1,000 Staples
One thousand staples aiming right between my eyes
It’s all for you.
It’s all for you…
I’m sitting on a concrete bench in Memorial Park, staring at the St. Johns River, deciding whether to go back to school or never return.
It’s November 1997. One of my favorite months in Jacksonville, where the sun shines bright all day but a cool breeze passes every few minutes, and for a moment, you can pretend you don’t live in an industrialized swampland where it’s usually a humid 95 degrees.
Today I left school after lunch and didn’t go back. I don’t do this often — one of my last classes is choir, and I hate to miss it. But some days the stress and dark emotions get too heavy, and the only way to calm my mind is to drive to the river and read something not assigned by my boring English teacher.
To my left is a giant statue of an angel holding an olive branch. In my lap, a copy of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and a composition notebook I use as a journal. The park is lined with large oak trees draped in grey webs of Spanish moss.
I find the water calming. And I begin to think about all the things I am not able to say out loud.
And when I find the words, I fall apart inside. It’s all I knew. It’s all that I knew…
How much I hate my parents — especially my father, who stopped doing anything remotely fatherly many years before.
The memories of middle school that still haunt me, even though I’ll finish high school in less than two years.
Even as I think these things, I feel my jaw clench. My upper lip folds over the bottom one, pursing tight. My teeth bite down on the fleshy interior of my cheek. My breath stops.
These are the patterns my body created to keep me safe from punishment.
Another thought: my choir teacher, who stiffed me again after an audition for a prominent solo — despite knowing I have just as much performance experience as the best singers in the group.
In her defense, I am easy to hate.
I’m clearly a poor kid with a chip on her shoulder. No one likes a broke kid unless they walk around constantly grateful for any scrap of kindness. I do hold that job — part-time — but I save it for people who are genuinely nice to me.
Ms. Davis* is not one of them.
This was an elite school of the arts — a place that required an audition and interview just to get in.
When I showed up the summer before ninth grade, my hair was its natural medium brown, my makeup natural, and I wore thrifted clothing with labels from the Gap and Kat Man Du. An older friend from church had coached me for weeks on how to pass the audition despite having no formal training — only solo performances at church and a few sessions where she taught me to engage my diaphragm, keep my shoulders down, and read just enough musical notation to appear capable of sight-singing.
I could not.
I had a naturally nice voice. I was earnest. And I appeared to be a normal middle-class girl from a good home with enough income to afford private lessons.
I think Ms. Davis was onto my scam within weeks.
I was the weakest link in the soprano section. Even though I could reach the high notes, sometimes I was off-pitch, and it was obvious my sight-reading skills weren’t what they seemed. Whenever I sang at full voice during exercises, my pitches proved otherwise.
I learned to lip-sync, concentrating hard, learning the parts in secret alongside my classmates.
I can still remember her sending poisonous laser beams at me after the second bad pitch.
But nothing’s easy when your home is a war zone. That’s all I know. That’s all that I know.
My face would burn with shame.
I knew I hadn’t been honest in my audition. I had presented myself as someone more “worthy” than I was. And then that feeling would make way for a deeper shame — my shoulders hunching forward, tears burning in my eyes, my throat tightening.
No matter what, I would always be a poor kid from a working class neighborhood with angry, bitter parents who didn’t seem to care about me at all. Without a mentor, I feared I could never become the singer I longed to be.
It was so confusing, because in other ways, I was used to people supporting me.
At church, people told me all the time how much they loved my voice. Some said they looked forward to hearing me sing. Some even said I was their favorite.
But every time Ms. Davis looked at me with that irritated expression, I shrank and wondered if everyone at church was just flattering me. Maybe they were just being nice because that’s what you do in a religious environment.
This argument played on repeat in my head.
Was I lying to myself about my talent? Was I just a self-absorbed brat who couldn’t handle not being the center of attention? Was I too weak for the pressure of the music world?
In those moments of confusion, my heart would race and my breath would shorten, and sometimes the anxiety would reach such a pitch that the only thing left to do was collapse in exhausted sobs of despair. Sometimes I would cry so hard I couldn’t breathe.
And in all those moments — alone in my room, gasping for air — no one heard me. No one came.
They want to arrange me, and I will dare them to try. They just want to arrange me. I welcome them back with a fight!
As time went on, I began to change.
I dyed my hair black before buzzing it all off with electric clippers. I started wearing burgundy lipstick. My daily outfits included Doc Martens and something black. I was losing my ability to stay happy, and when you add a sad look to that kind of ensemble, you don’t exactly fit the standard appearance of a glee club kid.
Ms. Davis never raised her voice. She would just look at me with a frown, a mild sigh deflating her chest as she tightened her jaw and tried to control the urge to shake her head.
Ms. Davis represented a lot of people to me.
It wasn’t just her disapproval that hurt.
It was people in powerful positions disapproving of me. It was my parents looking at me with those same weirded-out expressions. It was the exasperation I felt at needing love and attention from these people — and knowing the truth: I would never be able to depend on it.
Worse, I feared I would never have any agency in my life as a singer, which was the only thing I really cared about.
A cardboard box for your feelings! And I’m tripping over your dreams. An olive door in your ceiling — Taking everything!
A gentle breeze brushes my face as I watch a sailboat go by on the shiny water. The sky is decorated with fluffy cotton-ball clouds that play with the sun, darkening the sky for brief moments before bathing me again in a bright spotlight.
Days like this — when I’ve reached a tipping point and take solace in nature — are the days when I make my plans.
In less than two years, I would be on my own. Free to choose whatever path I liked.
So what was I going to do?
The lesson I had learned at this intense school was clear: no matter how much the audience likes you, you will always be at the mercy of people at the top who keep the gates closed. No matter how long you practice your technique, there will always be teachers who yell in frustration when you don’t get it right, directors who humiliate you in front of the cast for being a few minutes late.
After a middle school experience that felt like prison, after spending my entire childhood trying to get my parents’ attention and approval, after ending up at a coveted music program where the most important adult didn’t seem to care about my progress at all — I decided I would have to choose a different path.
The expectation was that I would get a scholarship to a conservatory, move to New York, and begin the grueling process of daily auditions while sharing a studio apartment with three other struggling artists.
The picture was too grim to bear.
My boyfriend at the time had loaned me his nylon-string classical guitar. I was slowly learning chord shapes from a book of 10,000 Maniacs songs. Making my way through “Don’t Talk,” something started to click.
I might be able to do this. I might be able to play guitar.
And I wanted to try writing songs.
My appearance didn’t fit the classical music world or the sparkly Gap-wearing kids in musical theater. But I could commune with the artists and writers, and I was pretty good at poetry.
So I decided to silently chant fuck you as a daily mantra to Ms. Davis and quietly move on with my life. I would pour every ounce of effort into becoming the best musician, singer, and songwriter I could be. I was determined to start performing in coffee houses by the end of my 17th year.
That night, I took the chords I knew, put them in a sequence, and began humming made-up melodies. My pitches didn’t match the chords. I realized I’d need to learn music theory if I ever wanted to write the melodies I heard in my head.
But for now, I was happy to write simple folk-rock songs.
So I kept writing.
By the time I was 18, I had written “1000 Staples” — the first piece I was truly proud of.
It was vague enough to mask any real people or situations, but it conveyed the potent angst I felt on a continuous basis. The feeling of living inside a gigantic invisible dome that penetrated people’s thoughts, keeping everyone in line and on brand — a feeling that filled me with so much rage and nowhere to channel it.
The first time I performed it for an audience, I was able to sing out in a way the classical rules would never have allowed.
I stomped my feet as I played. I bent my body like I was dancing with the instrument. And I allowed my voice to sing the words with all the anger and rage I had been carrying around like a suitcase full of ugly clothing that no longer fit.
That first time I sang “1000 Staples,” I threw the suitcase into the river. All the ugly, ill-fitting feelings I’d been carrying — I let them sink.
My body felt more at ease. My mind cleared. And my voice began to sound better than it ever had.
For the first time, my throat was fully open. My chest was free. The sound that came out didn’t belong to Ms. Davis or my parents or anyone who had ever told me I wasn’t enough.
It was mine.
They just want to arrange me and I will dare them to try. They just want to arrange me. I welcome them back with a fight!
— “1000 Staples,” 1998
Read Chapter 2:
*Names have been changed to protect identities.
Music Credits:
Song written by Bella Payne
Bella Payne: Vocals, Acoustic Guitar
Brian Jerin: Electric Guitar, Production
Jude Kahle: Bass, Saxophone, Production
John Boote: Drums, Production
Rebecca Zapen: Violin, Production
Betsey Federman: Cello, Production
Chris Estes: Producer
Very impactful & unique! As YOU are! With lots of love, Donna
Brava. And condolences on the loss of your friend, Brian. May his memory be a blessing.