My ears had just popped, which meant we had reached the peak of Laurel Canyon and were about to descend into the Valley.  William was driving the 842, and we were running a few minutes late. 

“Did you ever hear about the guy – I forget his name – he was The Jazz Whistler?”  He asked me.

“A jazz whistler?”

“Yeah.  He was bad.”

“All he did was whistle?”

“Yeah, he was The Jazz Whistler!”

“But he didn’t start out as something else and also whistle?”

“Naw, he had a band behind him, and he would stand down front and whistle.  But he could play!  He was in tune, he would do runs and things…  You never heard of him?”

“I definitely never heard of him.”

“Hm.  My friend was telling me the other day about how, to get in the NBA, you have to be able to do one thing.  You got to focus on only one thing, like rebounds.  Or maybe you’re a shooter.  But you perfect one thing…  You get to be the best at one thing and you’re in there.”

“So you’re saying I gotta get practicing my whistle,” I asked.

He shrugged.

“Well, maybe you ain’t a whistler.”

I don’t wear a watch, so when the old woman asked me what time it was, I pointed to the flashing LED sign at the front of the bus that scrolled out the date and time at regular intervals.  She nodded and shook her head, a little embarrassed she hadn’t thought of that herself.  7:25, it read, and I relayed it to her, mostly because she was an older lady and the thickness of the lenses in her glasses made me think she’d appreciate the help.

I returned to my book – a rock drummer’s memoirs - but she caught my eye before I could retreat back into it.

“What are you reading?”  She asked me.  Her gravelly diction suggested she might be deaf, or, at the very least, have a severe speech impediment.

I held it up.  She didn’t recognize it, and looked confused.

“It’s an autobiography.  By a musician,” I explained.

“Is it good?”  She asked.

“It’s OK,” I said.  She smiled politely. 

“I got it for twenty-five cents,” I explained, as though I was ready to cut a lot of slack to anything that cost so little.

She rummaged through her bag and pulled out a battered old paperback, barely held together with dried masking tape and a rubber band.  She held it out to show me.  The cover was a photograph in comforting, saturated late-50s color of a woman reaching up to stroke the neck of a giraffe.  The title was ‘Bringing Up Daisy’, and it purported to be a true story.

“How is it?”  I asked.

“I like animals,” she shrugged.

copyright,  © 2006 Wyatt Doyle

for information on Wyatt Doyle's collaboration with Stanley Jason Zappa, STOP REQUESTED, click here.