The Trombone

Beautiful disastrous girls...

The trombone is literally the most masculine instrument in high School band. Or any band. It is like a kind of visual onomatopoeia if that makes any sense. In and out.

I don't want to go into any further detail.

However trombonists may compete with trumpets.

And let’s be honest: those trumpeters were kind of flashy and always damned handsome lads. They stood upright and had good posture when they raised their brass to the skies. Cocky and self-assured. We hated them.

The trumpet players all had suave hair on their upper lip even in ninth grade when most of us boys were not all that confident in the PhysEd class and subsequent gym showers.

Girls swooned over Trumpeters in 100 percent of high school marching bands. All deserved. But then again they were high school band girls so it was rather an unscientific sample.

I wanted to be a high school band member and ultimately I “lettered” in High School Band - not really something to brag about. I was on the bus and I had the shoes and the absurd helmet thing, and the desire to belong. I wanted them all to like me.

But I was on the “short bus” called “percussion.”

That being said, we boys consigned to the unterwelt of percussion could not stop looking at the flautists and a few of us noticed beauties playing the flugelhorn, inspired by a mis-hearing of a Dylan song lyric “Shelter from the storm.”

None of it is any longer recognizable. But I remember looking over at you among the trumpets with a larger horn and when I smiled at you, you smiled back.

In high school band smiling back was something.

My high school marching and concert band ambitions were embarrassing and pathetic. I wanted to see the girls change on the bus so I boom boom boomed on the bass drum and learned all the steps on the football field halftime show.

Marching Band one two three four.

There was a girl called "Coral" in AV who was a flautist and very thin and a few of us boys glanced at her changing on the bus. Now don't launch absurd 21st century rockets into my narrative: it was not all that lascivious. We just noticed from a side eye. It was rather innocent, thinking back. The poor girl nevertheless. She was pretty. Very thin. A split second of her changing and we all fell in love.

Beautiful disastrous girls…

But the girls in those high school band days were cute and a (very) few of them were foolish enough to be coaxed into my innocent spider web.

I temporarily fell in love with and cast a spell upon another flautist and sang to her Ramones songs (“I want to be your boyfriend”) on the high school marching band bus returning from a marching band performance at Knotts Berry Farm. And I will never forget but she said, “OK.”

It happened as she sat next to me on the bus not by accident and I surreptitiously yet suddenly grasped her hand. Painfully shy, it was for me a triumph. I expected her to repulse me with extreme prejudice. She was beautiful and so sweet, not given to flights of fancy.

And when I finally worked up the courage to reach down and grasp her hand on the band school bus bench on the way back from Knotts Berry Farm she simply consented to hold my own hand and it was innocent and breathtaking.

I could not believe that she did not slap my hand away, which she should have done. It was warm on the bus and warmer with her hand in mine.

Her hand was tender and unused and I felt a hot shock up the back of my neck. It felt forbidden and subversive, and it was.

Her name was P_ and every boy thought she was beautiful, which to be honest planted the seeds of disaster into my interest in her. I am a self-destructive person. I am not normal or remotely sane. And the appeal of beautiful but unapproachable P.- was a flute in her mouth and her eyes on no one. Certainly not on me.

Subsequently she was momentarily moved enough to go on a single disastrous date with me - but soon she realized what a terrible mistake she had made. I led her into a field of horrible and disgusting tumbleweeds falsely portrayed as a nice little nature walk and in my extreme self-doubt and embarrassment I gulped down some spirits someone had procured for me. I don’t remember so don’t hold me to it. But she was rightly repelled by my lack of any redeeming qualities.

I was just a sad and empty person who could not believe she held my hand on the bus so I had nothing else to add.

She let me know wisely after that that there would be no further tumbleweed adventures and that holding my hand on the bus was an embarrassing anomaly.

There were others I will not remember here. Others I dare not mention. Yet.

They would say none of it matters but to me all of it matters. Nothing is taken from me today from the forbidden warmth of a hand 45 or more years ago.

Everything stays. Right where you left it.