Speaking of Neil Young

As a junior in high school I found myself humming along to Neil Young’s “Old Man” and “Heart of Gold” whenever the local classic rock station decided to take a break from Aerosmith or Boston or AC/DC. Senior year I’d take the scenic route home from football practice while blaring Harvest Moon in the used Mustang I shared with my older brother, driving past the cornfields just as the setting sun made them glow and feeling nostalgic for the innocence I had yet to lose. First semester of college I was getting high to his 1969 self-titled solo debut, and by spring I waited for rainy days to wallow in my loneliness with the haunting On the Beach, playing it over and over on an old turntable of my father’s that I had restored.

In accordance with the natural progression of other Neil faithfuls, it wasn’t until I had exhausted this mostly acoustic, more accessible singer/songwriter side of Neil Young that I was able to graduate to an appreciation of his electric work—the highest and most challenging level a Neil faithful can reach. And it took me even longer to fall in love with it. Only recently have I begun to figure out why: his style of playing, with its wailings and repetitions and clutter and incoherence, is my style of speaking. Like his guitar, I stutter.

The phonetic makeup of the word itself seems cruel, stutter, in that its intonation peaks at the difficult and forceful “t” sound—a voiceless alveolar stop produced by blocking airflow in the vocal tract—and therefore prevents sufferers from cleanly vocalizing what’s afflicting them, rather like the blatantly onomatopoeic lisp. Not that sufferers necessarily want to vocalize what’s afflicting them, for speech problems run long and deep. I can’t recall a time when I didn’t stutter, but I do remember when it was first defined as such. I was eating breakfast with my older brother Jeff, who coincidentally spoke like me. We were very young, maybe eight and ten. I must have tried to tell him something—I’m sure my mind has blocked that part out—but he just looked at me and said:

“You stutter.”

“So do you,” I said.

“I know,” he said, bringing another spoonful of cereal to his mouth. Fortunately, we both had another avenue for fluent communication: the piano. Our parents had forced my oldest brother, Joe, to learn the instrument, and they imposed the same requirement on Jeff and me. Despite our resistance, we got really good really quickly. How freeing it was to feel my fingers dance across the keys with Clementi’s sonatinas, Chopin’s nocturnes, and Beethoven’s sonatas. But after a while I started doing the same thing with my fingers as I had been doing with my mouth. My tempo was first to change, and it became apparent at one of our early annual recitals, which my family and I watched on video. There Jeff and I appeared in matching tuxedos to play a duet of “Yankee Doodle Medley,” he on bass, I on treble.

“You see, you’re playing too fast,” my mother told me, pointing at the TV. “Your brother’s got to keep up.” I kept my eyes fixed on the carpet.

As Jeff and I grew older, our parents deemed us cultured and mature enough to choose our own hobbies. Our devotions turned from piano to sports, and somehow he eventually overcame stuttering. I did not. And so I would live at the mercy of my own mouth, harboring lifelong grudges against those who wouldn’t let me forget it: my childhood friend’s brother who answered the phone when I called and yelled to his brother that “it’s C-C-C-Chris”; the professor who, the one time I went to his office, said I should change my writing topic on Billy Budd from masculinity to speech, because I “stuttered like Billy”; my ex-girlfriend’s roommate who, in front of my brothers during their one visit to my college, silenced what...