by Stuart Dybek
Mihala’s hand shot up and he said, “A dozen donuts!”
It wasn’t the first time one of Mihala’s answers broke up the class. Once, during a spelling exercise, he was asked to use the word thirsty in a sentence. It was a fateful question, one that would earn him his nickname, a question he seemed utterly stumped by. He looked frantically around the classroom for help, then pointed at the goldfish bowl and said in his thick Chicago accent, “Da fish are tirsty.”
When Fish answered “A dozen donuts,” even Sister Phil smiled momentarily, then she shushed the class and said, “Thank you, Denny, very original thinking, but the question was more about groups of animals. What about cows or wolves?”
Fish stared mutely at her.
Camille Estrada raised her hand and said, “A pack of wolves, a herd of wild horses, a pride of lions, a swarm of locusts, a pod of dolphins …”
The lesson moved on, but I couldn’t let go of such moments. They kept replaying the way an insult or a slight lodges in the mind of someone with a temper—probably the way that Uncle Lefty replayed the fight in which Bobby Vachata broke his tooth, depriving Lefty, in a single blow, of his natural inclination to play trumpet. Instead of rage, it was hilarity rising in me. The more I tried to gain control over myself, the more I thought of what had triggered the laughter. Fish’s answer, “A dozen donuts,” wasn’t that funny in and of itself, but there seemed to me something infinitely comic about the way he’d thrust his hand up in order to share his inspiration with the class, and in Sister’s response, “Thank you, Denny, very original thinking.” I’d disappear under my desk as if tying a shoe or looking for a dropped pencil, but the laughter would find me. I’d rest my head on my arms pretending to nap at my desk while my sides heaved with barely smothered laughter—laughter that, despite my better interests, was proving more irrepressible than song.
The nun had seen this act before. “Perry, are you a loon or what? Go think about your behavior in the cloakroom until you grow up enough to join us.”
Banished to the cloakroom, where I’d been spending increasing amounts of time, I’d stand in the meditative company of my classmates’ hanging coats, free to surrender to spasms of laughter.
The worst, most achingly ecstatic laughing fits came on during obligatory weekday morning mass. Usually the mass was either the feast day of a martyr or a requiem, the priests’ vestments red or black. I’d follow the liturgy for a while in my St. Joseph missal, then slip into the stupor of another medieval morning that reeked of incense. But sometimes there’d be a diversion, like the time in fifth grade when my buddy the Falcon—Angel Falcone—who was sitting beside me, managed to toe up the padded kneeler during the Gospel without anyone noticing. At the Offertory, when the kids in our pew went to kneel, the whole row of knees hit the marble floor. The Falcon had the gift of remaining deadpan. I laughed for both of us even as I knelt, trying to choke the laughter back, pretending to be coughing or blowing my nose while my eyes teared. Then, from rows behind us, I heard the wooden beads of the nun’s floor-length cinch of rosary rapping rapid-fire against the pew as she furiously rose and rushed from her seat and down the aisle to where I knelt, pushing kids aside to get to me, yanking me up and dragging me down the center aisle into the vestibule.
“Laughing like a fool in God’s presence. He’s hanging on the cross for your sins and you’re laughing at His suffering like the Romans and Jews! You don’t deserve to be a Christian. Stop it! Stop it this instant or I’ll slap that smile off your face.”
“Make like you’re smiling,” Sid Sovereign told me. “Not like that! Did I say make like a shit-eating grin? What are you, retarded? Pay attention. This is a smile.”
I watched him demonstrate the proper smile. Eyes fierce, he smiled without showing his teeth. That was a relief, because he had small, rotten-looking teeth—tobacco-stained like his bristly gray mustache, which was yellowed where the smoke blew from his nostrils. He balanced his Lucky Strike on a cigarette-tarred music stand and into his tight-lipped smile fit the mouthpiece of his clarinet and exhaled an open-fingered G. I almost expected to see cigarette smoke puff from the bell of the horn.
“You see my cheeks bulging? I’m not blowing up a goddamn balloon, I’m playing the clarinet. You try. Sit up straight, how do you expect to breathe with posture like that? Now, smile. No, dammit! This is a smile.” He jabbed his fingers into the corners of my mouth, remolding my face. I could feel my face not cooperating with either of us, and I tried to concentrate and disregard my hurt feelings. My first clarinet lesson was not going the way I’d anticipated.
My father had decided that since Uncle Lefty had given me the clarinet, the time had come for me to take lessons.
“Someone who can play can always make a buck on the side,” he reasoned, and for my father a buck on the side was reason enough. He hated to see things wasted, and that included a clarinet sitting idly in a case. But maybe there was more to it than he was willing to admit. In his way, my father loved music. On Saturday nights he’d record The Lawrence Welk Show on his new reel-to-reel tape deck, an expense he justified because he’d never have to buy another record, not that he ever bought records. He sang most every morning as he got ready for work with a gravity that woke the house. “The voice of the Volga Boat Man is heard in the land,” my mother would say. He sang with facial expressions that caused him to cut himself shaving. He shaved with a straight razor rather than wasting money on blades, and he bled as he sang, the foam on the razor stained pink and his face stuck up with bloody clots of toilet paper. I was afraid that, reaching for a note, he’d cut his throat. The songs he sang were from a lamentable past I could barely imagine—“Old Man River,” “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” “That Lucky Old Sun”:
Up in the mornin’, out on the job,
work like the devil for my pay,
but that lucky ole sun, got nothin’ to do
but roll around heaven all day …
When I was little I used to think I was the son he was singing about.
Uncle Lefty had said he’d teach me to play, but, as my father pointed out, that had been several years ago, and Uncle Lefty had yet to return from California-in fact, we weren’t sure where he was. Besides, the word was out from Johnny Sovereign that his older brother, Sid, had been released from jail and needed the money. Whether it was a cheap haircut or cut-rate music lessons, my father couldn’t pass up a deal.
Sid Sovereign had done time in Florida for passing bad checks. Now he was back in Chicago, trying to go straight. Sid’s brother Johnny lived with his wife and their kids, Judy and Johnny Jr., in a two-flat around the corner from us. Their alley fence was camouflaged in morning glories, and behind it was a screened-in sandbox protected from cats where Johnny Jr. and my younger brother, Mick, played together. Johnny Sovereign ran the numbers in our neighborhood, Little Village. That makes him sound like a big shot, but everyone knew he was just a small-time hood, which in Little Village didn’t attract much more notice than if he was a mailman. Johnny was well connected enough, however, to get Sid the patronage job of band director for the Marshall Square Boys’ Club. There, in a room smelling of liniment, where basketballs and boxing gear were stored in a padlocked cage along with drums and tubas, Sid gave private lessons.
Sid hated giving lessons. He hated kids. He kept cotton balls in the cellophane sleeve around his pack of Luckies. He opened his Luckies with meticulous care and utilized the cellophane sleeve to hold matches, loose change, business cards, phone numbers on shreds of paper, and cotton balls. During a lesson, after the first few shrieks on the horn, he’d yell, “Fuckaduck, kid! Are you trying to ruin my hearing?” and reach for the cotton balls. A few more shrieks and he’d bounce up as if to smack you, then instead open a locker stuffed with boxing gloves and take a swig from a half-pint bottle. When I first saw him do it, I thought he was drinking liniment. He sat back down smelling of booze. Though I’d yet to master smiling, we were on to breathing.
“In little si
ps,” he said, “and don’t let the goddamn horn waggle in your mouth. The mouthpiece just rests on your bottom lip and the upper teeth bite down.” He tested my embouchure by grabbing the horn and giving it a shake that made me feel as if my bottom teeth cut through my lip. “It should be firm so I can’t jiggle it around like this. Little sips and then exhale just touching the reed with your tongue, like saying thoo.” He demonstrated without his horn, and boozy spit sprayed in my face. “Little sips! You’re trying to eat the horn. You’re not playing a hot dog. Did you think you were at a hot-dog lesson?” He rammed the mouthpiece down my throat so that the reed scraped the roof of my mouth. “Can you play like that? Well? It’s a question. Are you deaf? Maybe that’s the problem here.”
I tried to answer with the horn in my mouth. It was like trying to talk at the dentist’s. I shook my head no. I was sweating. My face threatened to betray me, but no way was I going to further humiliate myself before this man. And no way was I giving up on music a second time.
“All right, try again: thoo.”
I p-thooed a squawk that pretty much expressed my feelings, and Sid Sovereign flinched, then shouted, “Little sips, little sips!” and grabbed my nose, pinching it shut, forcing me to breathe little sips through my mouth, but the effect was that of throwing a switch, one that opened the valves of my shameful tears.
Despite this inauspicious start, I was marching—my maroon cape flaring behind me—down Cermak Road to the joyful cacophony of “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
True, at third clarinet I was bringing up the rear; true, Sid Sovereign had told me, “You’d be tenth clarinet if we had a part for it”; and true, I was mostly lost and faking the notes. I had a hard enough time keeping up with the band when we practiced sitting down. Every so often I’d blow a middle C that would fit in. Sometimes, having lost my place on the sheet music, middle C was all I played, as if adding a drone. Sid Sovereign, directing the band, didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he suggested I might want to fake it till my tone improved. He gave the same advice to Miguel Porter, another third clarinet marching beside me.
By now we were supposed to have memorized the music for the upcoming band competition at Riverview, a legendary amusement park on the North Side, but since this was a dress rehearsal, we were allowed to have our parts on miniature music stands clipped to our instruments. The maroon capes and matching maroon and gold-brimmed caps, and the white spats that I buttoned over my PF flyers had been provided by Sid Sovereign. It was summer, and the capes and caps were wool, and despite their mothball smell, moth-eaten. They looked to be from another era, the Great Depression, maybe. We suspected Sovereign had ransacked some long-forgotten storeroom in the Boys’ Club system. I admired the ornate satiny uniforms that the softball teams sponsored by neighborhood taverns wore, but I had mixed feelings about parading around in this kind of getup. I wanted to be in the band on our way to Riverview—the most magical place in the city—but not dressed as a dork.
It seemed out of character for Sovereign to be putting so much energy into the Riverview competition. He’d made the brass players polish their horns, and he’d added today’s late afternoon rehearsal to our regular Saturday band practice. Maybe the change in him had something to do with Julio Candido’s mother, Gloria, who’d begun attending our rehearsals, an audience of one who filled the band room with a tropical perfume that couldn’t all be coming from the white flower in her black hair. Julio’s father, wanted for murder, had fled back to Mexico years ago. Mrs. Candido drove Julio to band practice, to school, and everywhere in her white Buick convertible, not a car that a woman employed as a singing cocktail waitress at Fabio’s, a mob hangout in the Italian neighborhood just across Western Avenue, could normally afford.
The band room was actually the half-court basketball gym. Usually it smelled of fermented sweat. Mrs. Candido sat beneath the basket on a folding chair, dressed in a sleeveless white summer sheath, her bronze legs crossed, the toe of a white high heel tapping the air to whatever beat Sid Sovereign conducted. He’d begun conducting instead of hiding sunk in depression behind his office door, smoking and drinking while we blared direction-less in the gym, as had been his routine before Mrs. Candido started showing up. The cotton was gone from his ears. He’d even written music for us to play while we marched before the judges at the Riverview competition—piece to get their attention, something contemporary to go with the classic “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
“A little something original,” he bragged to Mrs. Candido before he struck up the band, “something you can bet nobody else will be playing.”
Sovereign had transcribed and arranged Bill Haley and the Comets’ hit, “Rock Around the Clock,” for marching band.
His arrangement began with the glockenspiels tapping out “One o‘clock, two o’clock, three o’clock,” and then the whole band shouting out “Rock!” The tubas picked it up: “Four o‘clock, five o’clock, six o’clock,” and we shouted “Rock!” Then the other instruments—flutes, cornets, trombones—counted out the remaining hours on the clock, winding up to our final “Rock!”— a shout punctuated by the drums, which launched the entire band into a swinging march beat we emphasized by swinging our horns as we played.
Mrs. Candido drove slowly along Cermak, part of the parade. It was hot and sunny, but the top was up on the Buick as it always was, no matter how bright the day. It made me wonder why she wanted a convertible.
Sid Sovereign, wearing a kid-size maroon cape that looked on him like an askew napkin, led us with the kind of baton that twirlers throw. A cigarette bobbed from the corner of his lip, and his gait wouldn’t have passed the walk-a-straight-line test at a DUI stop. He was definitely marching under the influence and probably couldn’t have managed to be out here sober. He signaled for us to turn down California Avenue. Mrs. Candido got caught at a red light, and Sovereign held us up, marching in place until the Buick turned down California, too. He had told us that we were only going to march once around the block, but we’d already gone farther than that and were on our fourth chorus of “When the Saints.” As soon as her white convertible caught up with us again, we marched the few blocks to the elevated station for the Douglas Park “B.” In the blaze of sunlight, the shadows of the El tracks and girders latticed the pavement. It felt cooler stepping into them, and our playing was graced with the resonance that shadow imparts to sound. I could see the people waiting on the platform for the “B” grinning down at us. A two-car El train clattered over, the screech of its braking steel wheels about as in tune as we were. Sid Sovereign signaled with the baton for us to stop playing but to continue marching in place.
I figured the El was the point he’d been heading for and now we’d turn back to the Boys’ Club. The El station was the kind of boundary that doesn’t show up on street maps. East of the tracks was Little Village, with its Ambros and Two-Twos and Disciples graffiti; west was a narrow stretch of No-Man’s-Land and then the African American neighborhood of Douglas Park, embossed with the graffiti of the Insane Unknowns.
The “B” train overhead clapped its doors shut and rattled off downtown to its own rhythm.
“Oh, yeah!” Sovereign hollered, waving the baton as if directing the train’s departure. The baton had become his scepter, and he saluted Mrs. Candido, who had all the windows open and waved back. She was wearing sunglasses and a picture hat that looked too big for the interior of the Buick—one more reason to drop the top. Sovereign regally sceptered at the commuters descending from the station. They looked surprised to see a band awaiting their arrival.
“Oh, yeah!” Sovereign yelled to no one in particular. “I feel we could march all the way to Riverview!”
I pictured the Blue Streak, Shoot the Chutes, Aladdin’s Palace, and the Rotor, a ride whose centrifugal force pinned you to a wall, defying gravity when the floor dropped out.
“I think he’s on speedballs,” Miguel Porter said.
“Okay, my little hepcats, my little mariachis,” Sovereign
yelled. “Okay, now let me hear it! A one, two, and glockenspiels, yeah!”
The glocks started pinging “One o‘clock, two o’clock, three o’clock.” We all shouted “Rock!” and Sovereign gave a little hop and landed yelling “ka-POW!” This was the one part of the song I could keep up with, and I was into it, too. The bystanders from the El train cheered. Sid Sovereign yelled, “Oh yeah, baby, tubas! Tubas give it to me, baby, oh yeah, let me have it!” We gave it to him: an oompahed “four o’clock, five o’clock, six.” Sovereign pointed the baton straight ahead, and to the roar of “Rock!” and of a “B” train screeching in, we marched under the tracks and out the other side into No-Man’s-Land.
The pavement thumped beneath our synchronized, rock-steady, maroon columns, and for the first time I managed to keep my place in the music and dared to play louder, suddenly recalling a dream in which Uncle Lefty’s clarinet could play itself. Playing felt automatic, as if the band glided on a conveyor belt of the music we blew before us. People, more and more of them black, stepped from doorways and threw their upper-story windows open to gape. Pumping the baton like a drum major, Sid Sovereign led us through stop signs without stopping as if we had the immunity of a funeral. When the green of Douglas Park appeared, Mrs. Candido began honking her horn, and Sid Sovereign, pretending to toot the baton as if it were a clarinet, and yelling, “Oh yeah, baby, pow, pow, pow! bass drum!” bowed in her direction. He must have thought she was musically tooting her automobile horn, adding a touch of Spike Jones, though what she actually signaled was, Where the hell are you taking my little Julio?
Sovereign hadn’t noticed that our parade had grown longer. We’d attracted a group of black kids who’d been hitting a softball in the park. Other kids from Douglas Park had joined them. They were marching in the gutter beside our column, and still more were running in our direction. Maybe Sovereign thought that music afforded us some dispensation and that everyone simply wanted to join in the fun as if we were Alexander’s Ragtime Band.
