[from Missionary Man, a memoir still in progress]
I had a very stupid argument once with my girlfriend Bertha, back when we were still living together. (Actually we had a lot of very stupid arguments, but I only plan to consider one here.) This was 1995, and we were at a small club in Seattle waiting for Barenaked Ladies to take the stage. We had both enjoyed the opening band, an act which managed the impressive feat of playing tunes in tricky time signatures without ever alienating the audience.
"How would you count that last song they did?" Bertha asked me. She had taken a class in music theory in college, coming away with just enough knowledge to make her a danger to herself and those around her. "It didn't sound like you could count it like a normal song."
This was her way of asking the number of beats per measure. "It was in five," I said.
"Five?" She shook her head and looked at me with the rapacious smile that indicated (in this instance) I was saying something too insultingly moronic to let slide. (Only things she didn't understand struck her as that insultingly moronic.) "What do you mean by that?"
"I mean exactly what I said. You count the song in five. Five beats to a measure."
"But how do you know?" she pressed. "How can you tell?"
"It's obvious. You can just tell," I said—though when her eyes began to blaze above her mad grin I quickly amended, "If you've had enough practice listening, I mean."
"That's not an answer," she said.
I sighed—condescendingly, I'm sure. "Look," I said, "the basic rhythm went like this." I counted to five while I clapped out a complicated beat with my hands. "See?"
She shook her head, settling into what I thought of as her bulldog stance. "That doesn't prove anything. You could have counted up to any number while you did that."
"Not easily, and my counts wouldn't have fallen on the beats."
"Your counts didn't fall on the beats."
"They did too! They didn't always fall on the claps, but they fell on the beats. That's what syncopation is."
She folded her arms, squaring up to me like a limbless pugilist, and I knew I had awakened one of the most vindictive of all Bertha angers: I had claimed to know something that, not partaking of her passing acquaintance with the subject, must therefore be inherently unknowable.
Well, she tried to get me to admit that I couldn't be one-hundred-percent certain the song was in five, while I averred that I'd stake my life on that very proposition, and the argument degenerated from there into one of our more memorably awful dustups. But that isn't really the point of the story. The point of the story is that, to Bertha's less musically practiced ears, a pattern that seemed perfectly straightforward and intelligible to me hovered just beyond the reach of comprehension. Another musician would have grasped the cadence immediately, and, had I casually mentioned to him that the tune was in five, he would have replied, "You got that right, man. Are these motherfuckers righteous or what? Dig the augmented elevenths that keyboard's layin' down."
(And then it would be my turn to feel stupid and pissed off, and I wouldn't tell this story with quite the same relish. But that's not the point, either.)
I must have told the story of my arrest—greatly abbreviated, of course—a hundred times in the past fifteen years (usually at the urging of some friend who says to someone else, "What? You never heard Shunn's missionary story? Hey, Shunn, get over here and tell this guy why they won't let you back into Canada! Dude, you gotta hear this. You're gonna pee yourself"). If I've learned one thing from all those tellings, it's that different audiences require different narrative approaches. If I tell another Mormon, for instance, that I phoned in a bomb threat to keep my companion from leaving his mission, he's with me immediately. He understands. He may not know the details yet, but at a gut level he grasps the urgency and desperation that would lead to such an act. He may even be able to imagine himself doing the same thing. A gentile, however, needs a little more background before I hit him with the money line. He needs a foundation laid for him first. Otherwise I just come across as dangerously unstable.
Another interesting characteristic of the LDS listener is that, like as not, he'll allow that I did a clever thing, a brave thing, an admirable thing. He may go so far as to call it inspired.
But even the truest-blue Mormon will smack his head and groan when I tell him what I did twenty minutes later.
