Here’s an excerpt I wrote about BAD ACCORDION music, taken from an unfinished short story. This is the finale of the tale. The main character, after a late evening of crazily sampling many other fast food restaurants in the dead of night (a spoof of John Cheever’s The Swimmer), arrives at his final destination and waits for his order at a Mexican drive-thru. The problem: In the late hours, when business was slow, the cooks used to play dance music at deafening levels, which almost always included the accordion. This character detests the accordion.
In this scene, he has placed his order and is anticipating the food. He already interacted with Penelope, the cashier, and was immediately struck by her beauty.
By Word Rubble
As I awaited my cheese quesadilla, anticipating gooey gobs of hot, melted cheddar wrapped in the seductive sheath of a corn tortilla, an intolerable strain of music suddenly assaulted my ears through the drive-thru window. The cook must have brought a boom box in for after-hours listening. For me, it was an agonizing din, so unbearable, so wretched, so unbelievably wrong that each note struck with blunt force trauma — the uninvited clamor vomited from what’s often mistaken for a musical instrument. Namely, that oversized harmonica some people call the accordion.
I was not a fan of the rusty squeezebox. I believed there should be a special place in hell reserved for the inventor of that nightmare. It had always been my opinion that the only good accordion was one that had been backed over multiple times by a bus. To my ear, the accordion aurally depicted the final death throes of some pathetic creature caught in a wood chipper.
It’s not that I hated the instrument, per se. I just hated my life whenever I was within earshot of one.
Worse than the thumbscrew, worse than a thousand cuts of death, if the accordion had existed in the middle ages, it would have been used by the Spanish Inquisition as a medieval instrument of torture; the musical equivalent of being drawn and quartered.
The Grim Reaper himself—who back then ran a thriving business plying his trade to the mass exodus of souls rapidly reaching room temperature during bubonic plague outbreaks—would have seen the obvious life-snuffing efficiency of the accordion. Those exposed to its death rattle dropped like the swollen gunny sacks of oxygen-guzzling riff-raff that they were (now worm food), undeniably and reliably dead before they hit the cobblestone streets.
But even in modern times, a rousing rendition of Beer Barrel Polka, as played on the accordion, could still bring grown men to their knees. There was indeed something sinister about the torturously cheerful quality of accordion music: also the musical equivalent of diabetes. It was a Bob Ross painting of spring flowers in Auschwitz; it was the Dalai Lama waterboarding Himalayan tourists.
Breaking my discordant reverie, Penelope — a girl who somehow took my breath away — ebulliently emerged from the window, leaning forward with a gaze of consolation. “My apologies for the delay. We’ve been swamped tonight. But not much longer. “
“While you’re here,” I replied. “Is there any way you could turn down that music?”
“How’s that?” she said, cupping her ear toward me.
I leaned out of the car window, and with a raised voice, replied, “I said I can’t stand accordion music.”
Penelope nodded, looked back at the cook, and then slowly turned back to me, shrugging her shoulders in reply.
At that moment, the music suddenly increased in volume by half. The cook’s apparent retort to my request. It was deafening. I felt disrespected. I thought of leaving. But I leaned forward again, and deep from the briny depths of my Davy Jones locker of nautical treasures, I vociferously recited, nay, bellowed my contempt at the cook:
“To the last, I grapple with thee! From hell’s heart, I stab at thee! For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee!”
A couple of diners in the restaurant, their eyeballs nearly ejected from their sockets, gawked in my direction, tacos in hand, mouths agape, frozen in disbelief. Penelope, with one eyebrow raised, stood silently, appearing somewhat tentative yet amused. Then she laughed.
“You okay, captain, or should we call a whale for backup?”
I slouched in my seat, embarrassed. Perhaps my Melville obsession was excessive.
“By the way, my father plays the accordion,” she added with a playful smile. “It’s not so bad. Most people just use earplugs.”
Out of curiosity — and genuine annoyance — I craned my neck forward to glimpse the cook working in the back of the restaurant, the big zero responsible for the God awful caterwauling that blared out the window.
A young latino man stood at the grill, lightly bobbing his head to the irksome two-step of the music. Looking lean and muscular in an embroidered grease-smudged western shirt, his cowboy hat tilted forward with an air of virility, a bottle of Corona in one hand—he was the heir apparent to total badass.
What the fool didn’t realize was when coupled with the emasculating cock-a-doodle-doo of the accordion, its clunky keys and squawking bellows merrily molesting the air with a soul-crushingly sappy oom-pah-pah, the status quo of this badass downsized into something more milquetoast and effeminate, like he had pulled his underpants over the outside of his pantalones. His strength of self-reliance, gone. An Aztec warrior, now a Disney princess.
I surprisingly felt despair for the budding muchacho at the grill. Why, oh, why, did our youth throw away their lives this way? I wanted to shout, “An accordion is not an escape, it’s a trap! Just say no!”
Meanwhile, as the music droned on, and with no signs of stopping, I wondered when the fight-or-flight syndrome might kick in. When you’re stuck in line and the music is painfully abhorrent (AKA some inconsiderate pendejo is playing an accordion), I began to worry that, in an act of desperation, I might suddenly lose my cool, slam my foot on the accelerator and launch several thousand pounds of Toyota Camry, from zero-to-sixty, in the suicidally limited confines of a fast food drive-thru.
Thankfully, the cashier then arrived with my meal. Penelope, still with that inclusive smile, leaned out the window and handed me the bag. “Here’s your quesadilla, sir. Have a good one!”
I thanked her and dropped the sack in the adjacent car seat.
That first whiff of the food, however, was the harbinger of an additional problem, the musical equivalent of another fine mess. I wasn’t sure if it was the ill-advised medley of seven previous fast food stops or the nauseating wail of the accordion, but the gluttonous orgy had apparently mixed everything together into some sort of microbial casserole. In other words, the gastric upset left me feeling like there was an old license plate rusting in my gut.
The first sign of alarm came from the cashier, her huge-socketed eyes engulfed in terror. She knew from the sour expression on my face that a fast food refund was imminent. Then, with hell-bent propulsion, like the after-effect of a lighted match tossed in an open sewer, my gaping mouth stretched into a cavernous yawn, and with a heave-ho, the contents of my stomach went south, projectile style.
Gallons of pre-chewed food, bubbling like cascades of molten lava, gushed down the side of my car, across to the drive-thru window (which the cashier, in reflex, slammed shut), and splattered onto the pavement below. It was X marks the spot. Seven fast food potlucks one too many, followed by an unwanted sidewalk pizza delivery, with extra bile and spew.
Yes, unbelievably, from the bowels of my digestive sewer, and in front of the girl of my dreams, I had expelled a McYechy®, the flagship product of my gastric secretions, in foamy and foul technicolor.
The girl of my dreams, however, now flashing the clichéd pallor of green around the gills, teetered as if desperate to regain her sea legs, before thrusting her window open just far enough to toss a fistful of napkins toward my car. I liked to think this was her Cato falls on his sword moment—a willingness to endure hardship for a greater cause, despite my reverse peristalsis of what now resembled partially chewed Mexican chowder, extra chunky style..
And yet, against all odds—and perhaps with a pinch of desperation, I still asked for her number.
by 