A Dream About Lightning Bugs

by Ben Folds

  Still in last night’s clothes, which felt damp and permanently pasted to my skin, I hadn’t had a minute’s sleep. I stood up straight as I could, thrust what little chest I had forward, and walked the fuck through the big glass door. I made a beeline through my peers to my percussion professor. Everyone could hear every whispering word echo off the concrete walls as I begged for my test to be put off until the next week.

  As it turns out, the University of Miami percussion department didn’t play that game. In the professional world, you see, you’d just be fired for showing up in such a state and asking for the night off. So that was that. I would have to perform soon. How I would’ve loved to at least change my clothes or brush my teeth.

  “Hey, Mike,” I whispered to a kid next to me. “Man, I’m sorry, but would you mind if I used your sticks and mallets for my test?”

  “Nah, sorry, Ben, can’t wait around to get them back. I gotta run and I need these sticks for my next class.”

  “Okay, okay, that’s cool…” I muttered, searching for a receptive face.

  “Hey! John, can you loan me your sticks for my jury?”

  “Dude, you stink.”

  * * *

  —

  This was it. The slaughter was nigh.

  “Ben, turn to page five,” instructed the band director. “This one is called ‘Fusion Juice.’ Stay with me.”

  He counted it off and the band burned through each measure. I did not stay with him. I was left in the dust, crawling around under the snare drum for the stick I dropped, as the band squeezed out some “Fusion Juice” with no drums. To this day, my Miami percussion professor, Steve Rucker, doesn’t think it was he who went all Whiplash (the 2014 award-winning movie about a struggling jazz percussion student and his abusive professor) at that jury. He suspects it was the senior percussion professor instead who made me play with a broken hand. But I think that I should damn well have had to perform, broken hand and all. Because that is life. And in my decades as a touring recording artist, I have personally canceled fewer shows than I could count on that broken hand. Cheap lesson learned. Either way, Steve and I both recall my jury for the disaster it was.

  * * *

  —

  So, here’s the story of the previous night’s drunken idiocy that led up to all of this:

  On that night, the eve of my juries, some guy named Jim had taken a special trip down from the eleventh floor of our dorm to my room on the ninth. Nobody on the ninth floor really knew this fellow. Jim’s ninth-floor trip, as we would learn, was quite premeditated. He was in search of someone his size to beat up (as you do) and had his eye on my roommate, Doug, who seemed to fit the bill. They were of equal builds, both a few inches shorter and thicker than I.

  I imagine that in the hours before his trip to the ninth floor, Jim had been flexing shirtless in the mirror, with a cheap-beer buzz, making intense eye contact with himself, and whisper-shouting to his reflection. Getting himself stoked, psyched, and pumped, under a single bare bulb in his cinder-block bathroom. He seemed warmed up and mid-script when he made the scene.

  I knew how important the next morning’s juries were, but I’d never found it useful to dwell or cram the night before an audition or performance. It just made me more nervous. I’d prepared my ass off anyway, and I imagined it might be a good psych-out technique to appear cavalier to the other musicians. I was competitive that way. So at midnight on jury’s eve, while the music students were practicing and commiserating about their jitters, the PBR flowed freely for the non-music students. And for me too. I took the opportunity to have a few beers myself while organizing my side of the room. I had just cleaned my desk and was coming through the door to empty the trash and, boom, there was Jim.

  Jim was tan and jock-like and appeared a little anxious. His eyes were on fire and he was brandishing a fire extinguisher. It was all good, though. I was learning not to judge a man too quickly. Away from home for the first time, you discover that the way a fellow is when he’s drunk is not necessarily a good indication of the kind of person he really is. People who are normally soft-spoken can suddenly become boisterously loud after only one drink, like this kid Jonathan, a studious science major who lost his shit every weekend, yelling, “Nine sixteeeeee!” up and down the hall. Our dorm was called 960 Complex, and I guess he was really proud of that. Hell, I’d just had a few drinks and was now walking around with a trash can, so I didn’t think it was odd if a guy had a few drinks and went for a fire extinguisher. If that was his thing.

  I was about to be hospitable and invite this odd man in. Doug sat cross-legged on his bed behind me, white-knuckling a pair of sticks with his face in the next morning’s jury music, as Jim and I stood face-to-face in my doorway. I remember sort of bobbing my head, Southern style—yup, here we are—to fill the awkward silence, which was now going on too long. There was no how do you do or even my name is Jim and I get really nervous when tipsy—oh, and I heard there was a fire. Instead, he puffed up his chest, looked around as if calling an Iron John meeting to order. He took a hard, deep breath through his nose, the kind that nearly collapses the nostrils, and announced his intentions to hose my roommate with a fire extinguisher. He would then “kick his pussy ass,” he continued. Maybe he said he’d kick his ass first and then hose him down. Something like that. Whatever. It just seemed absurd.

  I’m not exactly sure what came out of my smart mouth, but it got a good laugh up and down the hall. And then the air got even heavier. It had officially become Real™ on the ninth floor. And there was no turning back. Jim was the lion, and I was the small man in a loincloth waiting to die in the middle of a Roman coliseum. It was a National Geographic documentary featuring a boa constrictor and a small rodent, with Morgan Freeman narrating. And there’s no turning back once Morgan Freeman has spoken. Oh yez, it was on! And the shit would soon be going down.

  Only I didn’t yet realize it was “on.” I may have been the only one who didn’t quite hear what Morgan Freeman said. I didn’t even get that rush of adrenaline and holy-fucking-shit-ness until moments later, when I was being pummeled. Back home my sense of humor had always kept me from getting my ass kicked. It always defused a situation like this. Joking in these situations can earn respect or break down the predator by making him laugh. Ah, let the kid go—he’s funny! Not this time.

  It turns out that Jim was an amateur boxer who was attending college on a wrestling scholarship. My little quip that made the hallway laugh was sort of like a ringside bell for this guy.

  Ding!

  I just stood there getting beat up in the doorway, holding that damn trash can for God knows how long, until my limbic system suggested to my right hand that maybe it should, you know, let go. But, then, my teenage ego suggested I advance and swing like a maniac—in the general direction of Jim. Which, I’m told, I did.

  Jim seemed to be beating my ass and conducting an interview all at once. He was asking me questions between jabs, like, did I want “another piece of this?”—pop pop!—and what did I “have to say now, chump?”—pop pop pop! This was the best day of Jim’s life. As he frothed in ecstasy behind a blur of fists, I reflexively hollered something I’d learned back home, like, “Yeaaaah, you little titty bitch, let’s go!” I also stepped closer, making me easier for him to hit.

  I remember bleeding all over the elevator and getting a last blurry glimpse of Jim being held back by a few other kids. He was freakishly pumped up and loud, still high off his conquest, pounding his chest and yelling, “Yeah, I kicked your fucking ass! I kicked your fucking ass!” as the elevator doors closed.

  All said and done, this was a brief affair. In the time it took you to read these last few paragraphs, the whole event would have occurred four times over. I was soon off to the South Dade Hospital ER. Dressing my wounds, the doctor asked if the attacker had worn brass knuckles. Doug told him no but that Jim had had some really fat rings on his
fingers. I called my parents collect from the pay phone in the lobby at 5 A.M. for my insurance information.

  In the end, the nail in the coffin of what was once my dignity—the thing that hurt at least as bad as all those blows to the head—was what I learned in this exchange:

  ME: “Damn, they say my hand is totally broken! I must have put a hurtin’ on Jim too, right? He’s in the ER too, right? I can’t wait to see what I did to his face!”

  DOUG: “Uh, he’s fine. You missed him and punched the wall.”

  ME: “…”

  DOUG: “Twice.”

  Some said later that the loud snap of my second punch to the cinder-block wall, which had wildly missed Jim’s head, had made one of the onlookers sick to his stomach.

  DRUMS IN A LAKE

  LEAVING MY JURY, HEAD HUNG low, I knew that my scholarship wouldn’t survive my awful performance. My time at the University of Miami would soon be coming to an end. My friend Mark tried to hatch a last-minute plan to unlock some of his personal savings to help me stay in school, but I couldn’t accept that. No, I was cooked. So I did what anyone would do—I rolled my drums to Lake Osceola, which was right next to the music school, and tossed them in, one drum at a time.

  This wasn’t completely spontaneous, though. I’d been dreaming of chucking these drums for months. The truth was, the whole set wasn’t even worth a bus ticket back home. The bass drum was so anemic that when a tom was mounted on it, it would collapse in on itself. I had to jam two pencils where the metal bass-drum legs had once existed, to keep the kit stable. But even then I’d have to steal resting moments in the music to pull the bass drum back in place, so it didn’t inch forward each time I kicked it.

  I’d first unveiled these drums in front of a class called “Fundamentals of Swing 101.” Despite its insipid name, I found this class terrifying and intimidating, and it seemed to have been designed that way. The instructor, a gruff old-school jazz pianist, encouraged a sort of mean-spirited competition between students as a way to motivate us to improve. In an environment like this, my shitty drums were open season.

  Each day, a few of us would be grouped into a small ensemble—usually piano, bass, guitar, and drums—and assigned a jazz standard to perform together. The rest of the class would critique. In fact, critiquing was most of the grade, so you’d have to say the right things when called upon, and the right things were seldom kind. The more scathing the takedown, the more catty the tone, the more delighted the teacher would become.

  “Sound and balance, Mr. Folds?” he would call.

  If Mr. Folds didn’t rip the band a new asshole for being out of balance, then God help Mr. Folds. Conversely, when Mr. Folds finally got his turn to play, the same musicians would be foaming at the mouth to turn their steely knives on his broke-ass drum set.

  Eventually I got my first turn to play in an ensemble for Fundamentals of Swing 101, and a famous vibraphone player from a successful fusion band who was buddies with the teacher came in and sat in the back to watch. I nearly shat my pants. Anyone who’s spent any time in elevators has heard this guy. I must have gotten my teeth drilled to his music at least a few times, so I was starstruck. I’d never seen a famous person before. Well, there was that one local radio DJ at Hanes Mall when I was ten.

  To be fair, as green as I was, as cheap as my drums were, I was no slouch of a musician. I was just more of a jack-of-all-trades than a technical monster. My creativity earned me my scholarship, but at music school it’s all about being a specialist, since you can’t really teach creativity. I was now supposed to be a technically proficient jazz-drumming specialist, I guess. My training had been orchestral percussion, but that wasn’t really the thing at Miami, and burning through a jazz standard was not my strongest suit.

  As the class was about to begin, the other musicians in my ensemble were putting away their cases and taking their places at their instruments. There were definitely no cases with my drums. Nothing to put away for me. As I sat at my garden of droopy plywood and tried to calm my nerves, the harsh critiques that I’d dished out to other students the week before echoed in my mind, and I shivered. Quiet order came over the class and I noticed a weird little sound nearby, an annoying high sizzling buzz, sssssss, just down to my right. What was it? Shit. It was me! It was my right foot on the pedal of my hi-hat cymbals (I’m a left-handed drummer, for all you drummers), trembling so fast it made a buzz roll. I shut it down and looked around to make sure my quivering cymbal roll had gone unnoticed. As my mind scrolled through the music I was about to play, the damn sound started up anew, surprising me as much as the first time. I had to stop it repeatedly. Taking my foot completely off the pedal didn’t seem to occur to me.

  As we began whatever cocktail-jazz garbage we’d been assigned, I felt myself losing access to all that had before distinguished my musicianship. The sense of danger, the playfulness. The humor and lyricism. All that stuff, though still in its crude form, should have been fostered and encouraged. I wasn’t a virtuoso but at least I was original. Here in jazz school I was suddenly just some chump with a mean single-foot hi-hat roll and a sagging drum set. I could feel my inner musician retreating to the furthest reaches of my frightened soul.

  When the tune was over, and I’d managed to drag it to half of its original tempo, the peanut gallery began to chime in. I’d expected the comments to be harsh, but they weren’t even musical in nature. They were personal, about the scared look on my face, how the bass drum had advanced forward and I had to lunge to reach it. I felt I was being punished for not having the money for a slick drum set. And for my Southern accent. My North Carolina lilt drew further sniggers and eye-rolling—or, at least, that was my youthful perception. The proper criticism, I thought, should have been simple and obvious: Ben’s tempo dragged the whole song down. Enough said. But because I didn’t fit in, didn’t wear the right clothes, didn’t have the right way of speaking and, of course, the right brand-name drums, it was a personal pile-on. As the semester wore on, my performances in the class kept getting worse.

  * * *

  —

  But I learned a lot about swing and music in general in that class, despite the quasi-abusive atmosphere. I learned how to pinpoint performance problems within an ensemble, which formed the basis of how I identified musical problems and their possible solutions during my time as a judge on The Sing-Off, a prime-time a cappella competition series that aired for a few seasons on NBC. Only, as a TV judge, I tried to bring some kindness to this method. All said and done, my experience in my brief time at University of Miami certainly toughened me up. It was an indispensable part of my education as a musician.

  As I was chucking drums in the lake, I’d had enough of feeling diminished for not being a rich kid. I’d be happy to never be thrown to the Fundamentals of Swing wolves again. I was also tired of so many of the exchanges I had in Miami, where strangers would repeat what I’d just said back to my face in a mock hillbilly voice. And I looked like a skinny seventh-grade bumpkin in my secondhand flannel shirts (a decade early for grunge) and baggy jeans. Somehow the average University of Miami student of my age looked more like upper twenties, made for TV, with designer sunglasses and muscles. Tom Cruise in the movie Risky Business. It’s like Miami wanted me to know that even though she was far south geographically, she was not culturally Southern or backward, and she made her point at my expense, daily.

  * * *

  —

  As I rolled my drums down to the lake in the middle of the campus, I could feel some of these made-for-TV college bros turning my way, pausing to take note as I hurled the first drum into the water. Soon they began to cheer me on. I wasn’t used to approval from this set. To be fair, I somehow hadn’t really even registered them as human. For me, it was like the plastic mannequins that had decorated the campus suddenly came to life. And for them, it was probably like the little invisible nerd suddenly became a badass. I got
a few backslaps and even a “Gimme five!” (This was 1984, prior to the “high five,” which is performed above the head. A proper 1970s gimme five was, of course, executed at waist level.) Mark had his Polaroid camera and made a few snaps of the drums as they floated toward the far side of the lake, where the locals fished. I bowed to a few of my new frat-boy admirers. And for a moment I thought, I might actually miss this place after all.

  * * *

  —

  Bass drum floating in Lake Osceola

  MT. LABOR

  MT. TABOR SUPERMARKET’S 1960S STOREFRONT sign and the sprawling brutalist structure beneath it seemed a little lost in time—even in Winston-Salem in the year 1985.

  MT. TABOR: LOW PRICES WERE BORN HERE AND RAISED ELSEWHERE!

  The manager, a dead ringer for Lyndon B. Johnson, glanced over my application.

  “What happened to your face, son?”

  “I got my ass whipped, sir,” I drawled, like an extra out of Forrest Gump.

  I was hired.

  Maybe it was the “sir” part. It’s always good to be respectful to your elders, especially in the South. It was decided I’d start in January, when my hand was up to the task. It wasn’t quite Christmas, so I had a couple weeks of winter to acclimatize from the sun and fun of Miami before starting. On my way out, one of the younger scrupulously mulleted stockroom employees corrected the store’s motto.