Courier Crabgrass Homage to the Saxophone I Had to Rent
I had left
the saxophone my parents rented for me on the school bus. Of course, on the way over to retrieve it
from the church parking lot where the bus was parked they made me feel
miserable. The same thing when I left my
winter coat at school in third grade.
Anyway, I quit the saxophone not long after. I’m sure my parents carefully calculated the
money wasted on the whole misadventure, crying over how much more they could
have given to “the Lord.”
What
happened to that saxophone? Through the
magic of cable television’s bastard offspring, the fanciful essay, we can now
know for certain. In fact, we can now
say for certain that it was a tenor sax.
Whether it was a tenor or an alto has been the subject of much debate
over the years, my Democratic allies arguing that it had been an alto, while my
Republican supporters maintained that it was a soprano, however bent. They should both have known that I would
follow in the footsteps of Eric Dolphy and play the bass clarinet.
However,
that forlorn saxophone, purchased as part of a bulk lot labeled “machine
parts,” eventually found its way into the manipulative extremities of a Bargo
Nulph from the planet of insect skull planets.
This Bargo Nulph, named Impetro Mzad, used the alien instrument to
record the album, A Little Boy’s
Collection of School Bus Terrors, hailed by Intergalactic Downbeat as a “murky crawl through the heresies of
Trad Fusion.” Well, what do they
know? I can’t imagine that they ever
squatted down in the floor of the bus and took a pee.
.
