Whale Music Read Online Free PDF

accordion solo. But here’s a secret: that’s not me playing, like everyone assumes. That’s Danny.
    Our teacher was an old man named Hermann Gerhardt. Danny identified him as an escaped war criminal and accused him of various atrocities including eating dead babies, but basically Dan was very fond of the guy. Hermann Gerhardt was slightly humpbacked and wore his trousers pulled up to just below the nipples. He had spectacles, but one of the lenses was blackened. Sometimes the glasses would slip over thebumps of his nose and we could see a yellow eye floating there, wet and fishlike.
    We were very good students, Danny and I. Myself, let’s not make too big a point of it, I was by way of being a child prodigy. Music simply became my language, probably because whenever I attempted to communicate in my mother tongue the father would make me feel like I’d said something stupid.
    I practised constantly, sitting on my bed and drawing out all those lush Italian melodies. It didn’t take long before I’d figured out the system of music, how sensible and mathematical it all was. People claim that I can play any musical instrument (which isn’t true, I can’t play the saxophone, is Mooky Saunders dead or what?) but once you’ve glommed on to what’s happening, it’s a simple matter to reason out how any particular fretboard or twisted piece of tubing works. A piano keyboard is, to me, a beautiful thing, the doorway to an orderly and rational universe. I can slip through when baffled by this sorry world we live in.
    Danny never spotted the doorway. He was always more than happy to jump into whatever shitpiles littered his path. But he was an excellent accordion player, and here’s the reason—more than almost any other musical instrument, the accordion is a
machine
. It’s a contraption. It has to be pumped, the mystery buttons have to be depressed, and it’s only as a sort of afterthought that your fingers stumble up and down the keyboard and force out schnoozy melodies. Danny figured out the mechanics of the accordion, but was forever baffled by the mechanics of music. Still, he was Hermann Gerhardt’s pride and joy, even when, at his first recital, Danny pretended that every in-squeeze of the bellows was pinching his nipple. Dan didn’t allow the music to be interfered with, but over and over again he would screw up his face and silently howl with pain. The audience, four or five sets of parents, stirred nervously in their fold-up chairs. I watched Mr. Gerhardt. He was laughing so hard that tears came even from his yellow, fishlike blind eye.
    Of course, the father was very excited that he’d produced amusical genius (Danny, that is—the father thought I was no more than competent) and he forced Danny to practise all the time. Danny’s chief interest in those days, however, was the Los Angeles Dodgers, recently transplanted from distant Brooklyn, and between that and my father’s badgering he lost all interest in the accordion. That was the first bad blood between those two. I tried to cheer my father up by practising very hard and achieving a level of excellence on the accordion, but he was not to be cheered. He didn’t even notice when I played a piece called “My Dad,” one I’d written especially for him. Granted, the melody was rather derivative, and the tune likely sounded like any one of a thousand schnoozy ditties, but all the father did was note in a disinterested way that my left hand was getting lazy. My mother liked the tune, it set her to dancing in the living room, so I changed the title to “My Mom” and never played it again.
    Danny became a very good minor-league baseball player, the captain of his team of nine-year-olds, the winners of regional championships. The father decided that he’d sired another Ty Cobb. He bought himself an oversized glove and demanded that he and Danny spend long hours practising hitting and put-outs. Dan-Dan soon realized that practice with a fat and clumsy man