Chapter Six #4
Danny wasn’t sure he had any idea what she was talking about, but he couldn’t help smiling and nodding along.
“I know you all wanna belt and sound fierce, or whatever,” she said, to giggles from some of the students, “but the only thing I care about is if you believe what you’re singing.”
Ms. Mellon stood up, slipped into her clogs, and walked over to the piano, where she picked up a stack of paper-clipped pages.
“For the first few weeks, I’m assigning you songs that you’ll get a chance to workshop in class,” she said, waltzing over to the haphazard semicircle of cubes.
“They may not necessarily be ones that you know, or even like, but it’s important that you learn them inside out so that you’re fully memorized when it’s your turn to work on them in class. ”
She began passing out the packets, the sleigh-bell jingle of her wrist getting louder as she made her way closer to Danny’s seat.
He studied each student’s face as they received their songs: some excited, some confused, some openly annoyed.
He mentally rehearsed his face, which he decided would be nothing short of elated, no matter what song she handed him.
“I think you’ll like this one, Danny,” Ms. Mellon said, handing him a packet with a title printed across the top of the page in capital letters. “It’s an older one, but it really holds up.”
She remembers me! he silently cheered, before taking a look at the top of the first page.
“What’ll I Do?” by Irving Berlin, he read, with zero recognition of the song, the old guy who wrote it, or what he was supposed to do with sheet music.
“I don’t know it,” he said, shrugging and looking up into her dreamy brown eyes.
“It’s one of my favorites. I’m excited to see what you’ll do with it,” she said with a smile.
For the first time since he’d squinted his eyes open that morning, Danny felt his shoulders release, like he’d been clenching a fist all day and had finally relaxed his fingers.
If this magical woman was excited to see what he could do, maybe he did belong at this school.
Sure, he didn’t have a cool haircut, wasn’t a porno heiress, didn’t possess an encyclopedic knowledge of every show on Broadway and the taste to know which ones actually sucked.
But maybe he could become one of those people, the ones who cracked jokes and had loud opinions and were real artists and could walk down the halls without hiding from the world.
“Now, I know I didn’t assign you anything for today,” Ms. Mellon announced to the class. “But if anyone brought their book—”
She didn’t even finish the sentence before half a dozen hands shot up in the air like geysers.
“Okay, Nina,” she said, beckoning her up with an open hand. “Whatcha got for us today?”
“I’ve got ‘Sing Happy,’ ” Nina said in a tone that seemed casual to Danny, but sent a shudder of recognition through the rest of the class.
“Right on.” Ms. Mellon nodded approvingly, dragging her chair over to the piano. “Show ’em how it’s done.”
Nina pulled a thick black binder seemingly out of her bag, stuffed with glossy pages and pasted with a black-and-white portrait slipped in the clear front cover.
The photo, obviously taken professionally, showed Nina leaning assertively against a brick wall, arms crossed, with dark lipstick and a made-in-America smile.
Nina skated to the piano, placed her open binder in front of the old man, and tapped her foot, whisper-singing an indecipherable tune.
Danny looked around the room. No one seemed to find this strange.
In fact, most of his other classmates either looked bored or flipped through their own binders, preparing for this moment as well.
Once she finished her weird little half-singing routine, Nina marched to the center of the room, rolled back her shoulders, and announced in a new, confident voice:
“Hi, I’m Nina Hershkowitz, and today I’ll be performing ‘Sing Happy’ from Flora the Red Menace by John Kander and Fred Ebb.”
Danny sat up in his seat. This wasn’t the girl who said “like” every other five words, or wore rich old-lady clothes, or bragged about her father’s seedy job.
This was an actress. A young woman, standing with one foot rooted slightly in front of the other, her voice loud and clear, a suit of armor on her back.
How could anyone ever look that fearless?
He squinted, memorizing every detail—the quick nod to the guy behind the piano, the slight raise of her chin like she was talking to someone just over their heads, the spread of her ribs, inhaling all the air in Manhattan, and her eyes growing wider than the Hudson.
Sing me a happy song about robins in spring.
Danny was launched out of the school and dropped into his room in Port Richmond, Nina’s voice playing through his uncle’s rubber earphones.
Each note shot through his body, bouncing off every bone and muscle, ringing out like a church bell or car horn or tornado siren.
Danny had never heard a voice like Nina’s in real life—had never seen one of the characters on his cassettes stand six feet away from him.
Nina sounded like the girls from Annie and Evita and Gypsy all rolled up into one.
He didn’t just hear her voice, he felt it.
Keep it a HAPPY SOOOONNNNGG!
The final note ricocheted through the room for a whole four seconds after Nina closed her mouth.
And then, like it had never even happened, she gave a little shrug and skipped back to her seat on the cube next to him.
Danny looked at her, speechless, only managing to raise a thumb, which was when Nina turned back into the girl he’d met at lunch.
“Meh.” She rolled her eyes, whispering sheepishly. “That last note was, like, kinda pitchy, but thanks.”
Entire wars are fought, won, and lost in the time it takes for the first day of school to end.
When Danny stepped outside, he thought he was hallucinating.
It couldn’t be that the sun was still shining, could it?
Wasn’t it midnight, at least? He took a breath, filling his lungs with all the foul, fantastic smells of New York—stale coffee and car exhaust and urine and hot dogs and orange-striped construction-pipe steam that smacked his face like an old wet towel.
Danny passed newsstands and scaffolding and the red neon sign for the Hotel Empire.
He passed kosher delis and video stores and videotapes spread out on bedsheets like sidewalk picnics, bootleg copies of The Craft and Independence Day.
He passed telephone booths covered in peeling stickers and traffic poles taped with the “Missing Angel” flyers.
He passed windshield wipers crammed with take-out menus and advertisements for peep shows.
He passed taxis and buses that looked just like the ones he had back home.
There were men in tan suits with wingtip shoes and women in silk scarves and dresses from France.
There were models and hustlers and sidewalk chalk artists and sidewalk preachers and students, just like him.
There were ones with disposable cameras and ones running in high heels and ones eating folded pizza slices with orange grease running down their chins.
There were ones with guide dogs and ones sleeping on cardboard beds and ones standing in front of traffic holding dripping squeegees like riot batons.
And all of them walked together. All of them breathed in the same rancid air.
All of them ignored the crosswalk signals and the angry man with the “REPENT OR PERISH” sign.
And they all looked like they were searching for something that was better, or realer, or stronger, or just different from what they had.
And the ones who weren’t searching? Maybe the City had already given them everything it had to give.
Or maybe it had taken so much that there was nothing left to want.
But in the case of Danny Victorio, he found what he was searching for on Forty-Ninth and Broadway, at a place called Colony Records.
It was the poster in the window that first caught his eye, a grid of faces, people who didn’t look like they belonged in musicals but somehow fit right in on the streets of New York.
Danny pulled open the heavy door and stepped into a place more confusing and colorful and chaotic than even Times Square.
Five hundred shelves stacked with twenty-five thousand dusty records in an order that no map or computer could ever help him figure out.
And with the money in his wallet that he saved for emergencies, like getting robbed or getting laughed at or not knowing what was cool, he marched up to the counter to the guy with the earring.
“I’d like to buy the Rent cast album, please.”