Music Super Short Stories

Chuckles and Full Pint sat around their shared record player, playing the game they played most nights, drinking cheap beer and listening to cheap records. The rules of the game were easy. Pick one half of a LP or a full 45, and then it was the next guy’s turn. They were currently half way through Chuckle’s pick of side-one of Lou Reed’s Rock n’ Roll Animal.

Punk nicknames were acquired in one of two fashions, either you were so cool you got something great, or, like most, you stumbled into one through unfortunate life choices. Neither Chuckles or Full Pint were that cool.

Full Pint’s real name was Jason Vala, but after a five-day bender of cocaine and Little House on the Prairie he demanded to be called Half Pint; the name of some girl in the show. After a few years of beer and fast food, the once skinny punk had ballooned to 260 and his once demanded nickname of Half Pint was ballooned to Full Pint.

Chuckles’ case was less in-depth. Originally named Charles Dearth, an evening of laughing fits thanks to huffing nitrous oxide and computer cleaner had forever deemed him Chuckles, and possibly borderline retarded.

The pair lived in a seedy part of downtown Oakland, in an apartment on a corner above a Japanese ramen house. The apartment was constantly engulfed in the smell of boiling noodles and pork belly, something both craved and neither could afford.

The apartment gave them a good vantage point of their corner. They could see everybody coming and going. They could see if friends were bumming around, or getting off the bus at the corner stop, or if there was some creditor out there, someone dumb enough to have lent them money.

I had always found the organ-playing at St. Barnabé highly interesting. Learned and scientific it was, too much so for my small knowledge, but expressing a vivid if cold intelligence. Moreover, it possessed the French quality of taste; taste reigned supreme, self-controlled, dignified and reticent.

To-day, however, from the first chord I had felt a change for the worse, a sinister change. During vespers it had been chiefly the chancel organ which supported the beautiful choir, but now and again, quite wantonly as it seemed, from the west gallery where the great organ stands, a heavy hand had struck across the church, at the serene peace of those clear voices. It was something more than harsh and dissonant, and it betrayed no lack of skill. As it recurred again and again, it set me thinking of what my architect’s books say about the custom in early times to consecrate the choir as soon as it was built, and that the nave, being finished sometimes half a century later, often did not get any blessing at all: I wondered idly if that had been the case at St. Barnabé, and whether something not usually supposed to be at home in a Christian church, might have entered undetected, and taken possession of the west gallery. I had read of such things happening too, but not in works on architecture.