All I wanted was to play ‘Sicilienne’ for two flutes and piano in a competition I’d set my sights on. Two other musicians to complete the trio were needed, so I put an ad on the online conservatory billboard and waited a hell of a long time for anyone to respond. My fault. In my haste, I had pressed send and closed the page without checking, so the ad said ‘Looking for two glutes’ until a week later. Imagine my chagrin.
The piece entailed a lot of hard practice. I set up in the spare room and attacked the first page. My flute was not top quality, but Bernie, a sax player I know, told me that my sound was great—round and smooth. The second page had a passage I found difficult, and especially one measure, where I kept getting snagged by a B flat. I circled it, and kept going, but every time I came to it, I played plain B.
This is when the demons in me woke up and took over. They stood over me, rooting me to the spot in front of the music stand, day and night, teasing me, bullying me, frightening me, but mostly, keeping me there, until there was a knock on the door.
My upstairs neighbor.
“I don’t know if you realize how fucking annoying you are with that goddamn B flat!”
(He was a cellist, and one who would never stoop to play with the likes of me.)
I turned fifty shades of red. The last being one of indignation, because as tragic as it was that I couldn’t play the note in question, I thought he should have lead with a ‘hello’ or one of the standard softeners, ‘I hate to tell you this, but…’ And obviously, he didn’t hate it. He was enjoying this, which made me even madder. I told him if he liked I could go up with him to his place and turn his cello into a nice piece of headwear.
He stormed off, and I slammed the door. A walk in the city park was what I needed, a break—no, wait. The demons were ordering me to take the flute with me and practice au plein air. Only the extensor muscles in my right forearm disagreed, but the demons told them to shut their noise.
I knew places deep in the park where people would walk and contemplate the season in the fall, or feel relieved from the heat in summer. No distractions there. The park was big enough to buffer the sound of traffic on all sides. Wildflowers, pleasant paths and sun-dappled benches awaited me. It was only two p.m.
I set up in front of a hoary oak and took a deep breath. The sound of my flute mixed with the calls of the birds and the chittering of some animal I couldn’t see over the music stand. When I got to the second page, there was the B flat, circled in red like it had been spanked.
“Play it right or you don’t get to go home,” hissed the demon.
Of course, I played B.
“Leave off hassling me!”
I was talking out loud and didn’t care who heard me. “How can I concentrate with you breathing down my neck?”
This is when I realized a man was standing there watching me. I jumped. It’s not unusual for people to linger a bit and then move on when you play in public, but we were alone, and there was something odd here. His hair. The pattern of his shirt. The way he was standing. Something in his expression. It was off. Guilty, like a puppy who’d just messed the carpet, and also unmistakably nervous.
“Hello,” he said. I nodded, beaming go away vibes at him.
"You play beautifully." He pulled the stringy hair falling over his dome-like forehead to one side.
"Thank you." The glare in my eyes went from mezzo-forte to fortissimo.
"I wonder if you could help me."
Oh shit.
"What with?"
There, he skipped a beat and I feared the worst.
"I want you to watch."
My brain refused to engage with the words until his hands moved to his belt. My hands held the flute like a baseball bat.
"Get out of here, you sick fuck!"
The pervert slash intruder was so terrified, he jumped over a row of low hedges and fell face first in the grass, then scrambled to his feet and disappeared into the foliage. It didn’t matter that I had got rid of him. My idyllic spot was irrevocably spoiled. Cursing green space urban environments, I decamped.
By the time I reached the more populated section of the park, I felt better. There was the artificial lake and the innocent ducks and swans and children. The chestnut vendor chatted with customers and a trio of musicians playing the Mozart Serenade No. 2. I bought ice cream and sat to listen to the tail end of their little performance. All was right with the world, except that the demon was telling me to get back to work.
“Okay. Jesus!” I groused while I set up on a grassy hill.
My lungs filled with air and the sound of Fauré filled the air. Page one was sounding divine, and to my delight when I saw the red circle coming I didn’t panic, but leaped right into measure thirty, clearing the B flat as if I’d been born to do it. I went on to page three and page four, holding another B flat in my mouth for the appropriate number of beats, and rapturously so, when something went splat right between the B and A keys, no more than three inches away from my face.
Pigeon shit.
Now, the risk of pigeon guano-related diseases is rare, but what’s associated with these droppings includes Cryptococcosis, Histoplasmosis and Psittacosis. Nasty things from the Dark Ages. You can become infected with these diseases by just breathing in the dust created when cleaning droppings, so imagine what the fresh stuff can do. Plus, it’s acidic. My face stung where it splashed me. The demon was laughing itself silly, ‘I told you so’s’ included, since we had argued about the idea of going to the park in the first place. It took a lot of pipe cleaners to get all the particles out of delicate foot joints and crevices of the keys’ mechanisms, but I did so with all the patience and dedication I could muster.
Ugh Ugh Ugh Ugh. We won the competition, I'm happy to say, but the first prize was a plaque with a bird on it, that looked suspiciously like that damned pigeon.