Stuart Dybek - I Sailed with Magellan

When I brought the clarinet home, it caught my mother by surprise. She’d suspected Lefty had pawned his horns in order to pay his bar tabs and gambling debts. I didn’t tell her he was leaving for California. I asked if I could keep it, and she said maybe. Maybe Uncle Lefty would give me a lesson sometime, she said, but it was better not to ask him because he didn’t need that kind of pressure right now. Maybe I should think of it as simply taking care of his clarinet for him until someday maybe he’d want to play it again himself.

I promised her that if he ever did, I’d give it back. I meant it, too, because I couldn’t understand why somebody who was once in the Bluebirds and could play for people on an instrument like that golden saxophone would ever stop playing. I thought that if I could play a horn like that, I’d never give it up no matter what happened. I knew I’d never stop singing.

Yet all it took to end my career was Sister Relenete, who during my first choir practice stopped the choir in the middle of “Silent Night,” looked directly at me, and asked, “Who is singing like a tortured frog?”

It was a shock: the shock of humiliation. After my command performances of “Old Man River” just a few years earlier, I’d joined the Christmas Choir in third grade expecting to be a star. Those rounds with Uncle Lefty had left me feeling special. I was a standout all right, but for the wrong reason. It was an awakening of a kind I hadn’t had before, but I grasped it immediately, not doubting for a moment that the nun’s appraisal was right. I wasn’t prone to blushing, but I felt the hot, dizzying rush of blood to my face. Sister Relenete directed us to begin again, and this time I moved my lips, only pretending to sing. After a few bars Sister Relenete signaled a pause and said, “Much better!”

I never returned to choir practice. I didn’t fall silent though. Stifled song can assume so many shapes. Instead of being a singer, I became a laugher. Not that it occurred to me then that clowns are, perhaps, failed singers. All it would take to set me off was some odd little thing: Denny “the Fish” Mihala’s answer in fourth grade to Sister Philomena’s question “If birds come in flocks, and fish in schools, what other kinds of groupings can you name?”

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”: