Flyshit on Toilet Paper

Samantha Malinowski raised the trumpet she was cradling in her lap and blew an angular pentatonic scale in the key of F, holding the top note until the sinewy tone finally petered away. "All the great classical trumpeters - Armando Ghitalla, Raphael Mendez, Herbert Clarke, Roger Voisin, Adolph Herseth with the Chicago Philharmonic… all had distinctive sounds. I gotta find some way to dampen the harmonics in the upper register… darken the fundamental."

"Dampen the harmonics in the upper register..." Taylor Billingsley was sitting in the living room of the Malinowski home. He understood nothing about the trumpet repertoire, but could listen to Samantha prattle on and on about the complexities of brass playing - whether a V-shaped mouthpiece with a number twenty bore on the throat and Schmidt-style, symphonic backbore was preferable to traditional bowl-shaped cups.

Samantha stood five feet four and weighed a meager hundred and six pounds in her birthday suit. The teenage girl suffered from a mild case of acne and one of her front teeth was chipped. She wasn't pretty, not by a country mile and, when Taylor Billingsley thought about it, which he tried not to do, his slavish, self-effacing devotion made no sense. They had been sleeping together since December. Early on, he became obsessed with the novelty of sex, but through the wintry months things settled down and Taylor's fondness for the chip-toothed brunette, who seldom ran a brush through her frizzy hair, evolved into a more muted, unassailable passion.

Lately, Samantha began having 'musical' dreams. Two or three nights each week, she heard a phantom trumpeter playing melodies with the most exquisite tone. All night long, or so it seemed, the ethereal music floated through her slumbers, lingering like a pungent aftertaste into her waking hours. Suddenly she looked up. "You wanna get naked?"

Taylor pulled her close and started undoing the girl's blouse, but she abruptly laid the trumpet aside, wriggled free and redid the topmost button. "Let's wait until my mother calls." Mrs. Malinowski worked for an insurance firm in downtown Boston. Weekdays, she rode the Amtrak train into South Station and hoofed it over to the State Street office. The woman, who called her daughter after school to check in and make sure everything was alright, seldom got home much before six.

Samantha reached for a laptop resting on an end table. Flicking the computer on, she navigated to a music video. "These are the Black Dykes, the best English-style, brass band in the universe." The symphonic music built to a thunderous roar of cornets, flugelhorns, trombones, baritones, euphoniums and tympani. "Someday I'm gonna play in a band like this."

"What's with the weird uniforms?" The Black Dykes were decked out in black jackets with scarlet lapels and epaulets, the cuffs bordered with gold embroidery.

"It's part of the brass band mystique."

"I see." Actually, Taylor thought the military-style uniforms looked rather silly.

"The band director at Wheaton College is putting together a brass band and is willing to audition several high school players for second and third chair. Problem is, traditional British brass bands use cornets exclusively, which means, even to audition, I would have to show up with a reasonably good cornet."

"How much do they go for?"

Samantha rolled her eyes. "Over a thousand bucks, and that's for used instruments!"

*****

Fifteen minutes later the phone rang. "Yes, mother, I already finished my homework…"

When the call was done, Samantha fed the cat, locked the front and back doors. She stripped her clothes off, throwing them in a heap on the bedroom floor and lay prone on the mattress with her thin legs splayed and back arched. The late afternoon temperature had already scrambled to a humid eighty-five degrees, but to keep expenses down, the Malinowskis seldom ran the air conditioner during the day. "You don't smell so hot," Taylor noted following the lovemaking.

A bead of sweat was pooling on the girl's stomach. "Our washing machine broke down last Friday, and my mother's strapped for cash. She can't afford to fix it until sometime next month, so we have been washing laundry by hand." The house had been falling apart long before Mr. Malinowski, who was never terribly enterprising, dropped off the face of the earth. The day he vanished, Samantha's father put a fist through the living room wall and cleaned out the joint-checking account as a final act of mean-spirited retribution. Samantha wipes a splotch of sour-smelling sweat from her armpit and held her sticky finger under Taylor's nose. "No air conditioning or clean laundry. It's gonna be a long, hot summer."

"Doesn't matter." The boy kissed her rancid hand. "Not the way I feel for you."

"I'm sure my old man spouted similar, mushy sentiments while whoring around and smacking my mother upside the head."

"After I finish college, “Taylor ignored the sarcasm, “maybe we could marry… settle down."

There was no immediate reply. Taylor doubted that she was even listening. It wasn't that the girl was inconsiderate of his feeling. The washer was caput. They couldn't afford air conditioning through the dog days of August. She needed a professional cornet.

In the bedroom, even with the shades drawn, the heat was staggering. Taylor dozed off. When he woke an hour later, Samantha was naked in the far corner of the room with her back to him blowing chromatic intervals. Her skinny elbows splayed out to the sides, she hunched over the instrument as a broken arpeggio climbed from low C to the G on the space above the staff. The bony, angular girl held the languid tone for a generous interval. Fingering the middle valve, she played a matching inverted triad in the key of B-natural, continuing through all seven, stepwise progressions until the trumpet bottomed out on low F-sharp. Then she relaxed her lips, pushing the pink tissue deep into the mouthpiece and produced a series of raucous, unmusical pedal tones extending a full octave lower.

Taylor studied the bumpy outline of her spine. The fleshy side of one breast swung forward in bold relief. Twenty minutes later, she finally put the horn down and crept into bed beside him and lay on her back, breathing from her belly the way small children do after strenuous play. "Why don't you get your tooth fixed?"

"For the same reason we got no air conditioning or clean laundry." The girl rolled over on her side. "Would you love me any better with a perfect smile?"

"I like your looks just fine."

Samantha pointed at the full length mirror tacked to the back of the bedroom door. "Next time I'm standing over there staring at my blotchy mug, I'll remind myself that there's at least one person on the planet who thinks I'm a knockout." The garbage truck pulled onto the street and progressed in a loop until it came back full circle stopping in front of the Malinowski property. There was the clatter of cans and broken glass before the diesel engine revved and the truck was gone. "The Black Dyke Mills… that was their original name."

"What are you talking about?"

"That brass band on the laptop earlier… most of the musicians were originally employed at a Yorkshire mill, and their fancy outfits were made from the mill's own cloth. Back to the eighteen hundreds, the musicians were all dirt poor, working stiffs." She breathed out heavily. "Sure wish I owned a fucking cornet."

Before Taylor left the Malinowski home, Samantha retrieved a five-gallon plastic pail from the basement. Positioning it under the bathtub spout, she filled the bucket with warm water then added a generous capful of detergent and Twenty Mule Team Borax laundry booster. The girl stuffed the pail to overflowing with dingy panties, frayed bras, socks and blouses. "You think I overdid it?"

"The soap will loosen the grime,” Taylor said, “but rinse each piece separately by hand. Did you want me to help?"

Samantha leaned into him suggestively with her hips. "All I need is for my mother to come home and find you fondling my unmentionables!" Leaving the bathroom she returned a moment later with a faded newspaper clipping. "That's Laura Hirst, principal cornetist with the Brighouse and Rastrick Band. For a hundred and thirty years back to Victorian times, they never let a woman perform with their orchestra. Not a single female musician!"

Taylor studied the picture of a pudgy-faced blonde. "So what happened?"

"The Brighouse and Rastrick Band was preparing for the regional competition and had their heart set on winning the coveted silver trophy. Along comes this beefy, twenty-seven-year-old - a virtuoso cornetist, who can double and triple tongue at the speed of light and has a tone that would put the archangel Gabriel to shame."

"So, the band tossed a century-worth of tradition out the window."

Samantha retrieved the clipping. "That girl's ten years older than me. Maybe just maybe…" Reaching up on her toes, she kissed his cheek and went to secret the clipping away in its place of honor.

* * * * *

Saturday morning Taylor Billingsley drove into downtown Boston, parked the car on a side street off Huntington Avenue near Symphony Hall and went directly to the display counter at Simon's Music. "I need a professional cornet."

"Lacquer or silver plate?"

"Doesn't matter." The salesman, a middle aged man with a pencil moustache and jiggly paunch, disappeared into the back room, emerging a minute later with a golden horn trimmed in silver. Taylor stared at the instrument for the longest time. "Bell doesn't look right."

"What do you mean?" The salesman seemed personally offended. "Half the symphony players favor this particular model."

"It’s too long,” Taylor explained. “I need the one with the tubing all scrunched together."

The salesman shuffled back to the supply room and reappeared with a second, considerably shorter instrument. "It's a Schaeffer… medium-large bore, shepherd's crook model with nickel silver pistons and spring-loaded throw on the third valve tuning slide to accommodate low D and C-sharp."

"What's with the bell?" The metal exuded a peculiar orangey hue. Taylor couldn't decide if it was pretty or grotesque.

"Most professional cornets are made exclusively from yellow brass," the salesman explained. "Schaeffers come with a custom, copper bell that darkens and mellows the tone."

Taylor ran a finger over the sleek, tubing. The salesman handed him the instrument. "I'm assuming you brought your own mouthpiece."

"I'm not a musician... can't even play a kazoo. It's for my girlfriend."

The man shook his head in exasperation. "I already got someone seriously interested in the Schaeffer, so if you're just yanking my chain…"

"What's the price?"

"Eighteen hundred with deluxe case and Wick four-B mouthpiece."

Taylor reached into his back pocket and withdrew his wallet. "Would you prefer credit card or personal check?"

When the paperwork was processed and the horn with the copper-colored bell nestled safely in the case, the salesman asked, "You in a hurry, kid?"

"No, not especially."

The man came out from behind the counter. "I want you should tell me a little something about this girlfriend of yours that you just dropped the better part of two grand on like it was a freakin' walk in the park."

Taylor lowered the case to the carpeted floor. "You know the swing tune, In the Mood?"

"Yeah, Glen Miller’s classic arrangement,” the salesman replied. “Back to the forties, it was the number one tune in the country for thirteen weeks."

"My girlfriend, Samantha... she’s the only trumpeter in her high school dance band who can belt out the high D on the final chorus with any consistency."

The man shook his head up and down appraisingly. "And that's a brutal chart… goes on forever."

"Samantha's got a useable range up to high F and screeches double C's for the sheer fun of it. When the band gets a totally new arrangement nobody's ever seen before, she sight reads the music without missing a single note."

“A born lead player with cast iron chops!” The salesman chuckled softly and his ample waist did an impromptu jig. "She can read flyshit on toilet paper!"

"Yeah, I guess you could put it that way."

The salesman pointed at the black case resting on the carpeted floor. "But that don't explain why your trumpeter girlfriend needs a top-of-the-line, short-model cornet."

"It's a long story," Taylor said, "and you may not find it even remotely interesting."

The salesman ran a thumb and forefinger over his pencil moustache and watched the only other customer, a woman who had been browsing sheet music racks, exit the store. The older man pulled a three-legged stool out from behind a Tama drum set and handed it to Taylor. "Why don't you let me be the judge of that?"