This is part four of a mult-part story which begins here.

From the last episode: For me, however, it was to be a journey into truly uncharted waters, an instrument none of us had ever dreamed could exist, never mind had we ever even heard of it. The fateful turn came near the end of the third week of trumpet lessons, when Migliori suddenly called on me to play the full octave of the basic C scale.

I couldn’t help the smile that broke out on my face. Asking me to play a C scale now was like asking me to take a breath. Easy. No problem. During the week since the last lesson the bizarre secret code of the scale fingerings–open, first and third, first and second, first, etc.–had suddenly dropped down into the correct file folder in my head and was mine forever. Even now, twenty years since I last picked up a horn, they come back to me in an instant. Somehow, I knew this moment was an audition of some sort. Up to now we had just been playing short groups of the same note, repeated over and over. But playing my first full scale for Migliori was like a pilot’s first solo flight. But I was sure I was up to the challenge.

Like a star hurler arranging the dirt around the rubber just before delivering the payoff pitch, I gave the valves on the gleaming Holman a good rattle. They were loose, well-oiled, ready for action. Giving the mouthpiece a little twist to make sure it was seated properly, I raised the instrument to my lips. After shooting a quick glance over at Migliori to make sure he was ready to be dazzled, I filled my little lungs, set my embrochure just as I had been taught, and then let it flow.

The low C flowed from the bell of the trumpet perfectly shaped, coming in low but full of promise, like that opening note of Thus Spake Zarathustra. I relaxed, knowing that I had laid the foundation properly, so building the house should be no problem. Note by note I crept upward confidently. My fingers changed valve positions at exactly the right moment, note-unfolding-into-note, semi-legato. Now I was two thirds of the way up the scale and in the home stretch. Once I was past the G I knew I’d get home standing up. The A….the B…

If the folding chair I was sitting in while playing had been placed just 30 degrees east or west of its present position, I would be a trumpet player today. Or at least an ex-trumpet player, just as good for bragging rights as being an ex-quarterback as far as I am concerned. Life can turn on a few degrees of the compass, and my heading, unbeknownst to me, was dead-on out of Quarterback Land. Straight in front of me as I worked my way so carefully up that C major scale was the little rectangular window cut into every classroom door at South End School. And in this particular little window at that particular moment, just as my middle finger was lifting the second valve and my lips were set for the triumphant, life-affirming, high C, appeared the one face that haunts my nightmares to this day.

Johnny Malucci, professional fifth grade mob hitman, had put a personal contract out on me since the first day I had arrived in this New Jersey school, full of Midwestern aww shucks innocence. Those days are another story for another time, but suffice it to say that just hearing the sound of Malucci’s voice from around a corner of a hallway was enough to make me take my lunch money out of my pocket to save him the time of turning me upside down to shake it out.

There are few things that could have shaken me from completing that seal-the-deal C at the top of the scale, the C that would have set my destiny down a path of cheerleader girlfriends (well, maybe flute-section girlfriends, but just as good in my book!), Ivy League universities, and success that would make Norman Vincent Peale and Dale Carnegie bow in admiration. Very few things living or dead could have tipped me from the pedestal I was then mounting. An appearance at that tiny doorway window of the face of Adolph Hitler, Friday the 13th Jason, or even Ed Gildenstern (the principal), would not have rocked me in the slightest from the first and most significant achievement on the cusp of my adolescence.

But the face at the door window was not Adolph or Jason or Ed. It was the face of the true terror of my life: John Malucci. The face was only there for a second, maybe less. But the face in that split of a second said many things: “You are dead!” and “You better have more lunch money on you this time” and “You are dead!” and “I hate your puking fifth grade face!” and “You are dead!” and “Did I mention that you are dead?”

Why is it that just the sight of a certain person can reduce the strongest of men to a puddle of milk, their once rigid spine now collapsing on itself and slowly sinking into the pool? What is it about that one person in our lives whose very name causes us to pull the blankets up over our heads and promise God anything if he will just make that guy disappear?

I do not know the answer to how someone gets such control over us, but by fifth grade we already know that such golems exist and walk the earth. And by fifth grade, I had also come to believe that they were controlled by Evil Forces beyond our human understanding. If I hadn’t believed that before, I became a believer at that moment, as just as my lips pursed and my fingers released all three valves for that final, life-affirming, course-setting, destiny-winning high C….my Personal Prince of Darkness appeared at the tiny glass pane in the music room door.

SKQUAAARRREEEEKKCCCHHHH is not music. Not even for a fifth grade novice trumpet player reciting a simple one octave scale. For one terrible moment that mangled corpse of a high C hung in the air like the mushroom cloud after Hiroshima. It was a sound so bad, so horrendous, that we could all smell it, we could taste it on our tongues. It felt slimy on our skins. Not daring to look at what I knew would be on the faces of my classmates—something ranging from revulsion to contempt to horror—I turned quickly to Mr. Migliori, who had been standing just behind me as I had begun my attempt at the scale. For a moment terror gripped me: he wasn’t there! I had killed him! My eyes turned quickly to the floor where I expected to see his corpse, frozen forever in the pose of a painful death. But then his distinctive polyester plaid pants caught my eye. In the millisecond since the devil-screech had left the bell of my trumpet, while it still hung in the air like all the combined farts of every fifth grade boy who had ever ingested Bean Dish Supreme in the school cafeteria—in that brief moment Migliore had covered the distance from my chair to the classroom telephone.

“Muriel, get me Capellini, quick!” he spat into the phone. With a wave of his hand, seemingly not wanting to have to look at us again, Migliore indicated to us we were dismissed. We all quickly slammed our trumpets into their cases and evaporated from the room. Capellini. The high school band director. We had, of course, all heard of him, but didn’t actually think of him as existing. He was like President Nixon or Mick Jagger, someone you had heard about but couldn’t conceive of as a walking around human being like yourself. But that was who Migliore went to the moment I destroyed the scale upon which all Western music, and perhaps Western Civilization itself, was built. I had no idea what that meant, but somehow even then, in my little Jello Fun Pak of a fifth grade brain, I knew that something of terrible consequence for my life was being decided. There are phone calls that change history: FDR giving the go-ahead to use the atomic bomb, Nixon dialing in his decision to resign, Jimmy Carter calling Begin and Sadat to invite them to Camp David. Somehow I knew this phone call was all of those and more in the world of a little fifth grade piece of flotsam now set adrift in the currents of the recess tide shift in the great Sargasso Sea that was the South End School music wing hallway.

To be continued….

This entry was posted on Friday, August 24th, 2007 at 8:52 am and is filed under It`s All About Me, 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.