Last night I made a trip back to where I've spent most of my time in Costa Rica, Tamarindo. I brought the essentials: clothes, board shorts, a computer, my guitar, and my friend's melodica. Shortly after I arrived the sound wave weapons were drawn and we started to play some of our classics.
I had been living alone for a few days with very little human interaction, and it was good to be back with the boys and some new friends. One of my buddies started playing a song written by him, and i hastily picked up the melodica because his song is one of the few things I can play on that little device.
Now for those of you who don't know what a melodica is, it is essential that you understand the structure of this instrument to comprehend what happens later in the story. It is essentially a piano and a flute combined. Before I knew the instruments proper name, we had aptly named the device the "plute." It has a normal piano keyboard, but instead of the keys making drums hit strings, the keys change the structure of an internal tube, and the sound is produced by blowing through a hole.
Normally a melodica is played by laying it down on a surface, like you would for any other type of keyboard, and a long bendable tube is attached to the melodica's air input hole. However, absent having the bendable tube, you can just hold the melodica with your hands and blow directly into the hole. It limits your ability to play the melodica, because your thumbs must be used to hold the instrument. But for simple tunes it is a much more enjoyable way to play. This was the manner I was playing that night.
Now back to our story...
My buddies began the jam and I waited patiently to play trying while i tried to listen to and remember the notes in the song. (It's better to be silent and thought of as a non-musician than to play out of key and remove all doubt...) As the notes came back to me I readied my weapon by placing my fingers on keys and and took in a long breath.
The song came to life as three of us danced around our instruments to the pleasure of ourselves and our two lady audience members. My role in this song is pretty simple, cycle through four notes, blow hard when my buddies strum their guitars hard. Staying in beat and playing the notes to this song is easy, so I add a little color to the music by playing the melodica with absurd expression.
The melodica is an instrument that you just can't help but laugh at. It looks like a kid's toy, indeed it is a kid's toy, but the notes come out loud and proud. It took me a bit to be able to play the thing without starting to giggle myself, especially while moving it up and down as if it were the instruments position in space that changed the notes and not the keys pressed.
As I was playing I felt a tingly sensation on my face. Bugs in Costa Rica are more than abundant, and thus I feel these little guys on me all the time. However I also occasionally have tingling sensations on the extremities of my fingers etc. and it so the bugs can really mess with me, since sometimes I can't tell if i am just tripping or if there really is a bug brushing against me. However the music train was in motion and there was no option to stop, so i just contorted my face and kept jamming.
I managed to forget this uncomfortable sensation and push through the rest of the song to its proper conclusion where the notes peacefully fade away into the distance. We had one of the brief moments in life where something special was just experienced and no one can figure out what to say next. For the few moments before, the realization we filled the void with giggles and smiles.
And then it came. Out of nowhere she screamed,
"WILL THERE ARE ANTS ALL OVER YOU"
what? I thought ot myself, and then in just under two seconds my brain put it all together. Ants create bases. The inside of the melodica is a large space with a tiny entrance, an absolutely perfect design for an ant colony. And the ants had just experienced the most tremendous thunderstorm of air waves and were NOT happy. They were rushing out of the sound hole at an unbelievable rate. How many fucking ants were in that thing, i have no idea, but it was no short of 100 and probably in the 200-250 range.
I rushed to the sink and sipped water, spat it out, sipped water, spat it out, i felt it all hit me at once. Now i had known just how strong the trance i must have gotten in with the music, because i felt the mother fuckers biting me everywhere. I rushed to the bathroom and threw off all my clothes and started showering immediately.
It took me only a few minutes to start laughing harder than i was laughing before, but that horribly disturbing image of the ants marching out of the melodica will probably stick with me for the rest of my life.