Drums: a Novel

  “That’s correct,” Zoe said. “So?”

  “I think Holden is cool,” I said.

  “The point I’m trying to make is that Mark Chapman is absolutely crazy. It scares me to think that there are people like that in this world.” She tossed the magazine aside and sprawled, face down, on the floor. She laced her fingers into the brown hair covering her ears.

  Zoe came over and sat next to me on the hearth. We both looked down at Abbey. My back felt cold. There was no fire in the fireplace.

  “Aren’t you being a little melodramatic, Abbey?” Zoe asked. Abbey said nothing. No one spoke after that.

  When John Lennon was a Beatle, I was a preadolescent, too young to understand Lennon’s political and social messages. I was then under the impression that there was an abundance of Peace and Love in the world, not a shortage. I didn’t have a clue what the songs meant.

  But every radio station played the Beatles. I grew up listening to their music in the background, and liked it for the same reason that I liked Disneyland: the songs’ colorful places and funny characters captured my imagination.

  Yellow submarines, eggmen, kites, diamonds, marmalade skies, meter maids, strawberry fields, walruses, nowhere, everywhere, revolution, Rocky Raccoon, Sgt. Pepper, Penny Lane…

  Now, as I sat in the cabin called Oz looking down at Abbey, bits and pieces of Beatles songs swam once again in my mind. I felt like I did when I was a young boy. I realized how awful it was that someone had killed John Lennon.

  We put on a couple of Beatles records and listened to them reverently.

  * * *

  “I’m still depressed,” Abbey said. “I’m going for a walk.” She pulled her army boots over the bottoms of her jeans. The jeans clung tightly to her small calves and narrow ankles and showed off her legs handsomely. “Anyone care to join me?”

  “I’m busy,” Zoe said.

  Abbey opened the door. Green incense rushed into the cabin, as did the sound of the churning Truckee River. “Come on, Danny,” she said. “I need some company.”

  Here’s my chance to impress her, I thought—but once I was outside, alone with her, I was speechless.

  “Cat got your tongue?” she teased.

  “Cat? No,” I said.

  “You’re weird, Danny.”

  Loser ... crap ... Mary Lewis said ... Perverted ...

  What the hell was my problem? The only women I had success with were promiscuous groupies and teenage nymphos. This was easy. They made all the moves.

  I didn’t know how to go after a real woman, like Abbey. I just didn’t have the guts.

  * * *

  When I was fourteen I had a hernia operation. A pretty brunette nurse came into the room to shave me before I went on the table. I was red faced, embarrassed, and desperately trying to stave off an erection while her hands worked around my genitals. I kept having this fantasy about the nurse drawing the curtains around my hospital bed, removing her white nylons, pulling up her crisp white dress, climbing on top of me, and moaning in rapture as she moved up and down. I had read about such wonderful occurrences in men’s magazines. There was this guy at my high school who claimed something like this had happened to him—while he was at the chiropractor, an exotic Japanese nurse gave him a blowjob.

  I couldn’t control myself. The pretty brunette nurse smiled patiently, not seeming alarmed. She bowed her middle finger against her thumb, and snapped the finger hard against the underside of my erection—instantly yielding smallness, softness, and a stinging welt. “Don’t be ashamed. I have to do that a lot,” she said, “even with adult men, sometimes.” She finished shaving me and scrubbed me raw with pre-op disinfectant.

  * * *

  I thought about that friggin’ nurse as Abbey and I strolled through the forest. Abbey Butler was equally deft at “snapping” guys when the need arose. But soon I discovered Abbey wasn’t acting like that nurse at all.

  We walked slowly along the narrow path that followed the river, our shoulders brushing together. We traveled in the same direction that the river flowed, downstream from Oz. The woods grew thicker and more lush, and the path became more cluttered with pine needles and twigs. Abbey ran ahead.

  “Look at all of the lovely pinecones,” she called back to me, “I’m going to find one that’s just perfect and box it up and send it to Izy.”I continued walking until I caught up with her. She stood holding a fine pinecone. Our eyes met and locked.

  “I think your mother will really like that,” I said.

  We located a large granite rock on the edge of the Truckee and climbed onto it. “It’s getting cold,” she said. “Do you mind?” She snuggled against me, as we sat looking down at the water. Her body felt soft and warm.

  “Danny,” she exclaimed, “we’ve found Oz. We’re living in Oz.” Her eyes remained fixed upon the rapids. “Life is being so good to me lately,” she said. “Not too long ago, a lot of things were wrong. I feel so very happy right now.”

  The thin mountain air seemed to amplify the sounds of the forest—the rustle of squirrels and creatures, the rush of clear liquid over rocks, the creaking and cracking of wood. In the deep forest, our voices sounded crisp and chimy like brass bells.

  “I feel very happy right now, too,” I said. “And it’s because of you.”

  “Do you think so?” Abbey said coyly. “Is it because of me? Or is it because of this pretty forest?”

  “Because of you,” I said.

  “Not this?” she asked.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Well,” she said, “since I’m in too good of a mood to give you a hard time, I’ll say thank you. But just because I feel so sweet, don’t take it for granted.” She tilted her head, laughed.

  “What was wrong with your life?” I asked.

  “Oh, a lot,” she said.

  “Tell me about Domino.”

  Abbey studied my face. She seemed to be trying to decide whether or not she wanted to answer. She took a deep breath, the same way she did before she sang a long note. “Everyone knows I used to go out with Bandit’s old drummer,” she said. “But you see, I really loved him. It wasn’t like me at all. It’s more fun to like guys just a little. Then, if you need to, you can be mean to them.” She rolled the pinecone she had picked up for Isabella, over and over, spinning it backwards, into herself, as if it were the mechanism of a clock, unwinding.

  “So much happened between Domino and me. I can’t tell you everything. I don’t want to tell you everything.” She looked up from the spinning pinecone. “You probably think I’m pretty sure of myself, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Abbey sighed.

  “Oh, Danny,” she said, “it seems like a long time ago. I moved away from Izy and joined Bandit. It was back when I met Zoe, and Domino. San Luis Obispo was kind of like our little Oz is now. At first there weren’t any jobs, but there seemed to be so much promise. Eventually we made it. We became popular! Then, things blew up.”

  She tossed her pinecone into the water, and it floated away. The feisty Abbey spoke. “It was all such a fucking mess. I never felt so much pain.” She started to cry, yet before she became lost in emotion she stopped herself.

  She dried her eyes on the sleeve of her jacket, and we listened to the forest sounds. A blue jay squawked nearby. The jay woke us from the dream. “You have your arm around me,” she said. “I just realized that.”

  The wicked snap. I withdrew the arm I had ever-so-gently placed around her.

  “You don’t have to do that,” she said. “Why are you so timid? Do I scare you?”

  “Sort of,” I said.

  “Haven’t you figured it out by now?” Her ever-changing eyes were now the color of the halo of pine needles above her head. “I’m the one who’s afraid. I know you care for me, Danny, but I don’t like to admit that I care for you. You’re such a coincidence, damn you.”
r />   We kissed. And I would remember it forever. The green, forest kiss of Oz.

  When our lips parted, I felt like I was glued to the granite rock. Abbey was charged with energy, and she shot up and brushed the twigs off her jeans. “Can you help me now?” she asked. “I’d like to find another pinecone to send to Izy.” Arm in arm, we sprung to the task, and Abbey hummed a song I had never before heard into the nape of my neck. What was happening didn’t seem real.

  * * *

  In the days following our walk in the forest, Abbey continued to be affectionate with me, up to a point. We sat around together in the evenings and snuggled in front of the fire. We went on more walks, scavenged for pinecones, talked for hours. But the intimacy stopped at kisses. She told me she wanted things to happen slowly. I hadn’t expected such caution from her, and it made her even more attractive.

  One evening I drove her to a pay phone so she could call her mother. Standing outside the telephone booth, I could barely hear her voice. It was muffled, and the whish-whish of cars driving past the gas station on Tahoe City’s main drag sometimes drowned out Abbey’s voice completely. Yet, the last thing she told her mother before she clacked the resin-hard receiver into the hook was clear: “Tell Hector I love him. Mother, tell him I miss him a lot.”

  * * *

  Bars smell funny. Especially in the morning when all the customers are home, and it’s dead silent. The spilled beer in the carpet smells like sweet rotten rice. The counters smell like stale oil and stick to your elbows. It is said: take one of the five senses away and the other four become keener. In a bar in the morning, there’s nothing to hear, to hug, to see among the dreary tables, to taste because the thought of liquor is about as appealing as the thought of drinking cough syrup. So the nose becomes the kingpin and detects the residue of barf in the far corner, from the girl who drank ten daiquiris on her twenty-first birthday.

  I got a bad impression of the Hofbrau the morning we set up. The place reeked. Now, as I ate my complimentary dinner before our first show, the Hofbrau still didn’t impress me. There was a four-inch black hair baked into the meat of my hamburger. I would have gone to the rest room and made myself throw up, but I was afraid I might get stabbed.

  Mickey, the manager, stood across from me. He was serving food and tending bar. I dangled the black hair in front of him, as though it were a piece of thread. Mickey laughed and remarked wryly, “Look at what the cat drug in. Ha Ha. Hey, let me get ya another.” He turned to the nearest waitress. “Who the hell’s cooking back there? One of the guys in the band got some goddamn hair in his goddamn burger.” Mickey shoved my plate into the young girl’s hand, which were already full of empty mugs. “What the hell’s his name? Oh yeah, Danny. Get Danny another one of these. And tell that dirt-ball to put on a hair net for Christ’s sake!”

  Treating me as if I were his good buddy, Mickey confided, “You wouldn’t know the problems I have. The help I get is lousy. Plain lousy. Listen here, Danny, you guys do good tonight. Play some good music, okay?”

  I never did get my second hamburger. My stomach was thankful.

  That evening the Hofbrau swam with ruffian clientele. Burly men in T-shirts sporting boating murals and beer ads lounged loudly and heavily at the tables. Pool sharks circled the tables in back. Hard-looking women weaved in and out of the men, or sat among themselves and smoked cigarettes. The women’s voices sounded like splintering wood. The men’s voices sounded like a fleet of diesel trucks.

  Abbey, Seth, Jay and Sly, and Zoe emerged from the back room. Abbey was heralded with cat-calls. She had on a tank top with no bra, tight jeans, and snakeskin boots. Her face was painted wildly with stripes of blue and green eye shadow, red-red rouge, and red-red lipstick. Her boot heels snapped the floor like a whip.

  “How do I look?” she said, spinning around for me. She was acting very giddy, fully of artificial energy. So was Zoe.

  “You look great,” I told her. I wondered what the girls were on.

  “Good,” she exclaimed, giving me a firecracker kiss on the cheek. She let her lips remain next to my ear. “Be careful,” she whispered. “Tonight might be your night.”

  I about fell off my barstool.

  Eddy had recently paid us a visit at the cabin and had brought us a jar full of uppers as a gift. Through it was no lake house, Eddy really liked our cabin called Oz. One thing about Eddy, even though he was rich, he wasn’t a snob. Eddy was a bad influence, however. Groupies tended to be like that.

  “This place is a dump,” Abbey shrieked. “Let’s get crazy. What the hell.”

  She announced to the audience that I, the drummer, would kick off the show, and for 32 measures I played variations of Pihtahbah - Pihtahbah - Pihtahbah - Pihtahbah. I cued Jay, and we kicked in the rest of the band. We did a couple originals by Seth, next a medley of old Stones songs, during which the place went wild.

  Some bikers arrived during the second set, and Mickey cautioned us to ignore them. He said a couple of them played, and they were always wanting to jam with club bands. Jay broke a string, and while he changed it, one of the bikers approached me. He was tall as a lumberjack, and wore oily black leather and a long buck knife.

  “I’d like to play your drums, pal,” he said. He helped himself to one of my spare drumsticks and started testing my floor tom. He smelled like the underside of a junked Buick.

  “Oh, do you play drums?” I said nicely.

  “No, I just want to make a fool out of myself. Fuck yes, I play!”

  “Nothing personal, but we like to keep it pretty professional onstage. Sorry about that.”

  “You’re real funny. Real funny, ya know.” The large biker smiled, and I saw that all of his teeth were rotten. “If you don’t let me play, I’m gonna fuck you up. I’m going to fucking kill you.”

  “That’s the magic word,” I said. This friggin’ moron pissed me off, but I wasn’t going to provoke him into using his buck knife.

  Seth and Abbey remained frozen. Jay shrugged and indicated his bass was ready. The biker was amused. “Guess what? I’m going to do you a favor,” he said, pushing me back down onto my drummer’s throne. “I don’t think you really want me to play, and it fucking hurts my feelings. It fucking hurts my feelings like a little baby. You go ahead and play tonight, pal. You go ahead and don’t say I never did anything for you.” The biker issued a few bullish snorts and left. The sonofabitch gave me the creeps.

  For a while, the bikers behaved. Then a woman with tattoos got on one of the tables and did the writhing dance of a harem girl. The girl caught Abbey’s eyes, and Abbey started rooting for the dumb slut between songs. Jay, who was also cranked on uppers, egged on the biker chick. The crowd grew around the table, and the woman shucked her top and started shaking her floppy white tits with large, cocoa-brown nipples. Mickey tried to stop the woman, but the bikers pushed him away.

  The biker who hassled me about playing drums climbed onto the table, took his shirt off, and started dancing an erotic duet with the woman. My biker friend kept yelling, “Booga-booga-booga!” as he stuck his face between the woman’s tits. Each time he came up for air, he issued a goofy look to the crowd and everyone cheered. The tall biker was sloppy drunk and his long frame teetered on the table. We didn’t know what to do, so we continued to play. Most of the dancers cleared the floor and gathered around the live, impromptu sex act.

  An even bigger, meaner-looking biker—who was big like a gorilla as opposed to tall like a lumberjack—pulled my friend off the table. The big newcomer evidently wanted to sample the woman’s tits for himself. The tall one made the mistake of pushing the big one back. The newcomer attacked the other viciously, throwing him down on the floor and kicking his stomach with thick-soled motorcycle boots. The big gorilla stopped, and the tall biker lay motionless.

  Slowly, life returned. The tall one got up, bloody and lame, and limped away. “Fuck you,” he
cried shakily. “You can have the slut.”

  Human nature. The crowd sided with the big gorilla, and heckled the loser. Even the biker women were cruel. “Boo. Boo. Chicken-fucker. Chicken-fucker. He needs another lesson. Get him. Boo. Boo.”

  We gave up trying to play. Mickey was behind the bar on the phone. I hoped he was calling the cops.

  I sensed what the stupid tall guy would do. In a rage, he unsheathed his buck knife and ran hog-wild at the big biker. But the gorilla broke a chair over the tall one’s head before he could cut him. The knife slid onto the dance floor. Nobody touched it.

  The big one climbed onto the tall one’s chest and grabbed a fistful of hair. He slammed the loser’s head into the wood flooring. Before each slam, he lectured the senseless, bloody head. “Nobody fucks with me.” Bash. “Nobody pulls a knife on me.” Slam. “A brother who turns gots ta pay.” Thud. “Nobody fucks with me.” Crack.

  The blade of the buck knife gleamed on the vacant dance floor like poison.

  The cops cleared the place. Abbey, Zoe, and Sly were shaken up. They went in the back room and wouldn’t come out. We put away the instruments.

  “I wonder if that biker is dead,” Jay mused, as he wiped down his bass.

  “Close to it,” I said.

  “This place is strange,” said Seth. He had just gone outside to watch the medics load the biker into the ambulance. Seth looked sick to his stomach.

  “Strange? That’s a real astute observation, dude,” Jay said.

  Seth lit a cigarette. He started several times to issue one of his famous polka-dotted party horn laughs. But he couldn’t get himself happy. “Shit,” he said. “In addition to this place being a war zone, there’s ghosts around here.”

  “Good God, what are you mumbling about?” I asked. I was in no mood for any of Seth’s arty, spiritualistic bullshit. Neither was Jay. We wanted to get our stuff packed up and go home.

  “No kidding, you two,” Seth said testily, “I saw a car-load of guys drive by. They slowed down to look at the ambulance and shit. One of them looked just like Uwe.”