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He played that thing all the time: waking, sleeping, walking, riding his bike, reclining in the bathtub fully clothed, where the acoustics were the best, he said. Even in the backseat of the family Buick, when we were trying to have a conversation up front. It was maddening. If we turned the radio on to shut him up, he simply played along with it, the relentless little buzzard.
It never occurred to us that he was on his way to greatness. One of the greatest harmonica players ever: jazz, folk, rock, Latin, blues, country, even classical. The inventor of the chromatic playing style on a regular diatonic ten-hole harmonica.
But to us he was just the kid who sucked and blew and drooled a lot with that thing forever installed in his mouth, alternately buzzing like a beard of bees, chugging like a locomotive, wailing like a professional mourner, chiming like a bell, whistling like a blue jay or a catcall, squeezing out chords and major triads like an accordion, then bending one single note so low, so lonely, that it almost broke.
One day Mom lost it, screaming, Put that thing away! I can’t hear—she was on the phone—and she confiscated all of them (he had one for every key) for a whole week. He wept and begged her to give them back—Just one, please, I’ll play quietly—but she wouldn’t relent.
He cried and cried, emitting these strange, low animal noises and high keening sounds as though he had a blues harmonica stuck somewhere deep down inside him and was trying to get it out.
She hid them in the fruit bowl, under the apples, which she knew he never ate. He’d starve before eating fruit. I reached for an apple, glimpsed the shining underneath, the buried treasure he’d have killed for, and was dying without.
Paul Hostovsky's poems and stories appear widely online and in print. He has won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac, and The Best American Poetry blog. He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter. Website: paulhostovsky.com