26th
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Week of Waller: Day One
I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter (1935)
I grew up in a cultural dead zone, a working-class Buffalo neighborhood surrounded by industrial train tracks, abandoned storefronts, and used car lots. Despite this, I was a sensitive, inquisitive kid with a natural talent for drawing and painting – an anomaly in some circles, a freak in others. When I was seventeen, with the encouragement of some teachers and the financial help of New York State taxpayers, I attended the New State Summer School of the Arts program. It was life changing. The other students, mostly well-cultured rich kids from the Boroughs or Long Island, kids who regularly went to the theatre and read Dostoevsky for pleasure, absolutely fascinated me.
Natasha, for instance, was a pretty girl with amazing posture and diction. She spoke with such elegant discipline, as if she were from another age. Also, she wore safari hats. One day, while in performance-art class, I heard Natasha idly whistling. Clearly, it was some kind of song, but it didn’t sound like anything that I’ve ever heard before. “What is that?” I asked, wanting to know what made a girl like Natasha whistle. “It’s Fats Waller,” she replied – casually, as if it needed no further explanation.
When I returned to Buffalo, I borrowed every Fats Waller album available at the public library. I recorded them all onto tapes and began listening to Fats Waller obsessively on my Walkman. I was drawn to Waller’s outrageously boisterous performances that belied a peculiar kind of sadness in his songs. It seemed well suited to Buffalo’s deteriorating urban landscape, where faded signs earnestly advertised shops and products that simply no longer existed. Fats Waller came to represent another world to which I desperately wanted to belong. And though it all seemed so impossibly far away – the elegance of Buffalo’s glorious past, the cultural and monetary wealth of New York City, and, yes, Natasha – listening to Fats Waller (as if by stimulating one of the senses, the other four might follow suit) made it all somehow seem, with a little make-believe, as if I were already almost there.
