Read Online Losers by Matthue Roth - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Matthue Roth
Tags: Fiction
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the length of the warehouse floor by those rented house-party lights, the solitary figure left where I was standing, and the only target for the eyes of a girl coming out of a hot and heavy make-out session.
âWhat up, kid?â she said, almost a whisper, although I could hear it all the way across the warehouse.
I smiled back.
âWhat up, Margie?â I said, in my new downtown voice, exactly the same tone as hers. I knew her name wasnât Margie, but I said it anyway. I think she got it.
And thatâs how I lost my accent.
5. HOW I LOST MY ACCENT
I didnât lose it for good. Not immediately, at least.
If my decision to drop my accent was a science fair project, then Friday night would have been my hypothesis statement, and the weeks that followed were the rest of it, the experimentation and research and the cutting and pasting to make my diorama look like it deserved an A.
In other words: I had to start learning how to sell myself.
I took all my parentsâ old records. I went on a rampage on the turntable, discarding the antiquated â50s country and lounge-singer albums that theyâd bought at thrift stores while they looked for their hair-core records, love ballad after love ballad, and selecting only the most passably retro recordsâJames Brown, Johnny Hartman, Frank Sinatra, and the immortal Sammy Davis Jr.
Then I went out to the thrift store and ransacked their bargain bin for the best it had to offer. I listened to The B-52âs, The Beach Boys, Dire Straits, The Cure. I listened to each of the singers, mouthed the words (first with the lyric sheet, thenwithout) and I gleaned from them the person I wanted to be. I plagiarized syllables, vocabulary words, and the breaths and spaces in between, integrating them all into my voice. Every hour of every day, I was either listening to someone or I was listening to my headset, to the little yellow Walkman that Iâd picked up for a dollar thirty-five at the local Salvation Army, to the tapes from long ago and to the voices that I wanted to be. The batteries cost more than the Walkman did, but people paid thousands of dollars to get the education I was receiving. Really, I thought, what I was getting was priceless: an open ticket to not getting beat up ever, ever again.
That weekend, I prepared for the rest of my life. It was going to be Easy Street, but it was the hardest Easy Street Iâd ever heard of. I was challenging my own biology, trying to will my lips to change shape, my tongue to dance differently.
Monday morning, when I emerged from my room, my parents were both sitting at the kitchen table, drinking individual cups of coffee. They both drank instant coffee, strong, but they drank it sparingly. When both of them were sitting down and drinking full cups , you knew it was bad.
They didnât say anything when I ran through, my customary mad dash to make it to the bus stop in time for the 7:35. I glanced over my shoulder for a second and saw their faces. Their looks tore through me like I was old newspaper.
The looks said, What happened ? and Why us ? and We donât know you anymore .
I hate to say itâI hated, actually, to even think itâbut it actually felt pretty cool.
Vadim wasnât at his usual bus stopâheâd come in early for his meeting with Principal Mayhewâand the 18 bus chugged along slower than ever, but I had my headphones on, and the ride felt like the fastest in recent memory. I listened to the lead singer of The Cure, who the coffee-stained booklet referred to as Robert Smith, as he sang about loss and anguish and giant spiders eating his head, which I initially decided was a bit of slang so fresh that I didnât even understand it. I vowed to start working it into my conversationsâ¦until I realized that the tape was even older than I was, and for all the wonders this was doing for my pronunciation, maybe I had better just chill out and wait on the snappy dialogue
âWhat up, kid?â she said, almost a whisper, although I could hear it all the way across the warehouse.
I smiled back.
âWhat up, Margie?â I said, in my new downtown voice, exactly the same tone as hers. I knew her name wasnât Margie, but I said it anyway. I think she got it.
And thatâs how I lost my accent.
5. HOW I LOST MY ACCENT
I didnât lose it for good. Not immediately, at least.
If my decision to drop my accent was a science fair project, then Friday night would have been my hypothesis statement, and the weeks that followed were the rest of it, the experimentation and research and the cutting and pasting to make my diorama look like it deserved an A.
In other words: I had to start learning how to sell myself.
I took all my parentsâ old records. I went on a rampage on the turntable, discarding the antiquated â50s country and lounge-singer albums that theyâd bought at thrift stores while they looked for their hair-core records, love ballad after love ballad, and selecting only the most passably retro recordsâJames Brown, Johnny Hartman, Frank Sinatra, and the immortal Sammy Davis Jr.
Then I went out to the thrift store and ransacked their bargain bin for the best it had to offer. I listened to The B-52âs, The Beach Boys, Dire Straits, The Cure. I listened to each of the singers, mouthed the words (first with the lyric sheet, thenwithout) and I gleaned from them the person I wanted to be. I plagiarized syllables, vocabulary words, and the breaths and spaces in between, integrating them all into my voice. Every hour of every day, I was either listening to someone or I was listening to my headset, to the little yellow Walkman that Iâd picked up for a dollar thirty-five at the local Salvation Army, to the tapes from long ago and to the voices that I wanted to be. The batteries cost more than the Walkman did, but people paid thousands of dollars to get the education I was receiving. Really, I thought, what I was getting was priceless: an open ticket to not getting beat up ever, ever again.
That weekend, I prepared for the rest of my life. It was going to be Easy Street, but it was the hardest Easy Street Iâd ever heard of. I was challenging my own biology, trying to will my lips to change shape, my tongue to dance differently.
Monday morning, when I emerged from my room, my parents were both sitting at the kitchen table, drinking individual cups of coffee. They both drank instant coffee, strong, but they drank it sparingly. When both of them were sitting down and drinking full cups , you knew it was bad.
They didnât say anything when I ran through, my customary mad dash to make it to the bus stop in time for the 7:35. I glanced over my shoulder for a second and saw their faces. Their looks tore through me like I was old newspaper.
The looks said, What happened ? and Why us ? and We donât know you anymore .
I hate to say itâI hated, actually, to even think itâbut it actually felt pretty cool.
Vadim wasnât at his usual bus stopâheâd come in early for his meeting with Principal Mayhewâand the 18 bus chugged along slower than ever, but I had my headphones on, and the ride felt like the fastest in recent memory. I listened to the lead singer of The Cure, who the coffee-stained booklet referred to as Robert Smith, as he sang about loss and anguish and giant spiders eating his head, which I initially decided was a bit of slang so fresh that I didnât even understand it. I vowed to start working it into my conversationsâ¦until I realized that the tape was even older than I was, and for all the wonders this was doing for my pronunciation, maybe I had better just chill out and wait on the snappy dialogue
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