I was pushed into playing trumpet when I was ten or thereabouts. I never loved playing the damn thing…no joy in the blow. I nonetheless took trumpet lessons and played in school bands. Innate-gift-wise I was certainly never Bix Beiderbicke. For a reluctant, undisciplined kid, my trumpet-playing abilities were, at best, mediocre.
(Ditto my swimming skills when I competed in freestyle and backstroke in my early teens…ditto my drumming when I played with a couple of rock-blues bands when I hit my early 20s…I was ultimately only good at writing and acting and, during my hound-dog days, unbuttoning blouses.)
When I was 11 or thereabouts I took part in an elementary school concert, performing for fellow students, teachers and visiting parents. Myself and another kid playing some simple-ass tune. Because I wasn’t much good to begin with and because I didn’t practice hard enough, I choked when the big moment arrived. My playing was tolerable for a beginner, I suppose, but I went off-key a couple of times, whining like a dying cat or one being strangled.
I felt embarassed by this public failure, naturally…so much so that after it was over I felt a sudden instinct to let the audience know that I knew as well as they did that my playing sucked balls. And so two or three seconds later and just as I pivoted to go back my onstage seat amid my fellow band members, I formed a pistol with my thumb and right index finger and shot myself in the right temple.
The next day the school music teacher, a fairly cool guy with a sassy, sardonic sense of humor, bawled me out for “breaking the fourth wall”, so to speak. I told him that my playing was so mortifying that I had to cop to it…I had to admit to the listeners that I knew my future probably wouldn’t have much to do with trumpet-playing.
That same come-what-may, fuck-it, let-the-chips-fall impulse manifested decades later when I became a stream-of-consciousness movie columnist in ’98, or 26 years ago.
