I Sailed with Magellan Read Free Page A

to play trumpet. Instead of rage, it was hilarity rising in me. The more I tried to gain control over myself, the more I thought of what had triggered the laughter. Fish’s answer, “A dozen donuts,” wasn’t that funny in and of itself, but there seemed to me something infinitely comic about the way he’d thrust his hand up in order to share his inspiration with the class, and in Sister’s response, “Thank you, Denny, very original thinking.” I’d disappear under my desk as if tying a shoe or looking for a dropped pencil, but the laughter would find me. I’d rest my head on my arms pretending to nap at my desk while my sides heaved with barely smothered laughter—laughter that, despite my better interests, was proving more irrepressible than song.
    The nun had seen this act before. “Perry, are you a loon or what? Go think about your behavior in the cloakroom until you grow up enough to join us.”
    Banished to the cloakroom, where I’d been spending increasing amounts of time, I’d stand in the meditative company of my classmates’ hanging coats, free to surrender to spasms of laughter.
    The worst, most achingly ecstatic laughing fits came on during obligatory weekday morning mass. Usually the mass was either the feast day of a martyr or a requiem, the priests’ vestments red or black. I’d follow the liturgy for a while in my St. Joseph missal, then slip into the stupor of another medieval morning that reeked of incense. But sometimes there’d be a diversion, like the time in fifth grade when my buddy the Falcon—Angel Falcone—who was sitting beside me, managed to toe up the padded
kneeler during the Gospel without anyone noticing. At the Offertory, when the kids in our pew went to kneel, the whole row of knees hit the marble floor. The Falcon had the gift of remaining deadpan. I laughed for both of us even as I knelt, trying to choke the laughter back, pretending to be coughing or blowing my nose while my eyes teared. Then, from rows behind us, I heard the wooden beads of the nun’s floor-length cinch of rosary rapping rapid-fire against the pew as she furiously rose and rushed from her seat and down the aisle to where I knelt, pushing kids aside to get to me, yanking me up and dragging me down the center aisle into the vestibule.
    â€œLaughing like a fool in God’s presence. He’s hanging on the cross for your sins and you’re laughing at His suffering like the Romans and Jews! You don’t deserve to be a Christian. Stop it! Stop it this instant or I’ll slap that smile off your face.”
    Â 
    â€œMake like you’re smiling,” Sid Sovereign told me. “Not like that! Did I say make like a shit-eating grin? What are you, retarded? Pay attention. This is a smile.”
    I watched him demonstrate the proper smile. Eyes fierce, he smiled without showing his teeth. That was a relief, because he had small, rotten-looking teeth—tobacco-stained like his bristly gray mustache, which was yellowed where the smoke blew from his nostrils. He balanced his Lucky Strike on a cigarette-tarred music stand and into his tight-lipped smile fit the mouthpiece of his clarinet and exhaled an open-fingered G. I almost expected to see cigarette smoke puff from the bell of the horn.
    â€œYou see my cheeks bulging? I’m not blowing up a goddamn balloon, I’m playing the clarinet. You try. Sit up straight, how do you expect to breathe with posture like that? Now, smile. No, dammit! This is a smile.” He jabbed his fingers into the corners of my mouth, remolding my face. I could feel my face not cooperating
with either of us, and I tried to concentrate and disregard my hurt feelings. My first clarinet lesson was not going the way I’d anticipated.
    My father had decided that since Uncle Lefty had given me the clarinet, the time had come for me to take lessons.
    â€œSomeone who can play can always make