I taught myself how to play by listening to the airwaves. I didn’t even have a horn back then. Hell, being tone deaf didn’t stop me either. I would sit in front of our Silvertone radio and scream along with the sounds of New Orleans pouring out like honey.
I’d yell and yell and yell some more. I never did find the right key to anything, but I never stopped trying. After a while, they took the knob off the radio. Later, they took the radio and left the knob.
One day, my aunt Agnes asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I told her cheese.
After I finished the cheese, she asked me if I wanted anything else. I told her I wanted a trumpet.
She laughed and said, “Little Man, if you had asked me for the trumpet first, I would’ve had just enough money to buy one. Cheese is expensive these days.”
Thirty-two years later, she asked me that same question. I was thinking trumpet, but I said cheese again.
I sat on the porch eating my gruyère. I couldn’t complain. The cheese was good and even more expensive than it had been three decades ago. Just as I was getting ready to scream out a rendition of St. James Infirmary, a scrap metal truck barreled around the corner and nearly crashed into the steps of my aunt’s house.
It kicked up such a storm of dust! The old rickety truck rocked itself steady and sped down the road with a clankity clank. When the dust cleared, I noticed something had fallen out of it. Bless my soul, it was a trumpet. And I still had a little bit of cheese left too. It was kind of like that saying about having your cake and eating it too, although I never tried to play a piece of cake. I grabbed the trumpet out of the road and ran to the radio.
CHAPTER 2
I played that trumpet for days at a time, not even stopping for the smallest amount of cheddar. Not for swiss. Not for gouda.
I played that horn till my lips bled. I played it till most of my teeth fell out. I played it till I fractured my jaw in three places. Then I met Old Joe.
Old Joe was walking by the porch one day while I was playing my heart out. More blood than usual was running down my cheeks.
“Wrong way, Suskind,” he said.
I stopped playing and looked up at him. He was blocking the noon day sun and around his head was a halo of light. He looked just like an angel. Or an eclipse.
“How’s that?” I asked, squinting to see anything.
“You’re holding it the wrong way, Suskind. You blow into the little end.”
I had found my mentor.