Views and Mechanics Publisher's Note Editor's Note Review of A Man Without a Country Review of Gail's Place Review of Three 1-Act Plays Review of Yesterday's A Dream Crossword (Solution Posted in May. Printable version in pdf format of journal.) Jan/Feb Crossword Solution Creative Nonfiction Imagining Nora By Lisa Norris Loving the Fat Girl By Christina Fisanick Nate's Fish and Poultry Shop By G. David Schwartz The Folly of Valentine's Day By Andy Martello Poetry Hawk King By Wanda D. Campbell After the Rain By Wanda D. Campbell You Cannot Fold the Flood. By Mariela Perez-Simons And Darkness Fell By Beth L. Block Demise of a Family Resort By Carolyn Howard-Johnson The Asparagus Cutters By Joe Wilkins Fiction Voices By Ed Boyd Little White Sambo By Brett Alan Sanders Dies Irae By Timothy Reilly Follow By Dawn Paul Crumbs By Kim Tremblett Cover Art Photography by Seth Brown About the Contributors © 2006, River Walk Journal and respective authors and artists. All rights reserved. Do not use or reproduce without permission. River Walk Journal, Inc. Board of Directors Chairman - Elizabeth Ross Vice Chairman - Joseph Koch Secretary/Treasurer - Geri Stock-Ross Editorial Director - Patti Kurtz, DA Literacy Director - Bill Mausteller Policy Director - PA State Rep. Jess Stairs Advisory Board Chairman - Patti Kurtz, DA Asst. Chairman - Dan Lachenman, PhD Samuel Hazo Christopher Leland Edwin Yoder Joseph Bathanti Journal Staff Publisher - Elizabeth Ross Editor-In-Chief - Joseph Koch Sen. Fiction Editor - Patti Kurtz Sen. Poetry Editor - Neeldhara Misra Sen. Creative Nonfiction Editor - Brenda Coxe Contributing Editor - Robert Dittman Publicity Director (PA) - Geri Stock-Ross For information about submissions, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/submission.html. Questions about promotions, subscribers' services, and advertising should be sent to publisher@riverwalkjournal.org. River Walk Journal, Inc. is a non-profit corporation run entirely by volunteers. For information about volunteer opportunities and internships, visit http://www.riverwalkjournal.org/volunteer.html. |
Dies Irae By Timothy Reilly --For Jo-Anne The word was that Gordon Nibbs had been offered the chair months ago; the audition was a sham: for appearances only. Still, over one hundred hopefuls, lugging from one to three tubas apiece, were crowding into a stuffy conference room at the Ramada Inn, waiting to take a turn in the high-ceilinged hall, performing to a burlap curtain, behind which sat an unknown number of icy judges, whom (the candidates dreamed) might be persuaded to dislodge set outcomes and choose a hitherto unknown—from New Mexico or New Hampshire or New Jersey or some old place—when confronted by the virtuosic execution of solos and excerpts, and a tone-quality to draw tears from devils. Gus Nolan was among the herd shuttled into the waiting room. He carried the traditional two tubas: an F and a CC (in tessituric order). Gus was a veteran of six auditions, and held hope with a death grip. He was wary of the common pitfalls: showing up too early, drinking too much coffee, inadequate or excessive warm up, talking or listening to the other candidates . . . That was the difficult part: ignoring the others. There are those who are expert at unnerving the competition. It doesn’t take much, either: "Jeez, you sound incredible," a rival once said, hugging a vintage silver-plated York. "I just wasted an airline ticket." With those very words, Gus Nolan went down in flames, auditioning for the Pittsburgh Symphony. As if possessed by demons, he’d suddenly developed a severely flamboyant vibrato, and his rendition of the second movement from the Vaughan-William’s Tuba Concerto, sounded like Julia Childs singing in the shower. NEXT. Sometimes the distractions are unintentional. A well-meaning player may have come from some small town or village, traveling to the big city with the pie-faced innocence of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. "So you’re a paddle-pusher?" said one Mr. Smith, noting Gus’s rotary valve tuba. "I prefer the piston, myself—less pops in the slurs." At that doomed audition, Gus "popped" his way through the slurred (sehr gehalten) and treacherous opening bars of Wagner's "Eine Faust-Ouvertüre." Vielen Dank! Herr Schmidt. Equipment can also be a factor: the tuba can legitimately malfunction. Valves—paddle or piston—can work flawlessly for years, then, when a career is in the balance, a valve can freeze in a limbo between nodes, causing a comically muffled sound, like a leaky serpent horn. This can occur during a performance or audition, and in either case, the human part of the duo is charged with the err. Then there is the mysterious "clam." A clam is simply a botched note: overshot, undershot, or shattered completely. It can happen to any player, at any time—the great and the meek. It’s the bullet with your name on it, the sports equivalent to a Bronze Medal in gymnastics (a slip on the dismount, after a perfect routine). A single clam eliminated Gus at one audition. It struck at the gate of one of the most familiar tuba licks: the Dies Irae, from the fifth movement of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. It’s an excerpt that Gus always played beautifully. He could play it standing on his head—with a sousaphone, a beer bottle, a garden hose—and the pity was he’d had a great audition up to that point. "Now, Mr. Nolan, we’d like to hear the entrance after sixty-six." Gus raised his F tuba and began: Di-es Ir-ae, di-es il-%#! "Thank you, Mr. Nolan. That will be all." Gus arrived at the present audition seventy minutes before his scheduled time slot. To help avert his attention from the siren song of failure, he brought a copy of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur. He sat in a metal fold-up chair, hiding his face behind the massive volume. He wandered half-heartedly through the thick language, taking frequent side trips to the Pre-Raphaelite illustrations, of which, one—a knight reaching desperately toward a vision of the Holy Grail—seemed to best represent his current predicament. The book, however, offered Gus little refuge: his ears were too well-trained to ignore the pandemonium of scales, arpeggios, lip flexibilities, tonguing exercises, etudes, and excerpts. His ingrained awareness of intonation, automatically identified the pitch (E flat) of a dying florescent light bulb. He also recognized the chatter of a familiar cast of auditioners—the Low Brass Philosophers, the Iagos, the Mr. Smiths, the Eeyores, the Jolly Jumbos, and the Ding-Dong Daddies from Dumas. And there was a new variant to the mix: a Hobo tubaist. It would have been impossible not to notice the man. His tuba, a battered four valve Miraphone BB flat, was draped in a quilted moving van blanket; his dark curly hair was uncombed, his face unshaven and bewildered, and his clothes—a wild mismatch of colors—had been bed clothes, for at least three days. Gus heard the Hobo tubaist mention that he’d ridden the Greyhound Bus, all the way from Florida, and that he’d be lodging at the Y. Gus peeked over the top of his book and studied the Hobo’s face: the face of Saint Sebastian, in the process of martyrdom. "Why do guys like that even bother to show up?" said a Ding-Dong Daddy. "Why did I show up?" Gus asked himself. Auditioners were called into the high-ceilinged room one at a time. They entered through a small door that disappeared into a wall panel when closed. After each admittance, a field of curious heads bent heliotropically, straining to steal a peek of the other room. Those who completed auditions did not return to the waiting room. Only eight or ten of the one hundred-plus would be chosen to return later that day, for the final weeding out. Gus had carefully planned his warm-up strategy. He began the warm-up forty minutes before his audition time, playing in leisurely increments of five or six minutes each, beginning with the traditional Schlossberg Daily Drills. Nothing was played full volume. After the drills, he played fragments from openings of the most hazardous excerpts and a few mid-ranged cantabile passages. He knew the repertoire; there would be no surprises. Gus used the same routine for both tubas, and pretended to read his book, while resting. Gus had just finished playing a gentle solo from Lieutenant Kijé, and was gazing at a picture of the Green Knight, when someone, breathing like Darth Vader, shuffled up behind him. The man stood there a moment, drumming the bell of his tuba, then asked, "Aren’t you Gordon Nibbs?" Gus, without turning around, replied "Not me." The man, a hybrid Jolly Jumbo/Iago, shuffled a half circle to view Gus face to face. "Hmh," he half snorted. "That an F?" he said, pointing to the smaller instrument resting on its bell. "Yeah." "Miraphone?" "Alexander." "Hmh." "Do you want something?" "Oh. . . no. I just heard some bea-utiful sounds coming from over here, and I thought it was Gordon Nibbs—‘His Nibbs,’ as we call him." Jolly Iago continued drumming his bell, staring, and breathing loudly. "You may go now." "Hmh." Jolly Iago left to make his rounds, seeking to shatter the nerves of unsuspecting souls. "Mind if I try your axe?" he said to one victim. "Ah. . .yeah. Sure. Go ‘head." Jolly Iago proceeded to play—at full performance volume—the entire solo from Die Meistersinger. When he finished, he held the tuba as if inspecting a bottle of wine and asked "This a Hersbrunner?" "It’s a Holton." "Hmh," said Jolly Iago, nodding his head and smirking like Charles Laughton’s Captain Bly. He continued to play through a good portion of the audition list, ending his impromptu concert with the "Bydlo" solo from Pictures at an Exhibition—just to show he could do it on a big horn. "Hmh. Nice horn." Gus took solace in the probability of Jolly Iago blowing his chops before his turn. But other distractions were breaking through Gus’s fragile defenses. He had his own worst enemy to deal with—self doubt was on him like the "Anvil Chorus." "What’s the point?" the chorus sang. "It’s like being one out of a million sperm cells: only one gets through to the egg, and that one is one Mr. Gordon Nibbs." "Why not me?" Gus answered in his head. "I’m as good as the next man. I’ve paid my dues. I’m prepared." "Are you? Have you? Are you?" Gus looked deeper into himself and found an emaciated old man, holding on to a tattered banner. "We can do it," the old man said. "Don’t listen to them." "Hmh," a sound from the outside world broke in. "Mind if I try your axe?" The intensity of Gus’s stare caused the intruder to retreat just beyond the range of a right hook. "Keep your goddamned hands off my tuba!" Gus warned. A panel in the wall opened and Gus heard a powerful and indifferent voice call his name. The voice cut through the din like a war trumpet. |