This personal essay was first read at a Howlin’ After Dark event at Howlin’ Books in Nashville and then published in 2018 as part of a self-published essay collection titled Guinea Bastard. It has not been published online before. Hope you enjoy!

She got up and walked quickly out of the room. She left us all there, the entire St. Nicholas second grade class, to wonder what had happened. When my teacher returned, she called me out to the hallway.

“Do you know what you have written?” she asked me. Earlier that day, we had all turned in essays on the subject of love—what it was, what we knew about it. She had been reading them. Mine was one long drawn-out analogy comparing love to a flower. This is not a groundbreaking notion, but my teacher’s reaction made it seem extraordinary. “This is a very complex thing that you’ve done here, comparing love to a flower,” she continued. My mother was called and the essay was sent home with a long note from my teacher about how talented I was. It was decided right then, among my parents and siblings, that I was going to be a writer. I already loved reading, but it was at that moment that I realized that there was a person behind those words, and that perhaps I could be that person.

That I compared love to a flower should not have been surprising. One of the biggest songs of the time was “The Rose,” written by Amanda McBroom and performed by Bette Midler. I was seven years old when that song came out, and I must have heard it frequently enough on the radio that it made an impression. There’s no way, though, I could have grasped the complexity of it. The opening stanza is gut wrenching:

Some say love it is a river
That drowns the tender reed
Some say love it is a razor
That leaves your soul to bleed

This love is a far cry from any of the love—Like God’s Love or Valentine’s Day Love—I would have been familiar with at the time. Even now, listening back to those words can be an emotional experience. For while Midler’s delivery of the line “I say love it is a flower / and you its only seed” may appear to be positive, in the context of the impossible cruelty love is capable of in the verses, you can’t be so sure.

In fourth grade, I asked my homeroom teacher if I could sing a song to the class during recess. She was happy to oblige. At the allotted time told the class, “Listen up everyone, Joey Pagetta is going to sing a song for us.”

I stepped to the front of the class in my uniform of blue pants and light blue shirt and blue plaid tie, and completely from memory sang the J. Geils Band hit, “Centerfold.” If you are unfamiliar with the song, it is basically about a guy, who years after high school, is “going through a girlie magazine” and finds his “homeroom angel on the pages in between.”

The song was a breakthrough hit for the J. Geils Band, and includes such classic couplets as “Slipped me notes, under the desk / While I was thinking about her dress;” “Those soft fuzzy sweaters, too magical to touch / To see her in that negligee is really just too much;” and my favorite, “Take your car, yes we will, We’ll take your car and drive it / Take it to a motel room and take ’em off in private.” I like that the narrator of the song didn’t have his own car. As a fourth grader, I could relate.

After I sang the song, my teacher, mortified, composed herself enough to ask me in front of the other kids if I knew what the song was about. I said yes, it’s about a guy who saw his girlfriend naked in a magazine. In my mind, I was probably thinking of the Sears catalog. My teacher told me it was not an appropriate song for me to listen to or sing. It was an adult song.

I don’t recall it being brought up with my mother, though I’m certain they must have called her to ask what radio station I was listening to. A few weeks later I was back with another song: Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure.”

My teacher had to approve the lyrics before I sang them and then commended me after on both my song choice and performance. That’s when I realized that lyrics such as “It’s the terror in knowing what this world is about / Watching some friends screaming ‘Let Me Out’” were more appropriate for a fourth grader in Catholic school than ones about naked ex-girlfriends. Buildings burning down, families splitting in two and people living on the streets was okay fodder for 10-year-old. Shaking in your shoes whenever she flashes those baby blues? Not so much.

I don’t know what compelled me to get up in front of my class, unsolicited, and perform. I was an otherwise shy kid. Just a few years earlier I was locking myself in my bedroom when my uncles came to visit. But whereas in the second grade I was figuring out that there were actual people who wrote the books I was reading, by the fourth grade I had figured out that there were people behind the songs, too. Performing was a way to test the waters.

I was also likely trying to impress a girl.

The first dozen songs I wrote, that same year, were part of an album I titled Judith & Me. By songs, I mean lyrics with melodies in my head, and by album, I mean a marble notebook, now lost to posterity. By Judith, I mean Judith, the girl in my class. I had not yet learned that you’re supposed to change people’s names. I even designed and sketched cover art. It featured Judith and me holding hands in a field of flowers.

Thinking back now, I’ve come to the conclusion that you don’t—as a fourth grader—compose an entire album’s worth of songs, with cover art, because you are in love with a girl. You do it because you have figured out that words and music have the power to move people, whether it’s out the door and into the hallway to the principal’s office to call your mother, or to the front of the class for a teachable moment. Amanda McBroom’s words and music gave Bette Midler something powerful to sing about, which somehow gave me something to write about. Seth Justman’s words and music gave The J. Geils Band one of its biggest hits and got me a talking-to by my teacher. Queen and David Bowie’s words and music created one of rock’s greatest collaborations, and years later gave Vanilla Ice a career. Surely, I could get Judith to fall in love with me.

The funny thing is that I don’t think I ever showed Judith the songs or sang them to her. And perhaps that was for the better. At that age, that I could write words and put them to melodies was probably more important than whether I could do it effectively, or as some means to an end. Everyone remembers “Centerfold,” but no one knows whether the guy ever saw his homeroom angel again when her “clothes were on,” so they could “take ‘em off in private.” And that’s how it should be.