Enon, a mega church, is part of my community, a feature of my daily work commute. It’s what traffic engineers would call a significant destination. And although I later learned that peak hour traffic in that area had been manageable, not something to avoid, I had imagined a very different scenario.
I saw him perform in August, 1981. He’d stepped out on the stage at Chicagofest in his pink shirt and pale slacks – maybe the fog machine had kicked in, I can’t recall – but he’d stretched out his arms in openness and the audience had swooned, audibly, for that gesture and every one that followed.
And that’s what I imagined would happen on Cheltenham Avenue: thousands and thousands of swooning women from Philadelphia and Chicago and the rest of the country would converge upon Enon, and there would be no way to press through that crowd.
The power of eroticism, as I remembered it from almost 30 years ago, had perhaps waned. Or maybe the huge parking lot at Enon had been generous enough to absorb it all. But at any rate, the passing of Teddy Pendergrass came and went, over the course of slightly more than one cold week in the new year.
It plunged me into an unsettling nostalgia. TP – which features my favorite Teddy Pendergrass tune, Love TKO -- was the first CD recording I purchased. Listen to this, my friend Karen said, filling her East Side Milwaukee apartment with auditory velvet, a depth of sound I’d never heard, convincing me that my cassettes were one-dimensional in comparison. I was newly single and somehow imagined that the right music would seal the deal: put on Teddy’s Feel the Fire and a stranger would become the perfect life partner.
The week of his funeral, I pulled out my R&B and island cassettes, listened to some as I drove to work (amazingly, my 4-year old car has both a CD and cassette player) then left them on the Free Table at the office, where everything from stacks of Wired to partial skeins of yarn are recycled. I left behind Teddy and Billy Ocean and Eddie Grant, Bobby McFerrin, Michael McDonald, Aretha, Patti LaBelle, Anita Baker. (Somewhere along the way, I’d lost Luther Vandross, thin, in his white suit, singing Give me the reason to want you back).
At lunch, I watched my young co-workers stop at the table, pick up the tapes recorded before some of them were born, then set them down again. But by the end of the week, they’d all disappeared.
I don’t know who took them. Maybe people who believe that music sets the mood. People who believe that music is the mood. People who remember slow dancing to Turn out the lights with someone they had just met. Women who remember the electric charge when he walked on stage, the fog rising from the footlights, how it felt to call out Teddy, Teddy, as if something like love was just about to begin.
