanni to Spanish Harlem, why can’t I move Freischütz to Canada? He rationalizes that he is retaining the rustic essence of the piece. A bow’s hum is more musical than a rifle’s discharge. Mostly he doesn’t think; he just works. Writing is fun again—almost too much fun.

He’s never owned a music device that used headphones or ear buds because he’s always been able to recall tunes at a finger snap. In high school, he penned short reconciliation poems and set them to teary-eyed pop songs for players on the football team who had requested help after breaking up with their girlfriends. The sometime favor grew into a cottage industry, and by his senior year no break-up/make-up at the school was complete unless accompanied by an H* ghostwritten weepy. It wasn’t opera, but it was a start, and considering how long he’s been putting words to music that he knows only from listening, he should write better lyrics than he does.

Musicians have remarked on his unworldly, pitch-perfect ear, and German-English dictionaries are available online. As a bonus, he can count. So replacing Freischütz’s dialogue with rewritten arias and choruses is a doable challenge not encumbered by his inability to speak German or read music.

He understands that, technically speaking, Freischütz is not a true opera because of that dialogue. Like earlier The Magic Flute, it is what the Germans call a "singspiel¹⁹." A real opera, he has read, should have only singing.

Which Freischütz will after I’m done with it.

His method-of-madness is to create syllable grids on spreadsheets, breaking down each song to its smallest component. In that format, Killian’s opening Schau der Herr mich an als Konig, dunkt ihm meine Macht zu wenig? becomes the Naskapi Kilyah’s:

I am not an ex - pert arch – er

I ex - cel at trap - ping beav -er

How could I de - feat this buck?

Some would say that it took luck

Luck, not skill, to beat this buck.

His first pass on the peasant chorus’s teasing, he, he, he, becomes Innu birdcalls: first, caw, caw, caw, then, jeee, jeee, jeee, and lastly, wreet, wreet, wreet.

From his stuttering experience, he knows that vowels are the best linking sounds: if he can slide on a vowel into the m sound that gives him trouble, he has a fighting chance to get it out. Lyricists often end stanza lines with vowels to aid singer air flow. A line shouldn’t end with an aspirant, so the spotted sandpiper’s wreet should be sung as wree.

He can work on rhymes while walking, but not running. He finds it difficult to even daydream running. However, he can walk for miles lost in thought, often wondering after finishing how he got from point A to point B. Opera-wise, the workouts are time-wasters; a real writer would abandon them. But road racing is the only arena in which he has achieved moderate recognition, and he is reluctant to drop it. One has to be good at something.

The weather remains stormy through Saturday, limiting early morning runs to less than six miles. With the Sunday forecast dry, he phones around, blocking on h as usual. The area’s elite runners often meet in the parking lot of the College of Marin in Kentfield, which is located north of San Francisco, across the Golden Gate Bridge. The hotshots venture from there to Mt. Tamalpais to work trails on the 2,500-foot mini-mountain.

Getting no takers for a Mt. Tam run, he ponders a city course and decides on an Embarcadero-GG Bridge-Marin Highlands round trip. The out-and-back route to the gun turrets overlooking the ocean beyond the bridge is a little over twenty miles if round tripped via the Ferry Building. It’s shorter if he heads straight home once he’s off the bridge.

Although he set the alarm for six to get an extra hour’s sleep, he awakes an hour earlier, tossing a bit before deciding to get going. After sticking a hand out the alley-side window to feel moisture, not rain, he settles on wearing a baseball cap and two articles of clothing purchased in Chinatown the day before.

On the walk home from buying fruit and vegetables, he had seen a pair of fire-engine-red running shorts and a lily-white singlet in the window of a shoe store. Being visible to cars and other pedestrians on early morning or late evening runs is always a consideration. He’s willing to wear anything short of glitter to be seen.

He jogs east toward the Ferry Building, a stiff wind at his back, knowing that the route to the bridge will be testy once he veers west at Pier 39 on the Embarcadero. For now, the dry air allows him to warm up, and his body temperature is elevated when the rain hits as he’s crossing Market Street. The area’s street lighting is sufficient to see puddles and uneven surfaces, so he starts north on the Embarcadero without a problem. The turn west in Fisherman’s Wharf brings headwinds, and lowering his cap’s visor to shield rain from his face, he thinks, not for the first time, wrestling ear-guards are a must for wet weather running.

The sound of the wind is augmented by that of seals barking and honking at the returning fishing boats. When he had first heard their cries years ago, he thought a pack of dogs was loose in the wharf and altered his course up Telegraph Hill to avoid them. Climbing to Coit Tower, he looked down, expecting to see the equivalent of Kipling’s red dogs²⁰ laying waste to Jefferson Street. A custodian in the parking lot explained that the sound came from seals that had established a pinniped²¹ hostel on the decks near Pier 39.

Now he shouts, Arf, arf, arf as he passes them. The overhead street lighting in the wharf is adequate, with a few restaurants and shops emitting the equivalent of nightlights that illuminate puddles on the street and sidewalks. Despite the wind, none have whitecaps. Reaching Aquatic Park, he climbs the paved hill and descends to the Marina Green for the final leg to the bridge. The journey is a slugfest in the wind²². Near the Warming Hut²³, he elects to leave the shoreline and use streets for the ascent to the bridge.

He has tailwind entering the pedestrian sidewalk on the bay side of the bridge. Because of the weather and the hour, he is alone on the concourse. There are no walkers or bikers. Reveling in both the tailwind and the clear course, he throws in a surge, dropping the pace to what feels like a little over five minutes per mile. The goal is to beat the change-lane truck to the summit, which he does.

Four outgoing cars pass below him on the downhill. Suddenly, an incoming yellow sedan, buffeted by the wind, jerkily swerves over into the left-most outgoing lane and triggers a four-car collision. A deafening cacophony of crunching metal, shattering glass, and blaring car horns emphasizes the severity of the crash. The pileup ends with an empty doubled-decked car hauler, its second deck collapsed onto its lower from the impact, stopped dead at a forty-five degree angle to the road, its tractor front-end protruding into the far right lane.

A slow-to-brake car behind the hauler is rear-ended by the SUV behind it, and on the downhill, is launched onto the hauler’s collapsed deck. Instead of stopping, it accelerates across the deck’s track and goes airborne, clearing both the sidewalk barrier and the bridge’s short bayside railing on its plunge to the dark, turbulent water below.

Twelve feet above the melee, H* runs to the railing. Looking down, he spots the low-flying car afloat, topside up. Because of the rain, its windows are undoubtedly closed, and the collision may have triggered its air bags. Shouts from the bridge cause him to look back to see drivers exiting vehicles to check on themselves and look to others. Their sighs of relief are mixed with expletive-laced rivulets of anger.

He looks down again at the floating car. Without help, its passengers will drown in a matter of minutes. Pacing back and forth at the railing, he sees a familiar sight: fists flying in his face, and behind them, students watching with cow-eyed expressions, none moving to rescue him. He was teased and beaten up in middle school over his stuttering and vowed to always assist the overmatched, no matter the danger. Although he paid a price, even getting stabbed in college rescuing a coed from a rapist, he’s never regretted the bumps and bruises. Secretly, he takes pride in his heroic behavior. It’s the ultimate paradox that he’s paralyzed when doing the trivial, such as claiming a race number, but not when contemplating the suicidal, such as a bridge jump rescue.

To think is not to act. Yes, yes, idiot, that’s why you need to think.

He peeks down again, and feels cowed by the great distance to the water, and how small the car appears. Hesitating, he shifts his weight from one foot to the other.

Enough. Now it’s put up or shut up.

Swiftly untying his shoes, but keeping them on, he takes a last look down, then jumps over the guard rail and plummets, his cap sailing off in the wind. He hits the bay heels first, too jacked up to feel the pain, and surfaces a yard from the car. The furious water is cold, cold. Adrenaline, he prays, don’t fail me now.

Facing the driver’s side, he sees a black woman unconscious at the wheel. A boy, probably her son, is in the same-side backseat wearing a safety harness, cushioned by a side panel inflated airbag. In the front seat, another boy leans over the woman, trying to revive her. To his untrained eye, the boy in the back looks about ten, the one in front a few years younger. H* bangs on the left-rear-door’s closed window, causing the backseat boy to look out in alarmed confusion.

With the wind behind him, H* calls, Untie your seat harness. How’s the driver?

The boy cups his ears to indicate that he can’t hear, not surprising given the fury of rain and waves smacking against the car door. There’s no way he’d hear me if I was on the other side.

He roars a repeat, and the boy nods, unbuckles, and calls out to the front seat. He moves away from his air bag, and turns back to H* to shout in an amazingly calm voice that belies his terrified eyes, Mommy doesn’t answer.

The runner’s response is immediate. Unlock your mother’s door. DO NOT open it.

After the boy nods vigorously, H* moves to the driver’s door to address the boy in the front seat, who is still tending his mother. Both the front and rear air bags are smaller than the giant pillows he had imagined.

Unbuckle. Do not unlock your door. The boy signals that he understands.

Paddling backwards so that he can be seen by both boys, he fills his chest with as much air as possible and screams, You will go out your mother’s door. Looking directly at the boy in the back seat, he points his non-treading hand towards the front seat, and