The Monday after this first two Saturday circuses I left a little late for school. My mind was still at the arena relishing all the fun I’d had there. And I’d even managed to read my Algebra book for a couple of hours after the first circus. Moses turned out to be good at not bugging people when they had to study. He liked to sit and drink. The other guys were mostly comatose or joking around. Then the second circus and the third one that night had been more fun than the first! I hadn’t been so nervous. Shoot, the weekend had been a blast and I was enjoying the idea of myself as a real musician playing for a real circus. I’d thought it was going to be terrible being in the Shriners. I’d thought they were going to be a bunch of uptight Nixon-lovers. What I found was they were all about getting drunk and playing music and joking around. It was cool being at circus performances with them. I was freer at the circus that Saturday than I had felt in years at home or school. The fun I had with Moses and playing screamers with those old guys completely removed my memory of the other kids who didn't like me. I was part of an adult world, looking at kids as people who had to be entertained. I had this weird purpose that no one at school could guess at. I think I’ve learned that the best secret to have in life, better than love for a girl or something you want to buy, is a secret charity which stays secret.
Most mornings I left early for school and walked around the desert so I wouldn’t get attacked while I was stuck carrying my old man’s heavy trombone. Those jerks who were after me in junior high were still after me, but they were never in the desert real early. And after school they didn’t get out of the school fast, because they were busy slamming lockers on guys’ heads, so I was safe if I shot out of class right away and flew straight across the desert. I lived on the other side of this big old piece of desert that was beside the high school. Creosote bushes covered most of the vacant lot, with a few mesquites on the banks of the arroyo, which is a dry river that ran diagonally across the lot. In order to get across the desert you had to go down in the arroyo. There was no bridge, unless you walked the far way around the desert to the north, which as I said, was my usual path. The bank of this arroyo in the middle of the desert was low on the path because kids had worn the dirt down in all the years they had crossed it and gone on to high school. In the morning I was always a little nervous when I went over the arroyo bridge on Fifth Street because that was where someone could come up behind me. I took a good look before I walked too close. I was glad I did it because twice I caught a glimpse of those jerks from rocketry and their friends and I crossed Fifth Street quickly to keep them from seeing me. Then at the top of the hill, I crossed back again with a big crowd.
Since I was late that Monday after the first circus, I took a dumb chance and walking through the desert lot rather than skirting the edge. I discovered to my sorrow that some of my old enemies still remembered me.
As I was hurrying across, carrying my old man’s trombone, I also held one of those light blue cloth notebooks which I had decorated coolly with a large ballpoint drawing of Jimi Hendrix from an album cover. It had taken me a week to finish the drawing. I was really proud of the effect. Maybe I was admiring my drawing too much and that explains why I didn’t see what was coming.
I’d gotten to the same place where I loved to play as a kid, imagining it to be a fort I was holding against the Apaches. All the kids played in that empty lot which supposedly was owned by Howard Hughes so we called it the Hughes’ desert. I strolled down into the arroyo bed and was starting back out, when suddenly I heard the sound of people sliding down the arroyo bank behind me.
I spun around.
“Well, well, Jamesy, old boy,” a voice was saying. Two blonde goons, like Tweedledee and Tweedledumb, with surfer boy blonde hair-dos dipping over one eye and cool-looking madras shirts, stepped down out of a dirt hole in the bank.
I knew them immediately. The two jerks. The ones from Rocketry who hadn’t liked me in junior high. The pair of complete bozos who had bashed me on the head with rockets and tortured almost everybody at school.
I didn’t wait to find out what the hell those jerks wanted. Of course, I can never know exactly what they had in mind for me. Maybe they wanted to invite me to smoke some dope with them or something, but I didn’t stick around to find out. I wouldn’t have wanted to smoke dope with them anyway.
I took off running as fast as I could in the direction of the school.
A bunch of lucky things happened. The fort in the bank of the arroyo was a little too far from where I was that day for them to get to me right away, and they hadn't seen me coming because they were about to smoke marijuana. That gave me my first advantage. Secondly, they’d caught me off guard, but throughout the year I’d prepared myself for the possibility that they might attack, and I was ready to react. Thirdly, as they walked/slid down the embankment from this hole, they had to look down, luckily, because the dirt bank was kinda steep out of the old fort. Also, the bottom of the arroyo had broken glass. Their slow slide was another break I needed to outrun them.
Shit, I guess, they didn’t expect me to take off running immediately. Although they were surprised, one of them chased me and got close enough, as I flung my bod up the bank of the arroyo, to manage to grab my shirt, but I tore myself away. I felt a button pop off in the process of getting myself free. Up and out of the arroyo, I ran blindly. More blindly than my usual blindness. I spun around to get away and saw the burning dawn sun fly across the sky like the old Greeks thinking it was a flaming chariot or something. I threw myself in the direction of the school with no thought of where I was running.
I could hear the two goons chasing me, fairly far behind me at this point, and they were beginning to fall back farther. I felt good but I didn’t slow down a bit because I wanted to be well ahead by the time we reached the school in case some of their friends were within shouting distance of them. They might call out and get someone to grab me. I swung around to make sure they weren’t getting to close, and I was pretty damn happy to see that they were fading.
Then, not looking where I was going, I bashed into something terrible.
When school had started up after the Christmas break that year, and kids were again walking across the desert to high school, a dead German shepherd dog, was found lying near the edge of one of the main paths. We all thought a motorcycle must have hit it. It didn’t seem to have been shot and we doubted it could have been hit on the street and crawled into the center of that desert patch, which was, shit, super large. But by this time the body had been out for a month and it was rotting something awful. The carcass was still there, and it was not a pretty sight.
I never once thought about where the dead dog was. I never saw it on the ground and had completely forgotten that it was near the path I was running on. With escape only on my mind, I ran blindly, right into the damn dead dog.
When I tripped on it, or maybe I should say plowed into it, I went forward, but managed to catch myself. The collision moved the dead dog corpse, wrapping it around my lower legs. I felt the ooze of rotten flesh and the disgusting smell of decay. I kicked to get it off my feet and lower legs, but though I was free, I had to deal with the filth and disgust I felt. I vomited my breakfast onto my new notebook which I flung into a creosote bush. I couldn’t stop myself from vomiting though I tried. The two goons were still following me. By this time they were laughing and they watched me vomit and enjoyed that too. What a sick pair of cretins they were. And at least I didn’t drop my trombone or fall face first into the dog or anything. I’m pretty coordinated in emergencies.
As I said, the two goons enjoyed watching me. They were shouting and laughing, pointing and giggling at my predicament. They couldn’t have devised a better torture for me if they had thought for hours. Their faces dissolved with impish giggly pleasure. They were squinting their blue eyes with mirth, yeah, and falling against each other because they were laughing so hard. Damn, man, they could see my disgust which I guess, thinking the way their sick-o brains did, was better than a
ny physical pain they could give me with their feet or fists.
“Look at him! Look!” Tweedledee said to Tweedledum.
I couldn’t even take a chance to stop, but kept running for the school.
That day I spent wearing the delicious odor of dead dog as my cologne. And I had stains on my pants.
It was hard to walk home. I wanted to go back for my notebook, but I knew it was covered with barf. Lots of people at school knew what had happened to me. I saw the two goons leading some friends through the desert to see the dog now.
“Run into any dead dogs recently?” some grinning idiot asked in the afternoon. An in crowd moron, sheesh.
I managed to walk home with a big group of neighborhood kids, who knew nothing about what had happened to me, even talking about something completely different until I was home so I could keep my mind off of my humiliation. It wasn’t easy to pretend it hadn’t happened, but that was exactly what I did. I forgot about the horror as well as I could.
I carefully avoided my two enemies and never saw them again during that remaining high school year. I’m not sure they’ll even remembered me my senior year, this year. I told my mother that I stepped in a dirty mud puddle and I washed my new bellbottoms out myself with the hose in a bucket and hung them on the clothesline out back of Parental Weirdsville, U.S.A., so she wouldn’t ask about anything. Yeah, that’s right, I got a new pair of Levi’s that were wide legged. You really haven’t lived until you’ve run into a dead dog on the first day that you wore your new bellbottoms to school.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Shortly after this, the extreme heat arrived, as it does each year in Arizona. It is a shitty time of year with almost no chance of rain or even clouds to block the endless shittin’ sun, which beats down on you until it feels as though someone is gliding a burning torch about three inches from your skin. The heat coming off the asphalt knocks you out. The sun is so bright you can get a sorta blindness if you drive too far without sunglasses. The flesh of your arm scalds quickly on chrome parts of cars. If the wind blows, the moving palm trees sound like uncomfortable people trying to wipe sweat off them. And speaking of sweat, that stuff drips in rivers down the back of your legs, collects in the fold of your elbow and under your collar. Shit, summer is a serious blistering business in Arizona and nobody marches around or has festivals or town celebrations unless it can be at night or at dawn. People don’t want to pass out in the heat. Except for the screaming cicadas, things get quiet. Businesses shut sometimes for the whole month of June. The snow birds flee the state (and many of the Shriners were snow birds from cities in Minnesota and Wisconsin.) Plants wilt, people droop, and the circus and parade season in small town Arizona ends.
Gluey didn’t call for me once in May. By June, I asked during a lesson whether he was going to need me, and he explained that my substitute trombonist job was over until late September. The Shriner parade business hadn’t ended for the entire state; there were parades in Northern Arizona and the White Mountains, but that was too far for our chapter to travel. Gluey congratulated me on my performance at the local circus and urged me to continue lessons with him during the summer, something I no longer dreaded.
So the three performances at the local circus turned out to be the first and last Shriner events for me that school year. The circus performances with the Shriner band helped me some, because the memory of the funny old guys kept me cheerful. I was still surprised by how much I had enjoyed the day and looked forward to other events. I continued playing circus music with enthusiasm now, practicing my double and triple tonguing religiously.
By late July, Gluey informed me during a lesson that he would be losing one of his trombonists on and off all year, but luckily not my new friend Moses Grand. Although I thought Moses almost played well enough to cover for two members, Gluey wanted to keep the sound up. Gluey felt the band would not be up to its usual level of performance without a third trombone. Therefore, he thought he’d need me on several weekends that school year!
The fall and winter Shriner performances consisted of parades in rinky-dink Arizona towns, followed in the spring by circuses. For these events the Shriners travelled together by bus. On the third week of school, Gluey gave me the address of the local temple and told me to be there at seven sharp.
That morning I jumped happily out of our Plymouth, waving goodbye to Ginny and Mom, who’d driven me there.
“Step lively,” called Ginny, being her usual pain in the ass. This was a dirty dig about the ox poop and my TV debut.
“Thanks, dork,” I said, slamming the car door.
For the first bus trip, we journeyed to the small town of Crow Flats, Arizona for their annual Cuervo Loco Days parade. Cuervo Loco Days was the usual jolly festival of small town jerks fighting mock gun battles in the streets, imitating ladies of ill-repute, and dressing as outlaw gangs. I’d been to that idiot fest before. The Shriner band would play in the parade, riding on a float.
When I arrived, there was a line of ancient musicians waiting to get on the bus, which was already idling in front of the temple. The Shriner temple was a one story brick place, kinda modern like an insurance agency or something, with lots of palm trees and pyrocanthus bushes dotted around. A fake arch of bricks in front of a phony antique carved door. One of those Mexican carved doors with squirrels chasing acorns.
I joined the back of the line at the moment when the driver lifted a silvery section of the side of the bus, the place where luggage usually went. Two old coots coming out of the temple greeted me as though they’d seen me the day before, and more ancients, hearing my name, came over to slap me (weakly) on the back. One by one the musicians fumbled their cases into this compartment, with Gluey helping since he was one of the younger members of the ancient band. Some of the old guys practically fell in themselves when they tried to fling their cases forward. The tuba players were especially taxed. When I got to the front, I slid my old man’s trombone case in with all the other drum, trumpet, clarinet, and tuba cases. Then I boarded the bus. Two steps at a time.
“Wow,” said Milton II, one of two trumpet players named Milton who was coming up behind me, “I forgot legs could do that.”
“Here! James!” called Moses when he caught sight of me. He was holding a seat beside him for me near the back. Gluey must have told him I would be joining the band that day.
I fought my way through the crazy crowd of babbling old Shriners who were laughing and joking like a bunch of loony kids. A couple of them were trading mock punches and I pretended to duck. They all slapped me on the back again. Frank, the coronet player, wheezed at the effort.
“I’m almost perfect from the heart attack last month, James,” he said.
“Okay,” I replied. I felt my eyes popping a little bit at that remark.
Outfitted inside with big old cushiony seats and a toilet in back, what was different about the Shriner bus was all the liquor those crazy Shriners brought with them. Damn, lemme tell you, was there ever a lot of drinking on those buses. Whoa, I’m not lying when I say those Shriner guys were mostly all crocked. I don’t know if this is some general thing with Shriners everywhere or if it was something peculiar to those Shriners of that temple or the temples in Arizona. Man, those jokers loved to get themselves boozed up. Somehow it never occurred to them that it might affect their playing, and if anything I suppose it kept them playing longer than they would have otherwise. The buses they hired were actually run as a rolling bars all the way to some stinking little Arizona berg in the middle of a dry and dusty hell.
They must have gone out and bought hundreds of dollars of booze for the trip. I suppose this was considered part of their expenses of travel. They brought in every kind of liquor imaginable: rye, scotch, vermouth, beer, wine, and vodka. I don't know the names of all the drinks they could mix. Sheesh, I’m not a damn drinker myself. Just imagine every damn weird concoction and you just about have it. The bar keeper would be different Shriner guys, but there were about three of them that
did it, and the one you got depended on who was going along to play and who felt like putting out the effort to bartend. Not one of them cared about underage drinking. They were all for it! And how! I’m not sure I get their philosophy on that. They seemed to be very upright guys, very moralistic in general, but as far as alcohol went, they thought early drinking was dandy. I guess in part it was something of their era, having seen a little of Prohibition and not thinking it was any good at all, they decided any restrictions on drinking were stupid. The guys in fezzes liked their booze and they liked it non-stop and they weren’t afraid to offer it to young kids like I was. They didn’t worry. For a long time, and certainly that first day on the bus, I didn’t touch a drop, but eventually I broke down.
Looking at it from their point of view, I suppose they thought they were getting young people involved in the act of charity. After all, they were helping kids with cleft palates and deformities and stuff, and if they got the younger people a little drunk on the way, that might be good for keeping them interested in the habit of good-deed-doing. They really liked it when young people were with them. So they figured if they were a little lenient on the booze they’d get young people to be happy to join. I even heard one of the old bartenders telling another young sub once that booze was better than marijuana. Booze is not exactly a healthy life-style or a good thing to be doing while trying to be charitable.
But as I was saying about that bus trip to Crow Flats, I swam up-current, against the ridiculous waves of drunken, jolly musicians who were returning to their seats with highballs and beers. When I got to where Moses sat, I dropped onto my seat beside him.
“How’s it going?” I asked him. It was odd taking a seat beside Santa Claus, but Moses was just as reassuring and welcoming as before.