I Sailed with Magellan Read Free Page B

a buck on the side,” he reasoned, and for my father a buck on the side was reason enough. He hated to see things wasted, and that included a clarinet sitting idly in a case. But maybe there was more to it than he was willing to admit. In his way, my father loved music. On Saturday nights he’d record The Lawrence Welk Show on his new reel-to-reel tape deck, an expense he justified because he’d never have to buy another record, not that he ever bought records. He sang most every morning as he got ready for work with a gravity that woke the house. “The voice of the Volga Boat Man is heard in the land,” my mother would say. He sang with facial expressions that caused him to cut himself shaving. He shaved with a straight razor rather than wasting money on blades, and he bled as he sang, the foam on the razor stained pink and his face stuck up with bloody clots of toilet paper. I was afraid that, reaching for a note, he’d cut his throat. The songs he sang were from a lamentable past I could barely imagine—“Old Man River,” “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” “That Lucky Old Sun”:

    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.
    â€œIn 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,