Medford went into my old man’s study very honorably one day and told him that he had taught me everything he could and that I was better than he was now and he thought he ought to step out. He said also that he suspected there was some practical joke being played on him, because I had learned trumpet just too rapidly really for him to believe that I had been only a beginner. The old man probably looked at him in some flat way and wrote him out his check. I never knew how proud the old man was of me. I don’t know but what he was embarrassed by my musical progress. In one way, of course, every good thing I did in music proved me a little more of a pervert — if you accepted Lloyd Reese’s story about how I had molested him and stolen his trumpet.
Once I heard the rumor about myself in full from one of my buddies who’d stayed for the game and witnessed all of Lloyd’s testimony. My buddy knew it was false, and he and I went out in the bushes on that hill of the stadium and kicked around trying to find Lloyd’s horn. I don’t know what the little snake did with it; as I’ve said, he was a genius. After the night I was alleged to have molested him, he quit band and went secretly into his great discipline of anthropology, a course that wasn’t even offered at Dream of Pines.
I put the Italian pistol under the seat of my car and drove around pretending I was going to nail Lloyd. I discovered how much I detested this place, with its rancid paper mill air and its rumor-hungry dead Baptist subdivisions. I couldn’t drink coffee any more because the taste reminded me of the atmosphere. I saw those rain-gray stacks of pulpwood down by the tracks again, and right above them, a steely little airplane creeping across the hot tops of the pines and my stomach wanted to throw up everything in it. I’d seen Dream of Pines too much. I drove by Ann’s house with only a gassy, diarrhetic feeling in me. And then I sat in my car in the garage for two hours one night thinking about Dream of Pines until I decided I wanted to see everything in it burn — the subdivisions, and Pierre Hills, and especially those houses on the track like Ann’s house, and Ann tangled up with her current lover in the back seat of a car parked in her front yard, Ann on fire like a building, with her ribs broiling in an X-ray view, and the guy she was with screeching as his crotch turned to embers and flames took his head. And you bet I wanted Harley Butte’s house on fire: Harley lying in bed with his musical instruments having been made into molten brass by the fire before he wakes up, and then he wakes up to be scorched to death, howling, by the molten pool. I also wondered what my old man would do if he woke up with walls of fire in all corners of his room. I had a box of wooden matches with me and struck them one by one in the car, studying each one from the initial ragged burst of yellow to the cool blue wavering blade at the last I wanted Dream of Pines High School to burn too; to turn into the coal skeleton like the matches did.
It’s hard to tell whether my trumpet-playing profited by all this fire I was dreaming up. I did stay at the old trumpet every afternoon after school. I would play long after my lips had given out, even after they would begin tasting bloody, to prove something or other. The bruises on my lips finally calcified until they were tough enough to play high and low for long periods without giving out. I went around with a strange, purple mouth.
I was directly accosted as regards the Lloyd rumor only once. In May, I was at a spaghetti supper sponsored by the Lions Club. I went alone, because I liked spaghetti, or the brand of it mixed up for the Lions Club by the only Italian lady in town. “Music’s golden tongue,” she said as I went by with my tray. I did not expect the smile of genuine approval I saw on her face. It was pure sunshine from Naples. God be kind to her. I ate my spaghetti, roll and salad, and thought of Italy, the beauty of it and its immense distance from Dream of Pines.
I went out by the storeroom door and down the greasy steps to the parking lot. This group standing by a Ford noticed me, and a fellow on the second-string football team, a small halfback type, started yelling to me that I was a queer, a queer, a queer. He wouldn’t quit. I sized him up, and noticed that Tonnie Ray Reese was leaning beside him, maybe as the date who had put him up to it. And I’m sure the guy had been drinking. I ran over to him, grabbed him by the shirt, and hit him in the face. The poor bastard didn’t know anything to do but try to body-block me; he destroyed himself missing me over and over and crashing on the blacktop. Then I dragged him up against the car window and hit him around the mouth, using the Trojan ring with a raised knuckle again. He commenced sobbing and finally fell down cold-cocked. I myself had the sick heaves. I felt all that Lions Club Italian sauce climbing up in me. My fists hung down throbbing and there were tears in my eyes. I don’t think I was meant to be a fighter.
“Prick,” Tonnie Ray Reese whispered to me. “Bully.” Tonnie Ray had beer or wine on her breath.
I didn’t have strength enough left to contradict her. I only looked at her face and saw the glum mouth and the lusterless wax-paper sort of skin and a broken curl of hair at the eyebrow. We used to think of killing you, I thought. I used to think of ironing you to death, Tonnie Ray. The Roach. Made it this far, that you go out with a halfback and get socked away on two beers, have you? Were intending a little scrimmage with him later, were you? Were going to show him a whole view of one of your crabshell knee-caps, were you, or even shuck off the sneakers from your claws during a moment of gay abandon? To be written up about slyly in “Who and Who” of the school newspaper: “Cute Tonnie is not ignoring a certain suave tailback. In fact, as W&W has it …” meaning they are mutually masturbating each other to death. I was getting back my wind. I introduced myself to her in as literate a fashion as I was able, sweeping my hand out a little.
“Prick. Bully. But not a queer. Your little brother lied about me.”
From then on to the end of high school, Tonnie Ray had a crush on me. And, by way of her tremendous mouth, my reputation around Dream of Pines improved.
7 / Horning In — C
In June I left for New York.
The old man finally took me seriously as a musician when I got a letter from Dr. Perrino inviting me to take part in what he called a “brass clinic” at N.Y.U. Perrino was the man with the horseshoe beard from Eastman who’d heard me down at Shreveport. I told the old man I wanted to go.
“I wanted you to go. But I want you to promise me one thing. That you’ll go over to Columbia University and talk to the dean.”
“What about?”
“About you going to Columbia.”
“Listen,” I said. This was hard to put. “I don’t think I want to beg any-body to let me into his college. Don’t ask me to do that.”
“Not beg. Tell about yourself. Tell about your music,” says the old man. “Use your style. You have a style. You’re my son, aren’t you?” He grins, and blushes.
I suppose he meant I would woo that dean at Columbia as if I were Jack Paar of New York and the dean were a horny old maid. I didn’t have that kind of confidence. It surprised me that the old man had this much trust in any “style” I had. I’d never heard anything about this. Could the old man be thinking of me as a seventeen-year-old version of himself, making a smash in New York on his first visit? Yes.