Denis Johnson - Fiskadoro

They assembled their clarinets, and Mr. Cheung picked out a page in the text. In silence the two of them studied the exercise, soaking their reeds in their mouths. They began to p!ay.

In this sparsely furnished space the melody of the two clarinets echoed forcefully, so that even the little mistakes Fiskadoro made in his fingering had a certain authority. Mr. Cheung stopped playing in the midst of the page, motioning for the pupil to keep on while the instructor listened, his head cocked thoughtfully. Then he stopped Fiskadoro’s playing, asked for the boy’s reed, and gently applied sandpaper to the tender bamboo. When he thought it soft enough, he gave back the reed. They resumed their practice.

Though Fiskadoro had come to recognize them as melodies, the duet exercises in Sidney Bechet's Clarinet Method weren’t exactly songs — nothing moved inside him when he and Mr. Cheung played them together. When they were no further than halfway through the first one, Fiskadoro was already wondering how many of these exercises Mr. Cheung would insist on mechanically accomplishing today, already impatient to get past them into the later moments, the time of improvisation and song-swapping which constituted, in Fiskadoro’s thinking, the actual lesson; but he had to play the Sidney Bechet exercises to satisfy the requirements of an education in keeping with his future as a clarinetist for The Miami Symphony Orchestra. He played now alongside his teacher while the afternoon outside grew fiery and the still air began to bake and the sweat dropletted their upper lips and foreheads, trying to mine out of his soul, or out of his sex, or his bowels — wherever it lay — the spilt-buttery tone that Mr. Cheung drew from himself through his own clarinet.

Today was one of those days when Mr. Cheung’s grandmother, as she often did, inched painfully into the front room from the kitchen, bringing with her a damp steam of boiling hearts of palm and assorted unrecognizable spices, and settled into the red leatherette rocking chair with the idea, Fiskadoro supposed, of listening to the clarinets, if she didn’t happen to be completely deaf. She lowered herself toward the rocker’s bucket seat in a gradual and dignified way, but in the end, as always, abandoned herself to gravity and fell the last fifteen centimeters into the chair, one arm outstretched beneath her in a pitiful try at cushioning this descent.

Out of respect for her, Mr. Cheung signaled for silence while she found her comfort, insofar as this was possible, in her accustomed seat. Then Mr. Cheung and Fiskadoro took up the piece, the Sidney Bechet exercise for two, at the beginning again.

Fiskadoro had nothing against the grandmother except that the whole time she sat there, every time, she smoked a long cigarillo backward, with the lit end resting in her mouth and the spit dripping down to darken the other end, the end she should have been smoking. Maybe this was how they’d smoked their cigarets in the old days, but it made Fiskadoro weak to see her keeping fire so close to her tongue, her leathery old Chinese monkey face collapsing into her secret deliberations, her jaw slack, her smoky breath audible in the silences between Sidney Bechet exercises, and her black eyes so totally opaque he couldn’t tell if they were sightless, dead, or coldly burning. Mr. Cheung sometimes spoke to her softly and briefly, in Chinese or whatever it was, and Fiskadoro wondered what her dilapidated brain made out of his words.

She wasn’t always the whole of their audience. Sometimes children came to hear them, never the same ones twice, it seemed to Fiskadoro. He’d look up from a page of music to see them standing by the kitchen door, two or three very small children with black eyes and long straight black hair, staring at him as if they expected him to do something famous. There was no telling what sex these children were because they all wore dirty white shifts that reached their knees: a sign of status, dressing the children, as befitted the Manager of The Miami Symphony Orchestra.

But there were no children today, only the grandmother slowly rocking while they played. She’d hardly had time to finish her black cheroot and pull the wet stub from her mouth, holding it in her hand absentmindedly, as if she forgot everything as soon as it happened, when Mr. Cheung called an end to the clarinet lesson.

The time had been long enough for Fiskadoro. His lower lip burned from the reed’s vibrations and he knew he’d made a lot of mistakes.

“You’re tired,” Mr. Cheung said. “There’s a mark of smoke on your forehead.” He unfastened the clamp that held the reed to his clarinet’s white plastic mouthpiece, and lifted the reed up to a beam of light that came through the cracked tar paper covering the windows, moving his head into the shaft of illumination and winking an eye against it — examining the flimsy bamboo for splits or fraying. “You were down by the fires last night.” Before Fiskadoro could deny this truth, or forge some kind of explanation or trump up an insincere apology, the teacher added, “Like all the young men. But it makes you tired. You need rest before the lessons, Mr. Fiskadoro — because the spirit, the guidance, these are always the first things to fall asleep when you’re tired.”

Fiskadoro jerked his head from side to side, not knowing how to answer.

“But your Commandant”—Mr. Cheung pointed with half a clarinet at the boy’s crotch—“he wakes up all night long.” The teacher laughed suddenly and loudly and then immediately his face was the same old mask. “Up all night planning his battles and wars.”

Fiskadoro had nothing to say. He kept his glance downcast, and looked at the illustration on a folder of sheet music beside him on the pew. It was a sketchy rendering of a group of musicians, as many as two dozen of them, all seated before their music stands. The folder of music came from the Teaman Music Co., Silver Spring, MD, and this is what the musicians must have looked like at Teaman Music Co., trim youthful gentlemen in the old, very impractical suits they’d worn in those unimaginable times, with hair that appeared to be slicked back in the manner of Mr. Cheung’s, but cut much shorter. Everything about them was thin and sensitive-looking — their unreal hands and blank faces and good posture, even the angularity of their many instruments. Except for their clothing and the absence of any paunches, they weren’t so very different from Mr. Cheung — not surprisingly, since Mr. Cheung did his best to be counted a part of civilization, with an understanding of civilization based on what had come down to him from the last century — but not by any stretch of thinking, not even in the light of the most exaggerated indulgence, did the men of the Teaman Music Co. resemble anyone else in The Miami Symphony Orchestra.

Fiskadoro’s teacher put not just a sound but a whole personality — insinuation, hysteria, denial, laughter, sobbing — through the black clarinet with the ivory-white plastic mouthpiece, and was regarded by the musicians of The Miami Symphony Orchestra as a player with The Spirit, an artist among them, perhaps a great artist among all the clarinetists who had ever lived. But Fiskadoro, in his youth and fire, most admired a man who called himself Hendrix Is, the greasy, completely white-blooded Soundman who managed the orchestra’s precious electronic equipment. Hendrix Is owned the generator and batteries that lit up their surroundings and shot the power of life — what he called juice , a term he applied in many areas — into the public-address amplifiers for the Israelite singergirl Little Sudan, who, as Mr. Cheung and Fiskadoro entered the orchestra’s headquarters, was shimmering onstage in leopardskin among winking automotive lights, smoky and sexy, her long fake-animal dress slit up the middle and fastened at the crotch, her hair braided in accordance with the tenets of her faith, singing: