Cheaply Made Dreamland by j. lucow

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 and yell along with the melodies of New Orleans pouring out like honey.

I’d yell and scream along with every tune all day, searching for the right key until someone told me to stop.  I never did find it.  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.