I went home that day and I tried subtlety to explain the facts to Mom, but she said she thought I ought to go on with lessons. Gluey believed I had real talent. Talent! Goddammit! Talent to play for a bunch of clowns! I knew he only wanted me for the Shriner band. I was being used as a fill-in for a band because they couldn't get anyone else to do it and my parents were perfectly copasetic with that!
As soon as I got this response from Mom I decided something would have to be done, and done quickly. I had a feeling that these private lessons would lead to a lot of Saturdays and Sundays spent volunteering for the Shriners, something that I didn’t want. I had to get out of those private lessons before a date when he asked me to play for the Shriner band. I didn’t want to be hanging out with a lot of conservative old coots in my spare time. They were probably hawks who loved Nixon or something! I didn’t know exactly what their main mission or idea was, but I was working on being cooler and I figured this Shriner stuff was not going to help. That was when I cooked up the idea of claiming that there was something mysterious about Gluey. Damn, the truth was I was trying anything to get my mom to think trombone lessons were a bad idea.
I recalled my initial reaction to the size of the house and the fact that he had me pay in cash. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I decided to use those to cook up some kind of suspicions about Gluey. I can see now that it was sorta a dumb-ass thing to do.
“Mom, the way Mr. McGluen hides his family is really weird,” I said as casually as I could a little while after I had arrived home from the next lesson.
“What do you mean?” asked Mom. “Everyone who gives private lessons in their home keeps their family out of the way. It wouldn’t be professional to let their family stroll in and out during lessons.”
“But I didn’t even hear them once.”
“There wasn’t a car in the garage,” mother pointed out quickly. “His wife and child must have gone out before we came for your lesson. There’s nothing weird about that. Most music teachers do that.”
I gulped and tried again. “But he’s pretending he doesn’t have a wife and a kid, you see. He never mentioned them to me. And there’s no name on his mailbox. Do you think he could be wanted? Maybe in Mexico or something?”
“Are you crazy?”
“What about the mailbox?” I asked.
“He probably didn’t get around to painting his name on it. Not everybody has their name on their mailbox. In fact, a lot of people don’t.”
I realized I was going to have to think fast to outsmart my mother, who was not falling for my bullshit. “But you have to pay him in cash,” I pointed out. I was trying to make my mother think that paying in cash had strange vibes.
“Oh, that’s nothing. You’re being ridiculous,” Mother scoffed.
I struck back quickly: “Why are you sending me to a man who only accepts cash, mom? The girls got to go to piano lessons and Miss Rich’s tap dance lessons and you paid with a check.”
(That reminds me of the fact that she had actually tried to have me take tap dancing lessons, too, years earlier, but I had thrown a major fit about it. “Boys do not take tap dance lessons!” I had yelled. At least my old man had backed me up on the truth of that.)
“Some people like cash,” Mom claimed.
“Maybe he can’t get a bank account, Mom. Maybe there’s something really, really wrong! He went to Juilliard and so why is he living in that dinky little house? I thought that was suspicious, right from the start. Why is he so cheap for lessons? That just doesn't make sense. That’s what I wonder...” It was true that Gluey didn’t charge as much as he could have for lessons. Three dollars was cheap. Being a graduate of Juilliard and playing for some of the best swing bands in the west should have made him a super expensive trombone teacher. That would be why my parents picked him. The thing about his lessons was he had that sneaky, ulterior motive. The damn Shriner band!
“James, you’re going to continue in lessons,” Mom said coolly.
She was getting fed-up. My ridiculous arguments had irritated her and she wasn’t listening anymore. I decided in desperation to try a bit of reverse psychology on her. “Oh, gosh, I’m not saying I want to drop lessons with him, Mom. If I had to drop trombone lessons it would be awful, just terrible! I don’t know what I’d do with my spare time! Please Mom, don’t make me stop lessons. I don’t think he's really dangerous or anything. I just don't know if it’s safe,” I said.
“Listen carefully, James Eldritch Sauerbaugh. You are going to continue trombone lessons. Mr. McGluen says you’re talented.” Use of my full name meant I was entering dangerous territory.
Since reverse psychology hadn’t worked, I returned to my original argument. “Okay, okay, but the whole thing screams suspicion if you ask me and if you have half the woman’s intuition you claim you’ll—”
“James, you’ll continue lessons.” She was getting rather brutal at that point; I knew it was time to quit.
So getting out of lessons was impossible. I was doomed to continue and face the possibility of being recruited for the Shriner Band. Unless I never learned double or triple tonguing. The trouble was I actually liked learning those techniques.
Starting that November, Gluey had me listen to some of his music. You guessed it—all of what he played for me was circus music. We heard an LP with “The Circus Bee” and another one which had “Rolling Thunder.” Gluey gave me pointers on what to listen for during the music, which were the trombone parts, fast, slow or deep. And over the course of the winter months, Gluey assigned me a lot of trombone duets. Sometimes he would take the fast part and I would take a slow, low melodic part. The next time he would switch and have me try the fast tempo. I was rather bad at it, and not even deliberately, either.
“Do you know your double and triple tonguing? We’ll need that for this piece,” he would warn.
Practice work for double and triple tonguing would be saying my little syllable sounds, ta and ka, sort of in a mumbo-jumbo chant like a zombie in a comic book coming to get you. I said these chants out loud to him. Ta-ta-ka, ta-ta-ka, ta-ka, ta-ka, ta-ka. Like that. And ta-ka, ta-ka, ta-ka, ta-ta-ka, ta-ta-ka.
Then another thing he did was he showed me some alternate positions with the slide that I might use to play a few of the fastest screamers. I was lousy at those. He worked me on pedal tones for a few weeks, extra low and obnoxious, because they might not have enough tubas. I understood the tuba guys were too old and couldn’t blow hard without keeling over. I liked pedal tones a lot.
His favorite thing to drill into me over and over was that “the music demanded light tongue, driven by air.”
In the early spring I played tons of music alone, not in duets. He assigned “Entrance of the Gladiator” by Julius Fucik, which is also known as “Thunder and Blazes.” That pieces just booms away; it’s really boss. Of course we worked on “Barnum and Bailey's Favorite,” by Karl King. That guy wrote hundreds of goddamned screamers. Gluey laid on a lot of Jewell and Fillmore, of course, because they’re sort of mandatory in circus land. I had to practice playing everything forte, because for circuses you had to play damn loud to be heard over the chugging motorcycles and trumpeting elephants and the screaming kids. I was blasting Gluey’s little living room. I’m surprised the paint-by-number clown paintings didn’t fall off his damn moss green walls. At home when I practiced, Ginny complained about the noise, but my parents defended anything I did for Mr. McGluen.
“Your muscle memory for triple tonguing will come with a slower tempo,” Gluey explained. So we played some slower things.
The next week he assigned “Sobre las Olas,” that’s “Over the Waves” for those of you who don’t know Spanish, if you haven’t been in Sr. O’Shaunnessey's class, and that’s the song that they use for the trapeze acts. Come to think of it, I probably listened to it on an LP first in Gluey’s living room. It’s an old thing that they always play for circuses and everybody knows that old swaying thing.
“Everyone assumes it was
written by Strauss,” Gluey said, “but I’m pretty proud to tell you that it was written by a Mexican. A great composer named Juventinos Rosas. He was a natural composer, a street musician who wrote many dances, polkas, schottisches, and this famous circus piece. It was available on a Wurlitzer so it became popular. He was a very talented man but he died at age 26 on tour in Cuba.” Gluey was a big booster for Mexican people and junk. I never really figured out why, but maybe his wife was from there.
Next, Gluey taught me the B-flat chord as a stinger, he called it.
“Ta-daa, onomatopoetically in English, is what you need to play when someone or an animal finishes a big trick successfully. It’s the flourish. The conductor signals it this way.” Gluey illustrated different signs of what the conductor might do to call for a stinger.
So I got more parade and circus music. More than I can tell you. Yeah, shit, I knew for sure then that he was trying to train me to play for the goddamned Shriner’s circus and parade band and nothing else. There was no classical music at all. He was charging my mother fees to train me to play in the circuses. Juilliard be damned. It didn’t feel right. I was being set up to perform for the clowns.
I was angry. I knew he meant well; Shriners was a charity. But somehow it didn’t seem fair when he knew, or could have guessed from the way I acted, that I hated the idea of playing for circuses.
My Algebra teacher my freshman year—the goofy man who went along with my textbook—was an extremely irresponsible person by the name of Lincoln Faber and he was a crack-up as a teacher, let me tell you. Totally goofy. Hell, every day in his class was funny.
He was the tannest man you’ve ever seen. And he had this enormous tan forehead. One of the kids in class said you could write the entire lyrics of everything Jim Morrison sang in “Light My Fire” on Lincoln Faber’s forehead, but he was so tan you wouldn’t be able to read it. “Light My Fire” is about a half an hour long or something. Sheesh. Mr. Faber had lost half his hair and the other half was a shimmery silver and blonde color. In the summer he wore brown pants. His shirts were plaids like graph paper. In the winter he always wore a tight navy blue or green V-neck pullover over those shirts.
Leaning like a lazy son-of-a-bitch against the chalk board, Mr. Faber seemed every day to be about to begin to lecture us on the subject he was supposed to teach, Algebra, but that never happened. He always stopped, held the chalk, looked like a damn wizard and then began drawing something slowly on the board, taking a great deal of care.
“What would you say this fellow was, huh?” he challenged the class after he finished the drawing.
We’d all seen this before. He would have carefully drawn this shape, but it wasn't a parabola or some interesting mathematical function. Shit no, it was always an indistinguishable insect. Antennae, six legs, three body parts. A shitting bug.
Every damn day he spent about half of our hour in class showing us the outline of various bugs, pests, which he had to be able to identify for his pest test. He had started a business painting lawns green, but that was failing, so he wanted to change and use similar spraying equipment to spread pesticides. This side business he planned for the weekends and summers and in order to spray pesticides he needed a state certificate. Teaching being such a well-paying profession, he had to have this stupid second job. Over and over he registered for the state test to spray pesticides and over and over he failed it because he couldn’t recognize the various bugs. He claimed the reason he kept failing this test was that the mimeograph that went with the test was too watery and pale. He was trying to show us on the chalkboard how watery and pale the mimeo had been. That’s the kind of nut this guy was.
Everyone who was awake in third period Algebra would be staring at the crazy drawing of a bug on the chalkboard. In the meantime Faber would be messing around with one of the bug’s legs, trying to make it look even more absurd and less bug-like. We’d all roll our eyes at each other behind his back, Faber was doing it again, showing us bug drawings. Where was the Algebra, the equations, the Cartesian coordinates?
Maybe, we thought, we ought to protest this by not saying anything in response to his question.
“I was like you. No way to tell, right? It isn’t clear, is it?” Mr. Faber claimed happily.
We would then be forced to agree that his pest test had been unfair. Yes, we nodded, what he’d drawn on the board didn’t look like any particular insect. That was all he wanted to hear.
At that point, he would sometimes go on to teach us some Algebra, in his own special crappy way, sorta as an afterthought like, okay, here’s what they pay me to do, take it or leave it and I’m not putting any of my effort into it.
But I liked that class because some of my classmates were strange, too. There was this girl who sat beside me. She was very pretty, long glossy brown hair, cute legs. Always wearing short skirts and tight sweaters, but she never talked to me.
One day that changed. She turned to me and suddenly said, “I’m really afraid about being kidnapped this weekend.”
Shit, I had no goddamned idea what she was talking about! It was bitchin’ that she’d spoken to me, so I just gazed at her sorta cool and boss. Or I tried to do that. My goddamned lips were kinda trembling. I didn’t feel brave with my lips doing that, however she musta thought I was brave since she was telling me about her troubles. Was someone threatening her? It sounded weird and wonderful. I was really embarrassed that she was talking to me, especially because that day I had a string of zits across my forehead like a dotted line to show where you needed to open my head for repairs or something and I didn’t want her looking too closely at me. (She did have some zits herself, but much smaller ones near her nose, which was as oily as a homemade taco. My eyesight is bad, but I could see the shine.)
“We have to leave the front door unlocked on next Friday night and they’re coming to get me at about 4 am. Isn’t that awful early?”
“Huh?” I said. It seemed peculiar to complain about the hour of your kidnapping. I was beginning to think she was what my Grandma Sauerbaugh would have called “ex-ta persnickety.”
“I got into cheerleaders,” she added by way of explanation.
“What the hell do you mean?” I asked politely.
“I’m going to get kidnapped. For a kidnap breakfast? You know?”
“Oh.” I suddenly realized what she’d been talking about. I’d heard of those strange rituals where some of the members of the club you joined drove to your house in the middle of the night and came in your unlocked door to your bedroom and woke you up and took you to a pancake restaurant for breakfast. A bunch of new kids would have this happen to them every spring. I thought the whole thing was great for dip-shits.
“I’m going to find out where they’re taking me.”
“Okay,” I played along with her.
“It’s going to be so exciting!”
The bell rang and I left the conversation at that.
The next day she started in on the same dumb topic again. I was a little excited that she was talking to me once more, but the kidnap breakfast bored me.
“Do you want to know where they’re taking me for the kidnap breakfast?” she asked.
“Not really,” I said in all honesty.
“I’m not supposed to know,” she said in a dumb-o whisper, “but it’s gonna be Bob’s Big Boy.”
“Oh yeah. Pancakes and crap.”
She looked a little shocked by the curse word. “I guess. I don’t like going places in my pajamas,” she added.
“Shit, that’s uncool being in pajamas. Sleep in your clothes.”
“Yeah, I want to, but my mom won’t let me and I hate it. I’m wearing shoes, no slippers, no way. I’m going to hide my slippers so I can’t possibly wear them.”
“Yeah, shit, do that.” I was getting a little tired of this kidnap breakfast topic. I’d never been disappointed by talking with a girl before, except Ginny. It was a new experience and kinda educational. I’d always thought pretty girls would
be fascinating, but this one was so damned boring. I’d never talked to anyone as boring as her in my entire life. It was worse than that, really. Talking to her was like opening a hideous trunk—like Pandora’s Box. For two days she had chatted to me about kidnapping and there seemed to be no end of her yakking on the subject.
The next day, a third day in a row, she started in for another go on that same dumb topic. “I’m pretty sure my mom is going to suggest I wear my slippers when I’m kidnapped,” she bitched.
“Okay,” I said sullenly. I got the definite feeling she was talking really loud so other people could hear that she was in cheerleaders. This day I noticed she was sorta casting her eyes around in the direction of the in crowd to see if her amusing words were having much of an effect on them.
“She’s probably going to tell me to put my hair in pigtails or something cute when I’m going to bed before I’m kidnapped. I don’t want to look like a kid with all the cheerleaders!” I caught her sneaking a glance at an in crowd guy nearby. She was talking loud enough for him to hear.
“Ah huh,” I said kinda slow and disgusted-like at her.
She was picking up my angry vibes. “I think them coming into my house is kinda creepy. What do you think?” She tried to act truly fascinated by my opinion.
“Yeah. I can dig it. Oh, by the way, are you experienced?” That was a thing you asked girls to embarrass them, but you were talking about Jimi Hendrix’s album.
“Huh?” She looked shocked. The in crowd guy snorted loudly.
“Have you heard The Jimi Hendrix Experience?” I asked, trying suavely to get off the pancake breakfast topic.