The Magic Horn AU CC Mature ch 12 pg3 Jan 18, 2007
Posted: Sun Dec 03, 2006 5:24 pm

The Magic Horn
M,L I,A M,M Kyle and Tess unpaired
AU without aliens
Mature I am not very racy anyhow.
I hope to show all due respect to characters not mine they belong to the commercial Roswell procucers. They are used in accordance to their character in different roles. I claim only the plot line and the joy of jazz.
In the year 2001 my younger son was killed in a car accident coming home from college. While spending most of my time staring at a blank wall I discovered Roswell everyday on the Sci fi channel. Roswell had some young actors portraying young characters much like I had in my classes through my many years of teaching. I listen to TIVO recordings over and over. I read all the Mentz books and the others that were written. I bought the first edition of the DVD that came out on Amazon. Finally my older son told me about fanfiction. I found an unlimited selection of Roswell stories. I read through hundreds of marriages and thousands of pregnancies. Finally I decided to try to write some myself.
This story comes from the lectures my young son gave me about what he saw in jazz. He was a Macintosh programmer, a mathematician and he played a jazz trumpet. After his death I spent a year studying jazz, taking trumpet lessons to regain what I had in high school. I learned Jazz the way his teacher taught him. Listen until you can memorize, practice until you can play by ear and then explore the freedom that jazz gives without being an anarchist.
There is a delightful movie with Reece Whitherspoon. I worked very hard not to make this in any way like that movie. Toward the end of my story I will tell the name of the movie. It is a good view.
I am not trying to sell anything and I do not mean this as a commercial but most of the artist and the pieces can be previewed on Itunes. They have a good search engine. The 30 second snippets are free and if you want the feel for what I am talking about it might help. I have tried to describe the feeling of playing a trumpet and the feeling I receive from playing jazz. I am sure I will fall short, sorry.
The Gypsy culture was studied many years ago so where I make mistakes forgive me. There is absolutely no logic in this story. It is magic. I Hope someone likes my story. I need to write this in memory of my son. John Keith Renouard.
The Magic Horn
Chapter 1
Max was a good student in his junior year. He had majored in business with forays into philosophy, humanities and music. His parents had been tolerant in most of his detours through his college career. His father, a Lawyer, felt that any knowledge would have use someday and his mother, a student of literature, felt that she wanted a son who had a broad education. The one thing he had stuck with was his interest in music. Max never intended to perform professionally. But, he used his trumpet as both an entertainment device for friends and a distraction for himself.
It is said that the junior year in both college and high school is a hard year for many students. They have suffered for so long in academics and the finish looks so far in the future. The excitement of being a freshman and the hope of finishing as a senior are both so distant that the limbo is emotionally difficult. When Max would tire of the repetitive pounding of his mental resources by his classes, he would sometimes find a secluded corner of the campus and just let his trumpet lead him where ever. Max had been trained in music by studying the classics. Now, he preferred the migration to Jazz. Jazz gave him a freedom that he didn’t have in his other disciplines. With Jazz, you could skirt convention and still embrace a song without following the rest of the world as they played the melody. It was natural for Max to sometimes jam with other players. Do they still call it jamming? Time sometimes leaves me with an archaic vocabulary that does not correctly convey my intent.
There was a small club that three or four of his acquaintances would play at on weekends. Max wasn’t there every weekend, but he was there enough that they always invited him to join them. As Max progressed through his college career, it seemed that his relationship to his music became stronger. Max had a good grade point average, but the more stress he faced maintaining this average made his music more of a necessity. He had a good trumpet that he had played in high school. It was like an old girl friend who he was comfortable with.
Max had a twin sister. Their makeup couldn’t have been more different. Isabel was an ‘out there’ girl. She was a student of marketing. She already had summer mentorships with big corporations, first enjoying their philanthropic status of helping students and then of nurturing these same students as potential employees. She was close to Max, but she was also exasperated with him because, while she had hard and fast directions as to where her education was going, Max just seemed to be drifting. Isabel already had invitations of employment to consider and also offers of graduate schools to attend. Max had the grades, but no one knew what he wanted and thus there weren’t any avenues open for him to travel. He would have to make his own way. Max also had two friends, Maria and her on again off again boyfriend Michael. Maria always had Michael to fight with so she couldn’t help feeling that Max was missing something. Max was good looking enough, but he was a serious young man. The girls he met were either just after a good lay for the night or they were just looking for a husband to care for them. Max didn’t have the slightest idea what kind of girl he was looking for. Maybe, he wasn’t even looking for any girl. He felt alone sometimes even in a crowd. Maybe, this was his destiny.
Maria was a student of music and sometimes her path crossed with that of Max in his playing. She was serious in her study and intended to someday sing professionally. Michael was a civil engineer who hoped to build bridges. He felt that walking and driving across water was magical. It was clear to Max that both Michael and Maria enjoyed their volatile relationship. They enjoyed the mutual banter as they quarreled and loved. There was Tess, the little blonde sorority girl, who had intentions on Max, but these intentions were only to her structure and restrictions. Tess was available when her sorority was not having functions. At these times, she was insistent as to the attention she demanded from him. When her sisterhood was having activities she completely avoided him. Max just couldn’t live with this slavery to her schedule and needs, but never his.
Tess would sometimes trap him into being her consort but Max just wasn’t that able to selflessly serve her needs. He admired Isabel with her computer engineer boyfriend, who she would probably marry someday. They both were at the top of their studies and would become a professional couple someday as they wound their way through the world of business. To Max, even the business management he was studying just didn’t seem to be the sanctuary he was seeking.
This junior year, Max had become depressive. He just couldn’t shake the fact that his life was traveling directions that everyone else approved of, but to him, his life was just wheels spinning on the ice. On weekends, Max had taken to walking down some of the seedier streets near the university. These streets were lined with used bookstores and pawnshops. As students had need of quick money, they sold the Bibles and gadgets that Aunt Emm had given them for graduation. The pawnshops were always full of guitars and other instruments. Max liked to look in the windows and, sometimes, he would go in to get a closer look at one instrument or another. He was further from the “U” than usual today. Sometimes, he felt that if he were mugged, it would force his body and soul toward some direction that he could continue. Max, as so many, was looking for purpose.
The street was lined with ethnic bars. There was a Hispanic bar with Mariachi music blaring. Max liked this music and he slowed to listen for a minute. Max heard running foot steps and he tightened his shoulders expecting to feel a blow, but the runner at the last minute just brushed Max as he headed for where ever his destination was. Max knew he really did not have any business alone in this part of town. He turned down a side street and, again, was faced with Pawnshops. He browsed, looking in the windows.
At last, he saw it. In the window was a dusty, silver trumpet. Max looked closely, and sure enough, it had the double supports on the tuning slide that indicated a Bach. There were so many other new trumpets that now used these twin supports that Max wanted to get a better look. The bell over the door rang. The old man who came from the curtained back seemed right out of a fairy tale. He was bent and using a cane. He looked with rheumy eyes over small glasses at Max. “May I help you,” he inquired.
“May I look at that trumpet in the window,” Max asked.
The old man frowned, but he complied. He moved to the window as one in pain. Carefully, almost tenderly, he lifted the trumpet from its stand. He presented it to Max all the while watching his face. Max got the impression that he was being studied like a bug in biology.
Max looked carefully. It was a Bach Strad. It didn’t have any dints, but it was terribly tarnished. The valves were stuck. It had a mediocre mouthpiece and the slides did not move smoothly. Without asking, Max took the trumpet over to the water cooler and unscrewed the valves. He put a drop of water on each valve and worked each of them up and down. Their movement was sharp once he got them moving. He went back to the showcase and put the trumpet to his lips. The sound he made was so gut wrenching that even the old man looked like he would cry. Max ran up and down a few scales and then he started playing the blues. As he started to play, the trumpet seemed to take on a life of its own. He ranged from the highest notes to the low pedal tones. It was hard to stop. This trumpet in his hands felt truly magical. He put the trumpet down and asked the old man how much. On the tag, it said two thousand dollars. There was no way Max could come up with that much money, but the feeling as he was playing this instrument was almost dream like. Max wasn’t sure he could allow himself to pass on the instrument. The old man, wiping his eyes, wrote one thousand on a paper and slid it toward Max. Max hesitated; this would wipe out his account for the semester. The old man quickly withdrew the paper and wrote eight hundred, then slid it back to Max. He seemed almost eager for Max to have the horn. Max, with no rational thought, what-so-ever, took out his credit card and bought it. There would be hell to pay when his parents saw the bill. They would take every bit of the eight hundred out of his allotted money for the semester, but Max couldn’t leave without that horn. The old man found a beat up trumpet case that had the label of Olds or Conn or something on it and he put the trumpet in the case for Max to take. A very strange thing happened when he brought the cased trumpet out to give to Max. He hugged Max like he would a son and Max saw tears in the elder’s eyes. Later, Max was to wonder about this.
On the way home, Max stopped at a music store and purchased valve oil, slide grease, some cleaning brushes and several silver, instrument polishing cloths. The rest of the day, Max spent running hot water through the trumpet cleaning and greasing the slides and carefully oiling the valves. Then, he started to use the polishing cloth. It took a long time, but by night time, the trumpet shown like new. With all of the gunk cleaned out of the bore, the sound was truly heavenly. Max got a silk handkerchief out of his drawer, one that some relative had given him for Christmas and holding the trumpet in this cloth, he began to play. He was so happy with the tone that he couldn’t wait to try it at the little club where he and his friends played.
As stated before, Max wasn’t regular in his playing with the small combo. Tonight, they had a piano player who had written some music of his own. At first, the piano player was embarrassed because he hadn’t written a trumpet part, but the band members all just said Max would catch up. They started the first piece. Max waited until he had a feel for the melody and the chords. Then, so softly the audience could barely hear him, he started his journey about the piano players melody and the chords from the base. At the end of the piece, he had increased the volume to the point where he was now leading the song. The feeling he had before and every time after, that the trumpet played itself was there again. The piano player, the rest of the band members and the audience were mesmerized. When they stopped, there was silence and then the applause rose as the audience stood and the band stomped their feet, the musicians equivalent of clapping. Max lowered his trumpet and just looked blankly for several seconds. When he came to his senses, he started to look frantically around.
“Where is she?” he asked of the base player. The man looked at Max incredulously.
“Where is who?” he replied with a question.
“The dark haired woman, she was right in front of me. She had long dark hair and soft dark eyes. She stood right in front of me as I was playing.” Max was looking everywhere around the club.
The bass player shook his head. He had never known Max to touch chemicals, but he knew that Max was under a lot of stress. “Man, there was no one up on the stage with us!”
Max just shook his head.
The next set of songs that the combo leader, who was the base player, called out were old time jazz favorites from the great band era. The piano player started with an old blues song and, at his nod, Max came in. They played against each other, first one, then the other leading. The crowd loved every minute of it. For tonight, the little club was as popular as a Vegas casino as the audience was treated to song after song, played as well as they had ever heard before. Max wasn’t even aware of what was happening. His lips thinned out and they vibrated as the muscles in his face tightened. The trumpet itself seemed to be controlling his playing. He automatically followed the other musicians and then departed on his own to enhance their efforts.
Max was far from reality. Before him was a slender, bright-eyed girl or young woman, what ever. She was sad, but as he played she seemed to become stronger. As she became stronger, Max increased his intensity. When the set was over, Max almost passed out. It was only the string base player who caught him that prevented him from falling. For the first time any of the band could remember, during their break, Max asked for a drink. The bartender poured him a shot of scotch, neat, which he downed in one gulp. He coughed as the raw whisky went down his throat. Max was playing better than he had ever played, but he wasn’t himself, otherwise. During the last set, Maria and Michael stopped by. They intended to pick up Max and head back to the University. Michael enjoyed music, but it was Maria’s trained ear that picked up the difference in Max’s playing.
As the band was putting away their instruments, Maria came up to Max. She threw her arms around him. “Max, I have never heard music so moving. The whole audience had not a dry eye in the house. What did you do?”
Max was still looking around. He grabbed Maria and looked at her. “Did you see her?” He pleaded with his eyes.
“See who Maxwell?” this was Michael.
“The girl with the long brown hair and the soft brown eyes, about in her early twenties and very small.” Max looked from Maria to Michael.
“Max, we didn’t see anyone like that,” Maria said. She was beginning to become alarmed.
When Max arrived home, the one drink and the stress of the evening caused him to fall asleep as soon as he was in bed.
In front of him was the face again. “Hello,” she said.
“Ah, hey,” Max replied. “Who are you?”
“I don’t know. I only know something called me tonight,” she said in a very weak voice.
“”My name is Max. What is yours?” Max was determined to keep the conversation going.
“Hey Max, did I say it right? I don’t think I have a name,” she said.
“What do I call you?” Max asked.
“What do you want to call me?” was her reply.
“What about Elizabeth? Max suggested.
“Why Elizabeth? she asked.
It was the name of the first girl I ever kissed, in the fifth grade. Of course, I then showed her my pet spider and she ran off screaming,” Max told her.
“Well, I promise not to run off if you promise not to scare me,” she was smiling.
“Where did you come from?” Max inquired.
“I don’t know that either, but I am feeling weak. I think I am going away, again.” She began to disappear.