Orpheus Johnson

by Paul Bowers

Orpheus Johnson sold everything he owned and hired a violinist.

Half this city knows the story from there. The Tribune chronicled his deeds, and the artists penned his hagiography. I know of a dozen placards marking the places he visited. His face adorns an illuminated fountain just off Michigan Avenue, where all the tourists can stare into his eyes and understand nothing. Our hands are stained red with remembering.

What’s remarkable about it all is that he picked me. The money was so good, I’d tried out on a whim. I told him at the audition that I’d been playing for three years when it was really more like two. He heard the occasional squawks of string and bow, saw the taut tendons in my neck, and still he chose me. A student in a Juilliard sweatshirt played faster than I could hear, and still he chose me, a self-taught amateur. A man from the Grant Park Orchestra played a tryout piece that made me weep, and still he chose me, a waitress from the West Side.

“Play on, Pearl,” he moaned when I had finished my song, leaning back in the wooden auditorium chair with eyes closed in rapture.

The next day, we met at Clark and Division, I with my hefty duffle and he with the clothes he wore. Thin as he was, it was hard not to imagine the clingy black cardigan weighing him down. Wordlessly, we made our way to the platform amid the early morning throng, I paying for his fare card as he had no money to his name. He reclined on a bench and nodded toward the violin case bulging through my bag.

“The people must hear,” he said. I hastily opened the case, tuned the strings, and rubbed fresh rosin on the bow, and then I began.

Again, I must emphasize that I was no classical master. I started with songs I could remember from the lesson books—dumbed-down arrangements of “Ode to Joy” and “Ave Maria” and the like. Every false note clanged against the subway walls and returned to my ears twice as profane. Three songs in, a boy ran over with pocket change to dump in my case, which I suddenly realized was propped open.

Just as he was about to make his deposit, my employer snapped to attention and kicked the case shut. The kid froze mid-stride, apparently paralyzed by the man’s relentless gaze. Orpheus reached out and closed the boy’s fingers one at a time around the coins.

“Keep it,” he rasped in a near whisper. “Save it toward a trumpet or an easel, but do not throw breadcrumbs to the wealthy.” And the boy bounded back to his mother, shaking.

Fifteen years later, that boy would graduate from a conservatory out east and join the Boston Pops. Upon making the cut, he would track me down and thank me—as if I were some great patron.

Here is what people saw that day: a wild-eyed man, sometimes pacing the platform, sometimes lying prostrate on a bench most people were afraid to approach. Beside him was this hack violinist, a too-tall girl with freckled arms and quaking hands. Three more times, people attempted to give us money. Each time, Orpheus would leap from his presumptive haze and berate the person: “Can’t you see the case is closed?” he would bellow, his hands flying up over his head.

When several trains had stopped and rumbled off without any response from my entranced companion, it became obvious he had no plans of moving. A Chicago Transit Authority guard took notice and hiked his weaponless waistline to his chest. He ambled to within a foot of me and stared, arms resting on a quaking gut. He informed us of a city ordinance that requires street performers to register at City Hall.

With a quick inquiry and a dismissive flick of the wrist, he sent us on our way, and we boarded the next southbound train. Immediately upon entering, Orpheus grabbed a support bar and gave that same nod toward my violin. He didn’t need to remind me of the stipulation in my contract. I was to play constantly as long as he was awake. Still, I had not planned for the conditions of the weekday morning Red Line: packed to the tan plastic walls and quiet as a hated man’s funeral.

I found it difficult to move the bow without jabbing a stranger, so the notes came out staccato for the most part. Although I stared along the fingerboard at my thin clumsy fingers, I could feel the glares coming from all directions over newspapers and novels. A few measures in, Orpheus stilled me at the elbow and requested that I play something “in Elevated Train time.” Seeing my nonplussed expression, he began snapping his fingers to the beat of the El track’s clicks and rattles.

“In the key of F, please,” he intoned with an instructor’s practiced ennui. I drew a breath and pushed it through my lips, pulled the bow and scraped it back across the string. Of course I knew my scales. But I did not speak the language of improvisation.

I jerked my way up and down the scale twice and then set out with timid tonal footsteps, like bootprints on Mars. The vibrations barely broke the tension of the wordless air.

“Can’t hear you over the percussion section,” said my conductor. Grudgingly, I played harder, desiring to saw my way through the body of the violin. We were leaving the station at Grand now, and the notes started slowly. As the train accelerated, so did I.

I was suddenly aware of a black man built like a boulder standing to my left. He cleared his throat.

“Key of F?” he said, proffering a harmonica from his breast pocket. I nodded imperceptibly. “Mind if I join in?” he asked.

I whipped my head around to Orpheus, who curled his lips into a grin and crossed his legs. As I resumed, the train was still picking up pace. And whether I liked it or not, the respective instruments of the concert hall and the cell block sped onward together.

By now, we had an audience. One passenger looked to be scouring his CTA map for a security hotline number, but others had put away their papers and were leaning back to listen. College kids took out their earphones. Traders wrapped up their important calls.

It sounded like a children’s music class gone awry, but we played until my accompanist came to his stop at Jackson. As the man pocketed his harmonica, Orpheus sprang to his feet to shake his hand. A few people applauded; others audibly sighed. Orpheus granted me a brief bow, and then it was back to work.

The remainder of my first day passed by in this fashion, and we switched trains every time we came to the end of a line. I was joined at times by a motley arrangement of musicians—a businessman with a mandolin, a priest with a clarinet—but for the most part I played alone. I played for the winos who stumbled in at noon and undressed me with their eyes, I played for the out-of-towners with their cameras and children, and I played even after my fingers had lost feeling.

Orpheus Johnson was enigmatic in the public eye, but to those who knew him, he was utterly indecipherable. Every night, crawling into my trail-rated sleeping bag beside my master who reclined on the sidewalk, I would ask him why he did it—why he forfeited all his possessions and hired a girl half his age to follow him with a $100 violin for the rest of his days.

And each night, he would tell a different story. He told me once he was a Southern sharecropper who took his fiddle down to Hell to win a woman’s affection from the Devil himself.

“But I came up short, and now I know I can’t look back,” he said. “Now the music is gone from these dry fingers, but music’s all that sustains me. It is my daily bread, and you are my baker.”

On another night, he was a former Soviet minstrel, hired by the Kremlin to produce glowing folk ballads on his balalaika extolling the virtues of the workers’ state—until one day he wrote the wrong song.

Once, he told me he had played a flute song that charmed the Chicago River, reversing its flow and sending all the city’s sewage and trash downstream toward the Des Plaines. He was proud of the feat until one day a child in Joliet went swimming in the river and caught hepatitis.

He told me these stories with a toss of the head, his hair whipping free of care though it grew stiffer by the day. And yet when these stories involved children, the gesture was always stale and his pupils did not focus nearby. The creases around his eyes mapped a hundred dead ends.

I cannot say for sure how many days we rode the El Train. Most of the time, my thoughts were of food, as I could not unhand my bow to grab dinner until Orpheus was well asleep. Orpheus told me, “Just create art that imitates your life; I’ll take care of the life imitating art.” And so I composed original pieces with titles such as “Variations on a Stomach Growl” and “Sonata for the Way Pizza Smells in the Backseat of a Car.”

But for all the time we spent together, I never saw a morsel pass between his lips. He found an empty bottle on the third night and filled it with water that dripped from beneath the curves in the El track, but even that he sipped sparingly.

“He probably sneaks it while you’re sleeping,” my mother told me on the phone one night. And so I kept a vigil, hoping to glimpse my master’s artifice. I never saw him budge, but before long I was dreaming.

Orpheus announced one morning that our train-riding phase was over. I obediently followed him to a park just outside the Sox stadium. The sun was only peeking over the buildings at this point, and there were at least fifty elderly people on the grass doing Tai Chi or something like it.

Playing on while they practiced their art, I felt as though every note was an arrow I launched into the tradition of my elders. Orpheus sat in a swing five yards off, waving his conducting arm frantically. He opened his eyes for only a moment to regard me with his usual impatience—I was to play, and I was to play with full force. When I had reached a satisfactory volume, he began to swing back and forth.

The seniors continued stretching, doing their best to maintain their trance or whatever it may have been. I understood their frustration; I had found and been ripped from many such states myself in the past few days. But just as the light was filtering through the oak canopy above me, I looked up to see a leather-skinned Asian man three feet away. His head was bowed low, and the sun smiled back at me from his scalp. He muttered something without lifting his face, and I leaned forward to listen.

“He’s not speaking English,” Orpheus said, reaching the peak of the swing’s range of motion. “He wants to show you something.” I turned back to the old man and saw his hands were stretched out to mine, the knuckles gnarled as tree roots.

“The fingers, they feeling fine now,” he told me, sending out a search party for each word. He reached toward the violin, which hung limp at my side, and I unthinkingly passed it to him with the bow. Turning it over to his chin, he shakily brandished the bow and began to play. His fingers wove themselves up and down the neck, nimbly pirouetting and flitting from string to string. He played like a boy prodigy, and a single tear fell into one of the F-holes. Finishing a song I had never heard, he returned the instrument, whispered what I took to mean “Thank you,” and hobbled toward the parking lot.

Orpheus went on swinging, the morning breeze rippling his clothes like a sail.

We did not stay still from that point on. Each day brought a new series of street corners and park benches, and we slept in places that made my skin feel full of termites.

The next day found us on a street corner downtown, and I was performing with the kids in basketball shorts who played for tips. They sat with plastic buckets clenched between their knees, pounding them in unison with sawed broom handles.

I was unsure how to match their furious rhythm at first, and Orpheus nudged me in the ribs every time I paused to collect myself. At first the boys sucked their teeth at me, scoffing at my meager attempts. “Girl, you lost—the orchestra’s that way,” one hollered over the thundering of the drums.

“You are the orchestra, my friends,” Orpheus yelled back from his spot near a newsstand. This elicited a rehearsed set of groans and eye rolls. In time, though, I thought of the song to suit their tempo. I pulled the sheet music from its place beneath the shoulder of my dress, recalling the passing stranger—he looked to be a professor—who’d dropped it earlier that day.

As the notes cried out, I noticed the crowd around us begin to thicken. Several people pulled out video cameras and stared through the viewfinders, silenced. The quiet spread quickly, and then the first sound outside our music was the plunk of coins in the collection bucket. I watched a line form toward the boys’ receptacle, and soon the tips no longer plunked. People were handing over bills—first singles, then fives, escalating until one man in sunglasses forked over a hundred dollar bill.

The boys drummed on, their eyes bursting wide and hardly blinking.

Every new day brought such things. Orpheus must have led me through all 77 of this city’s neighborhoods. In La Villita, we assembled an impromptu salsa band of sorts that would go on to win two Grammys. In the Cabrini-Green projects, I would wait on a street corner for a car to roll by blasting bass, and Orpheus would tell me the key so I could play along. One soft-mannered kid in a low-riding Buick pulled up on the sidewalk, listened awhile, and called some friends over to check me out. An hour later, I looked out into the still-assembling mass of people and saw three different gang colors represented. Their hats were in their hands.

In Wicker Park, where the beatniks and hipsters reside, we set up on a busy corner, and I was told to play the simplest sorts of songs as loudly as I could. Slowly, the guys in thick-rimmed glasses and girls with nose rings made their way outside. They set down their organic mixed coffees, rolled up their carefully distressed blue jeans, and commenced to dance. By mid-afternoon, the shops were empty and the street was packed. Not a car could pass through, and strangers locked arms and reeled.

At this point, Orpheus was unable to join the promenade. He would occasionally turn the color of blackboard chalk and stagger to the edge of fainting, but his hollow cheeks still glowed when I nailed a song.

I was in the middle of leading a line dance when I found myself staring down the barrel of a news camera. A microphone was thrust before me, but I knew I couldn’t answer questions without moving my chin and thus upsetting my form. I twitched my eyebrows and jerked an elbow toward my maestro.

Perched on a fire hydrant, Orpheus did not change his posture for the reporter. He continued staring in my direction, apparently absorbed in my technique and song selection as the questions came in.

“You’re a hard man to find, boss—mind if we ask you a few questions?”

“Is it true that you sold everything? Does your family know about this?”

“Is it true that your violinist’s music made a stray cat dance? Did you really heal an arthritic man outside of Comiskey Park?”

Orpheus remained silent for these and slowly raised a hand. When the reporter stopped to listen, my master spoke.

“I bring you no great message,” he said, and his voice quivered like Mother Teresa’s. “My aim is no loftier or lower than yours or anyone’s: to love and to be loved. But my bride is music, and I am a faithful bridegroom.”

From there, I was only a spectator to the meteoric rise of Orpheus Johnson. The next day brought more reporters, and the next a few more. We appeared on a morning news show on the condition that I must never be silenced, even in the studio. I began to notice familiar faces in the crowd every day, and eventually a small group shared the sidewalk with us at night.

Orpheus’s waking hours, meanwhile, were growing shorter until he was prone to drift off in the early evening. His trousers were lashed to the mast of his body with a length of twine from a dumpster. I had hardly noticed the changes in his physique since he started so thin and I was with him every minute, but others began to dote. One man affixed half a sandwich to the tip of my bow, thinking Orpheus would accept it as it passed by his face. Instead, Orpheus met the donor’s eyes, his gaze as sure as ever.

“Your intentions are kind, but your actions are deluded. I’ll draw sustenance from the only source I know,” he said flatly, shooting a knowing smile in my direction.

By this time, Orpheus Johnson was more than a man. He was a movement. Students were taking to the arts en masse, three new schools of visual art had formed, jazz was making a comeback, and every person in Chicago knew somebody who’d met the man himself.

One evening, as he eased his brittle body onto the asphalt of an anonymous alleyway, I requested a moment alone with him. Nodding, he swept a few fingers and the whole crowd around us dispersed.

“Why me?” I asked, allowing the words to stall in the air between us. He closed his eyes and set his head on the ground, and for a moment I thought he had drifted off.

“You were relentless,” he said after some time. “The others were talented and trained, but in you I saw a determined ragamuffin who would not quit playing—even when you missed a note, even when it was against your better judgment. And look at you now.” I had kept playing while I spoke to him. I was fairly adept now, and the calluses on my fingertips had become indestructible.

“Now play me to sleep.” I obeyed.

In the morning, we were to meet the Chicago Philharmonic to rehearse for a public concert. Orpheus was to conduct, and I was to be a soloist. I didn’t know what I was doing.

In the morning, he was to wake to the music he had inspired. He was to embrace the dawn that shone for him, and he was to walk the streets of the city that sang his praise.

In the morning, Orpheus Johnson did not move. I played his favorite songs and made the instrument wail a wake-up call, but it was all in vain. As a young guitarist moved in to check his pulse, I looked upon the bow and violin in my hands. For the first time, I regarded these things as they truly were, and I let them fall to the filthy ground.

I have not picked them up since. These days, my mother tells me she misses the songs I used to play for her. Sometimes at a party, my friends will ask if I’m still making music. I simply tell them I am finished. I know what I have done.