“C’MON BOYS, OVER THE TOP”

 

Kill the Bass Drummer

I want to start this piece by saying that I have a great deal of respect for those men and women who have served, or are serving our country in the military. My grandfather fought in France and Germany during World War 1, my father on Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal in World War Two. My wife, the coveted Laura, recently spent over four years in Afghanistan. I, myself, spent a full day and a half in the United States Air Force. I certainly appreciate those who have given even more than their lives, who have had their minds disrupted, deleted, or even destroyed because of the horrors of war.

At age fourteen, I took employment as bass clarinetist with the Elk’s Band, a group of fine concert musicians who played in various locations around central Illinois and west central Indiana. Our repertoire consisted of classical pieces, the occasional show tune, and patriotic numbers by John Phillip Sousa and his ilk. One fine Sunday all forty-two of us climbed aboard the bus and headed for Danville, Illinois, to play a concert at the VA hospital. The director rose to his feet as we neared our destination, and cautioned us about the upcoming venue.

“We’ll park at the back of the auditorium,” he said. “Go directly inside. Do not look around, do not leave the group, do not talk with any of the inmates.”

“Inmates?” I thought.

“I’ll pass out playlist when we get set up. The program will be very docile. When its over, pack up and get back on the bus as soon as possible. If there is any trouble, stay together. There’s safety in numbers.”

“Safety in numbers?” I wondered.

I was sitting next to the bassoonist, long a member of the band, who explained that this particular Veteran’s hospital housed men who had, for whatever reason, lost their mental stability while in the service of their country. The Elk’s band had not played there in over eight years. The last time they had played there the director had called for some Sousa after his first two rather placid selections failed to elicit applause from the five or six hundred onlookers. When Stars and Stripes Forever lumbered into the section where the trombones come on strong descending down the scale, an overly excited worthy in the fifth or sixth row, moved by the stirring performance, leapt to his feet.

“Kill the bass drummer!” he shouted, and charged the stage.

A large number of his compatriots, equally moved by the music, buoyed by his fearless assault on superior numbers, took up the cause and joined in the rush. Cries of “Over the top, boys!” and “You wanna live forever?” filled the air. Dozens of veterans of the first and second world wars and Korea, attacked the musicians. The band, with most of their clothes, some of their instruments, and none of their dignity in tact, made it out the back door to the waiting bus. Injuries were minor, but the band refused to come back for eight years.

We played the concert. An hour and twenty minutes of things like “Sheep May Safely Graze and Pasture,” a truly boring experience. The audience never moved or reacted in any way. Back on the bus and out of danger, a Dixieland jam broke out, and we boogied all the way home.

Four years later a college professor I had a huge amount of respect for told me he believed it was in my best interest to leave higher education before I learned how not to think. I took him at his word and dropped out of college. Certain members of my family took exception to my escape, and pressured me heavily to return to the halls of higher learning as soon as possible. I enlisted in Danville Junior College. The year before, Danville Junior College had installed its campus on the grounds of the same Veteran’s hospital where sheep could safely graze and pasture. So could the students, the college propaganda said. The more troublesome inmates of the institution (veteran, not student) had either died off, or had been transferred to other locations. The population was down to about eight hundred patients, only outnumbering the seekers of education by about twenty percent.

I went to Danville Junior College for a while, passing through the large iron gate, locked and heavily guarded after sundown, off limits to the vets during the day, moving through the depressing stone buildings, going to class with students who felt and sometimes acted, like prisoners. It was not a happy place. A friend there, Jerry Bailey, decided once that since the mental patients out numbered the rest of us, if majority rule was in effect, we were the ones who were insane the minute we stepped on campus. As time went on, I became convinced he was right.

One afternoon, Bailey, me, and two other misfits were walking down the long sweeping drive to the front gate, two abreast, and just naturally fell into step. Down the road we marched for nearly a quarter mile. When we reached the gate and stopped, we noticed nearly a hundred of the vets were right behind us, in a column of twos. They also had fallen into step, increasing in numbers as they followed us to the street. There was no guard, the gate was open, freedom beckoned. Three of us freaked. Bailey, some years my senior and a Viet Nam veteran, remained calm. He looked over the column quietly.

“Ten-hut!” he shouted. They snapped to.

“Ha-bout hace!” They turned.

“Howard-harch! Yo lef, yo lef!” The entire assemblage marched away, back up the drive.

Bailey looked at me. “Rank tells,” he grinned. “I was a corporal!”

On that day, in that place, with that company, the boy was a full-bird Colonel.

BEST FRIENDS

 

          When I was very young, my dog Judy was my closest friend. She remained more than dear to me until her death when I was fourteen, the best listener I have ever known, ever willing to lay on the floor in front of the stove while I told her about my life. When I was about five, however, she stopped answering me. She was still more than willing to listen, but the conversations became one-sided. I needed more than that. My grandparents were too far removed from my five-year-old world to relate to me on that level. No, I needed a friend. His name turned out to be Mike Duke.

Mike’s grandmother, Mrs. Hale, owned the house and land just east of her home and, when I was five, her daughter, her daughter’s husband and their family came to my small town to live in that house, right across the highway from me. Mike, who may have been an accident, had two older brothers who went to the high school at the other end of town. There was nobody in his family close to his age either. He and I were a mortal lock.

Called “Stinky” by his father, a mechanic with a shop behind their residence, Mike was an individual of non-conformity. Summer and winter, for instance, unless he was to be immersed in water, he wore a sock cap pulled down over his ears. To the best of my knowledge it never came off. At least I, his best friend, never saw him without it. Even in the rigorous confines and regimented surroundings of first grade, the cap stayed on. I sometimes wonder if, because he was never without that maroon and gray sock cap, our teacher, Fanny Marie Hopeshell Jervis, simply assumed it was part of his head.

When the rest of us were finally old enough for big bicycles, Mike got a little one, with small wheels. It was nimble and quick, easily out performing my Huffy Heavyweight on corners and curves, stops and starts. Oh, he couldn’t keep up on level straightaways, or match its frightening speed down Pridemore’s hill, but when it came to jumping curbs or tearing through alleys, he smoked me.  Twenty years later, similar bicycles painted bright colors and fixed with “banana” seats became the rage. Stinky had the original.

My first camping trip was with Mike. Huddled in a tiny canvas pup tent in my back yard, we stayed awake all night, fearful of lions and tigers and bears, oh my, until the sun began to rise, and we could actually settle down enough to get some sleep. We swam in the river together, wading out on sandbars until the water was up to our necks, never telling the big people about it, because we knew they would make us stop. We played Tarzan in the woods during summer, swinging on grapevines from tree to tree, looking for Tantor and Cheetah, fearful of Bolgani, the gorilla. We discovered girls together and decided we didn’t like them, built a tree house that fell out of the tree, engaged in B-B gun battles, successfully hiding the welts from our folks, built snow forts together in the winter, rushed to each other houses immediately after opening our presents on Christmas morning, watched the Mouseketeers at his house because his TV could get Disney, played with the dog at my house, because I had a dog. We sat on porches, bounced on inner tubes, crashed on ice skates, rolled in the grass, walked the river, and a thousand other things, because we were best friends. Then he moved away.

When we were nine, after being together since we were five, a long, long time, Mike announced his family was moving to a place called California that was so far away, it would take almost four days to drive there. And they did. Without asking either of us if they could, they did. He and I tried to say goodbye, but didn’t know how. We had never had to say goodbye before. It was awful. We knew we would never see one another again.

A few days after my best friend left, I was riding my bike listlessly up and down the river road, something that was no fun at all without Stinky, and I looked up the road into the setting sun. There, casting an endless shadow in my direction, silhouetted against the glare, was an apparition. I actually thought it was a ghost. Mike came walking down the road. His grandmother had taken suddenly ill, and he and his mother had flown back on a big plane called a Constellation. He was back for a week. We made the most of it. And then he left again.

Eight years later, when we were seventeen, his grandmother died, and again he and his mother flew back. I couldn’t wait to see him. We had not spoken since we were nine. When he arrived on our front porch, we were both suddenly shy. We got in my grandad’s car, and drove to the lake to tool around and stop at the Tastee-Freeze. He wasn’t Mike anymore. He was a teen-ager from California and we had virtually nothing in common. Even the sock cap was gone. It was too uncomfortable for both of us and, even though he was in town for several days, we didn’t hang out. It was just too hard. But, to this day, he remains the best friend I have ever had, the first human being to ever share the intimacy of my fears and hopes. I still see him sometimes, walking out of the setting sun, a sock cap pulled down over his ears…and I am young again, back to the days when a puddle could be a mystery, when dandelions made a beautiful bouquet, and when an RC Cola on the porch swing with my best friend Stinky, was as good as anything needed to be.