Up in the mornin’, out on the job,
work like the devil for my pay,
but that lucky ole sun, got nothin’ to do
but roll around heaven all day …
When I was little I used to think I was the son he was singing about.
Uncle Lefty had said he’d teach me to play, but, as my father pointed out, that had been several years ago, and Uncle Lefty had yet to return from California-in fact, we weren’t sure where he was. Besides, the word was out from Johnny Sovereign that his older brother, Sid, had been released from jail and needed the money. Whether it was a cheap haircut or cut-rate music lessons, my father couldn’t pass up a deal.
Sid Sovereign had done time in Florida for passing bad checks. Now he was back in Chicago, trying to go straight. Sid’s brother Johnny lived with his wife and their kids, Judy and Johnny Jr., in a two-flat around the corner from us. Their alley fence was camouflaged in morning glories, and behind it was a screened-in sandbox protected from cats where Johnny Jr. and my younger brother, Mick, played together. Johnny Sovereign ran the numbers in our neighborhood, Little Village. That makes him sound like a big shot, but everyone knew he was just a small-time hood, which in Little Village didn’t attract much more notice than if he was a mailman. Johnny was well connected enough, however, to get Sid the patronage job of band director for the Marshall Square Boys’ Club. There, in a room smelling of liniment, where basketballs and boxing gear were stored in a padlocked cage along with drums and tubas, Sid gave private lessons.
Sid hated giving lessons. He hated kids. He kept cotton balls in the cellophane sleeve around his pack of Luckies. He opened his Luckies with meticulous care and utilized the cellophane sleeve to hold matches, loose change, business cards, phone numbers on shreds of paper, and cotton balls. During a lesson, after the first few shrieks on the horn, he’d yell, “Fuckaduck, kid! Are you trying to ruin my hearing?” and reach for the cotton balls. A few more shrieks and he’d bounce up as if to smack you, then instead open a locker stuffed with boxing gloves and take a swig from a half-pint bottle. When I first saw him do it, I thought he was drinking liniment. He sat back down smelling of booze. Though I’d yet to master smiling, we were on to breathing.
“In little sips,” he said, “and don’t let the goddamn horn waggle in your mouth. The mouthpiece just rests on your bottom lip and the upper teeth bite down.” He tested my embouchure by grabbing the horn and giving it a shake that made me feel as if my bottom teeth cut through my lip. “It should be firm so I can’t jiggle it around like this. Little sips and then exhale just touching the reed with your tongue, like saying thoo.” He demonstrated without his horn, and boozy spit sprayed in my face. “Little sips! You’re trying to eat the horn. You’re not playing a hot dog. Did you think you were at a hot-dog lesson?” He rammed the mouthpiece down my throat so that the reed scraped the roof of my mouth. “Can you play like that? Well? It’s a question. Are you deaf? Maybe that’s the problem here.”
I tried to answer with the horn in my mouth. It was like trying to talk at the dentist’s. I shook my head no. I was sweating. My face threatened to betray me, but no way was I going to further humiliate myself before this man. And no way was I giving up on music a second time.
“All right, try again: thoo.”
I p-thooed a squawk that pretty much expressed my feelings, and Sid Sovereign flinched, then shouted, “Little sips, little sips!” and grabbed my nose, pinching it shut, forcing me to breathe little sips through my mouth, but the effect was that of throwing a switch, one that opened the valves of my shameful tears.
Despite this inauspicious start, I was marching — my maroon cape flaring behind me — down Cermak Road to the joyful cacophony of “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
True, at third clarinet I was bringing up the rear; true, Sid Sovereign had told me, “You’d be tenth clarinet if we had a part for it”; and true, I was mostly lost and faking the notes. I had a hard enough time keeping up with the band when we practiced sitting down. Every so often I’d blow a middle C that would fit in. Sometimes, having lost my place on the sheet music, middle C was all I played, as if adding a drone. Sid Sovereign, directing the band, didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he suggested I might want to fake it till my tone improved. He gave the same advice to Miguel Porter, another third clarinet marching beside me.
By now we were supposed to have memorized the music for the upcoming band competition at Riverview, a legendary amusement park on the North Side, but since this was a dress rehearsal, we were allowed to have our parts on miniature music stands clipped to our instruments. The maroon capes and matching maroon and gold-brimmed caps, and the white spats that I buttoned over my PF flyers had been provided by Sid Sovereign. It was summer, and the capes and caps were wool, and despite their mothball smell, moth-eaten. They looked to be from another era, the Great Depression, maybe. We suspected Sovereign had ransacked some long-forgotten storeroom in the Boys’ Club system. I admired the ornate satiny uniforms that the softball teams sponsored by neighborhood taverns wore, but I had mixed feelings about parading around in this kind of getup. I wanted to be in the band on our way to Riverview — the most magical place in the city — but not dressed as a dork.
It seemed out of character for Sovereign to be putting so much energy into the Riverview competition. He’d made the brass players polish their horns, and he’d added today’s late afternoon rehearsal to our regular Saturday band practice. Maybe the change in him had something to do with Julio Candido’s mother, Gloria, who’d begun attending our rehearsals, an audience of one who filled the band room with a tropical perfume that couldn’t all be coming from the white flower in her black hair. Julio’s father, wanted for murder, had fled back to Mexico years ago. Mrs. Candido drove Julio to band practice, to school, and everywhere in her white Buick convertible, not a car that a woman employed as a singing cocktail waitress at Fabio’s, a mob hangout in the Italian neighborhood just across Western Avenue, could normally afford.
The band room was actually the half-court basketball gym. Usually it smelled of fermented sweat. Mrs. Candido sat beneath the basket on a folding chair, dressed in a sleeveless white summer sheath, her bronze legs crossed, the toe of a white high heel tapping the air to whatever beat Sid Sovereign conducted. He’d begun conducting instead of hiding sunk in depression behind his office door, smoking and drinking while we blared direction-less in the gym, as had been his routine before Mrs. Candido started showing up. The cotton was gone from his ears. He’d even written music for us to play while we marched before the judges at the Riverview competition — piece to get their attention, something contemporary to go with the classic “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
“A little something original,” he bragged to Mrs. Candido before he struck up the band, “something you can bet nobody else will be playing.”
Sovereign had transcribed and arranged Bill Haley and the Comets’ hit, “Rock Around the Clock,” for marching band.
His arrangement began with the glockenspiels tapping out “One o‘clock, two o’clock, three o’clock,” and then the whole band shouting out “Rock!” The tubas picked it up: “Four o‘clock, five o’clock, six o’clock,” and we shouted “Rock!” Then the other instruments — flutes, cornets, trombones — counted out the remaining hours on the clock, winding up to our final “Rock!”— a shout punctuated by the drums, which launched the entire band into a swinging march beat we emphasized by swinging our horns as we played.