Drums: a Novel, Page 3

  He and Flipper were hitting it off. I couldn’t think of anything to say to Jane. She kept staring at me with her blue butterfly eyes.

  “Let’s go dance,” I said finally.

  We made our way through the halls, through the cocktail darkness, dark-orange and purplish-blue. I felt like I had a fever and my skin prickled. My arm was around Jane. Paranoia nipped at me. Taking cocaine, Danny?! Crap!! Pathetic loser!!

  I kept moving. I willed myself to blend into the noise and the frenzy, like lotion into skin.

  I led Jane into the dancing. I liked to dance. It felt like I was playing drums with my body.

  She had a good sense of rhythm. I wished for a slow song. Instead the electric music made us twist and jump.

  We danced for five or six numbers. The music was exceedingly loud. I grasped her small shoulders and spoke directly into one of her ears. “Take a break?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said.

  We went outside and stood in the cool, dark quiet. I liked Jane and fantasized about her and me making love. Yet, once again our conversation had stalled. That is, until she mentioned Domino.

  “You’re not at all like he was,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Domino. The band’s old drummer.”

  “You knew him?” I asked.Seth, Jay, and Uwe never discussed Bandit’s old drummer.

  “Sure, everyone knew him,” Jane said.

  I asked her why I was so different.

  “I don’t know, exactly,” she replied. “For one thing, he was so show-biz.”

  “What?”

  “You’re more quiet. I like that. Domino used to get so obnoxious when he partied.” She paused. “Not like a jock or that type—he didn’t stomp around and break stuff. He just got real braggy.”

  “I see.”

  “He was full of a lot of B.S.”

  “When I joined Bandit, all the others told me was that the last drummer quit because he got a better offer.”

  “Yeah—that and because of him and Abbey,” Jane said, “because they broke up.”

  I’d never met Domino or Abbey. But, nevertheless, Jane’s words skewered my gut. These two. Their legacy. I wanted to know everything.

  But this is what I said: “I guess that’s their business.”

  “Oh it’s not secret Domino and Abbey were lovey-dovey,” Jane said. “Then they had a fight and Abbey left the band. Domino and the rest of the guys kept playing and they did okay for a while.”

  Jane recklessly crossed her twiggy arms and cast a look of reproach. “Abbey’s a bitch anyway, even if she is a great singer. You know, I heard Seth wants to let her back in. Maybe he likes her, too. What do you know?”

  “Only gossip,” I said.

  As Jane had the strange habit of doing, she reached out and pinched my stomach. “I like it that you’re in the band now.”

  I should have stopped on that encouraging note. “So,” I asked rather smugly, “was this Domino a decent drummer?”

  “Most people say he’s the best drummer they’ve ever heard. I bet he gets in a really good band down in L.A.” Jane’s blue butterfly eyes became apologetic. “Let’s do some more toot.”

  I followed her back to Spook’s room and we located the mirror under the bed. Quickly she shoved the mirror in front of me and motioned for me to make us some lines, which I did as best I could. She sucked up two long ones. I did the same, and soon became full of that clear, perfect high I felt earlier. I was having fun again.

  We each did another, and another. We hummed and twitched and sniffed through our nostrils. The medicinal energy that had previously sparkled my thoughts and made all sensation seem so Right and shiny, now centralized into one, single urgent drive to make it with Jane.

  I also felt disoriented, anxious, and shy.

  She changed that. “I’m so hot,” she said, her voice low and amorous. “Let’s go to my room and get naked."

  We made love furiously. Jane still had her top on, and I had my pants around my ankles in an awkward wad. We rested and then finished undressing and climbed under her sheets. We did it again—this time more slowly and proficiently. Then we lay there, both awake.

  The sweat and friction between our bodies dissolved most of Jane’s makeup. Her blue butterfly eyes were gone. This young woman, whose face was so near I could feel her warm, humid exhales, seemed naggingly, naggingly foreign.

  * * *

  It took a moment to place where I was. I did not move. I did not want to wake the girl. I needed to think, alone.

  Fragmented voices played in my mind: “Domino ... So show-biz ... She disappeared … Cocaine ... Crap ... You loser.”

  My nostrils were dry and my mouth tasted like chalk. I lay there feeling the presence of a naked stranger beside me, hearing the crisp hum of morning; when I played these sensations against flashbacks of the night it all seemed incongruent. I wanted to get out of Jane’s bed and out of her, Spook, and that other girl’s house.

  I met Jay in the hallway. He had the same thing in mind. “Getting the hell out of Dodge?” I whispered.

  “Breakfast with Flipper is something I don’t want to experience,” he said. “ She’s into some pretty weird stuff.”

  “Oh?”

  “She wanted me to tie her up and shit like that.”

  “Marvelous,” I said.

  Jay put his finger to his lips. “Sssshhh,” he said.

  Inside the van, the compartment was cold and damp with morning. “So how come you bailed?” Jay asked. “Jane seemed pretty cool.”

  I didn’t answer. Instead, I asked him a question. “Did your old drummer really used to go out with Abbey?”

  “Yeah,” he replied. He took a long time before he reached down and turned the key in the ignition. “But I guess, Danny, that’s like all water under the bridge.” Jay looked straight ahead as he drove, and made it a point to leave it at that.

  Chapter 3

  Making the Rudiments Sound as They Are

  My first music teacher’s name was Mr. Luck. He was a peculiar, thin high-strung man with crooked and aged teeth. The thick, black vinyl frames of his eyeglasses were faded from the whiteness of sweat. The name “Luck” had no significance for me as a fifth grade kid. Now, however, it seems like the perfect antonym for what Meriam Luck had none of. There were five elementary schools in the Sacramento suburb where I grew up, and Mr. Luck was assigned to drive from institution to institution in his “music center on wheels,” a moth-balled school bus. The old bus was painted gray and all the bench seats were removed; in their place were racks for the band instruments that Mr. Luck loaned to his students. Along the right-hand side of the bus, underneath a bank of square, filmy windows, was a long counter hedged with metal stools. It was there I learned to play the snare drum.

  Once a week I got to leave class, in order to visit Mr. Luck in the school parking lot for a lesson. He screamed from beginning to end.

  “Didn’t I tell you not to put your drumsticks together with rubberbands? You’re going to wreck the finish on them. Rubberbands cause oxidation marks,” he ranted when I arrived.

  If he would have told me what oxidation meant, and if two drumsticks bound together by a rubberband didn’t make such a good mock airplane propeller when one stick was wound against the other, I probably would have listened, but back then I nodded dumbly and mumbled, “Yes, Mr. Luck, I was just trying to keep ‘em together so I wouldn’t lose ‘em.” “Get those wrists warmed up,” he blurted next.

  Upon command I placed a drumstick in each hand, gripping the centers of the sticks as if they were batons. I rotated my wrists back and forth, back and forth. That exercise is one I never forgot. It was a cool thing to do; while brass players got their mouth pieces warm by sucking on them like metal lollipops, and woodwinds started first by slobbering on their reeds, drummers merely twirled their sticks and yawned. Later, when I progressed to playin
g a drum set in a group, I still waited out the moments before a gig with that same routine I learned from Meriam Luck.

  “How’s that roll coming?” Mr. Luck would inquire. “Okay, begin. Right-Right, left-Left, right-Right, left-Left. No. No. Start again. Your sticks aren’t in proper position. The angle’s wrong—too close to the rim. When I want a rim shot, by God, I’ll ask for one. Right-Right, left-Left, right-Right, left-Left. No. No. Accent the second sticking. Better. Better. right-Right, left-Left, right-Right, left-Left….”

  In a couple minutes I would be buzzing out a choppy long roll. Bbbzzzzzzzzzzzz. At these times, Mr. Luck would grin his dirty, crooked grin, and I would grin back.

  But these momentary calms were short-lived. “Now back down. Slow it up. No. No. Not so fast. Control. Use a little control.” Soon we’d be back to, “right-Right, left-Left, right-Right, left-Left.” Ten minutes into my lesson I felt as much a nervous wreck as he.

  Mr. Luck taught me how to play a paradiddle, a flam, a five, seven, and nine stroke roll, and, of course, the infamous long roll, upon which he placed so much weight.

  “Danny,” he would lecture, “first, you have to learn the rudiments. One must always start out with the rudiments. They develop a drummer’s speed and coordination, and all drum playing is built upon them.”

  “Vikker,” he called me by my last name when he was most serious, “do you know how the rudiments get their names?”

  “Not really, Mr. Luck,” I would say politely.

  “Back in the old days, back when drummers marched with the armies, the art of snare drumming was passed from one drummer to the next by word of mouth. Each rudiment derived its name simply from how it sounded.

  “Play ‘right-left-right-right, left right-left-left.’ Quickly now. Quickly.

  “Now say, ‘paradiddle, paradiddle.’”

  “Paradiddle, paradiddle.’”

  “Paradiddle, paradiddle.”

  “You see what I mean, Vikker?”

  Mr. Luck loved that story. He told it to me often. “Rrrooolll. Rrrooolll. Fla-aamm. Fla-aamm. Paradiddle. Paradiddle,” he impressed upon me. “Rudiments are the beginning. Rudiments sound as they are.”

  * * *

  When the two girls and Jay arrived at 29 Orchid Street, I was sitting in front of the stereo with Seth and Uwe, listening to Pete Townshend’s Empty Glass album. There were a couple of songs on the record that Seth felt Bandit ought to try. Seth was putting together a new repertoire, or list—four collections of songs—sets A, B, C, and D—that each took an hour to play; four hours worth of music was enough material for a typical gig. About a quarter of the songs were originals, and the rest were copy tunes, borrowed from popular, big-name bands. Seth hoped eventually we would have enough originals that we didn’t have to rely on copy tunes.

  “What took you so long?” Seth asked the three persons who spilled into the house. He was excited.Tonight was our first practice with the band’s former lead singer.

  “I was starved, man,” Jay said. “We stopped at the Dark Room for some chow.”

  Jay wore Hawaiian-print Bermuda shorts, an unbuttoned pea coat, and rubber thongs. Exposure to the brisk night air gave the brown skin on Jay’s face and bare legs a pinkish hue.

  The two girls were sharing a dish of frozen yogurt. Abbey, whom I immediately recognized from Seth’s painting, took the plastic spoon from her girlfriend’s hand and placed a large carob-coated scoop in her mouth. “Care for a taste?” she teased Seth.

  Seth didn’t reply. He lit a smoke and gave one to Abbey, then lit another match with a quick, deft strike and put an amber glow on the end of her cigarette.

  Abbey and Jay continued to kid around with Seth. Abbey’s friend didn’t seem to mind not being included in the conversation. She ate her frozen yogurt happily, and didn’t offer any to me or Uwe.

  After a while, the guitarist, bass player, and songstress stopped chatting, and Abbey Butler stared at me with penetrating green eyes.

  She wore an unusual array of color and fashion on her slim, curvy body. A black and white checkered sport jacket draped her square, confident shoulders, and flowed down her torso with streamy, cosmopolitan lines. The lapels of the oversized man’s jacket flopped loosely; a necktie dangled well past her waist and was tied with a funny girlish knot. She wore tight blue-green slacks, high heel boots, and feathered earrings. As she removed her gaze from me to wink saucily at Seth and Jay, the weightless earrings brushed her smooth neck like naughty angels.

  Her stare returned. “Well,” she said, “Aren’t you going to introduce yourself? The boys told me they found a new drummer. I’m not blind.”

  “Cut the theatrics, Abbey,” said Seth.

  “Oh shush,” Abbey said pertly. She returned to me. “Seth always tries to be so level-headed. You know what I think?” Her green eyes swam over me like a screaming gust of hot wind. “He ought to try letting go. It’s really fun. I do it all the time.”

  “I’m Danny,” I said, “I—”

  “They told me your name,” she said, cutting me off, as though I were being excessively dull. “I’m Abbey, of course. We already know that, don’t we? The point is that we’ve never met—in flesh and blood. Now we have. Savvy?”

  I nodded. The physical space between me and the capricious girl vanished. It felt as though her sharp, painted fingernails were tapping on my chest. She was ten times more beautiful in person than she was in Seth’s painting.

  “They say you play drums well,” Abbey continued. “I hope so. Seth and I mean business this year. Oh, I’m sorry—.” She stopped and looked up at Jay as if to acknowledge that he was a part of the plan, too, then she looked at Uwe more superficially.

  Uwe said, “I knew she was going to do this if we let her back in.”

  “Do what?” Seth asked.

  “Do what?” Abbey repeated.

  “She’s already taking over the whole show,” Uwe said.

  “Mellow out,” Jay said.

  Abbey said, “Isn’t a lead singer supposed to steal the show, or something like that?”

  “Yes,” Uwe said.

  “Then what’s your problem?” Seth asked.

  “Nothing,” Uwe said.

  Uwe did have a problem. Abbey didn’t like him. That was obvious.

  Abbey’s friend was still finishing her frozen yogurt, daintily spooning the last bit from the bottom of a pink plastic dish. “Hi,” she said demurely. “I think it’s nice the band has a new drummer.”

  Abbey announced, “This is Zoe Cleopatra Hash. Isn’t that a beautiful name?”

  “Yes, it is,” I said cautiously. “Very beautiful, and very different.”

  “Oh, my,” Zoe replied.

  “Zoe and I are spiritual sisters,” said Abbey. “We live together. We talk about everything. And we get in all sorts of trouble—that is, when I’m not singing and Zoe’s not studying.”

  The two girls batted eyes back and forth, communicating some sort of secret message. Abbey grabbed Zoe by the hand and led her to where the rest of us were in the living room. It was cute the way Zoe’s short blonde hair bounced up and down when she moved. Like her friend’s Zoe’s attire was unique. Her nautical blouse had a flapping collar and a sail boat monogrammed on the breast. She was taller than Abbey, and had long, tan legs under her jean skirt. Zoe Cleopatra Hash definitely had a subtle beauty, but next to Abbey she was no competition.

  Uwe got up off the couch. Abbey and Zoe started to sit down in his place. “Don’t you think we should practice?” Uwe said. The Pete Townshend album had stopped playing on the stereo, and the speakers were making a popping noise. Uwe walked over to the stereo and flicked a switch on the turntable and ended the tone arm’s lonely spiraling in the record album’s center return track. Power off, the record platter stalled and greedily ate momentum in a dying spin.

  “Uwe’s right,” Abbey said. “Let’s start. I can�€
™t wait to sing.”

  Uwe looked rather shocked that she agreed with him.

  We went into the small studio and took our places. Zoe’s actions were as well-rehearsed as Jay and Seth’s ritualistic guitar tuning. She homed-in on the big, tattered chair in front of the sound board and plopped herself on it, then reached over and hit the P.A.’s power switch and twirled a few knobs.

  “Thanks,” Seth called, as he helped Abbey with her microphone.

  Zoe smiled at the guitarist and singer, then pulled a yellow felt pen and a book entitled The History of the Mideast out of her cloth handbag. Sitting cross-legged, her back straight and poised, she put on a pair of professorial-looking glasses and began her studies. She read diligently, high-lighting important facts with her marker. She seemed content and happy. I wondered if she had a good pair of earplugs.

  “One, two, three,” Seth said into his mike.

  “Three, two, one,” Jay said into another.

  Abbey stood in the center of the room. “Test. Test. Ditto. Mine’s working fine, too.”

  Seth stepped on one of the many foot switches in front of his amp, and the bank of overhead fluorescent lights popped off and gave way to dimmer mod lights which bled thick theatrical color; in unison, Zoe flipped on a small lamp next to the chair. Except for Zoe’s pale yellow reading light, the atmosphere of the studio was a blue and red dream-vision. My eyes were on Abbey. One cheek bathed with the color of ice, the other radiating fire.

  She removed her jacket and laid it swiftly at the base of her mike stand. She unbuttoned the sleeves of her blouse and tugged them up her thin forearms, leaving the sleeves ruffled and ready for work; then she arched her back and recentered her hips with a spunky snap. Last of all, Abbey shook her long brown hair, and let it fan out, wild. “It feels so wonderful to be in front of a mike again,” she said. “To be with Bandit.”

  Abbey looked at Seth. “Shall we jam?” she asked.

  “Okay, Danny,” Seth said, “you start us. Here’s the tempo I want: 1, 2, 3, 4.”

  As we fooled around and got the instruments warmed up, Abbey swayed with the music and played a tambourine. Soon she walked over to the keyboards and whispered something into Uwe’s ear. He returned a sour look. She leaned over and coaxed him a second time. Uwe got up and Abbey replaced him at the keyboards. Without a glitch made in our sound, Abbey joined in playing the right chords, following the improvisation with good instinct and style. Even more energetically, she played and swayed from side to side.