Haunting Melodies

He slammed the glass down hard against the oak counter top, a hard knock shooting across the empty bar. The thirsty patron rested his head on his forearm and pointed at his empty glass, signifying to the disinterested bartender that he wanted yet another drink. Hand gestures were easier than talking, and not necessarily because of impaired speech, though the young man was likely at that point with how much he’d been drinking.

The bartender’s lack of eager service wasn’t so much because she disliked the customer who at first glance appeared only a few years younger than herself. In the time she’d been working the bar she had seen all sorts of heartbroken, despondent, lost, and even the truly poor being all three. All were looking to drown their sorrows or escape from some sort of looming pain in their lives. This one was different though. Katherine had lent her ear to his ranting several times, but always found herself getting lost within minutes. At first she listened with feigned interest. This was partially motivated because the bar tended to be lacking customers when he normally came in. He wasn’t like any other customer she had ever had. He was not rude, irate, or falling off the stool, but more importantly he always tipped well. You didn’t turn away those clients, especially at 2:13pm in the afternoon. With each new visit to the bar, Katherine started to take his words with earnest attention, almost fascination. She initially thought he was one of those suffering artist types, but he didn’t exude the same pomp or condescension. This guy was clearly on a whole other level. She could tell by the way he talked about the music.

She didn’t think much of it when he first told her he heard music in his head. A hard drink– or multiple, in his case – seemed like an extreme measure to take to get rid of a song being stuck in one’s head. Anyone who’s been to the mall or listened to the radio has had that phenomenon happen to them. Even though these songs were not of the cheesy pop song variety designed to be catchy and stick in your head, the experience remained incredibly annoying for him. Painful even.

When she first inquired, he explained how he started waking up with the songs in his head. Songs he didn’t recognize when he first heard them. He described it as being odd but kind of neat at first, to start your day with a song in your head as soon as you woke. It wasn’t bad music per se, just unfamiliar. Yet specific. There were notes. Instruments playing the notes. The songs were designed. Rehearsed. Created. It was like a recording being played over and over. They were, however, intrusive thoughts nonetheless. Slapped onto his brain like a sticky note he couldn’t remove. It eventually started messing with his focus. Then his sleep. It even ruined the poor guy’s last relationship. Katherine never learned the specifics of how, but she could fill in the gaps for herself. After one particularly bad day and the failed remedy of hard liquor, he informed Katherine that this had been going on for years. One wouldn’t think of music as being damaging, but clearly his odd condition had worn him down. If music was food for the soul, then this poor guy had been force fed if there was such a thing. And it was making him sick.

During the slowest times of the day, Katherine could turn around and see him stagger into her bar, find a seat, and mutter his medicine of choice. Some days it was beer, others it would be shots. Until she got to know him and began to listen to his story, she thought he was just a drunk who couldn’t make up his mind on what his poison would be, but she could now tell he was looking for a cure. It didn’t seem to be working. It was hard to separate whether his sickly complexion was due to the non-stop parade of music blaring in his skull or the drinks he consumed in an effort to make it stop. Whatever it was, he wore a look of exhausted paleness. Bartender’s tended to be ere to the side of being counsellors, not doctors. Still wishing to help the poor guy, Katherine politely asked if there might be something else going on with him, some other ailment in which the music was a symptom and not the disease. 

He politely explained there wasn’t. He had visited doctor after doctor, expert after expert. No one could give him an explanation. And before she could squeeze in a follow-up question, he answered her unasked question. He wasn’t schizophrenic, a blunt statement given as though he’d been asked that – or perhaps assumed to be – all the time. His “condition” also wasn’t autism, Attention Deficit Disorder, or any form of extreme hyper activity. She offered him peanuts on a whim one day and noticed how much he mowed down handfuls of peanuts pigishly in between sentences. Katherine was beginning to wonder if the music prevented him from eating or taking care of himself in other ways. Thankfully he hadn’t neglected the most basic forms of self-care. He may have looked bedraggled, but he fortunately didn’t smell like one unlike some of her other more slovenly customers. 

In an effort to be a caring listener, Katherine suggested that maybe he focus on other senses, one thing at a time to try to take his mind off the music. He gave her a sour look of derision that told the bartender he had heard that piece of advice a million times already. The patronizing tone of his response would normally give Katherine a great desire to smack the lip off of him, but she was no stranger to worse drunken behavior. She pressed on though, offering suggestions. He initially rejected the idea that he was a savant when she offered it as a possibility. Savants were supposedly incredibly smart and retained insane amounts of knowledge. That he knew so much about music that was traditionally known for being listened to by intelligent people seemed to fit the bill. Whether pessimistic or humble, he refused to accept the idea as true. He didn’t know how to play an instrument let alone create music. He hadn’t even taken any sort of music classes aside from what was offered during his elementary school curriculum. The only plausible explanation was in that his parents had admit to playing classical music recordings to their son as an infant. They were as baffled as he was in the extreme attachment to the composers and their life’s work. His mother and father had insisted they hadn’t overplayed the sound tracks, but had merely done what thousands of doting parents had done. Having been convinced that playing classical music for their children would help them learn and grow up to be smart individuals, they bought CDs, toys, and other products that would play the praised sounds. Studies had recently proven that these claims were not rooted in scientific merit. It didn’t matter whether or not they were true, nor whether him being a savant was an accurate diagnosis. Neither changed the fact that his mind was constantly bombarded by classical music. Despite what most people thought, hearing classical music non-stop had not helped him. It looked more like it hurt him.

A small silver lining was that it wasn’t just one song being played repeatedly. The music would change like a delayed juke box selection. Nevertheless, it would still be loud and annoying. One day it was Bach. The next it was Beethoven. Then Tchaikovsky. These names she knew of. They were popular. The others were a bit more obscure. Some Katherine had never even heard of though. Haydn. Buxtehude. Suk. Tippett. She was convinced half of these were made up when he drunkenly mentioned them, but a quick Google search during her smoke break revealed they were in fact real composers, all having contributed some legacy of classical music to the world after their death. He would list them all off, describing the specific details of their designed music, like how one wood wind section in a composer’s song was structured differently in another, or how the string instruments would accent the percussion section more appropriately in one song. This nuanced knowledge wasn’t intended to impress her. She could tell he simply needed to get it out, to exorcise this buffet of music trivia that he couldn’t help but overindulge on. Some found music to be curative but for him, it was a sickness.

Mozart seemed to be the most painful. That one messed him up for days. On the third day Katherine saw him, he drank enough that she actually had to cut him off. He might have been aiming for unconsciousness in order to silence the music in his head that no one else could hear. Before getting to that point, he had asked Katherine if she had ever listened to Mozart. She admit she had not. She probably had heard one of the famous composer’s songs, but couldn’t put a name to it and didn’t bother mentioning that detail. As she expected, regardless of her answer, he launched into a lengthy description of Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgang Theophilus Mozart. The bartender was soon overwhelmed with the most minutia of details, from Mozart’s early prodigious ability with the keyboard and violin as a child to his supposed rivalry with Antonia Salieri. The unexpected biography of Mozart came to a tragic end with the common debate on whether Mozart died in his home from disease or poisoning. Leading up to his demise in 1791, he was thought to have suffered from depression, a state which was also rumored to have inspired Mozart to write a requiem for himself before he died.

Katherine knew Mozart’s music was famous, but she never understood nor thought about why exactly. Now that his songs were described to her in the utmost detail, she began to grasp a better understanding of their notoriety. Like a bitter drunk complaining of an ex-lover, the impromptu music expert in front of her would polish off his drink of the day before launching into a tirade about his subject’s sonatas requiems, operas, concertos and other pieces. With his words explaining every single one of Mozart’s masterpieces as well as his lesser known work, Katherine was painted pictures of idyllic European villas, breathtaking landscapes, colorful people and the beautiful lives they lived. Even broad concepts like love seemed like palpable and almost tangible with the drunk’s surprisingly vivid descriptions of Mozart’s symphonic talents. Whether or not these were the artist’s intentions she would never know, but this man seemed utterly convicted in his interpretations. The poor drunken soul in her bar seemed to know everything about a man whose legacy haunted his ears rather than serenading them.

It was a shame. Katherine knew how many famous artists used their pain and suffering to drive their craft and create legends of art, be it Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night or Beethoven’s 5^th Symphony. Things weren’t that different with modern celebrities, though the mediums in how their pain was captured had evolved. Katherine began to wonder if one of Mozart’s most unwilling aficionados would meet his end in a similar way. Calling him a fan seemed inaccurate and apt to upset him even worse than he already was. Whatever condition this man was inflicted with, the finest works of music ever to grace human ears wouldn’t inspire him to create his own, but seemed destined to drive him to the same unfortunate fate as those who created them. 

As she poured him another beer much to his insistence, she caught herself listening to the medley of bubbles, the grinding slide of the drink across the bar, and the deep resounding thud of the empty glass. To others, these were just typical sounds in your everyday liquor establishment. Katherine knew though that these were the notes being played to the man’s own requiem.