Drums: a Novel, Page 2

  “Forgot to tell him it was expand weed,” Uwe chuckled.

  “Sorry,” Seth said.

  “You all right?” Jay asked. “You look pretty fucked up. You took way too big of a hit.”

  The bong went around a second time. I let it pass.

  We sat in the center of the room, Indian-style on the floor. Seth, Jay and Uwe buzzed on the pot—red-eyed, quiet.

  Above us, beyond our circle, I saw the eyes of the beautiful poster girl staring sideways like the Mona Lisa. She dared me to seek an answer. She was impatient. So was I.

  “Am I in?”

  Seth began to explain, “We auditioned six drummers so far.”

  “We were supposed to give one more guy a chance after you,” said Uwe.

  “But the three of us talked. We liked you pretty well,” said Jay.

  “We played this town for almost three years,” Seth continued, “then we lost our drummer. He left us for another band in L.A.” Seth scratched the stubble on his chin with his thin fingers. “Now, I guess, we’ve got that problem taken care of.”

  Jay grinned. “You’re in, if you want.”

  I accepted. It seemed like an elegant thing to do.

  “Don’t forget to tell him about Abbey-baby,” Uwe said, “now that she’s made her grand entrance into town again.”

  “Don’t be such a donkey,” Jay said.

  “I’m just trying to make a point, that’s all,” said Uwe. We’ve got our new drummer. We could do fine without Abbey.”

  Seth turned on Uwe, “She’s our ticket, you idiot! People love her. She’s a better musician than you’ll ever be.” Seth paused. “Maybe better than all of us.”

  Seth puffed on his cigarette to calm down. “There she is...” He was pointing to the beautiful poster girl. “I painted her a couple years ago. Do you like it?”

  “She’s a knock-out,” I said.

  “About a year after we started the band, there were some hard feelings. She left town,” Seth continued.

  “More like she totally disappeared,” said Jay.

  “She’s back. We want her to sing lead again. We’re doing okay without her, but with her I think we’ll be able to really go someplace.”

  “She’s stringing us along, man,” said Uwe. “She hasn’t said yes.”

  “She will,” said Seth. “Give her time.”

  “She digs the limelight, and it digs her,” said Jay. “How can she say no?”

  “She can’t,” said Seth.

  I looked once again at the promo poster of Abbey. I hoped Seth was right.

  Chapter 2

  Swashbuckling at Spook’s

  Winter Quarter

  Jay phoned and said he would stop by my place around eight. Spook’s party wasn’t supposed to start until nine or ten, but Jay suggested that we have a few beers before heading over.

  “Got to get in the proper frame of mind,” Jay Wong reminded me before hanging up.

  Thursday night we had played Aces and during break Seth’s ghoulish friend, Spook, invited all of us to this party. Friday we had played Chee’s Nightclub, and we were supposed to play again tonight, Saturday, but Uwe’s frat was having an exchange with some sorority and Uwe refused to miss it.

  Seth wasn’t thrilled about cancelling the gig. Jay and I were bummed, too, but we decided to make the most of it and go over to Spook’s. Seth said he was going to lock himself in the studio and write songs.

  I was still getting used to the idea of being a rock musician, and, as I got dressed for the party, putting on jeans and a button-down shirt, I wondered how I might look with a pierced ear like Jay, or with a mop of hair like Seth? After splashing on some after-shave, I examined myself in the mirror. I doubted if me and my pug nose and puny chest would ever make the cover of Rolling Stone.

  I sat down at my desk, deciding that I might as well do a homework problem or two while I waited for Jay. Ironically, the one class I thought would be winter quarter’s cake-walk turned out to be winter quarter’s bear. “Senior Seminar for Math Majors” was hardly a breezy, round-table discussion. The professor assigned twenty or thirty tedious problems every damn class, and the solutions weren’t in the back of the book; the professor made up the exercises himself.

  Gloomily, I reduced problem number twenty-four down to a messy integral—all problems in Senior Seminar invariably reduced to either a messy integral or differential. I was really getting sick of college. Sick of the whole business.

  * * *

  Earlier that day I received a phone call from my father. Dad and I did most of our serious talking on the phone—a medical doctor, Dad was a busy man.

  I really preferred talking to him on the phone. I didn’t like the no-nonsense-turn-your-head-and-cough expression he put on his face when he harassed me about my grades.

  “Are you giving your professors a run for their money?” Dad asked in his ex-All-American tight end voice.

  “I guess so,” I replied.

  “I hear the weather’s been exceptionally blissful down there at that resort where you’re going to school. Here in Sacramento, we’re up to our elbows in fog. It’s miserable. A lot of bronchitis going around.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Had a few spare minutes and gave Stanford a call on your behalf. My old alma mater. Stanford’s math department is topnotch. Of course their medical school is better.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “Someone’s application was not on file.”

  “I’ve been sort of busy.”

  “Yes?”

  “Playing drums.”

  “Christ almighty, you sound like some hippie person from the sixties.”

  “Dad, I’ve been thinking—“

  “What the hell is it this time, Danny. Still a loner? Still depressed because you left behind all your high school friends? I told you to join a fraternity. A good way to network. Crap! You could finally do something, son, if you’d get off your butt and mail in those applications. I say crap!”

  “Screw you, Dad,” I yelled into the receiver.

  But Dad had already hung up. I didn’t have the guts to tell him anything like that to his face.

  * * *

  Jay arrived.

  “I hate to tell you this, dude, but you stink,” he said. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you that the ladies prefer the natural aroma of a man?”

  I sniffed the air and realized I had applied my after-shave a bit thick. “Screw you,” I said.

  “Screw yourself, donkey.”

  Jay was obviously feeling punk. He had threaded a safety pin through the hole in his ear lobe. The black button pinned to the breast of this Sex-Wax T-shirt read in orange, brush-stroked letters, “Abbey Butler and Bandit!!!”

  Jay, like Seth, still seemed convinced that their elusive ex-singer was going to be with us again soon. I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of her.

  “Dude, I had such a day,” Jay exclaimed. “The waves off Morro Rock were breaking perfect. Cold as a witch’s tit, but, fuck it, I surfed the big blue till dusk.”

  “I spent the day doing homework. I’m still not done.”

  “Bummer."

  “School’s a drag,” Jay said. “That’s why I blew it off for a while. I just take people’s money down at the record shop and listen to good tunes. When the waves are good, the boss lets me skate.” Jay’s eyes squinted sleepily as he preached about the good life.

  Sometimes Jay was so content it made me a little sick.

  “You want to spin an album?” I asked, pointing to my stereo.

  Jay selected Regatta de Blanc by the Police. He took the album out of the jacket then put it on the turntable. He applied the disc cleaning brush before letting the stylus drop onto the first track.

  Sting’s cutting voice rang out the words to “Message in a Bottle” as I went to the fridge for brews. We drank a six-pack.

  * * *

  Spook, as it tur
ned out, lived in a rented house not far from my apartment in the Arroyo Lake suburb. It was a pleasant West Coast winter night, but Jay insisted that we drive rather than walk.

  “When I leave the party with some gorgeous babe,” he said, “I want to have some wheels right there.”

  Jay’s statement sounded overly macho and I laughed. “Seriously,” he continued, “Let’s cruise in the van. I don’t like to walk when I’m wasted.”

  The old Dodge engine didn’t have enough power to squeal the tires. As Jay lay on the gas pedal, the big van reared up front like a giant rocking horse, and I was pushed back into my seat. We let out crazy whoops and yells as Jay accelerated past the speed limit.

  We ran out of breath. We stopped shouting.

  I listened to Jay’s grinding downshifts of the engine. “Don’t want to get popped for a 502,” he muttered.

  We inched along about 25 mph. We seemed to be stuck in time. I wanted to keep racing.

  More and more, I didn’t like moments of stasis. When I had them, there was this holier than thou part of me that, given nothing else to do, dwelled on school, made me feel guilty, said I oughta buckle down, thought my father was right.

  Yet there was another part of me that thought he was wrong. Piss on him. Piss on Wenzl. Piss on Senior Seminar in Math. This was the part of me that liked to play drums. This was the part of me that liked to keep moving, keep in rhythm with the here and now. This was a part of myself that was relatively new.

  “Can’t you go any faster?” I asked Jay.

  “We’re here,” he said.

  I saw a house with jack-o’-lanterns in the windows. Cars everywhere parked on the street—some on the front lawn.

  Spook greeted us at the front door.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “The pumpkins are bitchin’,” said Jay, “just like Halloween.”

  Our host was in his glory, wearing a sweatshirt with the green face of Frankenstein on front and the brown jowls and white fangs of the Wolfman on back. He wore his black hair greased back, and had powdered his already pale skin death-white. From the neck up, Spook looked like Dracula, until he opened his mouth. His teeth were small, yellowish, and uneven—not big, white and sharp.

  We passed a darkly lit room filled with people dancing. None of the other guests wore costumes like Spook, but many were unusual looking. I watched with fascination as a red-haired young man weighing about 300 pounds did blobbish somersaults across the middle of the dance floor. The dancers screamed with joy and jumped out of his way. “That’s Big Ben. He’s one of my roommates,” said Spook.

  Through an aqua-black sliding glass door, I caught a glimpse of the backyard. I saw human silhouettes and amber glows that hovered like fireflies, joints and cigarettes holding the silhouettes together in clusters.

  We passed through the kitchen, the only room with bright light. Spook side-stepped the line to the keg and drew Jay and me two icy beers. We declined the hors d’oeuvres—a huge bowl of chips, beside it a smaller bowl of haphazardly concocted guacamole, with bits and pieces of avocado skin included.

  The room we ended up in had Spook written all over it. Eerie posters decorated the walls, and collections of plastic monster models were showcased on onyx black shelves. Jay pointed out a miniature guillotine that chopped the head off a little plastic man.

  “It works,” Spook told us.

  There were also textbooks, several bookcases of them. Many of them I recognized as required reading for science courses: Biology of Humans, Tipler’s Physics, Advanced Biochemistry. Above a small, organized desk, I spied a row of certificates. One was a Dean’s List award, bearing the name of its recipient, “Melvin Stevenson, Jr.”

  Spook, a.k.a. Melvin, asked Jay to lock the door. He unfolded a triangular piece of paper, revealing a small pile of white powder and white crystalline mixed together. He let the mixture spill onto a mirror.

  “Look at these outrageous rocks,” Jay said soberly, his eyes transfixed to the glass.

  Cocaine. I had only smoked pot once before joining Bandit. Now I got high at least a couple times a week. Getting stoned after practice was a part of our ritual. But this seemed more serious.

  The laws against cocaine were stricter, and you were up shit creek if you got caught with it. Also, the news was always reporting someone dying from it. Too potent.

  I didn’t want any. Q.E.D.

  As the party boomed beyond these walls, Spook used a razor blade to chop some white grains until they were dust; then he cut out three smaller piles from the large one. He said, “Some for me, some for Jay, some for Dan.”

  “We can get some hefty snorts out of those. Thanks, man.” Jay’s voice was both polite and rushed. He was ready.

  Spook made the three piles into twelve long, thin lines. He stuck one end of a short straw up his nostril and bent over the mirror so the other end of the straw could vacuum some powder. He changed nostrils and repeated this ritual. His eyes watering, he passed the straw to me.

  “I’ll pass,” I said.

  “Are you crazy?” Jay said. “There’s about a hundred bucks worth of blow here. Take it when you can get it, dude.”

  “You go ahead.” I handed him the straw.

  Jay rid the mirror of his share very quickly. Then he started eyeing mine. “What do you say, Spook—two and two?”

  “Yeah, sure,” answered Spook.

  “Danny’s a math major,” Jay explained to our host. “He’s cool, but he’s kind of straight.”

  “I’m pre-med,” said Spook, rather ho-hum. “Go on, Jay. You first.”

  Before Jay could get the straw up his nose, I reclaimed it. Gotta keep moving.

  “Maybe you and my father could get together sometime,” I said to Spook.

  Private joke. He didn’t get it.

  I inhaled.

  High in my nasal passages the substance gathered and then dripped onto the back of my throat. The taste of the substance was antiseptic, yet good—indescribable, really, in terms of other flavors and smells.

  The first sensation came on fast. My gums became numb as if from Novocain. My lips hung open loosely.

  The second sensation hit soon after: everything seemed so suddenly Right: everything was so crystalline like those white rocks.

  In the room of textbooks and plastic creatures, Spook, Jay, and I bobbed our heads to bassy reverberations. We buzzed.

  “Good stuff,” Jay complimented Spook, who was bug-eyed and fooling around with a small, green model of a lizard-monster. Spook let out a disconcerting roar.

  I sniffed casually like Jay kept doing.

  Someone pounded on the door from outside in the hall.

  “The cops are here,” said a female voice. The knocking continued. “What are you doing in there? Come on, Spook, everybody’s scared.”

  An entire liter of adrenalin shot straight into my heart. I felt sweaty, dazed, weak. “Shit,” I said. “Hide that stuff, Spook.”

  Spook slid the mirror under his bed. “Bummer,” he said.

  Again the voice sounded from behind the door, “What do you want us to do, Spook? The cops want to talk to the person in charge. They want to check I.D.’s.” The voice paused. “God, Spook, they want to bust us.“

  Clipped images of jail cells and rusty iron bars flashed in and out of focus. I saw Jay pacing the room like a nervous zoo cat.

  Two girls bowled over Spook as he unlatched the door. Another liter of adrenaline flowed into my chest. This time there was not enough room and some flowed directly into my brain. Straight adrenaline into my brain. It made me queasy. The girls crashed into Jay and me.

  Our bodies tangled as we fell to the floor. No one spoke.

  The girls erupted with giggles. One of them pranced over and slammed shut the door, trapping all five of us in Spook’s room. “Geeezzz,” she said, “we thought you guys were never going to open up.” Her face had a hard, sexy edge.


  “Were you guys scared?” asked her friend who was slight and twiggy, and wearing a lot of blue eye shadow.

  Spook was not the least but ruffled. “This is Jane, and this is Leslie. My two other roommates.” Jane was the cute, petite girl and Leslie was the rough, ravenous girl, who asked us to call her Flipper. I’d seen them before with Spook at one of our gigs.

  “You know what I want?” Flipper asked.

  “I can’t imagine,” Spook said.

  “Come on, Spooky,” Jane said. “Where is it?”

  “We did it all,” Spook replied.

  “That’s shitty,” Flipper said. “You’re not being nice to your two girls.” She playfully shook her finger at Spook. Spook seemed on the verge of letting out a giant yawn.

  He recovered his mirror, and all of us gathered around it. Jane sat next to me; Flipper sat next to Jay; Spook sat by himself. This arrangement pleased our host.

  The girls hungrily snorted white powder, and the rest of us did some more lines as well. Spook said he had to get back to his party. As he left, he winked at me. It was a funny wink. He had a hard time holding one eye open while closing the other—it was more of a contorted squint.

  “So,” I said to the girls. “This is some party.”

  “Yeah, so it is,” Jay said.

  “So what?” teased Flipper.

  Jane pinched me lightly on the stomach. “So there,” she said.

  “You know what?” Flipper said. “You guys are a great band. Jane and I saw you at Aces.

  “I like drummers,” added Jane, who kept staring at me with her blue butterfly eyes.

  “I like bass players,” announced Flipper.

  Flipper hopped onto Jay’s lap. Jay couldn’t seem to stop grinning. “Bitchin,’” he said.

  The cocaine screamed in my head like a high-pitched noise.

  Jay and Flipper played with Spook’s toys. Jay raised the blade of the miniature guillotine and let it fall and chop off the little plastic man’s head. The head dropped into a little plastic bucket. Jay tugged the guide string and hauled up the blade, revealing a little plastic neck-stub painted red.

  “Gross!” exclaimed Flipper. “Spook is so weird.”

  “I think Spook is a pretty cool dude,” Jay said.