The Bugle
Ever since I can remember, one musical
implement has hung on a hook among
the saws & hammers on the unfinished, black-papered walls of our many
garages, most memorably the garage at Colleen Street. Notice, I’m using the
term ‘implement’ to identify this musical antiquity of the Garritys rather than
the usual instrument, implement’s cousin.
Why the awkward synonym? Because, in the context of my attempts to learn a
musical instrument, it seems more appropriate to utilize implement, as in tool
of destruction; it applies nicely to both those within earshot of my earliest
attempts and to myself, because I predictably dropped yet another pursuit as
though it were a habit I didn’t want my mother to discover.
And, to which musical object
hanging today in my newest house’s garage do I refer? That would have to be the
tarnished brass US. Army bugle with the moderately bent horn and steel
mouthpiece no doubt played by a few lads in my father’s / your grandfather’s drum
& bugle corps eighty years ago I remember discussing in my journal for M
twenty years ago.
I hadn’t always remembered the
link between Dad and this bugle and wouldn’t until a couple decades later, but
when I was nine years old, months after my father’s death, I became the official
bugler for Cactusville Cub Scout Pack #246. Now… before you rush into assuming I
learned this simple instrument, let me rush to disclose that my promotion to
Pack Bugler was based solely on my implied
ownership of the bugle, which belonged either to my father or his defunct drum
& bugle corps. However, dearest next of kin, once I learned there’d be an award
attached to the office - if only a cloth patch my mother would attach by thread
onto my navy-blue Cub Scout shirt. And once I realized there’d be an opportunity
for me to receive some form of recognition, then - yes - I was up for learning whatever
was involved.
Also, I’m realizing through this
memory that back in the early Sixties, the word “honor” was something everyone
understood. Honor was an essential element of not just Boy Scouting, but of Life
Itself. And yes, I pinned my self-worth on a trophy or, in this case, a
cotton cloth patch that we had to buy through the Scouts catalogue, but – still
and all – I considered it one of my very first honors. And my personal model for honor and honors had
been my father – both my hero and role model for sure, but more
importantly my biggest fan.
Even at his burial, my father was
given honor – first by the 21-gun salute performed by three Marine riflemen standing
on a square lawn surrounded - as far as my eye could see - by pinon and Joshua
trees; and secondly, when the leader of the Marine unit presented my mother
and us kids a folded American flag flown in a Marine jet that had passed
over Arlington Cemetery in our nation’s capital.
So, the tarnished, gnarled-horn
bugle with “U.S. Army” embossed on its right side represents a chapter in my personal
musical history, but not in an honorable way. You see, I hadn’t been old enough
to perform music with the corps when Dad passed, but I had been receiving drum
lessons the days leading up to his death. He had just started my lessons because
I remember him instructing me how to hold the right stick different than how to
hold the left one, which I thought stupid and unnatural. Did I hint to my
teacher/father I didn’t love holding those big white maple drumsticks in my
little hands exactly the way he’d instructed me to? Are you crazy? He would not have wanted to hear any complaints
from me, so I never let on about its awkwardness or discomfort. But, you know
what? I’m realizing that if my dad HAD lived, I would’ve learned how to do
things the so-called correct way and not ‘my way.’ Moreover, I would’ve grown
up a lot faster and become a good candidate for real manhood. In other words, I
wanted to be a BADASS, just like my father.
Let me explain the connection
between failure and this bugle. I’d tried, even before Dad’s death, to blow into
one brass instrument or another hoping it would produce a sound, any sound. And, for most kids, that one
issue would be the real obstacle. Small children don’t have the kind of
strength, much less breath control, to cause the implement to do anything
besides frustrate the person whose lips are - for the first time - pressed even
harder than when they’d kissed a sliding glass door as a toddler and marveled
at the lips’ ability to spread out like those of a cute, adorable fish.
So, puckering my lips became all-important
to me in my quest to learn to play this implement, but since my first dozen tries
didn’t succeed in producing any sound whatsoever, I blamed it on my lips. I
told myself, with as much conviction I could muster, that one needed man-sized
lips to properly play the horn because, after all, only fully-grown men had
blown powerful, piercing notes out of their shiny golden trumpets on TV. I
don’t recall seeing a single woman, girl, or boy play the bugle, cornet, or
trumpet on our Zenith set. Yes, they’d without exception been adult men, but I didn’t
stop there with my built-in excuses for not continuing my efforts to make the
instrument / implement issue perky blasts and streams of notes like those I’d
heard on television.
My additional reason for failure
was due to a condition I’d learned of at age nine – “Stage Fright.” The prospect of my successfully playing this
dented, tarnished, seemingly mute bugle of Dad’s was further diminished by this
self-diagnosed, still theoretical disability to perform in public. So, armed
with not one, but two foolproof excuses, I was now off the hook from being
expected to play sufficiently for attendees at our scouting events to respond
in delighted applause, loud, shrieky whistles of approval, and shouts of
“Bravo, Bravo!” Thus, after one scout meeting in our school cafeteria in which
I struggled in the middle of “Reveille,” I proclaimed to myself that my
struggle to learn this barbaric, stubborn instrument that seemed in demand only
at corny scouting events was done… as in, over.
But, quitting the bugle was not my
earliest musical failure; that ‘honor’ goes to the drums. After Dad was
apparently killed, the drum kit in the middle of my parents’ bedroom became a
problem for my mother and so, to reclaim her space, she deemed that my practice
& rehearsal space would disappear from our family home along with the full drum
kit she’d return to wherever or whomever my father had procured it. Yes, he
borrowed instead of bought an entire kit because – being a wise steward of his
family’s finances – he wanted to first check me out on the drums and see how
I’d do before investing any of his hard-earned salary in a luxury like this
three-drum, two-cymbal set of percussive noisemakers.
Returning to Dad’s bugle, I have a
second story. My father - months before he and his running mate disappeared - performed
onstage in a production of the Thirties comedy chestnut “Arsenic & Old Lace.”
Dad played Teddy Brewster, the brother of two well-meaning, yet slightly
demented old maids who’d been putting old men residents in their boarding home
out of their perceived misery by adding a pinch of arsenic to the men’s
elderberry wine. After each successive resident succumbs to this permanent sleep
aid, the gals ask their demented, but safe-as-milk brother to bury the newest
corpse down in the basement, which Teddy and sisters call Panama. Because Teddy
thinks he’s Theodore Roosevelt, he wears the president’s iconic ensemble of
Aussie military hat, jodhpurs (weird, old-fashioned slacks tucked into riding boots),
a sheathed dagger, and this bugle, which he blasts whenever he ascends the family’s
stairs at a full sprint. The outburst would always follow his yell of “Charge!”
beginning his one-man charge up San Juan Hill. My father played the Teddy character
with equal amounts of frivolity and enthusiasm. The crowds loved his portrayal,
probably because of his outrageous, bombastic charges up and down those stairs
with bugle and sword. So, this bugle I described in detail earlier must have
been that very horn left languishing on a garage-wall hook until I commandeered
it.
And, as if by destiny twenty-two
years later, I was cast not only in a revival production of “Arsenic & Old
Lace,” but in the same theater in downtown Desert Center. Alas, I didn’t play
Teddy in this production, but I did perform the role of Jonathan Brewster, evil
brother to Teddy and the two old broads named Abigail and something else. The
director of this much later production asked our cast if anyone owned a bugle which
the young lad portraying Teddy Brewster might use during the month-long run of
the play. I awoke to the request and volunteered, “Oh, I have a bugle for
Jimmy. Oh, do I have the bugle!”
So, when I entered our next
rehearsal from stage center with Dad’s U.S. Army brass bugle in tow, I caught
our director’s attention. Babs Malone, former Broadway dancer and ongoing
doggy kennel owner / operator, called the Mojave Valley Press newspaper, who dispatched
a reporter/photographer to capture this quaint local human-interest story. I’ve
lost track of the yellowed, seventy-seven-year-old article, but let me, dear nephew and niece, recap it
for you. A brief side article appeared in the entertainment section alongside the review for our opening night performance and featured
a thumbnail photo of the new Teddy blowing on the same bugle my father and then
I had ‘played’ fifty years earlier.
And now, allow me to regale you both with the
third & final act of this trilogy relating to the family bugle:
My lady and I were putting up or
taking down Christmas decorations when I came across my father’s
bugle. As she sat at the kitchen table tying up whatever loose ends remained
from our collective chore, I decided to “play” this implement / instrument. I blew tentatively into the stainless-steel
mouthpiece and produced nothing; so, of course, I tried a second time, but this
time with more wind and muscle, resulting in an impression of a goose fart that explodes and then fades with a series of quieter blurts.
Not satisfied with that result and ignoring my lady’s many pleas to not strain
myself further (actually I was motivated by them to prove to her I was still capable of many essential-to-me tasks. So, once again linking virility with the
ability to produce sounds from a horn instrument, I put my manhood to question.
Thus, I resolved to knock my girl’s socks off by blowing my
own horn.
I huffed and I puffed and I pursed
my lips like a Nemo-like Disney fish… and let everything inside me blast up to my head and - hopefully - through my puckered mouth. And it did. What let
loose were meteor showers on the surfaces of both my eyeballs. The rain of bubble-like
drops fell and fell and… fell until lightening to a drizzle and then nothing, save for a gigantic red taco bouncing Pong-style up, down, and diagonally
across the aperture of my left eye. You see, in straining so
harshly to produce a loud noise from the bell of that brassy implement, I dislodged
some of the vitreous or natural “eye liquid” from the back of my eyeball to
create the big, fat red taco that today still occasionally makes an appearance
for just the briefest moment until retiring to its Grand Taco Stand - not in
the sky, but in my eye.
And so & thus, folks, is the
trilogy of tales from Yours Truly,
Ricky Garrity, Esq.
(Excerpted from the future "Colleen Street," due out in 2019.)
(Copyright by Patrick Rowlee -
all
rights reserved.)
