Trombones Can Laugh

by Lorraine Ray

  “No, but my sister has it. But have you ever been kidnapped?”

  There was that damned pancake breakfast kidnapping again! I’d had it with kidnapping. “No, I haven’t, but they’re pretty much for shit heads. Maybe we should listen to Faber.” The in crowd guy cracked up again when I said kidnap breakfasts were for shit heads.

  I really didn't need Faber to teach me though, I read my school books carefully. I did that a lot before the circuses and the parades. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  During the months following my first lesson with Gluey, my little sister Ginny loved to tease me about the trombone. She probably was mad about the spit valve torture I gave her, and she knew that I didn’t want to go to lessons or be in high school band. However the teasing increased when the month of February, my freshman year, rolled around. You see February meant the annual rodeo parade, La Fiesta De Los Vaqueros. As you may recall, it was my wondrous future appearance on TV during that rodeo parade that had caused my damned mother to make me stay in high school band after all. The big parade day arrived, and I was marching, just like every other high school bandsman in town.

  About six-thirty in the goddamned a.m.—and it is very dark at that hour even in Arizona—Mom and Ginny drove me to the park where the parade staging grounds were located. After carefully criticizing my appearance (she commented with real disappointment on the breakouts on my forehead and chin and volunteered to let me use her powder in her compact to cover the zits!) Mom pulled the Plymouth up to a curb across from the park and under a street light. My trombone and I split. I left the case in the backseat of the car. As my mom prepared to pull away, Ginny screamed through the closed window, “We’ll be watching the whole parade!” Her face, thrust against the glass, gave me a goofy thumbs-up with her eyes crossed and her mouth slack like a goon.

  I was about to yell something really sarcastic to Ginny, but from one glance at Mom’s face I could tell she was so happy to think she was going to actually see her son appearing on the fabulous boob tube. I felt sorry for her and knew I shouldn’t use the occasion to get nasty. Shit, it was better to see a live person than to see them on a television set, and she had some nutty notions, but I decided to be nice and humor her.

  “Okay, okay!” I called back. “You guys keep a look out for me.”

  “Be sure and smile!” Mom shouted. “We’ll all be watching!”

  At home Mom had laid out this big section of the newspaper which listed the order of parade goons and she had clearly marked my number so that she would know when to watch for me. Every group in the parade had an assigned number and the announcers would say the number and the viewer could keep up with what was coming next. Everybody who watched the parade had one of those parade lists handy so they knew when their friends or family members would appear on screen. It was a long list of ding-a-lings like prancing ponies and ladies in horse drill teams or members of a prominent family of morons riding in a rotten old stagecoach. Go West, young moron.

  Holy shit, where Mom had dropped me off, near the staging point at a park near downtown, I discovered thousands of these parade ding-a-lings milling around in funny western costumes. Boy, that big blob of the rodeo parade nuts and crackpots was hilarious. I never saw so many mules, creepy cowboys, arthritic imitation sheriffs, horses, oxen, broken-down carriages, dirty donkeys, and precision drill teams. Though I didn't want to be in the band, I have to admit that parade made the whole thing worthwhile. It was like being part of a giant insane snake or something.

  Everything corny and stupid showed up for this parade, proving the Wild West to be an amazing collection of crap. A lot of people dressed up as typical Wild West characters with parasols and gun belts. The parade also displayed the Indian tribes of Arizona, though I didn’t really care much about them to be honest. Even real Sonoran cowboys were strutting around. Oh boy, they were about as stupid as American cowboys. Maybe stupider! They certainly preferred higher heels!

  There were masses of high school bands and baton twirlers throwing their batons into the cold, bare branches of the park trees. This park was a goddamned orgy of golden and silver spangles and stinky leather. What I was wearing wasn’t much better. Being in the rodeo parade meant I had to dress like some kind of idiot cowboy in the whole regalia of western crassness and dumbness. My costume screamed “I am a stupid kid pretending to be a damn cowboy!” My band director had decided that year that we had to wear his idea of the traditional school rodeo parade uniform, which consisted of this dorky white shirt, any cowboy hat we had at home (and most of us had one of those) and a red kerchief knotted at our necks. (That kerchief was so you had an uncomfortable neck and a big triangle of funny looking fabric hanging off the front of you as though you were wearing a bib.) Of course, we had to wear jeans and for shoes, tennis shoes or cowboy boots, if we had them. That was a bad looking costume, lemme tell you. In it, I looked to be the biggest jerk, an all-around idiot goat-roper of semi-retarded intelligence. I’ll say the one nice thing about our cowboy costume was that we didn’t have to wear white gloves, the bands in traditional uniforms had on those prissy things.

  Big old mansions of the rich railroad men surrounded that park. Someone painted them bright colors like yellow and turquoise and the same jerks had probably transplanted saguaro cactuses in the dirt yards. Near one of those old homes, guys with headbands were sitting on a volcanic stone wall laughing at us, laughing at the whole parade. I’m pretty sure those guys were stoned. I can still see their dilated pupils looking over at us and joking back and forth. Shit, it was so embarrassing to be part of that parade when I saw those guys.

  By this time the mountains were going purplish to the north and the sun was burning its way over the eastern mountains. A light breeze shuffled a paper toward me. I was feeling sad about how dumb I looked when I noticed some guys who wanted to march in the parade in protest of the war and they were arguing with the parade marshals at a table in a corner of the park. One of them had on army fatigues. They all had headbands, woven ones from Mexico, beards, long hair, mustaches or goatees, and dark glasses. A couple of them wore cool olive drab jackets and kerchiefs on their heads, which was cooler than wearing them at your neck. Of course they all wore bellbottoms and boots and even leather sandals, though the morning was pretty cold and windy. There was a girl with them in striped pants that were tucked into her boots. Shit, she was so sexy looking.

  I tried to listen in to see if they were going to be allowed in the parade. I guess they didn’t get a permit and the marshal wasn’t going to give them one, because they had to be in western dress. They decided to walk at the very back of the parade and there wasn't much the authorities could do about that. Apparently it was still a free country. Who’da thunk?

  Within minutes a couple of cowboy shitheads began yelling curses at the protesters and they had to move away. Of course these cowboys had never been anywhere near a war. I’m sure they were in the National Guard or something, but from the look of them, not college deferred. There is no way they would go to college unless it was to major in Ag. They were both probably former members of the Future Farmers of America, an organization of goons who like to grow goats.

  Cowboy-type people mostly support the war in Vietnam, which is a really uncool thing about them that people don’t know, except those of us who actually know them. They are really gung-ho about killing people. They like beating up hippie kids almost as much as they like beating up blacks and Mexicans and Papago Indians who they happen to find wandering around in the wrong place. If they found a long-haired type, they would stomp him and cut his hair off and scream stuff at him like “fairy!” or “dirty Indian.” The hippies living out in the middle of nowhere in Arizona have to be really carefully of cowboys, young or old—they’re nothing but trouble. They are considered the goons of the west by the rest of us, just a roving band of dangerous dickheads waiting to make life difficult for other people. They like their hair in crew cuts and they want everybod
y to conform. That’s it really, they are goddamned conformists, which is strange given the fact that the original cowboys weren’t that at all, or maybe, come to think of it, they were. I guess it’s fake that the original cowboy was all for freedom. He might have been for his own freedom, however I’ll bet he wanted to herd the rest of us around. Get it, herd us? The modern ones sure don’t want any hippie stuff. What they love is Richard Nixon and the flag. All this stuff about cowboys being so great is a bunch of hooey and crap. A parade to honor them? Ho, ho, ho.

  Those of us lucky enough to be in the trombones were at the front of my school band, of course, leading the band, as in the popular musical with 76 trombones and all that shit. That being the case the camera would catch sight of us first after the drum majors. I didn't like any of our drum majors. Talk about bossy people! They ordered everyone around and showed off non-stop. That morning before the rodeo parade began, one of them was jumping off a volcanic stone wall over and over and screaming “Can you dig it?” The band director wisely was threatening him with various punishments, to no damn effect.

  Eventually, the goddamned show organized itself and we took off into the brisk cold sunshine, marching in the rotting streets of downtown, by the Old Pueblo’s bars, courthouses, sad department stores, and failing shoe stores. I remember some clerks standing under the striped awnings, waving and smiling in the morning sun. Outside a bunch of hotels, well-dressed tourists acted serious. I remember a few large women in fur, and their balding husbands in suits and Homburgs with bola ties at their necks. Old ladies in squaw dresses and suede jackets applauded us with their big penny purses from Mexico flapping around. Straw cowboy hats on old men and little babies. Tilting in every damn direction. You could see big old lumps of turquoise belt buckles on fat men in saddle pants, and fake mustaches on young men in serapes and sombreros. Laughing policemen held back boys who pointed silver revolvers at us. Far away, blue and purple mountains sat sorta quiet watching us pass the Indian shops and pawnshops full of Hopi jewelry and Navajo pots.

  All around me in the parade itself, donkeys brayed, mules snorted. Old wagons were creaking and swaying ahead of us in a long line. The strange sickly sweet smell of cotton candy drifted in the breeze. The conquistadores, cowboys and crappy clowns smiled and waved. Horse drill teams pranced behind a shiny black Mariah, an undertaker’s wagon. Empress Charlotte’s coach had Mexican bank clerks lolling out the windows.

  Eventually our turn came to be in the TV camera. That was when I got screwed. It just so happened that there was a wagon in front of me drawn by a team of giant bored oxen and one of those big bored oxen had relieved itself—and I do mean relieved itself—in the most massive pile of relieving you can imagine and that pile was right, I mean absolutely directly as possible, in line with me. Of course, the trombones led the band and we are supposed to really make things look sharp and not step the least bit out of line, no matter what. We’re trained to walk straight through the manure piles, but if I’d noticed this particular massive dropping I probably wouldn’t have stepped directly in it. I’m kinda blindish, you’ll recall. So you can imagine this big steaming ox dropping in front of me and imagine me stepping the only place there was to go. In the middle of the biggest pile of ox shit imaginable.

  And that was what my whole family saw on television. That was the big family glory that my mother had been waiting for so eagerly. You’ll recall the whole reason I was taking trombone in high school was so that I could appear on the TV and my big TV debut had come and gone and it involved ox poop and me stepping into it.

  Ginny was especially impressed by my colossal failure and has not since let me forget the look on my face when I stepped right into it. Yeah, and after I stepped I saw the camera and pretty much knew that I had been filmed stepping into it.

  “You were out of sight!” said Ginny when she saw me.

  Mother was solemn, stiff and sniffy with me when I got into the car and rode home that rodeo noon. I couldn’t look her in the eye, though I knew it wasn’t my fault. I got busy in the back seat taking my trombone apart and oiling it carefully.

  “What’s that stinky smell?” asked Ginny a few minutes after I had entered the car.

  “Slide oil,” I said.

  “No, I mean the other smell.”

  “Flake off,” I said evilly.

  I know Mom must have seen me on TV, and I also knew she probably could smell my shoes, even though I had tried to wipe them in the grass in the park when we stopped at the end of the parade. She didn’t say anything about the glory of my being on television after that. That was a lost topic. She seemed miffed at me though, as though I’d done it on purpose. I didn’t put that pile of shit in front of me, and I had nothing to do with where the camera was and the fact that I’d ended up in a close-up shot. It was the great Forces That Be again conspiring against James Sauerbaugh.

  I put my tennis shoes outside the door and cleaned them the next day. Ah well, at least I was able to say I’d appeared once on TV. Oh, and Mom was right; I’m real perky as a result.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Finally it happened. I dreaded it, but I knew it was gonna hafta happen. The phone rang a couple of weeks after La Fiesta De Los Vaqueros and Mom answered it. It was Gluey calling to say that one of his trombonists had left town in an emergency to nurse an ailing brother in New Mexico, and Gluey asked me to substitute in the trombone section of the Shriner band that very weekend.

  Lucky me, it turned out that my first concert with the Shriners was at their big annual circus performances which they were putting on for crippled and underprivileged kids in town. It was a yearly springtime thing in most of the towns in Southern Arizona to have a Shriner circus. They always had performances for the underprivileged children on Saturdays early. The evening show was for profit, and they used the proceeds from that for their charities, mostly surgeries for kids with cleft palates and cleft lips and problems walking. My mom left me off at the community center early on the Saturday morning and I was supposed to warm up to play three circuses that day.

  Following Gluey’s instructions on the phone, I was wearing a disgusting pair of dress slacks and goofy dress loafers, a jerky white button down collared shirt with a conservative tie like I wore at church, but I never went there anymore after confirmation. Not a wide tie, which was popular, but a narrow tie of conservative colors. I looked like a real A-number-one dork extraordinaire. And I had my Algebra book with me. I got to read a lot of it in the hours between the three circuses.

  When I got there, the desert sun was up, but it was March and I felt how cool it was in the shade of the big community center. I hadn’t wanted to play for a circus, but now that I was doomed, I was sorta excited about being part of a show until ten at night and my heart was really thumping as I found my way to the entrance for the band performers and circus people. It was kinda exciting being part of the circus instead of being a dumb kid in the audience gaping at elephants and straining to see the dorky man on the trapeze. Elephants and James were in the circus together now. I was part of the circus scene. Can you dig it? I guess every kid wants to run away with the circus, and here I was being a part of it, if only a Shriner circus and if only in the dumb band. I was really feeling kinda cool about being a circus backstager, and a little scared about my musical abilities. I’m kinda into honesty at the moment.

  The people who were around seemed sorta tough and blasé. I guess these performers were failures in regular big circuses and had to be in the Shriner’s crappy circus for a lot lower pay. Their costumes were a little sad, faded and less than perfect. One of the jerky trapeze guys looked like something out of the twenties. A whole lot of their glitter was gone from their suits, and their makeup was badly applied. The minute they were out of the ring they dropped their performer’s persona and got snappy and bored. Some of the trapeze flyers bit their nails and gossiped. Those were not very sexy looking ladies, up close, either. They could have been cleaning ladies in a goddamned motel or lunch ladies. The an
imal trainers chewed gum. There was crappy paint on props and a worn look to this circus, but I was a performer and that made it special. Though they were a sad bunch, they were circus people anyway. I tried to look blasé, too, to fit in with the tough, workman-like crowd.

  I passed a guy with yappy little dogs and crabby llamas. Some more trapeze flyers in goofy slippers walked by, waddling a little, and I could hear the elephants trumpeting. The arena was laid out in three ring, of course. Motorcycles chugged by with dogs stacked on the back and everywhere there was a lounging, evil-smelling crew moving dirty wooden boxes for the elephant to do tricks on.

  Then I had to stroll by the Shriner clowns. They had these loud clown cars, with lawn mower engines smoking and belching blue fumes. Blech! One of them had a gigantic wind-up key in the side, of course. That was the one the clowns were gonna crowd into, natch. They were hanging around waiting to hop into their goofy cars. Fake Ferraris and Corvette Stingrays. These clowns specialized in looking horribly creepy. A wrinkly old clown is something you don’t want to get up close to, no matter how much makeup is on their face and these clowns were very old and stiff. They were grouchy and sour and rather nasty. And they all smoked cigarettes and stared at me as though they had some kind of disturbing knowledge they wanted to give me. I’ve never liked clowns and this close-up encounter increased my hatred of them. They were just creepy. I don't even think they liked young people much, given the way they glared at me.

  The Shriner band though, when I saw them—shoot, I can’t even describe my shock.

  The first thing is they were ancient. They were so old that they resembled Biblical characters, the kind that lived beyond the century mark or the two century mark even! Some of these old guys were fat and some were horribly thin. Some were bald or wore crew-cuts like Gluey and a few had weedy, greasy hair flying in the air in all directions. There were red-faced guys and gray-faced guys. As I got closer I could see all of them had veiny hands and hairy ears. A few of the tall Shriners were stooped. Hard of hearing, mostly (I kid you not!), and the conductors had a difficult time getting their attention.