Lucky Break

Chapter 2-1

Chapter 2“Break!!!!”

Even at a most inopportune and possibly deadly moment, I played the pun card. The first night at taxi driving class, we had to exchange quiz papers with the student next to us, so they could grade our work. It’s said there’s one asshole in every crowd. Of eight students in the class, we had two. Like Beavis and Butthead, they spent the evening guffawing and making inside jokes to one another no one else would likely find amusing. Beavis ended up with Nasrin’s paper. Nasrin was an Iranian immigrant. English was not her first language. There was a question about skidding on ice and anti-lock brakes. The correct answer was There is no need to pump the brakes if your car is equipped with anti-lock technology. Nasrin had the answer correct, but she used the wrong form of brake, writing break instead. Naturally, Beavis had to comment on that, bringing up her nationality, border control, illegal immigrants, and the like. From that night on, I asked Nasrin to exchange test papers with me.

“Only if you will correct my English mistakes as well as marking my incorrect answers,” she said.

“You never get an answer incorrect, but I’d be happy to help with your English.”

There was irony there, since I was better at reading and comprehending music than I was with written English, but I liked Nasrin and respected her ambition and dedication. Her perfect average ended up half a point higher than mine, and I hoped we might remain friends.

“Redmond, are you there?”

My stomach dropped again. That damned radio needed some sort of warning. A quick bit of crackling or a soothing melodic overture. Just a few notes would do. Do, re, mi, and then Rishi. Maybe even a flashing red light before the voice of God came out of it.

“I’m here, Rishi.”

Now, I had to decide whether or not to tell him I’d tapped the rear end of a semi. Car coining or my tuna sandwich and milk with Jinx, one had already come back to bite me in the ass. I didn’t hear any brakeage when I breaked. No cracking headlight or crunching bumper. Hopefully, it was still attached to my cab and not the ginormous FedEx truck that would take it back to its depot instead of Lucky Clover’s in Springfield.

“Is everything okay, Redmond?”

My heart decelerated as my cab did the opposite once the light turned green. No part of Rishi’s new van was attached to the eighteen wheeler, so that allowed me a sigh of relief. I’d check for scrapes or scratches I could hopefully rub off with my shirt sleeve when I could find a place to stop.

“All’s well,” I said. “I just forgot how to talk back to you.” I’d always been told little white lies are harmless. As long as Rishi never found out I was setting up a potential f**k date while almost wrecking his cab, I’d be Employee of the Week my very first one on the job.

“Ah. We have a pickup at the airport, Redmond.”

“Oh.” That was rather disappointing. Since Rishi ran the type of service where we were allowed to pick up passengers who hailed us on the street, I assumed I’d mostly do that. The thought of different people getting into my cab all night, new characters, like in a play, was almost fun. I thought I might even meet someone famous. “Okay.” Ten minutes in, my job was one disappointment after another.

“Credit card payment, so the fare started the moment he called. Do not rush. Be safe.”

A two-hour trek to the airport, then back to wherever he or she wanted to go, one fare taking up half my night, it was kind of a bummer. “Got it, Rishi.”

“His flight arrives in two point five hours.”

And I’d have to wait at least half an hour once I arrived.

“He will meet you at the taxi terminal outside gate nine.”

“Got it.” I already felt like I needed a new catchphrase. “Roger that.”

Not that one.

“Over and out.” The humor in Rishi’s voice brought a smile to my lips.

I decided my first fare had to be some douchey rich guy who could afford ten times more than necessary for taxi service just for the convenience of having me there waiting for him like a personal chauffeur. Nasrin had become a chauffeur. She’d be working a lot of big life events. Weddings, funerals, and proms, I figured. My brother had offered to drive me to senior prom in his ten-year-old Ford. One of my aunts had driven me to the one funeral I’d attended so far in my life. The thought of requesting Nasrin to drive me to my wedding made me smile again. The image of Jordan in a tux was quite appealing. The notion of stripping it off him as we honeymooned in a Hawaiian hotel suite on a thirteenth floor, a suite he could easily afford once a Broadway star, was even better.

I had no doubt Jordan would stay likable even once rich and famous. “See you soon, jerk.” My first fare, on the other hand, I’d already decided I was going to detest.

My driver ID told me to simmer down. “Newsflash, Renny,” I imagined him saying. “You’re a taxi driver. So, shut up and drive.”

“Roger that.” Then I said, “Bixby, play Rhianna,” and made a U-turn to head to the airport.

Other than brief exchanges with Rishi, Jordan, and my brother, Cyan, most of the talking I did involved barking orders to technological entities like Spotify’s Bixby or sss’s Alexa. Would I be able to make conversation with airport dude? Would he want me to? It was a part of the job I hadn’t given much thought to. Now, I couldn’t think of anything else.

Luckily, though not the best trait a professional driver could possess, I was easily distracted. Having lived in Springfield all my life, every street sign, every building, every locale brought back a memory, an ambition, a loss, a failure. It wasn’t long before homes gave way to storefronts. Overture, on the corner of Fifth and Divinity, was the music store where my mother bought me a horn when I was only three years old.

My first bit of interest in music—my first show of talent—came one year prior. It wasn’t something I remembered, but there was video taken by my dad in our living room to prove it.

“I like the big one.”

“The little one’s a piccolo trumpet. The biggest is a flugelhorn.” My mother was quite petite. She had dark hair, which she’d passed down to my siblings, and wore a flowing silk robe in many of the videos I had of us. In the first one that came to mind, the robe was blue. If she wasn’t in a robe, Mom was in a gown, slinky, tight, sometimes velvet, sometimes satin, often accentuated or totally covered with sequins. Her attire changed according to what time of day the video was shot.

My father zoomed in on my freckled toddler face and fluttering ginger wisps dancing about from the ceiling fan in the living room. Then his lens caught the same, reflected now in the flugelhorn’s huge bell resting on the glass and wrought iron coffee table. Despite the fabrication and regal nature of my mother’s main wardrobe, our home wasn’t fancy. My parents were what one might call comfortable, our suburban neighborhood sort of cookie cutter with white, two-story houses featuring gray shingled roofs and black shutters. My parents owned the one we lived in and one on either side, which generated income via rent not quite sufficient to cover school and property taxes on three parcels of land and three houses. We were far enough from downtown to have green lawns and play in the street, but close enough to have to lock our doors at night. Our finances weren’t even on my radar back then. I had an endless supply of sugary cereal, peanut butter and jelly, juice boxes, and Oreos. At age two, what more did I need? Now, I thought about money a lot.

“It’ll be a few years before you can even hold one of those,” Mom said regarding the giant brass instrument.

While some boys looked forward to growing into their father’s leather jacket or the family car, I envisioned a future where I could pick up my mother’s flugelhorn. Mom played in high school. She also played in the US Army Corps band. The few photographs I had of her holding a trumpet from those days in the military were precious to me. No fancy gowns or perfectly coiffed curls, no makeup or shimmering jewelry adorning her ears or her neck, Mom stood at attention in her uniform, dark heavy wool, gold buttons in a straight line down the front, the visor on her hat a gleaming black, with her horn held in front of her, like other soldiers held their weapon for present arms. Despite a time during World War II when the army corps formed all female bands to perform for departing and arriving troops, in the 1970s, when Greenlee Brooks was elected to the line-up, a woman in the ranks was a rarity.

Mom wanted my older sister to follow suit. Amber was already ten when I was two. My brother was fifteen. Amber was what was referred to in the family as a surprise. I, my parents admitted, was a complete shock.

“Only three percent of trumpeters are female,” my mother tells Amber in one particular video. “We need to keep the Brooks tradition alive.”

My sister had no interest. “I’m not a Brooks. I’m a Hennessy.”

“You’re half Brooks,” Mom reminded her.

The point was moot, since Amber had even less talent than interest.

“You can’t just blow into it. Not like blowing out birthday candles.” There were at least a dozen recordings of my mother saying the same exact thing. “Like this. Close your mouth and blow. Blow hard. If a noise comes out, even better.”

How adorable was I imitating the lip sputter in video thirteen once Amber had stomped off? Pretty damned adorable according to Dad.

“That’s pretty damned adorable!”

Immediately, my mother put the horn to my mouth. “Do it again.”

If I closed my eyes, even twenty-six years later, I could smell her perfume and maybe a hint of some sort of liquor she’d sipped during her night at work. No matter the hour—always after three, sometimes as late as five in the morning—I always made sure to be up when my parents got home from The Silver Note, the jazz club where my mother played, and my father handled all business matters. Numbers, hours, big hands, little hands, I was years away from knowing anything about those. It was some sort of Pavlovian response. Whenever I heard the car door out front, I sprang from my toddler bed knowing the treat would be alone time with Mom and Dad in their fancy clothes, lots of attention, and now, music lessons.

“Sweet Renny, what are you doing up?”

I could still summon the feel of my cheek against silver satin as Mom offered a hug and Dad, sporting his pinstripe suit and a tie and pocket square that matched both the color and material of Mom’s gown, filmed the embrace.

“When do you sleep?”

I slept most of the day, like they did.

Mom showed me the closed mouth lip sputter again in our first real predawn lesson. It sounded just like when my brother, Cyan, made fart noises against his forearm. Both things made me giggle. I mimicked Mom’s sputter, my lips close together and just a fraction of an inch from the mouthpiece.

“And again.” Mom brought the mouthpiece closer, right against my mouth. She sputtered. I sputtered, and then I jumped back, maybe startled.

Maybe proud.

I was never certain as a viewer, and now there was no one reliable to remind me of the feeling.

What came out of the horn, the sound, it could barely be called that. It was hardly a note, let alone music.

“Bravo, Renny!” But my mother reacted as if I’d played an entire symphony. There was no mistaking her emotion. She beamed. The sheen of satin caught every ray of light in the room, and my father’s camera caught every glint of her jovial eyes as she shimmied with glee and clapped for me.

I understood the euphoria of applause long before Jordan. My first taste of it made me literally shudder.

“I still think you pissed your diaper.” My brother’s take was the same at our current ages, his forty-three and mine twenty-eight when we recently watched the clip together, as it had been when he was fifteen and I was only halfway through potty training.