Then the non-musician will be forced to ask, “What are Fibes 5As?”
This whole drummer thing just keeps getting better by the minute …
… at least until lesson number two gets underway and I realize I don’t actually know anything about playing the drums. At the first lesson, after I had learned how to hold a drumstick, Mr. Stoll taught me the names of all the equipment: “This drum in your lap is the snare drum. It’s called that because there are special wires called snares underneath that change its sound. This drum with the foot pedal is called the bass drum. The two on top of the bass drum and the one on the floor next to you are called the tom-toms.” I have a good memory for that kind of stuff, so I learned everything the first time he went through the set. Then he told me what I was going to learn, like how to read music and how to coordinate my hands and feet so I could play beats on the drum set. My only homework had been to listen to a jazz record he lent me and to “try to pay attention to what the drummer is doing.”
But at the second lesson, Mr. Stoll actually starts teaching me how to do things.
Apparently, I do not have a whole lot of natural talent.
He tells me there are like twenty-five things called “the Rudiments.” He says that if I master the Rudiments, I will be able to play anything. I ask him how long it will take for me to master them, and he laughs.
“Oh, you’ll never master them,” he says. “Nobody ever masters them.”
Now he sounds like Ben Kenobi from Star Wars again. I picture him saying, “Luuuukkkkeee! You must master the Rudiments without mastering the Rudiments! Only then can you defeat the Eeeemmmmmpire.”
The first rudiment is called the single stroke roll. He shows me how it goes, and it doesn’t look hard. All you do is hit the drum once with your right drumstick, then once with your left, and keep repeating. So basically, your hands are just taking turns.
Guess what.
It’s hard.
When Mr. Stoll does it, he starts super slowly, and goes faster and faster until I can’t even see the tips of his sticks. I can do it slowly, but as soon as I try to speed up, my sticks bang into each other, or I start hitting the metal rim of the drum instead of the plastic head.
“Practice that this week, okay?” he says. “You’ll be surprised at how much better you get with practice.”
All right, I think. I can practice. I’ve already promised my mother I would practice.
“Oh,” he adds. “Don’t forget to concentrate on hitting the same part of the drumhead each time and keeping the volume steady as you speed up. Your hands are going to want to get louder and louder.”
I can barely even make myself move the right hand at the right time, and now I am supposed to concentrate on two other things while I’m doing it? I don’t know about this.
Then Mr. Stoll shows me some more rudiments. There’s the double stroke roll, which is just like the single stroke roll, but you hit with each hand twice in a row: right-right-left-left. He tells me I should count while I am doing this by saying “ma-ma-da-da, ma-ma-da-da” out loud. “And keep the volume steady, of course.”
Yikes!
Then there’s the paradiddle, the ratamacue, the flam, the double paradiddle, the triple paradiddle, and the paradiddle-diddle. By this point, I am halfway sure Mr. Stoll is just making these things up. But he writes them all down on music paper, and then starts to show me the basics of how to read music. Finally, he tells me that my homework is to work on the single stroke roll and the double stroke roll until I can play each one smoothly without breaking the pattern.
My head is swimming. I’m supposed to play each pattern with my hands, say the pattern out loud, and read the pattern from some symbols that look like lollipops on the page—all at once?
This is beginning to look impossible. Coordination has never been my specialty. I mean, I was the last kid in kindergarten to learn how to tie my shoelaces.
Plus, I don’t have any drums at home. What am I supposed to practice on?
When we go upstairs, Mr. Stoll asks my mother if we have a hardcover dictionary in the house. He says I should practice by hitting that, at least for the first six months. Then, if I show “dedication and determination,” my parents can consider buying me a snare drum. Six months after that, I may be ready for a drum set of my own.
Well, this is embarrassing! I’m not a drummer at all. I don’t own a throne. I still don’t know what a metronome is. And forget about the actual drums.
For the next six months, I am a dictionary-er.
I try to be extremely good for the next few weeks, until Thanksgiving break. And, aside from the daily crayon sacrifice ritual, I think I do a pretty good job. It is exhausting, but then I get six days off! My parents have bought tickets to Disney World, but before the trip, we have a bunch of my mom’s relatives over for Thanksgiving dinner. My two great-aunts, Ida and Sylvia, are there, which is awesome. But Aunt Sylvia has brought her husband, my Uncle Gene, and their grown-up daughter, my Cousin Shira. I love them separately, but when they get together, they never get along. The worst part is that Shira has brought her new boyfriend, Carlos, who isn’t Jewish. Apparently, this is a huge problem, because when the relatives arrive, none of them are talking to each other.
I hate it! Usually, my aunts are the two funniest people in the world. Aunt Sylvia is very sarcastic, which I love, and Aunt Ida is the absolute best guest, because she always tells me and my sister inappropriate jokes. But everybody is just sitting there, staring at the turkey like it might come back to life and start singing show tunes. Just when I can’t stand another second of the torture, Uncle Gene turns to my mother and says, “That’s strange. Carol, why is there a girl’s head sticking out of your swing set?”
This is an excellent question. We all look out the big dining room window into my backyard, and a head with a whole lot of long, wavy blond hair is definitely sticking out from next to the top of the ladder that leads to our slide.
“I don’t know why there is a head sticking out of our swing set,” my mom replies. “Look, Harv,” she says to my dad. “There’s a head sticking out of our swing set.”
We all sit there for a moment, wondering how this head came to be sticking out of our swing set. I think the grown-ups must be pretty confused about what to do, because it’s not like there’s a manual for what to do in a head-in-the-swing-set emergency.
Then we hear a scream coming from the backyard. I’m not sure the girl whose head is caught in the swing set is enjoying having her head caught in the swing set. Everybody jumps up, and my father opens the side door of our house, which leads out onto our back patio.
Lissa and I go running out into the yard and over to the swing set. We have to walk around to the back to see whose head this is, because her neck is twisted all the way to one side. As soon as she sees us, the girl stops screaming and looks me in the eye.
It’s Lauren from up the block!
“Hi, Lauren!” I say.
“Hi,” Lauren says. She is a year older than I am and about a head taller when her head isn’t stuck in a swing set. She lives with her brother, Mark, and their grandparents in a big house on the corner. Sometimes, Lauren and Mark come down the hill and play with me, but I don’t see Mark anywhere. Maybe he is hanging upside down in our shed or something.
“Are you okay?” Lissa asks. Which is kind of a dumb question, because Lauren is stuck out in our backyard with her head trapped in our swing set.
“Um, I can’t move,” Lauren says. Then she starts to cry.
Uncle Gene is the first adult to make it across the yard. “Can you move your head?” he shouts in Lauren’s face. I don’t know what is up with all these questions, but obviously she can’t move her head. What does he think this is—a new kind of exercise?
As the grown-ups gather around, everybody has a comment. I wish they had talked this much over dinner!
“Oh, look! Her head is pinned between the railings,” Aunt Ida remarks. “I don’t think she can g
et out by herself!”
“And her hair is tangled up between the two top rungs,” Aunt Sylvia adds.
“I think we are going to need some scissors,” my mom says.
All the grown-ups nod. Scissors, they seem to say with their bobbing heads. An excellent suggestion! Scissors!
My dad goes and gets his shiny, sharp pair of medical scissors. As soon as Lauren sees them, her crying gets louder.
“Oh, please, not my hair!” she moans.
Lissa and I are crouched down and twisted so our faces are lined up with hers across the platform on top of the slide. “Don’t worry,” I say.
This is also dumb. If you’re not going to worry when your head is stuck in a swing set and a bunch of grown-ups are about to come at you with scissors, when should you worry?
Cousin Shira, who is very good at things like hairstyling and makeup, does the actual cutting. Then, when Lauren can turn her neck a bit, my mom puts one hand very gently on the back of her neck and the other under her chin.
My mom is excellent in a crisis.
“Lauren, I am just going to turn your head a little bit, okay?” she says.
Lauren whimpers, and my mom takes that as a yes.
Lissa and I hold Lauren’s hands, which feels kind of weird. But it seems to calm her down. My mom slowly turns Lauren’s face while she guides Lauren’s neck, and in another moment, Lauren is free! She stands up straight on the ladder, looks at Shira, and says, “Is all of my hair gone?”
Shira says, “Oh, no, sweetie! I just had to take a little off the ends.”
That is a lie. The back of Lauren’s head looks like she got attacked by a lawn mower. But all the grown-ups nod along.
If Shira’s boyfriend, Carlos, thought we were weird before, I can’t imagine what he thinks now as we parade up the block behind Lauren. My parents knock on the door of Lauren’s house, and her grandmother answers the door.
“Oh,” she says, “it’s Lauren! Where have you been, dear?”
“I was on the swings down the block,” Lauren says. I don’t think that really tells the whole story, but whatever.
As Lauren’s grandmother thanks us and closes the door, I realize we still have no idea why Lauren’s head was in our swing set. Maybe we can ask her in the spring. Once she hears the truth about the back of her hair, I don’t think she will go outside again until at least March.
You would think this adventure would be an excellent conversation starter, but everyone clams up again before we even get to our house. By the time the relatives leave, Lissa and I are dying. Aunt Sylvia didn’t say one funny thing about the food! Aunt Ida didn’t even tell her famous refrigerator joke!
If it hadn’t been for Lauren, the holiday would have been ruined completely.
While my mom is doing the dishes, I hear her telling my dad that Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Gene have threatened to disown Cousin Shira if she doesn’t break up with Carlos. Lissa tells me that getting disowned means she will be kicked out of their family!
I can’t believe you can get kicked out of your family just for going out with someone who isn’t Jewish. I know only one Jewish girl in my whole grade, and that’s Jennifer Deerfield, who is much too cool to ever go out with me when we get older. All the other girls are Italian and Catholic. Come to think of it, almost everyone I know is Italian and Catholic. I am either going to have to get much, much cooler before we hit middle school or become a monk.
And monks aren’t even a Jewish thing. I am probably doomed.
That night, when I am trying to fall asleep, I start wondering what else you can get disowned for. What if my parents find out I am obstreperous? Or that I have been pulling the hair out of my head whenever my mom is on her way home from Rutgers? Being obstreperous—or worse, crazy—seems a lot worse than just going out with Denise Silvestri.
* * *
Before we leave for the airport the next day, I change the water in Hecky’s bowl and spend a few minutes holding him. He seems kind of sluggish, but maybe that is because I fed him extra goldfish this week. We aren’t getting back until Monday night, so his next feeding will be a bit late.
The Disney trip is great. The best part is when Lissa and I get our dad to come with us on Space Mountain, our favorite roller coaster in the world. He sits in front of us, and when the multicolored lights of the ride hit him, his face looks completely green! When we pull out of the tunnel and into the station at the end, it turns out that his face actually is green. Also, he is rubbing his left forearm, for some reason. I think Dad didn’t enjoy Space Mountain as much as Lissa and I did.
Lissa and I get along great on vacations, even though we fight a lot when we’re home. We always get our own hotel room attached to the one our parents are in. That way, they can check on us when they want to, but we can do all kinds of interesting stuff without them getting mad constantly. Every night, we run to the ice machine in the hallway and fill up our ice bucket. We never use the ice for anything, but it is super fun running through the hall in our pj’s and trying not to spill the cubes everywhere.
We also play the excellent game we invented years ago. It’s called Burgermeister, Meisterburger, and it is very simple and very loud. Each of us stands on one of the room’s two beds. When we shout “Burgermeister,” we both have to jump across the gap between the beds. When we shout “Meisterburger,” we jump back to our own beds. The goal is to chant and jump faster and faster, until eventually someone either goes flying off the far side of a bed or falls short and lands between the beds. Or I start wheezing. Or somebody goes flying AND I start wheezing.
Usually we don’t get that far because our parents get sick of the noise and bang on the door that connects the rooms. Then we have to get in bed and just laugh for a few hours until we fall asleep.
But once, at a motel in Williamsburg, Virginia, we made so much noise that the manager called our parents’ room to complain. That wasn’t so good, because our parents actually came into our room and yelled at us.
Honestly, my mom got so loud, it was a miracle the manager didn’t call again.
But this trip goes very smoothly. Our dad even recovers his normal skin color, which is a big plus. Nobody wants to tell their troubles to a green psychiatrist.
* * *
As soon as we get home from Newark Airport, I charge upstairs to see Hecky. I can’t believe what I see in his cage! He is lying on the gravel next to the water bowl, not moving at all. But there are little six-inch-long skinny things crawling and rolling all over and around him. It looks like he is getting swarmed by a bunch of flexible black-and-yellow pencils.
After a few seconds of extreme confusion, I understand what I am seeing.
“Baby snakes!” I shout. “BABY SNAKES!”
My mom comes clumping up the stairs. “What are you talking about, Jordan? How could there be baby snakes when there’s no girl snake in the cage?”
“I don’t know,” I reply, “but look!”
She bends down so her face is against the aquarium glass and stares in. “Oh my God,” she says. “Baby snakes!”
My sister and father reach my room, and we all look at one another.
“Uh, Jord,” Lissa says, “I don’t think Hector is a Hector.”
What a weekend! First, there’s a dramatic swing set rescue. Next, I find out my cousin is going to get disowned. Then we take a trip to Disney. And now I have to change my snake’s name to Hectoria.
On Wednesday, I can’t wait to get to school and tell everybody about the baby snakes. Unfortunately, as soon as we enter our classroom, trouble strikes. The school custodian storms in and tells Mrs. Fisher he needs to speak to her RIGHT NOW! At first, I don’t think much about this, because I am busy arranging all my things in my desk while whispering to Robert about the Hectoria situation. Then I drop a pencil and have to bend down to get it. That’s when I notice the melted crayon puddle is not behind our seats anymore.
My heart beats even faster than usual. “Uh, Robert?” I say.
&nb
sp; Just as Robert turns to face me, Mrs. Fisher’s voice rings out like a cannon shot. “ROBERT FALCONE AND JORDAN SONNENBLICK! Come. Over. Here!”
Apparently, the custodian cleans the classroom floors over breaks. And apparently, it takes a lot of scraping to get a month’s worth of melted crayon off the tiles.
“Boys, how could you have committed such an act of … of … vandalism? And in my classroom! HOW DARE YOU?”
Robert stares straight down at the floor and mumbles, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Fisher. I’m sorry, sir.”
I feel sorry that we made the custodian do extra work. I also feel sorry that now I am a vandalism-ist. But I don’t say anything because I am afraid that if I try to talk, I will cry. The custodian is a big, strong guy with a massive belly and a thick, bushy mustache. He looks like the kind of man who will think I am a wimp if I cry.
Mrs. Fisher is not letting me off the hook. “Well, Jordan, don’t you have anything you want to say? It’s bad enough that you are a vandal. Are you also too rude to apologize?”
Oh, I’m a vandal. I knew vandalism-ist sounded kind of wrong.
I swallow several times, then look the custodian right in the eyes. “I’m sorry about the floor, mister. I promise I won’t do it again.”
“That’s right,” Mrs. Fisher purrs. “You won’t. And you won’t be sitting next to Robert anymore, either. Pack up your desk, Mr. Falcone, and move to the empty seat next to Kenneth.” She takes us by our upper arms and practically flings us back toward our desks.
As Robert starts taking all his stuff out of his desk, he doesn’t even look at me. But Britt Stone does. She is laughing silently, like a hyena with laryngitis.
When Mrs. Fisher is finished talking to the custodian, she gestures toward Robert’s new seat, and he starts moving his things. On his last trip across the room, he finally looks at me sadly. My friend! his eyes seem to say.
The Boy Who Failed Show and Tell Page 5