TROMBONES CAN LAUGH
Lorraine Ray
Copyright 2013 Lorraine Ray
CHAPTER ONE
I was living in Parental Weirdsville, U.S.A. on the night my old man asked me if I wanted to play the trombone.
Everything had been quite copasetic until his knock. Shoot, it had been stunningly cool, and I was laid back, contemplating a fine evening of model-making.
My old man’s appearance at my bedroom door was the pits. I knew it was him, and I was freaking out; ordinarily the old man obeyed the call of his pipe and his drafting table heaped with building plans, mechanical pencils, and plastic templates of teeny little toilets. Mechanical engineering crap. The tools of his crazy trade. He made it a habit to stay till midnight in our converted garage, rum and coke bubbling in a big turquoise Mexican glass, the TV blaring anything western followed by The Tonight Show.
Shoot, the pipe smoke used to stack up in hazy blue layers until it was a few feet above the damn carpet. If he ever took a break, it was to go outside and stare up at the stars.
Wow, I thought that night, what the hell was he doing at my door? Why the hassle? Why the visit? My fingers trembled as I spun the cap onto the tube of plastic cement. I crossed the threads. I remember seeing the cap sitting catawampus on the tube when my damn door creaked open.
The old man’s square face worked its way in. A high wave of Bryl Creemed hair (more than a little dab) and browline glasses. He found his twelve-year-old son, crouching at a small pine desk under a crook-necked lamp, having just slathered an enormous quantity of plastic cement on the halves of the fuselage of a Sopwith Camel biplane. The top of my desk was littered with tiny tubes of the glue, with glass bottles of enamel paint, and with poorly assembled models of the Rat Fink Hot Rod Series. Let me see, there was Mr. Gasser, Drag Nut, Endsville Eddie and Weird-oh. I’d built them all—poorly. Earlier that evening, I’d slopped paint all over the helmet and vampire teeth of Drag Nut, using a new, red, metal-flake enamel.
And then, high on glue and paint fumes, I lifted my head to hear my old man ask me, “James, don't you think the glue smell is awfully strong in here?”
“Huh,” I said, blinking twice at him like some drugged owl.
He repeated his question.
“No, sir,” I said.
“You're straining your lungs to find any air,” he warned.
“No sweat, Dad. I can breathe.”
“Well...let’s air this room out. It might be dangerous. Explosive. And while we’re doing that let me show you some photos. They’re of my band and me. When I played trombone. We’re—”
“One moment, Dad. I’m gluing,” I said, holding a palm up at him. Always postpone the Inevitable and Unavoidable Parental Weirdness for as long as you can, I remember thinking.
He waited patiently while I, behind my coke-bottle thick glasses, pressed the fuselage firmly together. I’d have to pry it apart later that night. Shit, I was doing precisely the wrong step—number 25 in the circle instead of number 24. Perhaps he guessed this. (How in hell was I going to get the wings on when the fuselage had already been glued together?) His face did express disappointment at the messy smear of plastic cement I’d created when the fuselage went together. Like the Rat Fink models, this airplane would be a klutzy disaster, the plastic actually melting from the enormous amount of cement I slathered indiscriminately everywhere. Damn, I was a real ding-a-ling when I was a kid. Hey, who am I kidding? I still am.
I emerged eventually.
“I was having a ball,” the old man said awkwardly, trying to use my favorite idiom at the time, “I think you'll be interested in what I did. Back then, I was always having a ball playing the trombone.”
As I said, I was a dumb little fellow, and I did believe he’d once “had a ball.” I made it a rule not to protest too much about things that happened to me, or about being told what to do, so naturally I left the Sopwith fuselage and my delicious glue and went along. Cheerfully. The old man’s hand on my shoulder, across the hall a few steps to the family living room.
Our family of five shared a little ranch-styled brick home. Imagine this suburban 1960s Arizona horror with dark brown linoleum tiles infecting every floor and veneered Danish modern furniture dropped here and there in front of drippy watercolors of New York skyscrapers. Arranged on the Danish modern furniture, it was possible to find five or six orange triangular plastic ashtrays for my father who smoked like some Beatnik dragon. The New York watercolors were there because my mother liked pretending she was a sophisticated person from Indiana who knew a lot about New York and had just landed in Southern Arizona by accident because of the attractive winter weather.
I sat on the sofa where the old man put me. He left me there and crossed the room to the stereo hi-fi where he dropped the needle on his favorite album which happened to be Tijuana Brass’ South of the Border. My old man did not pretend to be sophisticated. No siree. An engineer could never carry that off when he worked in an office full of architects. Those guys were always skiing in the mountains of Idaho, wrecking English sports cars, and having affairs with their big-boobed secretaries. My old man just didn’t have any of that in him. I guess I’m kinda thankful for that; who would be happy about a dad who did crap like that? English sports cars are special things and you shouldn’t wreck them! Anyway, as I was saying, after he dropped the needle on the album, he knelt down in front of a cabinet behind the sofa where we kept our family photo albums.
“Ah,” he said, sliding out this old black and white picture album of his. It had black paper pages and white writing underneath. The photos were a shitload smaller than the photos today. A very weird, dusty, decrepit old thing. My old man plopped the album on my lap. And opened it.
“Me at the ranch,” he said sternly.
I put my face closer to the album to see it properly. I noticed he was out in a dry field. Evenly spaced bushes stretching off into a dusty horizon made up of low mountains. The bushes were cotton pickin’ cotton, I thought. I’d seen tons of that shit, Arizona is crawling with it, and practically the whole country is snoozing on Pima cotton, but they’re too dumb to realize it. We got the strain from the local Indians around here. Hell, I guess Americans don’t care about agricultural facts any more than I really do.
“I fainted shortly after my uncle took that picture. In the cotton fields in Avra Valley. I was driving the tractor myself. It was one hundred and five degrees out that day. I blacked out completely, but,” my old man remembered what he was supposed to be showing me, “I wanted you to see pictures of me in the band.” He flipped to another page and the brittle black paper scraped the end of my nose and brushed me back.
Next, my old man pointed out a picture of himself with the coronet. “My first instrument was the coronet. It’s like a trumpet, but it doesn’t play as many notes.”
I let my face fall close to the page again, so that I could see real good and really dig this time of his life. “I started playing the coronet in junior high, because my mother had an old one of those, but then I decided the trombone played more notes. I thought shooting that old brass slide out would be fun, too. Swing, I was crazy for that stuff. The trombone was a lot jazzier.”
Another photo showed him where he was standing beside a thick wooden surfboard in San Diego. “We used to drive over to San Diego. Always at night, ‘cause it was cooler. Mother and sis and I drove over there together. I liked to surf.”
“Here I am at the Navy Station in San Diego. Training.”
He still hadn't gotten to his crazy adventures in the swing band before he went into the Navy. You see, he’d flipped too deeply into the album and had to work his way back.
“Ah, here. Here I was at the Naval Station north of Chicago. I was a pecker checker, Jame
s. All because I was a wise guy and shot off my mouth at some higher up. Let that be a lesson to you. A pecker checker had the delightful job of checking the penises of men who were enlisting in the Navy to see if the guys had V.D. I kid you not. And later, when the war was almost over, I took care of nuts-o Marines in the crazy asylum. I wrestled them into straightjackets. All of this happened north of Chicago. When I went to Chicago (this picture, here) the damned USO only served me hot dogs for breakfast, lunch and dinner. You notice I don’t eat those damn things anymore.”
“Yeah, you sure don’t like em,” I chipped in.
“That’s right. A pecker checker. And I got served hot dogs for every meal. Do you see a tie-in?” he said raising an eyebrow comically.
“Tee-hee,” I laughed feebly. Parents can really say some depressing crap at night when they’re tired.
He flipped to another page in the album. “Here it is. All the fun I was having.”
I put my head down real close and brought the page up, too. Sure enough, he seemed to actually be having fun, though it was hard to be certain.
“Man, Arizona was wild back then,” my old man claimed. “The Beehive Club, whoopee! Whadda joint. Able Cactus Dance Pavilion. Great dames. Some hot cats, too. Yeah!”
Then he flipped to another page and swung it around to showing me more of what he had talked about, all the fun he was having in the swing band and what it had been like when he was with the guys playing big band music in the forties. Saguaro cactuses. Dames. And big brass trombones.
“You’re dressed as a clown,” I pointed out with the bravery and damned brain power God grants twelve-year-olds.
“Yes, we…ah…performed as clowns,” he said happily. My old man actually wasn't embarrassed about the fact that he’d dressed himself up as a clown. In extra-large photos, my old man, I hate to say it, was wearing a baggy white silk costume and a big nose, probably red (as I said, the photos were black and white back then). They even stuck these dunce caps on their heads, doing the clown thing to the tee, and having crazy enormous pom-poms like cabbages sewn down the front of their costumes. Cabbage, cabbage, cabbage. This was part of the ridiculous junk he wanted me to share in.
The old man didn't notice, or preferred to pretend not to notice, my horror at the idea that he had performed in this absurd costume. I mean, damn, a boy wants his Dad to have some dignity. You know the kids of the knights of old in England got to be pages and followed their fathers into battle in armor and good-looking metal chainmail, so they say in Ivanhoe-type crap. And he was showing himself to me in a silky clown’s costume!
“This was my best friend, Chauncey,” said Dad, tapping the photo of another band member sitting near him.
“He was a clown, too,” I pointed out.
Dad turned quickly to another page of the album. The old man took no notice of my growing depression. “My 1935 Ford. Mom drove me up to the used car lot to pay for it. $350 smackers. Man that was the slickest car. When I finished working on it.”
A real gas, or a ball, that was what he’d had. According to my old man. A real gas with those band guys and that car. Wild clubs and bars were his hangouts, and he drove around the desert, and on the back roads of mountains, in the fast Ford, which he bought with the savings from playing in bands, and he bragged about getting lots of girls, or so he told me, though he might have been bullshitting, you know, I was only twelve at the time and couldn't tell too well when a grown-up man was bullshitting. This band idea sounded pretty good to me from behind my thick glasses.
“I’ve an idea... James. For you to have...for me to let you have…my trombone. My idea is that you would borrow it for a while. If, as I think, you’ll agree, you want to take band in junior high.”
The actual point was gotten to. Shit, my engineering father took forever to build up a premise, to build the foundations of a simple goddamned question. And the old man’s question was: would I want to play the trombone like he had?
“Sure, I guess so. Why not? Would it get me outta P.E.?” I asked hopefully. P.E. was a bad scene for me. You see my eyesight is terrible and I’m always tripping over things. Sometimes I fall over my own feet.
“No. I don't think it will replace P.E.,” he answered, honestly enough.
“Um. Okay.”
“It might get you out of chorus, though,” he offered.
“Oh, that would be pretty good. My voice is the pits.”
“I understand,” said my old man.
Using a blue cartridge pen, I filled out the card, Arizona Public School, District One, Elective Request, printing “7th grade band” in the indicated space. After school: Model Rocketry Club or Vietnam War Combat Club.
What a jerk I was then about that Vietnam club. Combat Club, jeez. I didn’t even like P.E. and now I’m bummed out all day about what I have to do to get out of the damn Vietnam draft. Seven more months and I’m eighteen. Have to register thirty days before my birthday. But Nixon isn’t calling up anyone born in 1955—yet.
CHAPTER TWO
At the beginning of every band class the junior high band instructor, Mr. Gomez, would stand at the door greeting students—“Hey, Petey. Hola, Josue. Hi, Robert.”
And my greeting?
He tapped me on the head with a handy baton or a pencil and said, “Jaime. Exactly like my little brother Alfred.”
Mr. Gomez hated me. Because I reminded him of his little brother, who must have been a royal pain in the ass, a real horror, given the way he decided to send bad vibes at me for two long years.
Shit, it used to make my face and my neck and my ears turn bright red. I know this because the guys in the trombone section would yak at me about it non-stop.
“James, your face is bright red!”
“James, your ears are really red!”
“Even your neck is red, man!”
“Shit, Jaime, is there any part of you that isn't red, man?”
Guys in band then took to calling me Little Alfred the Asshole, though my name is James, not Alfred, I’m not really short or anything, and I happen not to be an asshole, thank you very much for zilch.
“Little Alfred!”
“Take this, Alfred!”
“Hey Alfred, you’re a real dick!”
Uncool cats who wouldn’t let up on me began whacking me over the head with pencils or anything they had handy every goddamned time they saw me in the halls or the cafeteria. Lunch bags with apple cores in them rained down on me. Rolled up tests bopped my poor little bruised brain. Forks even thumped me. I was bugged by a bunch of jerks for no reason other than what this band teacher had said. This alone should have made me hate band, right? But I didn’t. I liked the old Souza garbage.
Then there were these two infuriating finks in Model Rocketry Club who took the old Let’s Torture James Thing to an extreme and used to bash me over the head with my model rocket and call out sarcastically for everyone to hear: “I launch you, Alfred the Asshole” like I was a ship or something and they were christening me with a bottle. If they’d had a real heavy glass bottle, a Coke or something, they probably would have smashed me over the head with it and killed me, the damn jerks. Their model rockets were badly built, even worse than mine. And no, I didn’t take Vietnam Combat Club. Ever.
Let me tell you, riding your bike with a banana seat for a couple of miles with a trombone case banging your knees is the pits. Shoot man, holding onto the case handle and the bike handle was tricky. I used to try to set the case on my left knee, crosswise, you see, and let the weight of the trombone go up and down while I rode one-handed. The bell part of the case would whack my elbow a lot, though, which was really annoying. I kept trying to figure out ways to strap the trombone onto the banana seat. I didn’t have one of those cool stingray bikes that were smaller and were made to go with the banana seat. No, I had the banana seat stuck onto a regular-sized bike, because you could buy the banana seat as an add-on and that was the cheap-o way my parents thought I would experience a stingray bike. Anyway, on windy
March days in the desert a big old trombone case crosswise creates a sort of extra wing off the side of my regular-sized bike with the banana seat and the wind wanted to rip the trombone out of my hand or knock the bike and me over. The way to think of it is that the bike and trombone became a kite which is pretty hard to correct for, and I crashed a couple of times into shrubs and signs, but no cactus patches, luckily, although I had few close calls. And I didn’t damage my old man’s trombone. I usually got a ride in the car to school if it was windy and rainy, thank goodness, but rain’s pretty much a zilch in the desert. You can’t count on that coming. Or if you do, you’re stupid. And riding your bike was even less fun when it’s like ninety going on a hundred degrees in May and early June and your home is two miles away across scalding hot pavement and dusty, empty desert lots. My parents consider that normal everyday conditions and did not give me, or my sisters, rides home from school for the prospect of extreme scorching, shitting heat at three-thirty every damn afternoon. Trombone or no trombone they expected me to ride home through my personal version of hell. But hells on earth have a way of changing. That one of mine came to an end as high school approached.
“Being in band in high school is going to brand you as hopelessly uncool, James. You do know that, don't you?” my older sister Gertrude explained during one of her visits on a blazing hot Sunday at the end of junior high.
As a judge of what was cool and uncool, I was beginning to trust Gertrude completely. She had managed to get herself together and escape from her life a few years early of being a jerk who wore dorky clothes and worked at the public library. Now she worked at the Anthropology Department at the University and she talked about cool things like Margaret Mead’s theories and sex as it was practiced in jungle groups. And she no longer lived in Parental Weirdsville, U.S.A. More power to her.
“I don’t think Mom and Dad will let me drop out,” I said. “Besides, Dad said I might be in a band and have some wild times, getting into nightclubs and shit.” Behind my thick glasses, I know my eyes must have looked crazy, searching her face for help.