This is part two of a multi-part story. Find part one here.

It was the late summer of my kidhood, sophomore year of high school to be exact. Freshman year had been little more than Eighth Grade: The Sequel. No, more like Eighth Grade vs. Godzilla, with Godzilla being the monstrous complexities of the high school social web. Most of us freshmen just tried to keep our heads down below the edges of our foxholes, vainly hoping against hope that if we couldn’t be seen, the artillery shells of the upperclassmen’s disdain for us couldn’t hit us.

It wasn’t until sophomore year that my friends and I really began to believe that we had actually been allowed into this private club called High School. We began to delude ourselves that we belonged, that this was our home. A home where you were afraid to go into your own bathroom, but home nonetheless. But even though we were beginning to feel at home, we were still looking for an invitation, a sign from on high, the divine light of acceptance to shine upon us. For some it would never come. These hapless slobs would be forever freshmen, forever dodging their way from one foxhole to the next, only to be told they belonged–maybe–in the next foxhole. For a few of us though the promise of that golden light, or at least a sliver of it, came with our acceptance into marching band, our enlistment to begin the week before the opening of sophomore year with Band Camp.

Now contrary to what might seem obvious, there are substrata within the coolness geology of any high school campus. Yes, there are those at the summit, visible to the whole world, the sun gleaming off the snowcapped brilliance of their permanent coolness. These are the usual suspects, the cheerleader and quarterback types. The vast unwashed majority of us knew we would never sit in their lofty heights; we were excluded by birth. But even the peasants in the mudfields, Monty Python aside, do not spend their entire days discussing the royals. They find their own way to be cool down in the mud. They hold their own mud festivals and mudpie contests, and build something they call a life, the royals be damned. The mudfield that had fallen to me at that stage of my existence was the A-Wing of Memorial High.

A-Wing was the performing arts ghetto of Memorial. Clustered around the auditorium, as if it were our temple, were the band and orchestra rooms with their attendant practice cells. To reinforce the ghetto imagery, the school assigned anyone signed up for marching band to a locker in A-Wing, thus herding all the band geeks together, safely isolated from the general population. The practical reason behind this was that the marching band practiced every morning for an hour before school actually began, and continued to practice right into first period. So band was your homeroom as well. No, it was not just your homeroom, it was your home. It was mother, father, sister and brother. Your bandmates were your comrades-at-arms. You would fight together and, if necessary, die together between the 20 yard lines every Saturday afternoon. Too often it was Gallipoli all over again: you gave your blood while the world went off to get a hot dog. But it didn’t matter. When you locked eyes with your buddy Hougher as you passed him in a triple-time maneuver, his jaw set as he fought his sousaphone through a vicious cross wind, you and he both knew the glory of battle.

So it was that we found our own little corner of self-created cool. The Jews in the Warsaw ghettos of the ’40s organized orchestras and plays and debating societies. Though the world despised them, they found their own life. And so it was with us in A-Wing. There was only one problem with our little Disneyland of the marching band: when the football season ended, our Fantasyland would close its gates. We all knew that was coming, but no one ever talked about it. It was just too horrible to contemplate.

Then one day at lunch late in November, Doomsday looming ever nearer, my friend Whistman mumbled something through his ketchup and Cheesewhiz sandwich that would change the course of my life: “You going out for stage band?”

“Stage band?” I inquired, “What’s that? You mean concert band? Concert band sits on the stage for the Spring Concert. I’m already in it.”

“No, not concert band…stage band,” Whistman shot back with the sneer of one who is in-the-know. “It’s kinda like a jazz band. Not everybody’s in it, just the best players.” He paused dramatically, eying me over the top slice of Wonder Bread, checking to see if he had his hook set in my mouth yet. Seeing that I was toying with the worm but not quite on, he pulled out his prized lure. “Al’s leading it.”

“Al?? Al Helm? Alan Helm?”

Whistman gave a smile of triumph. He had me in the boat.

Alan Helm was the undisputed definer of all that was cool in the bandroom ghetto. He was the Walt Disney of our Disneyland. He had been appointed drum major his junior year, unprecedented at Memorial where that honor had always been reserved for a senior. And now apparently he had won what amounted to the Grand Slam of band geekdom: in the same year he was drum major he had been given the reigns of the stage band. If being drum major your junior year was remarkable, getting headship of the stage band the same year was unbelievable. It was the pinnacle of success in our little world. And if could happen for anyone, it would happen for Al. Helm was a prodigy of near-Motzartian proportions. Born to parents who were both professional musicians, he could play four different instruments by the time he was eight with enough proficiency to be asked to play in a local college orchestra. By the time he was ten he was charting arrangements for his father’s jazz band. We had been hearing about him since the day we first brought in our instrument rental forms back in sixth grade. He was a legend, a myth, a god to us before we left junior high. To make marching band by sophomore year had been a worthy goal in itself for me, but knowing that it would mean serving under Al made it an obsession. And now the chance to continue to bask in the glow via stage band…

My dear buddy Whistman had his fish in the boat, but now it was time to gut the poor creature. “Alan’s looking for one more member in the horn section.” He couldn’t miss that he had the attention of every cell in my body. I was a horn player! “Too bad you don’t play trombone. That’s what he needs.”

My Ho-Ho dropped unnoticed from my fingers into my open milk carton. What was I thinking! How could I have even dreamed for a moment that I could ever be in the stage band. Yes, I was a horn player, but of the wrong horn…a baritone horn. Bb euphonium to be exact. The euphonium was the Ed McMahon of the band world—always the sidekick, never the star. There are no euphonium player Halls of Fame. You will never be asked the name of the greatest euphonium player of all time in Bar Trivia. Nobody in history ever set out to be a euphonium player. God knows I didn’t. No, I was an unwitting victim of that insidiously corrupt machine that is the high school band farm team system.

Continue the story…

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 20th, 2006 at 11:48 pm and is filed under It`s All About Me, Music, Pop Culture, Tell Me a Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.