The Ramen King and I (22 page)

 

The last time I painted something, I was in the first grade. I tried to paint a man standing outside on a sunny day, but I mixed too much water into the watercolor paint, and the blue in the sky dripped down, obscuring the scene. I turned the painting upside down and titled it the “The Drip-Up.” It’s still hanging in my parents’ living room.

As for where the desire to draw came from, I’m not sure. It’s possible that watching Takezo whittle in
Samurai Trilogy II
had something to do with it, because there was something attractive about that, though I didn’t feel like whittling. My friend Carla, who is a painter, suggested that I start out with a drawing class, so I enrolled in one at City College of San Francisco. On the first day, the teacher placed a plastic duck on a pedestal in the middle of the classroom.

“Your assignment,” the teacher said, “is to sketch the duck with a stick of charcoal.” But there was a catch. “You may not look at your hand or your paper.”

“Just look at the duck,” the teacher urged, over and over. “Really
see
the duck.”

When I was done with the sketch, I looked at my paper.

THIS LOOKS LIKE A SHOE, NOT A DUCK.

And then I understood that the purpose of the exercise was to hear that voice, and that there were many ways to begin hearing it, not only trying (and failing) to meet the inventor of instant ramen without an appointment.

A woman in the class said, “My drawing so does not look like a duck!” She must have found the voice in her head unbearable, because soon she was in tears, hitting herself over the head with a pencil sharpener. She left the classroom and never came back.

The trombone I had played for twenty-five years, the one my parents bought me when I was in high school, had been stolen from my car in a San Francisco parking lot. For several years I had played a spare Yamaha model, but I didn’t like it very much. It just didn’t feel like me.

I tracked down a used instrument shop in the phone book, and drove over. I blew into nine used trombones, but they were all either too wispy- or fat-sounding. On my way out, I spotted a tenth trombone, a 1959 Conn 78H, and when I blew into it, I heard a tone that was not too wispy and not too fat. It sounded regal, but kind of dirty. Like a king standing in a swamp.

I traded in my Yamaha for the 78H, and on the way home from the instrument shop, I stopped at a Starbucks, where I sat down at one of the tables to read the essay at the end of
Ramen Discovery Legend
Book 13, the one about hard versus soft water in ramen broths. (An essay by real-life ramen critic Hideyuki Ishigami—under titles such as “Toppings,” “Scallions,” and “Roast Pork”—appears at the end of every
Ramen Discovery Legend
paperback.) Halfway through, I noticed a woman standing in front of me.

“You play bone?” the woman asked.

I looked up. She had gray hair and she was pointing to the instrument case at my feet.

“Yes.”

“You like jazz?”

“Yes.”

She asked a barista for a napkin and a pen. Then she wrote an address on the napkin and handed it to me.

“Go there on Monday night,” she said.

“What’s there?”

“Just go. And bring the horn.”

The following Monday night, I found the address on a gray warehouse in a narrow alley. As I approached the building, I began hearing the sounds of wind and percussion instruments. I knocked on the heavy front door, but no one answered. I gently pushed the door, but it wouldn’t budge.

I pushed harder, and the door flew open. The band was coming to the end of a modern, up-tempo arrangement of “Take the A Train.”

The musicians were all men. Most looked past retirement age, and they sat surrounded by lathes, drills, and computer-controlled saws. I noticed the cereal-box man staring down from the open loft above the saxophones, and the golf-cart-cum-spaceship parked near the piano.

“Come on in,” the bass player said. “We were hoping you’d show up.”

A big band usually has eighteen members. This one had only seventeen, because nobody occupied the third trombone chair. I set my case on one of the lathe tables, assembled my horn, and took that seat. The first trombonist reached out a well-worn hand.

“Name’s Gary.”

“Andy.”

After shaking my hand, Gary examined my trombone.

“That’s a fine instrument you’ve got there, son.”

“Thanks. Just bought it the other day.”

The bass player called out “one hundred thirty-five,” which was the number of a tune called “Blues Machine.” My 78H sounded warm and full on it, and when we got to the last note, I wanted to hold it out forever.

“You know, my old friend Archie used to play that horn,” Gary said.

The 78H had once been a popular model.

“Is that right? I heard that a lot of people played this horn back in the day.”

Gary shook his head.

“No. I mean, he used to play your 78H.”

The C. G. Conn company must have sold thousands of 78Hs. I had never met anyone who could identify an individual trombone just by looking at it.

“You don’t believe me?” Gary asked.

“I don’t think so.”

Gary pointed to the tuning slide atop the bell section of the horn. “Archie loved tuning that horn extra-sharp for ballroom gigs—he wanted room for slide vibrato in first position—so one time he cut the inside of your tuning slide with a hacksaw. Take a look, you’ll see.”

I had never looked closely at the inside of my tuning slide. But when I pulled it all the way out, I saw that the ends of the metal tubes were slightly jagged. It wasn’t a factory cut.

The next tune the bass player called out was the Thad Jones arrangement “Low Down.” Gary played the first trombone part on it. In spite of his age, he was a powerful player. His high-note range was far better than mine.

THAT’S NOT SAYING MUCH.

At nine o’clock, the band took a fifteen-minute break. I put my trombone back in the case and explored the warehouse. A pistol catalog from 1968 lay next to a belt sander, and hanging on one of the brick walls was a framed newspaper article about the band and how it had been together for more than fifty years. (The article had been published in the early 1990s.) Atop a tool case, I found a plastic alarm clock shaped like a samurai warrior. I pressed the topknot on the samurai’s head, and a voice came out in Japanese.

“Wake up! Wake up!” it said. “The sun is rising over Japan!”

Gary heard the alarm clock.

“Son, when I was a teenager, I played on a cruise ship to Japan, and oh, boy, that was fun.”

The way Gary said
fun
suggested that his fun had involved Japanese girls.

“I’ve spent some time in Japan,” I told him. “I was in Osaka a few months ago.”

“You don’t say. Gig?”

“Not a gig.”

“What, then?”

I wasn’t sure if I should get into it.

“You know what instant ramen is?”

“The noodles?”

“I tried to meet the inventor of that.”

“Why?”

I definitely didn’t want to get
that
into it.

“I was researching a story for a business magazine where I’m on staff.”

“How’d it go?”

“Not so well. I didn’t get to meet him.”

“Sorry about that,” Gary said, and I could tell that he really was.

I asked Gary when the band’s next gig would be, and one of the trumpet players, a thin man with a mustache, overheard. He and Gary chuckled as they explained that the band had been rehearsing, more or less consistently, since 1939, but that the last gig had happened sometime in the 1970s. Then the two of them debated whether what happened in the 1970s actually qualified as a gig.

The following Monday night, Gary brought me a CD of his friend Archie playing my trombone in a 1960 session with the Woody Herman Orchestra. There was no mistaking the lush yet gritty sound of the horn.

“You like prime rib?” Gary asked, the Monday night after that.

The woman at Starbucks turned out to be the girlfriend of the second tenor saxophonist. I think they broke up, though, because I never saw her again.