The Fiddler in the Subway

The Story of the World-Class Violinist Who Played for Handouts. . . And Other Virtuoso Performances by America's Foremost Feature Writer

Gene Weingarten

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781439181607
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

GENE WEINGARTEN IS THE O. HENRY OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM Simply the best storyteller around, Weingarten describes the world as you think it is before revealing how it actually is—in narratives that are by turns hilarious, heartwarming, and provocative, but always memorable. Millions of people know the title piece about violinist Joshua Bell, which originally began as a stunt: What would happen if you put a world-class musician outside a Washington, D.C., subway station to play for spare change? Would anyone even notice? The answer was no. Weingarten's story went viral, becoming a widely referenced lesson about life lived too quickly. Other classic stories—the one about "The Great Zucchini, " a wildly popular but personally flawed children's entertainer; the search for the official "Armpit of America"; a profile of the typical American nonvoter—all of them reveal as much about their readers as they do their subjects.

 
My Father’s Vision,
Part I
 

My father, Philip Weingarten, was born on the day, almost to the minute, that Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, triggering the first World War. I used to joke with my father that he might be the reincarnation of the pompous, colorful, kangaroo-hunting aristocrat with the preposterous mustache and the ostrich-plumed pith helmet. As penance for his prior arrogance and ostentation, I told him, he’d been consigned to live this next life as a meek Jewish accountant in the Bronx.

December 29, 2002

MY FATHER WAS waiting for me downstairs, punctual as always, smiling as usual. But when he got into the car—we were headed to my house for dinner—he said, “I have a problem.”

I am not sure I’d ever heard him use that phrase before. At eighty-eight, my father is half deaf, three-quarters blind, and 100 percent “fine.” He has no problems whatsoever. He would not consider it a problem if, at dinner, his nose fell off into the soup. “I’ve still got face holes,” he would say. “I’m fine.”

So he had my attention, and he kept it.

“I’m seeing things that aren’t there.”

“What sorts of things?”

“People. People with big teeth.”

I pulled out into traffic.

“When do you see them?”

“All the time. I’m seeing them now.”

“How do you know they’re not real?”

“Well, if they were real, you wouldn’t be running them over.”

Ah.

And suddenly, I knew.

“Do they look like cartoons?” I asked, as matter-of-factly as I could.

“Yes.”

“Are they dressed any special way?”

For the love of God, don’t say in military outfits.

“Some are wearing uniforms. Khakis. They have chevrons on the sleeves.”

Several years ago, while doing research for a quasi-medical humor book I was writing, I happened upon the description of a real neurological condition so rare, and so preposterous, that even some neurologists haven’t heard of it. Peduncular hallucinosis occurs when perfectly sane people begin to see small, unthreatening cartoon characters, often in military attire. It is usually caused by a stroke or a tumor deep in the brain. Historically, the diagnosis has been confirmed at, ah, autopsy.

There might be 500 people in the United States who either have this condition or know enough about it to recognize its symptoms, and, near as I could tell, two of them were in my car.

“Do you see anything else? Animals?”

“Only donkeys.”

(I feel it necessary to assure you that this is all completely true.)

My father has always been a meek man—given to understatement, reluctant to assert himself, content to let others set agendas. And yet he is also the most practical and centered person I have ever known, blessed with a peace of mind I envy. Because worry is counterproductive, he simply banished it from his life. When I dropped out of college with three credits to go, and proceeded instead to infiltrate a teenage street gang with some vague notion of writing about it, it was my father who persuaded my mother to get her head out of the oven. He said I probably knew what I was doing, and, to my mother’s astonishment (and mine), he was right.

Throughout my adult life, my father has remained—even now, in his fragile winter—a bedrock of patience and reassurance upon which can be balanced the most fanciful of ambitions. On this unyielding ground, no plan I ever made ever seemed rickety or unsafe. I’ve never feared risk.

“How long have you been seeing these things?”

“Two days now.”

“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

Silence.

“You thought you were losing your mind.”

“That might have bothered me a little, yes.”

We dined that night on false cheer. Afterward, as I was walking him to the car, my father froze in his tracks. He wouldn’t budge. I felt his arm trembling.

“There’s a hole in front of me,” he said. “A deep pit.”

I assured him it was level ground, but he would not move. My wife came out and gently took his other elbow. Trust us, she said. So my father closed his eyes, took a breath, and stepped out into the abyss.

The next day we went for a brain scan. No tumor, no stroke.

My father doesn’t have peduncular hallucinosis; his is a similar condition—equally bizarre, but not as rare and not as dire—that sometimes afflicts people who lose their eyesight late in life. The hallucinations are identical.

“You can’t see, and your brain is getting bored,” the doctor told my father, “so it’s filling in the blanks.”

That brain of his—still as sharp as yours or mine—is doing a splendid job, churning out images his ruined eyes can no longer provide. Colors are brighter, movements are more distinct, and the details he sees—wedding rings, epaulets, facial expressions—are precisely the things that long ago disappeared for him into a blur.

And the people! I suspect it reflects well upon the human species that when our brains are freed to create a world of their own design, they deliver happy mischief. His cartoon characters resemble the work of R. Crumb, my father said, and the Katzenjammer Kids, and Tom Toles’s chubby little bureaucrats, and Goofy the dog. Buckteeth everywhere. (They don’t say anything, but if they did, it would probably be some variation of “gawrsh.”)

“Could be worse,” said my father.

How?

“They could be frightening.”

True enough. In the world of cartoons, pain is funny, and no one ever dies.

He was studying something on the floor. I asked what it was.

“A person.”

What’s he doing?

“Floating down to the ground, using an umbrella.”

Sometimes the hallucinations go away, the doctor had told me, and sometimes they don’t. Mostly, people simply learn to navigate this strange new world.

“You know, Pop, these people might be with you for a while.”

“I know,” he said.

We were walking to the car.

“So I’ll move around them. Or wait for them to move a little. I’ll be fine.”

There is a small pivot point, I think, where meekness and courage are indistinguishable.

“What are you seeing right now?”

“RFK Stadium.”

“Where?”

“There.”

It was a man, walking a dog.

My father shrugged, smiled. He sees what he sees.

We drove in silence for a bit.

“Now I’m seeing cardboard signs on the side of the road. With Hebrew letters.”

“What do they say?”

He looked at me like I was crazy. “You know I can’t read Hebrew.”

Of course, of course. What was I thinking? My father is eighty-eight, and he can’t read Hebrew, and he is not losing his mind, and he is not dying, and RFK Stadium is on a small street corner in Bethesda, Maryland, where it will likely remain for some time.

Everything was fine, just fine.

We rode off together, unafraid.

Snowbound

When I was an editor, I once issued a challenge to five writers: Hammer a nail into a phone book, then go write a great profile about whomever the nail stopped at. The idea was to test the old maxim that in the hands of a skilled journalist, absolutely anything can be a story. My five writers did splendidly; they proved it correct.

That was the basic principle behind “Snowbound.” I’d been on a plane, leafing through the maps in the in-flight magazine, when I saw the silly-sounding name “Savoonga.” It was a flyspeck island off the coast of Alaska, in the Bering Sea, not far from Siberia. It was nowhere. It would be populated by nobodies. When my plane landed I called my editor and proposed that he send me there the following week, still in the dead of winter, with no preparation at all. Not even a minute of research.

“Why?” he asked.

“Just let me do it. It’ll be funny,” I said.

He did. It wasn’t.

May 1, 2005

LET’S SAY YOU were looking for a vacation destination in winter. And also, that you were out of your mind. You might pull out a map of Alaska, locate Anchorage, and then let your eyes roam north and west, across mountain ranges, through millions of acres of wilderness, until you ran out of dirt. You would be in Nome. Nome: the last outpost, Babylon on the Bering, famously dissolute, said to be home to the desperate, the disillusioned, the hollow-eyed, the surrendered, the exiles, the castaways, the cutthroats, the half dead and the fully juiced. Nome, the end of the Earth.

Only it isn’t the end of the Earth. You can see that, right on the map. To get to the end of the Earth from Nome you would have to hop a small plane and head 130 miles out into the Bering Sea, where you would land on an island so remote that it is closer to Russia than to the U.S. mainland. To the people of Siberia, this island is the middle of nowhere. On it, according to the map, is a village named Savoonga.

Savoonga. Va-voom. Bunga-bunga. Funny, no?

I thought so, too, when I first saw it. It gave me an idea for a funny story. In the dead of winter, I would pack up and blindly head to Savoonga, unannounced and unprepared. No research at all, no planning beyond the booking of a room, if there was one to be had.

The whole thing was an inside joke, one with a swagger. It is a journalist’s conceit that a good reporter can find a great story anywhere—in any life, however humble, and in any place, however unwelcoming.

That is how photographer Michael Williamson and I came to be in a small commuter plane in late February, squinting out onto a landscape as forbidding, and as starkly beautiful, as anything we’d ever seen. Land was indistinguishable from sea—the white subarctic vista, lit to iridescence by a midafternoon sun, was flat and frozen straight to the horizon. The first clue that we were over an island was when the village materialized below us. It looked as negligible as a boot print in the snow, the grimy, nubby tread left by galoshes. The nubs were one-story buildings, a few dozen of them, and that was it.

I’m back now, trying to make sense of what we saw, trying to figure out how to tell it. It’s all still wi...