Thoughts of 'Tits'

Teenage memories of a well-endowed American beauty

NOTE: This blog was originally posted to WrittenByMe.com back in 2001, almost a decade ago. I'm re-posting it here because of a recent comment of my sister's, which then reminded me of an old 'acquaintance' from long ago.

She was gorgeous, a golden all-American beauty... Tall, lithe, with small pert breasts, a sixteen year-old's dream. I've been thinking of her quite a bit lately, especially since finding a new mistress this past spring. My new love is Italian, a golden beauty as well, though much younger, more petite, and, uh, less 'well-endowed'.

I was a sophomore in high school, struggling to play 'the family instrument', an ancient tenor sax. My uncle Eugene, my dad's oldest brother, had bought the sax back in the late forties from a long since defunct little music store in downtown Lodi, California. The horn was a Buescher, made back in the mid-thirties, and I considered it to be something of an eyesore growing up. When I entered the fourth grade and was finally old enough for band, my parents bought a new case for 'The Buescher' and sent it, and me, off together on the bus for school.

Ours was a 'love-hate' relationship from the very start. I'd complain that the instrument was too hard to play, too difficult to blow, but would never practice the hours I was supposed to... "It's old, breaks down all the time, and then has to be fixed" I'd say, failing to mention the many times I'd taken a running start and slid on the case all the way across my elementary school's lunch room floor.

My whining pretty-much continued until my sixteenth year, when my sister helped change the situation completely. She, unlike me, was (and still is) an accomplished musician; A piano/keyboard player, a bass player, a composer and arranger, who today holds a master's degree in music. Back then she was an aspiring pianist in the high school jazz band who needed a new instrument to take to gigs, an instrument my parents ended up buying her... a brand-new Fender Rhodes electric piano. It was the perfect opportunity... If she could get a new instrument, why couldn't I?

Though I felt I held the 'high ground', I was still surprised when my dad, a man forever frugal to a fault (the new Rhodes is still a partial mystery to me), actually appeared to give in. He took me down to our local music store, Bill's Music on Harding Way, in Stockton, California where we lived, and we talked with the owner, Bill Magellan, about tenor saxes. Bill was almost my downfall, as he'd been a sax player himself, had tried The Buescher, and thought it a fine horn. Still, I was determined to replace that scratched up old horn with something nice and shiny, so we were shown the new student instruments, all Conns, untouched polished brass and mother-of-pearl glittering in sapphire-blue lined cases. We were also shown one other horn, a slightly older, semi-professional model I immediately fell in love with, and later nicknamed 'Tits'.

The sax itself was a tenor, also made by Conn, but an upgraded 'Artist' model, with beveled keys and improved action. I'd love to say that the horn's quality was what impressed me the most at the time, but that really wasn't the case. The feature that stood out to me (so to speak) those twenty-two odd years ago was the engraving on the front of the bell, of the nude bust of a woman. "I'd be the only guy in school to have an instrument with TITS on it!", I remember thinking to myself. Needless to say, I was sold, and my father, the man under whose tutelage I gained my early appreciation of the female form, seemed as equally impressed.

Abandoning the old family instrument to a dark closet somewhere, I took that new and sexier horn a lot of different places... On high school jazz band and choir tours across California, Oregon, and Florida, and later on the road with GoldRush, the Top-40 lounge band I joined in my senior year of high school, playing in bars, clubs, and on military bases across four states and two countries.

A year or so after getting married, in our first house and so deeply in debt that each day felt like we were but a breath away from bankruptcy, I had to sell 'Tits' to help pay some bills. She ended up being bought by a music teacher from Holt, California, who needed instruments for the San Joaquin County Schools music program.

While I'm enjoying my new Italian beauty, a professional alto sax made by Grassi that I picked up in May and played this summer in the local community band and community jazz band, it's not the same. The action's superb, the tone (even from a hack like me) vibrant, her brass and mother-of-pearl shiny and new... Still, she's a little too 'flat-chested' for my tastes, leaving me to wonder if there's another obnoxious sixteen year-old out there, back in San Joaquin County, who's just been assigned his school instrument, has removed it from the case for the first time, and discovered that he's already 'made it to first base'.