Frank eventually asked me, what brings a person to spend Their Twenties trying to get famous in Los Angeles. God help me, I knew the exact answer. While I may not have been able to articulate it exactly when I was young, I’ve known the jist since I was four. “I wanted to prove I was smart. I thought the way you prove you’re smart is to be funny. If I could be famously funny, I’d also be famously smart.” His eyes went wide. “Where the hell did you get a stupid idea like that, Mike?”
“The same place I got every idea that I didn’t get from my family. The Television’s Cable-Box.”
On weeknights, up sick with Mom taking care of me, David Letterman seemed like the smartest man on Earth. Anything that happened, no matter how powerful or famous the clowns in charge, Dave could bring them down to Earth with a word. With Dad, back when “Saturday Night Live” wasn’t just happy to be there, all the puffery of a ten-million-dollar ad campaign could be blown to rags-and-atoms with a brief parody spot. Truth, in no way more effectively uncovered than by laughing at how idiotic the lies are. And nothing is smarter than knowing the real truth, after all?
“Where I come from,” Frank finally admitted, “you’d prove your worth by being good at music. Music is the highest value in the stands of trees I grew up in. But a runty little guy like me,” the six-foot-eleven mammoth sighed, though he wasn’t trying to be funny, that’s just short for them, “I couldn’t play the lutes we carved out of redwoods when they died. I’d neither lungs for horns nor hands for keys? Music was our faith and faith our music. Great minds weren’t making atom bombs or wi-fi routers, they weren’t writing novels or leading us into wars? The best of us were singing operettas skyward, for the blackbirds and the invisible hosts of the inscrutable heavens.”
Frank left his people for the first time, after all, to learn about humans through the spark of their, well, our music. If he couldn’t craft songs like the smart yeti, he would learn everything about it.
Those who cannot do, Frank Yetty reckoned, must at least understand why the other folks can.
“If you’re not smart enough to conjure holy writ,” he cast his eyes down, “at least understand it.”
“My dreams are gone now.” I said. “My people are gone now.” Frank said. We didn’t speak for a good while after that. I want to tell you we were silent out of our respect for both our species and our dreams, but I am far too old now than to lie about such things out of childish vanity. We were quiet because we were both ashamed of being so goddamnable stupid when we were both young.
That’s the gift of getting old. Realizing how stupid you used to be, and how stupid you still are.
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