Blowing It

C.P. Taylor

I knew I’d missed the rehearsal when I saw the guitars propped against the amps and heard the tubes humming. Just how many I had missed was a mystery, but I unpacked my sax and was sucking on a reed when I heard the door of the warehouse open and the low voices of the band members as they filed back in. Normally at this point, I’d hear Tim, the drop-dead bass player, telling of his sexual athletics of the night before, but today he was mute. Dave, the lead guitarist – and until that moment my friend – hung back behind Brian, the vocalist. Before I could shout out the good news that I was clean, Brian said, “You’re fired. Pack up your gear, get out, and don’t come back.”

As they stood silently watching me break my sax apart and put it away, I realized everyone in the room could see my hands were shaking, and even I could smell the rankness of my breath. Unlike pot, which covers the smoker like a shroud, or downers, whose sorry-eyed users smell like cat, heroine rises from the gut like slow death.

I had not been in the free air for four days – all of which I’d spent feeling like I wanted to crawl out of my skin as beetles moved under the sheets. Finally tossing the twisted and soiled sheets away, I was ready to look at human faces again. Somehow I’d had the idea that everyone whom I’d cheated or blotted out would shout hallelujah that the prodigal had left the wallow. Right.

As I looked at the polished brass now tucked into its green baize, I realized I’d left my flute somewhere in the warehouse the day I’d gone out – as in “Gone Out” – after running into Brenda, a bright flame and fellow traveler, who’d found God and wanted desperately to lose him again. The flute was a Paris Selmer – the real deal – which I’d traded for a military band jacket, inherited from my grandfather to a girl in a dorm room with whom I had sex, gotten high, and never seen again. I looked behind the amps with their snake’s nest of wires, and in the closet where the owner of the warehouse stored toilet paper for his motels, but nada. “Where’s my flute?”

“Sold it,” Brian said, “consider it payment for the fifty you owe me which you have conveniently forgotten.” When I told him the flute was worth way more than that, he said, “Not to me it wasn’t. Never liked all that tootling anyway. Now get out of here.”

Brian was in his glory. I’d been recruited to play in his band by Richy, the trumpet player whom I’d gigged with on some low-pay dates like weddings or clubs where the band was more furniture than entertainers. Brian had wanted a horn section after he’d seen The Stones perform with one they’d brought on tour. The charts we played could not have been easier and the money was – well, money. But I’d never had the impression any member of the band – except Dave – ever talked to the spirits, even on his best night.

The first time I ran afoul with Brian was when his on-and-off girlfriend Cindy approached me looking for weed, and being-ever obliging, I told her where to go and who to see. For myself, I never liked the stuff. I mean, like, why bother? The next day I found myself pinned to the wall and treated to every insult Brian could summon – it was true – from his rather limited vocabulary. “Junkie-fuck,” was about as original as he got, but what he lacked in imagination he made up for in verve. He was not front and center for nothing.

Once outside the warehouse, I noted that particular quality of light surrounding weed lots – at once too bright and too dull, as if reflected from old tin. And now free of the cold fluorescents of the warehouse-slash-studio, I realized this open space suited me down to the ground. So I put the sax together, tightened the reed, and standing under God’s sun, with ailanthus shoots, broken glass, and flattened cans beneath my feet, I blew it like a jazzman.