I wonder what ever happened to Butch Harper to make him such a mean bastard. He must have had some pretty serious unhappiness to contend with. Of course, when I was in 7th grade, I didn't care two figs about Butch's unhappiness. I was only concerned with my own—and the fact that the bastard was beating me up and terrorizing me every day in band class.
In Kaysville when I was growing up, grades six through eight attended junior high. When I was midway through sixth grade, my family moved to Kaysville from Bountiful, where sixth graders were the oldest kids in elementary school. This meant that I was catapulted from elementary school into junior high in the middle of the school year, with no friends to help cushion the landing.
I could write a dozen memos about how horrible that experience was (and I probably will), but today we'll stick to exploring how it affected my musical education. You see, I wanted to learn to play the saxophone. If I had started junior high at the time as all the other kids did, that would have meant simply signing up for band at the beginning of sixth grade, getting my parents to shell out for a sax, and showing up for class. Because I came to the game late, though, I wasn't actually able to enter the band until seventh grade, when the other kids already had a year on me.
That might have been more bearable had I actually been permitted to study the saxophone, like I wanted. Instead I was saddled with the clarinet. (Don't get me wrong—I have a lot of respect for the clarinet. But it just ain't as sexy as a sax.) You see, my dad, who is a school teacher, consulted with the music teacher at his school as to how to rent a saxophone for cheap. He was apparently told that it would be even cheaper to rent a clarinet, and that it would be easy for a clarinet student to switch to the saxophone later on. Moreover, my father was advised, it's damn tough for a sax player to switch to the clarinet later on.
When my father explained this logic to me, I was both crushed and baffled. "But that doesn't make any sense," I protested. "I don't want to switch from the saxophone to the clarinet later on."
Tough, kid. Here's your new clarinet.
Okay, so the clarinet wasn't all that bad. But the necessity of playing it only became all the more unhappy-making when Butch Harper entered the picture.
Butch was in a situation similar to mine. He was entering the band at the beginning of seventh grade, only his instrument was the bassoon. Butch was a tall, wiry kid with blonde hair and a look of permanent rage burning in the eyes of his otherwise stupid-looking face. Did I mention that he was a mean bastard? Oh, Jesus.
Mr. James Thurman was our band teacher. He was not well-loved by the kids in the band, as I recall, but he was more than competent as a musician and conductor. Still, he had a blind spot big enough to drive a truck through.
In order that Butch and I could catch up with the rest of the students in the class—and not be in everyone else's way—Mr. Thurman would regularly send the two of us off to a little soundproof practice room at the back of the classroom. That was where we were supposed to practice our instruments until we were good enough to be with the rest of the band fulltime.
That was where Butch Harper terrorized me.
For starters, he would usually force me to put his bassoon together for him. If I was lucky, that was all that would happen. If I wasn't, or if I balked from anything he wanted me to do (like setting up his music or turning his pages for him), then he would hit me in the upper arm with his fist or smack me on the back of the head. Sometimes I would cry, and Butch would call me a pussy and hit me again.
I tried to tell Mr. Thurman what was going on, but he pooh-poohed it all. "Just tell him to leave you alone," he said.
"I do," I said. "Don't make me go in there with him any more."
I believe Mr. Thurman once had a few words with Butch. That ended up a pretty bad day for me in the ol' practice room.
After a couple of months of this, I was good enough that I didn't have to go to the practice room anymore, and Butch Harper's tormenting of me ended. Mostly. Every once in a while he would threaten me in the hallway, but I finally put an end to that toward the last days of eighth grade, when he tried pushing me around at a school dance.
I was trying to ask a girl to dance (I don't remember who), when Butch came up and started, well, pushing me around. So I hit him, twice, right in the chest. I still don't know what came over me. The blows were glancing at best, but Butch left me alone after that. At heart, he was just a coward, and pretty pathetic at that.
Mr. Thurman is now a Mormon bishop in Layton, Utah, or he was last time I heard. I've mostly forgiven Butch Harper, but I have a harder time with Mr. Thurman. Maybe he was right to keep sending me back into that practice room to face my demon, and maybe not, but I certainly don't love him for it.
My only hope is that he's not trying the same tactic with the battered wives in his ward.
