The Musician’s Ear

 

(I heard this story in a café in Banks, Idaho)

    “The attack occurred late one Saturday night last July. Let’s make it early Sunday morning. I’d been playing bass in a bar band in and it was our last gig for a month, so by the time we drank a beer and got all of our gear back in the van and I drove an hour home, it was a good three or four in the morning.

     Been living out in the woods for thirty years. Bought ten acres when you could still do something like that on musician’s wages, and built the cabin myself out of logs from my own property. Three wives later I still have a roof over my head, but I am living alone.

     We’ve had some break-ins in the neighborhood over past few years.  Everybody blames it on the kids or the meth freaks, but some of the thievery has definitely been the work of pros. A kid or somebody strung out on speed doesn’t take the time to sort through a pocket watch collection like they did up at Charlie Goodnight’s place.

     Just about every spare dollar I’ve ever had went into musical instruments and at any moment  somebody could waltz into my home and walk away with twenty thousand bucks worth of old guitars. I am gone a few nights a week, so I have surrounded the cabin with lights and motion detectors.  

     It’s a homemade system, but if you are a stranger approaching the place and you get within a hundred yards it is like escape time at Stalag 17, lights flash and whistles blow and I even have a motion detector hooked up to a boombox in the barn that triggers a tape of my voice yelling “Get the F---- Out of Here, Now” with a couple of gunshot sounds for punctuation.  So far I haven’t been ripped off.

     And I leave the kitchen and porch lights on. So, when I was coming home from work that night, I grabbed the bass and amp from the car and hauled them up the steps onto the porch, half asleep, tired to the bone, and went to fishing for my door key when all of a sudden there was this enormous, deafening, Twop, Thwop, Thwop, sound coming from somewhere.

     My first thought was helicopter. There had been a few busts of pot plantations up on the Forest Service and I figured it was the DEA swooping in before daylight. They undoubtedly have the technology for that kind of flying.  But when I ran out into the yard and looked up there was nothing up there, no lights besides the stars. Something that loud should’ve been producing wind at least.

     So I was standing there, looking up at Cassiopeia and nothing much else, when I realized that the sound was coming from inside my head.  My next thought was that rock and roll had finally done it to me. Too many years of loud music and late nights had busted a blood vessel and I was bleeding from the brain, that the sound I was hearing was my heart pumping my cranium full of blood. I just sat down on the ground like Chief Dan George did in Little Big Man and thought, Well, it’s a good enough day to die.

    I am not normally a calm person, but I didn’t panic for some reason, just sat there, ready to meet my maker, until I figured out that the noise was coming only from the left side of my head and that my left ear tickled every time the sound happened. I stuck my little finger in that ear, mostly expecting to find it full of blood.  

     Instead, I touched a moth’s butt, which caused it to panic and it began to fluttering even faster. I wasn’t dying after all. A confused bug had left the porch light and found a nest my ear. Apparently moths don’t have a reverse gear or brain enough to back out of trouble. It was way down there in my ear canal, trying to blow on through, burrowing deeper into the wax at every wing beat. It was painfully loud. 

    Ever try to look in your own ear? In half an hour, even with the help of two bathroom mirrors, I could not get things situated well enough to see and grab the little bugger with a pair of tweezers. All I accomplished was to make the moth more frantic and the thumping more maddening. So I decided I needed professional help and headed toward the emergency room sixty miles away. 

     The moth and I got to know each other pretty well on that ride. For some reason, it didn’t seem to like right-hand corners. Must have been that there was just enough angular momentum to make an airborne critter think it was losing purchase when we turned toward the right. It would rest during the straight-aways and left turns.

     After a night of automobile wrecks and heart attacks and people beating the crap out of each other, the woman at the check-in counter was not all convinced that a bug in a bass player’s ear was an emergency. I had a terrible time filling out the admission forms because the moth was now firing off at random times and my handwriting was pretty darn jumpy. 

    About sunrise I got to see a doctor, a young fellow from Pakistan, who probably had seen every kind of moth and every Lon Cheney and Bella Lugosi movie ever made, because when he reached ever so gently into my ear with the roach clip or whatever they call those long scissor grabber things, he grabbed the moth just in the right place, backed it gently up the ramp and then held it up with its wings flapping and walked around the ward going “It lives!  It lives!  It lives!” in a combo Pakistani and Transylvanian accent. I fell asleep while they were irrigating the moth dust from my ear. I didn’t see what happened to the moth. The extraction cost me $265.

    I thought about leaving the porch light off during bug months to avoid having lightning strike twice, but I am too paranoid about getting ripped off to do that, so I took the cheap way out. I now keep two pairs of ear muffs, one in the house and one on the dash of my car, and wear them at night when I have to get anywhere close to the porch light.”