Drums: a Novel

  Darkness grabbed my mind and pulled it down, down—into the depths of the cold, dark liquid. I imagined myself naked in the liquid darkness and shivering; yet strangely, I could breathe. Then I turned into liquid myself, a formless fluttering meniscus, like a dollop of oil. This was always the beginning of my dreams about Tahoe.

  A string of red, green and amber lights appeared in the darkness stretching beyond the pier. We heard the sound of a boat.

  As the craft approached, the bow light became brighter and brighter. We had to crinkle our eyes. The pilot kept gunning the peppy engine. Varuum, glug, glug, glug, varuum. The image of a large inboard ski boat and its captain and passengers materialized. The pilot looked about our age. The three girls with him looked younger.

  “You want to earn yourselves a beer?” the pilot called to Jay and me. He threw us the bow line and scurried to the front of the boat to assist us; he seemed intent upon making this a perfect landing. He instructed me to hold the bow line while he hung rubber bumpers from the side. He then threw a line from the stern to Jay.

  “Don’t haul it in yet,” he told Jay. “You,” he said to me, “be more careful. I don’t want the bow to get scratched.”

  He leapt from the boat to the dock and ousted Jay from his job of securing the stern. He precisely tied the rear line to a cleat on the dock, and yanked on the knot to make sure it was taut. He then shooed me away from the bow, untying my knot and re-tying the bow line his way. “Well done,” he said to Jay and me.

  Remaining genuinely enthused, he introduced himself as Edward Mason, Jr., and said he was eager to have that beer with us as soon as he unloaded his passengers. The passengers included his younger sister, Tish, and her friends, Rhonda and Manny.

  Edward was slim with reddish-brown hair and a freckled complexion. His preppy attire included a thick cashmere sweater and deck shoes like Zoe’s. His face was rather plain and boyish. The three young girls had faces that were much more striking. The girls wore lots of makeup, lots of jewelry, and short, slinky, sparkly dresses that showed off their creamy, tanned skin.

  We helped the girls onto the dock. The girls were as bossy as Eddy; unlike Eddy, however, they were not interested in drinking beer on the dock with us.

  As the three girls started toward the club, Tish said, “Manny, you said you were going to borrow your sister’s I.D. Tell me, what do you want us to do, if they don’t let you in?”

  Little Manny crooned, “Oh, stifle, Tishy. I know that big apey bouncer. He lets me in all the time.”

  “My father told him to,” added Rhonda.

  We watched them push through the back door without being questioned.

  “Girls,” Edward mused.

  “Women,” I mused.

  “I’ve got plenty of beer on ice,” he continued. “Be prepared, that’s what I always say.” Eddy accented his last statement with a clean, orthodontic smile.

  He instructed Jay and me to board his boat, the Blue Max as the bow read. He cautioned us about stepping on the chrome railing as we hopped in.

  Eddy told us he was living in his parents’ summer house on the lake, and that his parents were in Japan. “Anyway, I think that’s where they are,” he continued. “They travel quite a lot, you know.” It came out in conversation that Eddy was thirty years old, which surprised me. He looked much younger.

  “What do you do for a living, Eddy?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” Eddy said. “I’m rich.”

  “Sounds pretty all right,” Jay said.

  Eddy replied, “It is and it isn’t. Being rich has its good and bad points.”

  “Good God, what the hell could be bad about it?” I asked.

  Eddy got himself another beer and didn’t answer my question; instead he invited us to a late-night party at his place, after the club shut down at two o’clock. Bragging, I told Eddy that Jay and I were up for anything, because our schedule was that flexible. We were rock musicians.

  “Really?” Eddy said. “I love music. I’m impressed. Let me buy you two another round inside.” I felt guilty that I had neglected to tell Eddy also that we were out-of-work rock musicians.

  Chaperoned by Eddy, all of a sudden Jay and I lost our outlaw status and became a part of the clique scene at the Lake Club. Eddy knew tons of people. We joined his sister, Tish, who sat with her girlfriends at a table next to the dance floor. It was the Pronouns’ last set, and they were playing very loudly. In order for someone to hear you talk, you had to yell. I asked Tish to dance, and she said, “Yes.” She and her girlfriends became very friendly toward Jay and me. I found myself having a blast. All too soon, the Pronouns ended their show, and bright lights flicked on inside the club. Eddy, Tish and her friends left for the marina. I looked around the main floor for Jay.

  As the crowd poured out the front and back, the Lake Club opened up and became like a solemn gallery. The blow-torch statues—the sharp-edged rusty metal—began to give me the creeps. Jay finally reappeared.

  He grinned from ear to ear. “Hey, dude, that chick, Sly, is taking me home with her,” he said.

  “You donkey. How’d you pull that off?”

  “She gave me some bullshit about going over to her place for a nightcap. I told her I didn’t have a car. She said we could worry about that later. I think she’s horny, dude.”

  “I think you’re right,” I said somberly. I told him to have a good time.

  “Cheer up, man,” Jay said. “You going over to Eddy’s?”

  “I don’t know.”

  It was a lonely business to be stuck solo after drinking and looking at women all friggin’ night long. I started having some wild ideas about going back to the cabin, and waking up Abbey, trying to put a move on her. But I knew I wasn’t friggin’ good enough yet. Paradiddle. Paradiddle.

  I stumbled into a bulletin board, mounted to an A-frame stand in the lobby. I leaned against it, trying to take a breather. The friggin’ flimsy stand nearly toppled over. I fixed the stand.

  My eyes scanned over blurry newsprint. Then, this one flyer went off like a bomb: “Appearing Labor Day Weekend. Three nights only. L.A.’s hottest new group, the Pricey Dexters.”

  Man oh man, I couldn’t even deal with this. It was too much, too much. I let the bad news dissolve in my pickled brain, until Domino’s coming to Tahoe was comical. What the hell, I thought, I’m drunk off my ass. What the hell. Dumb laughs trickled out of my numb mouth. Crap, Danny. I say crap, you loser.

  I ran back through the club to the decking, down the stairs to the dock. I yelled to Eddy, “You still hav’n that par-tee? I’s really fucked up, buddy.” It looked like a few extra people besides Tish and company were in Eddy’s boat.

  “Yeah, sure, a bunch of people are coming over,” Eddy said impatiently. “We’re casting off. Come on.”

  I didn’t care who the hell was going to be there. My dumb laugh started again….loser…. I scurried aboard the Blue Max. Varuum. Glug. Glug.

  We headed onto the lake, bled into darkness.

  Chapter 7

  Pihtahbah Pihtahbah

  My head felt like it was stuffed with cotton, and it was sure good to be back at the cabin—back at Oz as the front door now read, thanks to Seth’s handiwork.

  I had to concentrate hard to put into focus some of the events that took place at Eddy’s lake house. I remembered our arrival clearly. Sitting at the wheel of the Blue Max, Eddy pulled out a small plastic box and pushed a button. A big metal door rolled up slowly, whining from rust like a draw bridge. Eddy shifted the motor out of neutral and roared his ski boat into a boat garage that hovered over the lake like a barn.

  Once inside, he told his guests, “I’ve got stuff for sale, if anyone is interested.” I didn’t have a dime left after the Lake Club, but Eddy was pretty generous and cut lines of coke for everyone to sample, and Eddy’s idea of a sample was enough to make my ears sweat. The Pronouns’ bassist and keyboard p
layer, “Us” and “Them,” were present. I remember “Us” passing Eddy a wad of cash for a big buy. “Us” and “Them” split after that. Including Tish and her friends, there were about twenty-five guests partying with Eddy at his parents’ decadent lake house.

  After seeing the flyer announcing the upcoming arrival of Domino and the Pricey Dexters, and after walking out of the Lake Club solo, I felt like getting even more obliterated. People kept turning me onto lines, and I kept wetting my dry, numb throat with alcohol. The stereo blasted Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. I remember Petty’s scratchy, acrimonious voice repeatedly singing out the chorus: “She’s a woman in love, love, love, love …. She’s a woman in love, love, love ... and it’s not me.” I remember I felt like snatching the record off the turntable and hurling it out into the big, cold lake.

  Things started spinning and coming out of alignment. I left Eddy’s giant party room with its hardwood bar and expensive everything, and climbed a spiral staircase. The stairs made me more dizzy. I stumbled around upstairs and tried to find a place to lie down. Somebody’s hand squeezed mine.

  “Are you okay? You look pretty messed up,” Tish said.

  “Fine, thank you,” I said. It was excruciatingly difficult to try and compose myself. “I decided to take a little tour. I’m fine, thank you. Nice pace—, I mean, place.” Dumb laughter started trickling out of my mouth like syrup. “Oh, man, man, man. I’m so fucked up,” I said.

  Tish thought this was funny. “Ooooh. I liked the last part,” she said.

  “Do you want to know a secret?”

  “Pretty please.”

  “I liked the last part, too.”

  “Danny, what do you mean?”

  “Hey, wait a minute.”

  “A minute? I hope it takes longer than that.”

  “Longer?”

  “Yes, longer. Ooooh.”

  Deep inside, a small part of me remained sober; this part, my good fairy, reprimanded me for flirting with Tish, who was certainly old enough in mind and body for sex but whose legal age, I feared, was not greater-than-or-equal-to the statutory limit. My good fairy also blessed me with a sliver of equilibrium and kept me from throwing up. Thank you, good fairy. Unfortunately, my good fairy’s words of wisdom about Tish were spoken in a very faint voice and were easy to ignore.

  We stood in a bedroom with a king-size waterbed. Built into the wall above the bed was a 100-gallon aquarium full of turtles and gold fish.

  “Your pets?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she replied.

  “Hey,” I said. “Why don’t we feed them some fish food? I like to watch fish eat.”

  “I can think of something a lot more interesting to do than that,” Tish said.

  So much for talking innocently about gold fish and turtles. Sorry, good fairy.

  Tish stripped down to bikini panties and a petite lacy bra. She lay down on her waterbed and invited me to join her. Still buzzed and sluggish, I moved on top of her; she kissed me wetly and arched so that her groin collided with mine. It felt like I was in slow motion compared with her. Then, I sped up and she slowed down, until our crotches, still separated by a thin layer of moist cloth—ground together in a matched rhythm. I tore away her panties. She told me to wait.

  Before I could enter her, she made me sprinkle her clitoris with cocaine and lick it off. The coke made the salty stink between her legs taste pure and clean. Also, the coke made saliva pour out of my mouth. As we made it, I thought of coming—coming in her, coming all over her. I felt like a male animal going after a female in heat.

  When I awoke, I thought of going. But it was she who was gone.

  “At the beach, so thanks for last night. See ya around,” the note read, in the large curly-cue handwriting of a girl. It was signed “Tishy,” and at the bottom of the note there was sketch of a Happy Face, changed so that the mouth was a drawn with an “O” rather than a wide “U.” She also made one of the Happy Face’s eyes a line rather than a dot, so that he was winking. A bubble above the face made the cartoon say, “Nummy-num-num.”

  “So you wound up with dear Tishy,” Eddy said, as he prepared a thermos of coffee for the boat ride back to the Lake Club and my pickup. He looked disgusted. I didn’t blame him. If it had been my sister, I would have been furious.

  “Sorry, Eddy,” I said, feeling like a jerk. “I didn’t know what I was doing last night. Hey, I’ll talk to her and stop things.”

  He brushed off my apology. “Talk to her?” he said. “She and her friends are the biggest sluts in Tahoe. She screws everybody.” He paused. “I guess I’m not the greatest moral influence on her.”

  “What can you do?” I said.

  “Nothing, I just hope she doesn’t get knocked up or get herpes or something. At least I was straight when I was in high school. When I went to Yale, I just drank. Now it’s a different story. But I have to give myself credit for then.”

  I said, “Sure, Eddy. Can you give me that ride now?”

  He fixed us both a Bloody Mary for our hangovers. “Cheers,” he said.

  By the time I got out of there I was feeling like a total degenerate. I sought relief back at Oz. I needed to practice my drums.

  * * *

  Pihtahbah-Pihtahbah.

  Right- left-right-right. I tested my snare and it snapped back with the sound “Pit-Pit-Pit-Pit.”

  Left-left. I struck the small tom and heard a throaty response, “Tom-Tom.” Pihtahbah - Pihtahbah - Pihtahbah - Pihtahbah.

  “Chink-Chink” went the hi-hat, and “Ding-Ding” went the ride cymbal.

  My right foot tested the bass drum. “Bugg. Bugg-Bugg-Bugg.” I loved my drum set’s bass drum; it had an especially thick sound, like a mallet hitting a side of beef.

  I decided to work on triplets. “It” of the Pronouns had done a nice series of them in his drum solo. I set my metronome on 160 and counted along a couple measures, “one-two-three-four, two-two-three-four.” I played one tri-po-let slowly. “Pit. Tom. Bugg.” Then faster, “Pit-tom-bugg.” Then a tempo for a measure, “Pihtahbah - Pihtahbah - Pihtahbah - Pihtahbah.” And for another, “Pihtahbah - Pihtahbah - Pihtahbah - Pihtahbah.”

  Then a tempo measure after measure, “Pihtahbah - Pihtahbah - Pihtahbah - Pihtahbah. Pihtahbah - Pihtahbah - Pihtahbah - Pihtahbah. Pihtahbah - Pihtahbah - Pihtahbah - Pihtahbah.”

  I experimented, working in other drums. A roto tom-tom-bass triplet made the sound “Tootahbah.” Other variations produced “Tahpihbah” and “Bahtahpih.” The possibilities of this lick were endless. I played until my hands and feet were tired.

  “Don’t stop on account of us,” said Abbey, who was sitting on the fireplace hearth reading the latest issue of People magazine. On the front cover was a portrait of Lady Di, soon-to-be Princess of England. Zoe sat nearby at the small, rickety table she used as a desk, when the rest of us weren’t eating off it. Positioned in front of her was her open briefcase.

  “Your drums have been sounding really tight lately.” Abbey turned the page of her magazine. Her green eyes remained focused downward on glitzy pictures and gossip. “I’m an expert on drums and drummers, you know,” she added.

  I didn’t reply. I was no longer so pleased that she was pleased with my drumming.

  Zoe had bright news, at least. She had found Bandit a job at a place called the Hofbrau. It was a steady gig, five nights a week, Tuesday through Saturday. She was currently drawing up a contract and this activity seemed to amuse her very much. “You wouldn’t believe the list of stipulations I’ve come up with,” she said brightly. “The nitty gritty details of business can be absolutely rigorous.” She adjusted her professorial glasses.

  Abbey chuckled from behind the pages of People.

  It annoyed me that Abbey was so interested in garbage like Lady Di’s famous new hairdo and her upcoming plans for holy matrimony to that big-eared polo player, Prince Charles. A friggin’ match ma
de in heaven, as far as I was concerned.

  I sat down next to Abbey at the hearth. “What do you think of Lady Di’s haircut?” I said flatly.

  “If she wants to look like a page boy, that’s her prerogative. God, but to think of it. Di’s going to be sssooo rich.” She paused. “Why should you care?”

  “Just making conversation.”

  She reached over and ruffled my hair.“Danny, you’re such a sweet little bird sometimes.”

  I forgave her for everything.

  Her expression turned sad. “Actually, I just started reading about something else. There’s a follow-up on that fellow who shot John.”

  She flipped backward a couple of pages and located a line with her index finger. “‘It was almost as if I was on some kind of special mission that I could not avoid….’ That’s Mark Chapman’s excuse. Can you believe it? He wants people to think he’s special.”

  “He’s a psycho,” I said. “What do you expect?”

  “Don’t be flip. Doesn’t this bother you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know what I think? I think they ought to hang him by his prick.”

  “Abbey!” Zoe interjected from across the room. “That would be inhumane.”

  “Justice is sometimes inhumane,” she told her spiritual sister. “Don’t be such an idealist.”

  “I like being an idealist.” Zoe went back to her papers.

  “And another thing,” Abbey said, “have you read this book, Catcher in the Rye?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Hasn’t everybody?” Zoe said.

  “I haven’t,” Abbey said. “I was supposed to one time, but I read something else instead.”

  “You should read it,” Zoe said. “It’s a very engaging novel. There’s this boy, Holden Caulfield, who’s rather a smart aleck. Oh my, it’s sad. Holden has a dead brother named Allie, and poor Holden thinks about him all the time. What’s curious, you see, about Allie, is that he used to write poetry on his baseball mitt….”

  Abbey spoke quickly, before Zoe had the chance to launch into a critical literary discussion of J.D. Salinger. “The point is, it says here that Chapman thought he was that guy in the book, Holden Caulfield.”