Trombones Can Laugh

by Lorraine Ray

  “Absolutely! While watching Merv Griffin.”

  Yeah, yeah. I kept telling them over and over that they shouldn’t have been bothered by phone calls from ridiculous people who were just calling up to casually bug us and wanting to know if it really was me that destroyed what they called a world-famous Arizona landmark. Let me give you a hint, nothing in Arizona is world-famous or a landmark. Except maybe the Grand Canyon and that’s just a hole in the ground.

  I might have had my reputation besmirched by what happened. And tainted. And dishonored. And tarnished (hey, that’s cool, sort of tying in with the band instrument thing!) Despoiled even. I might have been despoiled in everyone’s eyes because of my drunken accident. Well, okay, despoiled might be going a bit too far with the story because dammit, I didn’t manage to lose my virginity once in the whole thing and I really, really could have used that happening, let me tell you, as I face down registering for the draft soon and hope I don’t have to be shipped off to Vietnam if my number comes up or if I do I hope I can get into college and get a bunch of draft deferments until the war is over. But if none of that happens and I get drafted, I wish I had been despoiled at least once. Notice I did use all my English vocabulary words there, besmirched and all that, so, holy crap, I’m picking up some cool shit in high school!

  But I wasn’t mortified and my head is not going to get messed with. No siree, Bob. Forces That Be, hit the road. My head remains my own! Can you dig it?

  Well, I’m not particularly bugged by what I did, but that’s not to say I’m proud. I think President Roosevelt was a groovy guy and if he went into a saloon in Arizona even to spit once, then that saloon ought to be preserved for posterity and all that. Now there’s only the staircase and that plaque with silhouette of President Roosevelt’s face, double chins and all, like a buncha of western buttes or plateaus running off his face at the bottom. The Roosevelt Adobe, as it was known, was once a historical place but now it’s a pile of goddamn rubble, broken boards, plaster, and mud. Shoot, I know it’s a crying shame. Moses said it was, but he said I ought not to blame myself, and he was there to see the whole thing happen. He wouldn’t have let me off if I did something wrong, either. He was the type of old geezer who takes right and wrong very seriously. He was a straight and honorable fellow. Not like me.

  Anyway, I have to tell you the terrible truth now, and get right to it.

  Two parades later, that is, two parades after I fell off the float and the Roosevelt Adobe was destroyed, Moses got more crocked than usual while he was with the band and his blood alcohol level reached the danger level. He died on the Shriner bus. Before they even got him to a hospital.

  Moses always asked me to get him drinks when we were together and I never argued but went right along with what he wanted over and over, again and again.

  I can only guess that Moses took my trouble pretty hard and he must have had a few too many on the next trips. Of course when I was with him I was asking the bartender to make them so that the alcohol ran a little on the lean side, but once he was getting them himself that probably ended, I don’t know anyone else who would have taken that on, and he probably was making sure that they had plenty of liquor in them himself.

  I wish I had been there. Maybe I could have stopped him from drinking so much or seen what was happening faster, because I was his helper all those times before. Maybe it wouldn’t have made any difference. I’m glad I wasn’t there when he died, if he was going to die on the bus.

  I didn’t even find out about the death myself. My mom read it in the obituary article in the newspaper first and then mentioned that it was a Shriner who died. She thought I’d mentioned the name Moses Grand.

  It was hard to read about his life in a newspaper that way after we’d had so many fun adventures together, and even more than I’ve told you. I wished I could have stayed with him to the end, but it wasn't to be.

  I drove myself to his funeral. First time driving alone.

  It was a Jewish funeral, a couple days after he died. With a rabbi. The whole crazy scene.

  Gluey was there and he talked to me for a few minutes, but I don’t remember a thing he said. How could I? I was crying about as hard as a person is able.

  That small obituary which my mother had clipped out of the local paper with Moses’ face under the fez looks at me now with the same crazy Santa Claus smile. The obituary was all about his devotion to the Shriners and kids in hospitals. It said his second son, named Abe, had died at the age of seventeen. Boy, when I read that it hit me hard. I thought it was strange when he started calling me “his little lost one.” Maybe it wasn’t me that was lost, but his real kid who’d been my age when he died.

  What am I gonna do now? What’s my big life goal besides not going to Vietnam? Well, I’m gonna do good deeds for kids, mostly, somehow. And this spring I have a little plan for myself. If I do my research, on canyons near Highway 242 in Santa Cruz County, my friend Scott and I might just graduate from high school and join up with that nudist camp I once heard about from Moses. They could probably use a blindish guy who plays circus music on the trombone.

  THE END

  MEET THE AUTHOR

  Lorraine Ray is an avid reader and writer. She lives in an adobe home in the center of Tucson, Arizona with her husband and daughter.

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