Miles Read online

  Miles

  by

  Adam Henry Carrière

  All original works herein copyrighted by the author.

  This electronic book & design copyright (c.) 2012-2013 by

  All rights reserved.

  The Buzz About

  Miles

  "Miles is Adam Henry Carriere's same-sex Bildungsroman about coming of age in the '70's among Chicago's very rich. Like Danse Macabre, his online literary magazine, this book is full of life's delicious, opulent things. One way writers with such socio-economics have traditionally established their value is by the delicacy of their appreciation and presentation of the material and sensual worlds. Proust's style is every bit as lapidary as his gemstone collar studs, and Carriere's phrases are fine as his food and furniture, resonant as the classical albums his protagonist purchases in abundance.

  "Young homosexual love is crystallized in facets of the first water, and set in narratives that glimmer like platinum. Carriere's hero suffers all the emotional difficulties that obtain in those parts of the world where poverty hasn't choked adolescence to death. But even in Miles' Young Wertherian sorrows, he walks with all the unquestioned self-assurance of one who knows that he is entitled to be gravitated upon, and gratified by, this planet of his.”

  ~ Tom Bradley, author of Bomb Baby and My Hands Were Clean.

  “A five star coming of age gay story that has the emotional intensity of a symphony (musical references abound)--but avoids all the pitfalls of over-wrought sentimentality, not to mention the same old, same old gestures of disaffected youth. The writing is fresh, often beautiful, and the descriptions of Chicago in the 70s--neighborhoods, diners, schools, and suburbs--provide a colorful backdrop to the narrative. Miles (the protagonist) relates self-discovery and journey from adolescent to adult in his own unmistakable and charming voice (which is to say I liked Miles right away): his intellect, humor, empathy, and honesty. Young love, like so many other themes in literature, is not easy to write--but I feel that Carriere is at his best when describing the complex, often awkward, and unforgettable moments of attraction (the longing, excitement, tenderness), as well loss and mourning. The dialogue? Well, that simply rocked. One great scene followed another and many memorable lines make up this book. A gorgeous work.”

  Kathryn A. Kopple, author, Little Velásquez (Mirth Press)

  c o n t e n t s

  I

  Men at some time are masters of their fates...

  I I

  A surfeit of the sweetest things...

  I I I

  My mind is troubled, like a fountain stirred...

  I V

  I never heard so musical a discord...

  V

  This bodes some strange eruption to our state.

  V I

  His heart and hand both open and both free...

  V I I

  There is no evil angel but love.

  V I I I

  Sit by my side and let the world slip.

  I X

  A little more than kin...

  X

  Receive what cheer you may.

  X I

  Sorrow breaks seasons and reposing hours

  X I I

  I turn my back.

  X I I I

  'Tis bitter cold...

  X I V

  You have such a February face.

  X V

  The orphan pines while the oppressor feeds.

  X V I

  By his face straight shall you know his heart.

  X V I I

  Lovers and madmen have such seething brains...

  X V I I I

  Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.

  X I X

  For many men who stumble at the threshold...

  X X

  Rude am I in my speech...

  X X I

  Such a man, so faint, so spiritless, so dead in look.

  X X I I

  If thou rememb'rest not the slightest folly...

  X X I I I

  The quality of mercy is not strained...

  X X I V

  When I waked, I cried to dream again.

  Author Bio

  D I S C L A I M E R

  A brief word to the ether-bots, lawyers, and aggrieved passed participants:

  I’m told it is advisable to point out the story you’re about to read is conspicuously a work of fiction. The furthest, most indistinct similitude between the imagined characters of this story and real persons, whether man or woman, living or dead, is the sheerest mishap of happenstance and in no way intended. To say it plain, no such persons as these ever walked God’s green earth.

  Likewise, the occasions, affairs, and scenes of the story are similarly imagined, and exist nowhere but in air, ether, and one’s own mind.

  Adam Henry Carrière

  Nevada, 2012

  Men at some time are masters of their fates:

  The fault is not in our stars,

  But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

  Julius Caesar

  I stood there staring, and remembered.

  We used to be able to feel the cold November wind through the closed window of our classroom. The panes were thin, and the wood around them old and rotting. The ugly radiator below the sill never kept up with the unwanted ventilation. The thin, leafless branches of the dark grey courtyard tree tapped and scratched against the window and side of our school building, an imposing, gothic horror of a place, surrounded by a prestigious and exclusive lakefront university, of which it was a nominal part. The entire Youth Pilot Institute facility had that wonderful air of benign decay so many of us confuse with elegance. In the hot and sticky Chicago summer, my school looked and felt like a mislaid Cambridge, while in the bitter winter, it could have been a proud embassy to a Hapsburg or Romanov court. The rainy spring brought images of the blossom around the Sorbonne, while in the toxic fragrance of a colorfully muted autumn, my favorite season, our school impressed you as a haunting remnant of our civilization's better days.

  My fellow students had been a mixed lot: male and female, black, brown, yellow and white, Catholic and Protestant, Jew and Moslem, atheist and agnostic, Chicagoan and suburbanite. However, we shared two important similarities: we were all bright enough to be accepted into the place, and had families that could afford the Youth Pilot Institute's extortionate tuition.

  Even though the Institute had no definitive dress code, we all dressed stylishly and well, hoping to blend in better with the energetic, high-brow college-types who buzzed back and forth through the school grounds during their class day, occasionally putting in grudging internship hours with us, as well. The lower grade kids looked like yuppies from Lilliput, while the bulk of the Institute's fashion independence came from the middle graders, who were at that age where a good deal of their individuality was derived from how they dressed. Rarely could you tell the difference between us upper graders and the collegians too many of us tried to emulate, except for a handful of misfits like me. I was in a "high-class hippie, low-class outdoorsman" phase in those heady days of my Junior year, rife with jeans, various combinations of t-shirts, sweaters, and flannel shirts, a brown suede fringed jacket if it was above freezing, a thick Navy pea coat liberated from my Dad if it wasn't, and hiking shoes, whose steel-tipped toes usefully served as concealed weapons, though I never had occasion to use them as such.

  Our curriculum emphasized a classical, liberal arts education, delivered in a college seminar manner. It was all very progressive, to the point of being chic, but it actually made spending every weeknight in a pile of books, breaking your ass to be a scholar, seem fun. Our teachers were the font of this. Like the students, our "adult resources" represented virtually every demographic niche, from the tough old battle-axes tha
t had forgotten more about geometry than an aeronautics engineer was ever likely to learn, to the middle-aged, ex-campus radicals cum social engineers who couldn't do anything else except teach. We also had our fair share of stereotypical schoolmarm history freaks, grandfatherly language dominies, and hyper-talented liberal arts maestros with fresh ink on their doctorates that scared everyone else on the staff because of their brains, degrees, and youth.

  Nicolas Mikhailovitch Rozhdestvensky was one of these.

  Just as there was no dress code, there was also no set way to refer to our teachers, except for the crazed and permanently menopausal Mrs. Jinak, who was known throughout the Institute as "The Psycho Bitch". One could be an invariably dull 'mister', like Mister Greene; or an aging 'professor' who ought to be at Yale or Stanford, but, like Professor Fleming, chose to write the texts they use there instead; or a military rank, for those middle-aged, ex-armed forces officers about to begin their decline, like Captain Selby; or 'doctor', for the conspiratorial ex-government scientists like Doctor Clemens, Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Porton, so we would maliciously gossip. As for the awfully young Rozhdestvensky? Well, our short, lemon-faced Principal Connelly (always a terse 'sir' to his face, but 'old boy' when he was out of earshot) snarled Nicolas Mikhailovitch, harshly enunciated to emphasize his (implicitly unimpressive) Slavic heritage. Students who had the good fortune to attend his music classes called him Papa Rozh (pronounced Rawsh), Papa Nicolash, or just Nicolasha. He had only joined the faculty in that autumn of my eleventh year, but had quickly become everyone's favorite, including mine.

  Nicolasha's parents were native Russians, violinists with the Kirov who had defected with their teenage son, already a prodigious cellist, when their company toured the eastern United States. The family was well-received by the close-knit arts community in Washington, D.C., and taken under the wing of another defector from the Soviet Union, a famous cellist who had become musical director and chief conductor for the National Symphony Orchestra. He saw to it that the Rozhdestvenskys were taken aboard the NSO as soon as possible, and that young Nicolasha received the best music instruction available - namely, himself. As one of the only students of, arguably, the world's finest cellist, Nicolasha was blessed with unmatched instruction and attention, but cursed with the very high expectations that came with such an honor. His public debut, playing a Prokofiev concerto written for the elder cello master himself, was strangled in the grip of stage fright, producing a form and function disaster, an embarrassment to his parents, and a blow to his beloved mentor. So unnerved was Nicolasha that he retreated to Georgetown University, where he earned all three degree levels in music history and instruction on academic scholarship, but never played in front of an audience again. We student types were exceptions to this. Even then, it was never the cello.

  I guess Nicolasha never watched the news or read anything in the papers about child molesters, or the sad, very American spectacle of gossip, charges, lawyers, reporters, lawsuits, book and movie deals, talk show visits, and general strife that accompany such stories (regardless if they be true or not), because he was the warmest and most openly affectionate teacher any of us have ever had, and didn't seem to give a damn to what anyone else would or could think. Everyone got a kind hand on their shoulder, a gentle rub of the hair, a fond touch on the arm, a kindly grin, or an affectionate bear hug, a hug as big as Russia itself. Sometimes you got hugged alone, and sometimes you shared the hug with four others, but it was always done with a wide smile and a gregarious laugh, and was a full and tight hug, not one of those cheesy hugs relatives give each other. The only people who were safe from Papa Rozh were his fellow teachers, who didn't talk much to him (and he didn't talk much to back), and the Principal, who saved all his hugs for his seven adopted children at home. Everyone giggled and blushed when they became the object of Nicolasha's beaming attention, but a lot of us were sustained by the glow he brought to the hallowed halls and classrooms of the Youth Pilot Institute. I know I was.

  My class had music history for last period, around two-thirty p.m. It was always a wonderful way to end our long, dreary day. You could feel the change in atmosphere just by walking in the classroom, which had pictures and posters of all the great classical composers surrounding a map of Europe on the wall opposite our leaky windows, and was littered with virtually every musical instrument and tool you could imagine, including a stand-up piano that Nicolasha usually sat on when he lectured (and leapt off of to make a point). He could efficiently demonstrate a few notes on most of them, but really swept into our hearts when he would seize our sole violin to perform whole stanzas of a particular piece or composer. Nicolasha seemed to know volumes about the masters and all their works, from Handel all the way to the 20th Century composers, which we could tell were Nicolasha's real favorites.

  Nicolasha and I became friends on that particularly raw autumn afternoon, a day I can remember like it was yesterday, not entire years ago. The dingy grey sky was covered in a familiar November cloud blanket and was filled with a sharp wind, blowing the leftover leaves along the bleak sidewalks and hardening lawns. We had been grilled in an oral quiz by Professor Tanaka, our Asian History teacher, and just finished an essay test in Italian from Signore Abbado - this was how our teachers liked to finish things up before a holiday. No matter what Nicolasha had planned, it would be a relief. As we filed into the room, he smiled at each of us in turn from atop the piano, violin in hand. I took my usual seat in the first desk nearest the door and readied my music notebook in the customary silence of the room.

  We were a well-behaved class, unusual, I suppose, since most of us were deep in the post-puberty adolescent blues, but it was easy to see why: we loved Nicolasha and everything about his class, we were usually shagged from our typical study routine by the time we got there, and none of us were very friendly with each other. We were all too diverse and out-of-water, as it was, to really become close. Our intellect and parental income tax brackets may have brought us there, but our disassociated neighborhoods (and suburbs) kept us from being much more than acquaintances. A lot of times it felt like we were in training to become our parents. Maybe that was part of our bond with Nicolasha. He made us feel like this big, warm family, at one with the music we listened so closely to.

  It also occurred to me that Nicolas Mikhailovitch Rozhdestvensky was a little out-of-water with the rest of the world, and the only thing that kept him from completely separating from the outside was his passion for music.

  Nicolasha's idea of a test was to tell us all about a composer, play little bits and pieces from his body of work on the record player or right there in class with an appropriate instrument, and then, have us listen to a different full-length composition and write a descriptive essay about whatever images, thoughts, or feelings the music inspired in us. This beat the hell out of reading and re-reading your textbook and notes for a couple of hours the night before, and trying to spit it all out the next day.

  Nicolasha had spent the last few days telling us about Dmitri Shostakovich, and, boy, what a chord those lectures struck in me. I especially liked the newer guys, like Edward Elgar, Paul Hindemith, Richard Strauss, and Benjamin Britten, because there was just so much more oomph in their stuff for me. But Shostakovich? He was the best of all. Talk about big music. You could hear the tank battle taking place, right there in the middle of the Eighth Symphony! Some downright silly stuff, too, like any of his Ballet Suites, probably the real source for all that great, goofy music in the Warner Brothers cartoons. Nicolasha said that if orchestral music had a fifth gear, Shostakovich was it.

  Thus did I make not one but two Russian friends that autumn.

  We all got ready to write as Nicolasha shut the classroom door and turned on the phonograph. The Age of Gold Suite emerged. The Introduction, its nervous, playful woodwinds chased by the string section, warned off by the urgent crash of the percussives, leading into a sneaky, childlike march that ends with a militaristic waltz. I saw many of the o
ther guys begin to write, attracted to the hint of martial fervor in the beat. Then the Adagio softly began, a pastoral, longing melody carried by a flute against the strings. I later read this was scored as a seduction scene between a devilish Western ballerina and a good-hearted Red Army soldier. Hm.

  Nicolasha's wide, light blue eyes caught mine staring at his face, a full-bodied, closely-shaved face with unkempt, unsettled brown hair, and the thick nose, jaw bone, and eyebrows of a moujik Slav that had been softened by a lifestyle far superior to that enjoyed by those ancestors who had contributed to his gene pool. His eyes plunged into mine with undisguised melancholy as he put the violin to his cheek, closely accompanying the record's soloist to the hypnotic gypsy stanza that was enriched by the orchestra behind it, flowing onward until the background players ceased and the solo violins of the recording and Nicolasha played in flawless unison for a few magical seconds, twisting the notes downward until the clarinets, strings, and flutes rejoined them. My teacher left off there with a self-effacing shrug and another glance toward me. I was embarrassed, and quickly started writing.

  The famous xylophone Polka followed, attracting many of the girls to their notebooks, and finally, the proud, peasant Dance, a tense, raucous spin that really has to be a ball for a musician to play. But my mind was still on the violin solo in the Adagio. I heard such sadness and longing there, something I could identify with at that point in my little life. Nicolasha's eyes seemed so far away. Did he see his parents? His boyhood friends still in Russia? His old home in Gor'kiy?