I Faked Playing A Xylophone For 2 Years

I faked playing a xylophone for 2 years so I could go to China once.

I played trombone for 8 years through middle and high school, and I knew a few people at my college before I went there. They convinced me to join marching band, but were always complaining that the band director wrote impossible drills

I, being the genius that I was, figured “Well, I played keyboard in a ska band for a couple years; how hard could xylophone be?” Xylophones don’t march, after all.

Answer: Xylophone is pretty fucking hard, and I’d never played one in my life before the first day of band camp, which is when the auditions were. The guy doing the auditions was the percussion instructor for the college of music and after my audition he told me to “Put the mallets down, step back, and never play a xylophone again.” Which, to be fair, I did butcher the shit out of “Hot Cross Buns”.

Due to some sort of administrative fuck up, they never got around to actually kicking me out that year, and I hung around and pretended to play the xylophone.

Now, every two years, my college’s marching band takes a big trip somewhere overseas to perform and I had entered on an off year. The second year, I show up and do the same thing, except the percussion instructor had been fired (I never really dealt with him beyond offending him with my ability to fuck up xylophone music, but to my understanding he was a general asshole and the music department had been wanting to chuck him out for years, so they made a big stink about him doing some paperwork incorrectly or something.) So, it was left to our section leaders to audition the section, and being good friends with the section leader, he just said “Jenkins, hit something every now and again, but not very hard, and make it look like you’re playing.” So that’s what I did. Found the softest mallets in the place, barely tapped the keys, wham, bam, going to China. Everything would have worked out peachy.

Except our band director also didn’t pay any attention to the orchestra pit, so when he was doling out the parts for the music we were gonna play in China, he assigned me to concert bells. Like, that little tiny 50 pound xylophone that has a sound that would cut through an aerial bombardment. Not only that, I had a solo at the beginning of “The Moon Represents My Heart ,” which as it was explained to me is basically “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” for Chinese people. Everybody knows the song, it’s a cultural treasure, and not something you wanna fuck up at national landmarks cause folks will notice.

So I busted my ass actually learning how to play that bit over the span of a couple months, and managed to avoid pissing off people in Shanghai and Beijing. (Not all the people, though. A group of Chinese youths caught me urinating into a bush in Shanghai’s club district, and I had to duck into a place called “Club Highway 3” with my dick still hanging out to get away from them.) Got to play a set of concert bells on the Great Wall and see a whole bunch of stuff in China, though.