Trombones Can Laugh

by Lorraine Ray

  “Have a lot of fun,” said Ginny, in an especially snotty voice when I opened the back door of our car and got out with my trombone. “This is gonna be super neat-o.” She has always excelled at making a person feel like crap.

  “Oh, flake off, will you?” I replied. “Do you have to bug me non-stop?”

  “Yes. I do. Bye, bye.” She waved this uncool little finky wave of hers. Despicable.

  My mom and Ginny didn’t pull away from the curb in that grand old chariot of ours, the white 1967 Plymouth Belvedere, even after I had opened the little gate in the chain link fence and walked with my trombone case in hand up to the tiny yellow brick house with the skuzzy front door to my first lesson with Gluey. “Why don't you go?” I called back to them in the car.

  “Go on up to the door,” Mom hollered.

  Ginny, the little dip-shit, fell over laughing.

  “Yes, look at me! I am doing that,” I said sarcastically.

  I guessed from the worried way Mom was looking at me that she was waiting to see if the ax murderer was going to run out of that cruddy little house and stab me in the forehead with an ice pick or I mean an ax or something. An ax murderer would chose to live in an unassuming homey but junky little place like that house Gluey was in. And I’m pretty sure my little sister had some high hopes along the lines of ax murderers and my forehead. Often it was plain from the look on her face that she relished me getting into problems and troubles. Shit, most of the time she was rooting for my failure and would add to my problems, though I must admit that I really liked it when she got into big trouble at school for throwing Bermuda grass around in the faces of kids on the playground. She had thought the teacher was not looking out the window or couldn’t see that far back. Ha! I coulda told her he had a pair of binoculars.

  Anyway, that day when I was going to my first private trombone lesson, I gave them a really angry wave-off signal, like leave me alone you dorks, which Mother ignored. She had spooky dark glasses on and was staring at me, leaning forward past my sister, I suppose she was leaning like that so she could see Mr. McGluen when I went into the house. She hadn’t met him and had taken the high school band director’s recommendation of Mr. McGluen sight unseen, though I know she talked to him on the phone. Well, if she was so damned worried I don’t know why she didn't just hold my hand while we walked up to the door. Or why the hell didn’t she sit in the same room knitting or something while I took the first lesson.

  I stood on the concrete walkway looking at the plain dirt front yard of the house. Packed dirt. Fuzzy weeds crawling with bumps that looked like beetles along a fence where no one could get at them. Some girl’s abandoned tricycle waiting in the dirt. Shit, my vision, even with my glasses, isn’t that perfect, so I couldn’t see much more.

  I moved forward all the while fuming at my mother and sister for being so annoying, and then I found myself stomping up the two red concrete steps to the door and jabbing the lighted doorbell.

  Jack shit, that’s what happened next. There was me, not groovy, standing in front of Gluey’s lousy house with the splintery front door. Note please that I did not think this crappy door was an auspicious beginning to our relationship. I like that word, auspicious, and I have been trying to stick it into auspicious places whenever and wherever I find them. Vocab word courtesy junior year High School English, of course.

  There were these three enormous eucalyptus trees on the west side of his home and the porch at his door was in the shade of one of them and was so cool even in the first week of June in Arizona when I first showed up at his door. After a minute or two, I rang the doorbell again, and I remember I was kinda enjoying standing there, imagining this was my first crappy house and I lived in it alone, having friends, especially girlfriends, over for crazy parties, smoking dope, listening to something besides Tijuana Brass on my own stereo. Then two things happened.

  First, Mr. McGluen opened the door. “Hello, James, is it?”

  Second, the splinters along the bottom of the door snagged the green wool carpet, so that he couldn’t even pull it back cleanly, which was ridiculous. “Dear, dear, this door got warped in the last monsoon. Need a new one!” he exclaimed.

  Third, I got my first look at him. My initial impression was that Frank McGluen looked like a large, unpleasant white grub or a huge blob of wet Elmer’s glue, and that, of course, explained his nickname of Gluey, which was everybody’s name for him at my high school.

  Gluey had blonde hair, shaved in a crew cut, and wiry blonde eyebrows above dark eyes that always looked intense and motivated like someone who wanted to tell you a story about a boss adventure he’d had. He was short and pudgy and, of course, very pale. He liked to wear suede shoes and polyester slacks that were a little too short. When he was seated, the pant legs rode up and there was always a gap between his sock and his pants where you could see how white his sickly skin was. The Elmer Glue skin of his. He wore belts in his pants and golfing shirts, but I don't think he ever golfed. His arms were hairless. Sometimes he wore one of those bola ties with a hunk of a shimmery golden red rock with his golfing shirt, and that kind of bola tie was popular among real uncool people. A bola tie in a golf shirt was weird looking, even weird for actual weird people.

  I looked at Gluey for the first time in my life and then I heard the car with my mother and sister in it pulling away from the curb. I swung around and glared as my sister stuck her tongue out at me because she knew how miserable I felt. I didn’t want to go to private trombone lessons. Certainly not in the first month of summer right before I was heading to high school. So there I was at four o’clock in the afternoon on the first summer Monday about to take private lessons with a weird white grub. Depressing? You have no shitting idea. I’d planned to memorize some lyrics off of album covers and get Gertrude to teach me to dance The Jerk and the Booga-loo before high school. I had not gone to any of my junior high dances and I vowed to attend the ones in high school, but I needed to dance better, not to mention getting my act together. Gertrude owned a ’61 Beetle and I was gonna learn some things about driving from her and look over engine parts so when I got my first car I could take care of it. I had a friend named Scott and he and I were planning to hike in the mountains to this cool canyon camp full of cool hip people that we’d heard about. These private trombone lessons were sorta interfering with my mental preparation to get it together and achieve coolness in high school.

  Gluey had gotten the inside track to my high school’s music lesson business because he and my band director went to Juilliard together. I think he was from Pennsylvania or New Jersey originally. I have to say he was a very fine musician. All the mothers at high school thought that their little angels would study with this great guy and end up going to Juilliard under his tutelage. What I have to say about that is “yeah, right suckers, fat chance given that you’re from the backward state of Arizona, a state which has a skinny jackass of a one-eyed governor named Happy Jack who hates anything intellectual and the state has no shitting culture at all, anyway, unless you're interested in Navajo pots or identifying the crop insects that are dangerous to cotton, oranges, dates and alfalfa.” And our state assets? Cotton, copper, climate and commerce. Arizona, to a c. What a crock of crap!

  The house where Gluey lived was made of regular red bricks, not adobe, but they’d been painted yellow probably twenty years earlier and never repainted again. The sun had really done a number on them and the fascia and about every inch of the house was peeling or buckling. Really, I’d have to say there were so many paint chips around the side of his property that it looked like the color was flowing away across the damned desert, and so much buckling paint that it looked like the poor house had eczema. It was an incredibly teeny home as teeny desert houses go, and they do make them small here to save on materials. After all, it’s pretty nice outside for most of the fall, winter and spring, so why do you even need a house? You could live in your backyard, BBQ, eat on a picnic bench, and sleep on a cot under a tree. But I mean I l
ive in a smallish brick house, okay, though I guess it was a custom home, but this thing Gluey lived in was the kind of house a young Air Force guy would stay in all by himself listening to some dumb piece of music, or maybe something good like Iron Butterfly’s “In a Gadda Da Vida” over and over again, and I picked that because we had that playing at our church confirmation dance, over and over and over, and this Air Force guy would be studying the album cover, and burning a fat orange candle that smelled like furniture wax. Who’da thought a guy who graduated from Juilliard and stuff would live in an itsy bitsy dump of a house like that one out in the desert? With crap evaporative cooling—a swamp box we call it—instead of air conditioning. Shouldn’t he have been someone big in New York or something? Shouldn't he be in some orchestra somewhere? That was the first thing that struck me. Not that I cared or anything, because as far as I’m concerned it’s live and let live, but it was an interesting observation. Why in the world was he living like this? Obviously, he was a big failure at life. There was no other conclusion you could draw, I told myself. And he had a kid, too. That was the middle class values of me coming out thinking a house had to be all fake magnificent and everything. I thought adults were supposed to pretend, at least, to be successful. I defined success in a very conventional manner, probably because my parents valued middle class objects over having any kind of higher calling. They wouldn't have understood the concept of a higher calling if it was going to cost them any actual comfort.

  “Put your trombone case next to the chair,” Gluey said.

  “Okay, sir.” I set my trombone case beside one of the two dinged-up metal folding chairs in the middle of a sad living room.

  I sat down.

  “No, no, I want to show you some of my instruments and funny things.” He urged me to get up and walk around the room.

  The furniture was old dingy stuff like my parents had in photos of when they first married. Dinky sofas with mustard-colored fabric. Scratchier than hell because it was the type of fabric that bumped up like caterpillars. Thick planks of blonde wood for table and sofa legs. He had musical instruments mounted on the walls, mostly trombones. Around the trombones he had these horrible clown and circus poodle paintings that looked to have been paint-by-numbers. (I know about paint-by-numbers because Ginny loves those sets and has begged me to admire her work on them many times). These creepy paintings were in frames made out of cholla cactus, the type of cactus wood that is full of holes, and that was super strange. His walls were painted moss green. Moss green walls! Heck that was really old fashioned. And I remember his living room lamp was one of those miniature chuck wagons made out of cholla cactus that you bought as a kit and made yourself. Real crazy jip-o stuff.

  I noticed the stacks and stacks of LPs and 78s that he kept on shelves and in overflowing piles. A very new stereo was about the only modern thing he had in the whole place. He obviously loved his music.

  Gluey led me around his dinky living room and a hall, too, and went on and on about the different trombones he owned and what each one meant to him. About his trombones and his slides and all, Gluey was a real nut. I don’t remember much of what he showed me, but Gluey owned a huge number of interesting instruments, silver trombones and special old trombones and lots of slides. I guess I remember him showing me a funny run-over slide he had, and one he’d painted black for some reason like he’d thought it would look cool that way when he was young, but just about when I finally thought he was going to lecture me about the Austrians putting trombones in their music and the great pieces composed for trombones, he did something I never would have thought of. He got around to the essence of what he thought made the trombone special.

  “There’re many special things about a trombone, James. One of the things is that it used to be called the sackbut. That is one funny name for an instrument. Anything with the word butt in it is probably good, huh?”

  “I guess so, sir,” I said stiffly. I was being a jerk about lessons still.

  “Another special thing about a trombone,” he continued as we took our seats on the beat-up folding chairs, “is that more than any other instrument in all the orchestra a trombone is able to sound like a human voice.” He played something so I could hear that. He was good at it and made his trombone talk, and cry, and whine, and weep, and sing. He even made it cough. “But the really special thing about a trombone is that you can laugh while you’re playing. Let me show you how and you can start practicing laughing while playing right away.”

  “What, sir?” I said, interrupting him immediately as I came awake. His deep voice had kinda lulled me to sleep. I was sure he hadn’t said “laugh”. I was mad at myself for daydreaming like that. “Ah, sir, did you just say you want me to practice laughing while playing?” Hearing him wrong seemed the only possibility. No one could have said anything as ridiculous as that.

  “That’s right,” he said patiently, as though he thought I were a real retard or something, “I want to show you how to laugh while you’re playing so that it doesn’t change your tone materially. It’s an important skill in any band. Indispensable, really, in many situations. Things that happen around musicians are crazy at times.”

  Shit, I couldn’t believe it. Who was he kidding? It was absurd! But I was proud of myself because I was able to control my reaction and I didn’t snort or anything, though I really wanted to. I mean really, at that point I thought, shit, this guy is a crazy kook or something. “Don’t you want to criticize my embouchure, and tell me my vacuum over the mouthpiece isn’t perfect or my upper lip isn’t going over my lower the right way or something?” I asked.

  “No, I don’t think I’ll talk about that too much. I took the liberty of phoning your junior high band director, Rogelio Gomez, and he said you were a pretty good player with good technique and you could read music. But just to be sure, if you want me to, I can check. Show me your embouchure.”

  I showed him my embouchure, without my instrument, which, by the way, is the way I held my mouth when I played the trombone. I’d been told I had a pretty good one and I wanted him to say that again because I was looking for a little positive feedback, so to speak.

  “Well, that looks fine. Now listen to me play.”

  Then he played for me–he was really good, amazing actually, playing some big band crap—and then he laughed out of the side of his mouth. He snuck it in in a strange way, and I’ll be damned, he didn't miss a note and the music didn’t change one bit, but he was laughing real good, a boss belly laugh.

  Then he made me get out my trombone and he watched me put it together and he had me oil the slide and play the same music and try to mimic him, playing along and laughing. He tapped the music where he had written the word “laugh” and I was supposed to try laughing then, but it was the pits. The music fell apart until there was basically nothing coming out of my horn. It was going to take a lot of practice to get any good at laughing and playing music any time soon.

  “Work on that,” he said quietly, “give it some of your time and effort. I can’t offer you much of a hint about how to do it. You'll have to develop your own technique. But I can tell you it comes in handy. There's always something funny going on with a bunch of musicians together. I’ve had to use my laughing technique lots of times myself and it’s been a critical skill. Critical, James. For parades, especially. I have a lesson notebook for you here and I want you to bring it with you every time you come. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “I’m going to write that laughing practice in right now. ‘Ten minutes of practice laughing while playing any music you like.’ You write ‘laugh’ in on the measure you want and try to continue playing and laughing.” And I swear he actually wrote that in on the first line of my lesson notebook. I still have it, so I can remember he actually assigned that and I wasn’t imagining it. Nobody will ever believe me, probably.

  “So, you want me to call you James, James?” said Gluey, talking quietly. “That’s the way you want me to address
you?”

  “Yes, sir. I don’t like Jim, or Jimmie. I really hate Jimmie, sir. If you don’t mind me saying it, being called Jimmie makes me want to puke.”

  “Jimmie would be an insult. That’s what they call a diminutive of the name James. You call a bawling five-year-old boy Jimmie. Not a teenager. I’m going to put your name down in my book as James and put a record of your mother’s payment in there.”

  That’s the way he told me to get out the payment. He was subtle about money, real suave-like. I had the bills my mother had given me crammed in my front pocket. Three smackers. He wrote out a receipt with a goofy lady’s pen which he kept in a teeny plastic box with fake jewels on it. He always kept that itsy-bitsy pen in its box on his music stand. It was the kind of thing a lady got in her Christmas stocking. A Canasta prize or something. I’ll bet his wife lent him that screwy thing as a big joke. As I said, I needed the receipt from him in order to prove I had taken private lessons before they’d let me into band at high school.

  The next week I came back with my music, which was the “Swing Time March” by Souza, with “laugh” written in on a measure and with me trying to put real laughing in at the point where I’d noted that I would. I’d tried screwing my mouth up different ways in order to laugh while playing and while I had been able to make notes come out, they weren’t really up to snuff yet, and I knew it. Gluey listened gravely while I played the piece and I tried to laugh on the measure where I’d written it. I was too uptight, though. The music crashed, although I had practiced several times that week exactly as he’d suggested. I was bummed.

  After I’d finished, he nodded and lied, saying that I was “beginning to succeed at playing and laughing.” That was definitely not true. I was terrible at it and had destroyed the piece.

  “Do about the same amount of time practicing laughing again this week, James. Don’t forget to do it, but don't get stressed out about it. If you worry too much, you won’t be able to play and laugh. Your laughing has to be easy-going.” Gluey didn’t seem in the least discouraged by my failure as he wrote in my lesson book. Also, he didn’t smile while assigning me to laugh while playing, but acted like it was something important and serious.