My crayon supply! I think.
“I will be reporting your behavior to your parents, JORR-dan. Just wait until parent-teacher conferences,” Mrs. Fisher hisses to me at the end of the day.
I would like to wait longer than that.
* * *
My parents say I have to “get rid of” the baby snakes. I argue about it for days, but they don’t give in. I think they are pretty mad about this whole crayon-melting thing. My dad tells me he is disappointed in me, which is the absolute worst thing he could say. He never curses, he never hits, and he almost never yells, so when he says he is disappointed in one of us, that is like his version of dropping a nuclear bomb.
I have no choice. It looks like either the baby snakes are disowned or I am.
There were twenty of them when we got home from Florida, but I have found two of them dead in Hecky’s cage in just a week. When one dies, it is the worst. One got completely stiff and straight, so he was even more like a pencil. The other got stiff, too, but it curled up really tightly into a tiny pile of coils. Picking that one up to take him outside to the garbage can was horrible, like carrying a sad little Slinky with eyeballs.
When my parents said “get rid of,” I am sure they didn’t mean “kill.”
Pretty sure.
After a lot of begging, my mom says I can keep two of Hecky’s babies. The only chance the remaining sixteen babies have is if I can give them away to good homes. I beg all my friends. Peter Friedman, B.J., Robert, Steven Vitale, and a third grader named Jonah Carp take two each. This still leaves me with six. My mom drives me to the parking lot of the Jewish Community Center swim club with Hecky’s aquarium in the trunk. I ask if I can have a moment alone with Hecky to explain things before we do the meanest thing I have ever done, which is to let these defenseless little babies loose into the wild forests of Staten Island.
It’s almost winter. Time for hibernating. But the babies haven’t had time to get fattened up. I am practically sending them in front of a firing squad.
My mother and Lissa give me looks as I pick Hectoria up and take a few steps away from the car and into the edge of the woods, but I don’t care. I am much more upset that I am a homewrecker.
“Hecky,” I say, “I am so, so sorry, but we have to let your babies go. I think this forest will be a nice home for them, at least.” I walk a bit farther, down away from the edge of the parking lot, where I know there is a small stream. When we get to the widest part of the stream, where it bends, I hold Hecky up so she can get a good look. “See? There are ferns all around here for shade, and the ground is nice and sandy. In the summer, your babies can lie here to bask in the sun. And if they get too hot, they can go in the water or hide out under the ferns. It’s nice, right?”
Hecky turns her head and looks me in the eye. She knows I am a liar. This is a stupid little swamp, and her babies are doomed.
I go back to the car, and I am completely crying as I put Hecky in the cage. I take each baby, one at a time, down to the sandy bank of the stream, where I put them down as gently as I can. When I go to take the last baby out, Lissa says, “WAIT! What if I keep that one?”
I hold my breath, or at least I try to. It’s kind of difficult because I am sobbing.
My mother says, “Will you be a responsible pet owner?”
This is a fair question. Lissa is a fantastically good hamster parent and kept our first-ever pet, a very fat hamster named Freddy, alive for something like four years. On the other hand, when I was in second grade, she begged and begged my parents to let her pick out a kitten from a litter that an old lady was giving away for free. When they gave in, she chose a beautiful black-and-white one and named him Spicy. Lissa promised she would do everything the cat needed, but in the two years since then, my dad has basically been the only one who takes care of Spicy. He refills Spicy’s milk bowl every morning and takes care of opening a new can of cat food for him twice a day.
And our mom has already had to take Spicy to the veterinarian a bunch of times. It’s always really expensive, and the whole way home from the vet, she always says, “This is some free cat, Lissa,” at least three times.
I don’t know what kind of snake owner Lissa will be. That depends on whether a baby snake is more like a hamster or more like a kitten. But at least the baby won’t be out in the middle of the woods in winter, freezing into a hard little pencil-shaped Popsicle.
My mom says yes, and I want to hug my sister.
I mean, I don’t hug my sister. But the thought crosses my mind. Briefly.
We stop by the pet store down Victory Boulevard on the way home and get a nice new aquarium for the baby. Lissa names him Stripe, which I think is kind of dumb. Every single garter snake in the entire universe has the exact same yellow stripe, so why would you call this particular one Stripe?
It would be like a person naming their kid Two Eyes or something.
On the other hand, I think it’s better for the baby to have an embarrassing name than to be dead.
* * *
A couple of weeks later, my mom has her conference with Mrs. Fisher. I sit down alone on one of the three chairs that are lined up just outside the classroom door. I try not to eavesdrop, mostly because I am pretty positive I don’t want to know what Mrs. Fisher is telling my mother about me.
I hear one sentence very clearly, though: “JORR-dan will never amount to anything!”
A few minutes later, my mom comes stomping out, grasps my upper arm so her fingernails are digging into me, and practically drags me down the hall and out to the car. She looks so mad I am afraid to say anything. In second grade, my parents were super upset when Miss Williamsen wrote Jordan’s listening skills need improvement on the back of my report card. I mean, for like a week it was clear that my dad was disappointed in me.
I figure that “JORR-dan will never amount to anything!” is way worse than that.
I just hope if they’re going to disown me, they wait until after Hanukkah.
Unfortunately, I am not good at staying quiet, especially when I am nervous. I only make it three blocks. When we are waiting to get through the traffic light at the corner of Clove Road and Victory Boulevard, I ask, “Mom, what did Mrs. Fisher say? Are you mad at me?”
She turns to me, and there are tears in her eyes. I am the worst kid ever. I have made my mother cry. “Oh, Jord,” she says. “Oh, Jord.”
By the time I have taken six or seven lessons, I decide Mr. and Mrs. Stoll are like magic people. I mean, the whole reason why I am here is because drumming is magic to me, and I want Mr. Stoll to teach me how to do it. But they have another kind of magic: They are serene.
I first found out what this word means in second grade when Miss Williamsen read us The Trumpet of the Swan. The main character is a boy swan named Louis, and he is in love with a girl swan named Serena. Miss Williamsen told us that Serena’s name is from the word serene, meaning calm, peaceful, and untroubled.
When I am sitting in the Stolls’ living room and waiting for a drum lesson, I feel like all my worries are far away. Mrs. Stoll always gives me a cup of tea and some kind of snack she has just finished baking. Then she asks me all kinds of questions about what is going on in my life, and she really listens when I answer. The Stolls have a cat named Cee Cee, who doesn’t have a tail. At one of my first lessons, Mrs. Stoll saw me looking at where Cee Cee’s tail should be, and chuckled. She told me there was nothing wrong with Cee Cee. She was just a special kind of cat called a Manx, and that most Manx cats didn’t have tails. She also said that Manxes were mellow and friendly. That makes sense, because a lot of times, Cee Cee comes over to me on the couch and puts her head in my lap.
Cat fur makes me wheeze, because I am completely allergic, but I don’t even care because Cee Cee likes me so much. Spicy would never put his head on my lap unless it was a trick to make me relax so he could sink his claws into my leg.
At the Stolls’ house, even the cats are serene.
Here is the perfect example of
Mrs. Stoll’s personality. One day in the middle of a conversation, she pulls on a strand of her long, wavy hair so it is straight out in front of her eyes. Most of her hair is jet-black, but the hairs in her hand are almost white. “My hair is getting so gray!” she says. Then she throws back her head and laughs. I have never met a lady who laughs about gray hairs before. My mother dyes her hair black, and if she even finds one gray hair, she gets super annoyed. Once, at Burger King, I asked how long she had been dyeing it, and a lady behind us laughed. My mom pinched my arm really hard, and then she barely talked to me the whole meal.
My grandma and her two sisters are the same way. They go to the hair salon every week to get their hair colored and then they sit under big, round helmet things that heat their heads up and make their hair curly.
But Mrs. Stoll finds her gray hair amusing. It’s like she is a Manx person.
Mr. Stoll is super mellow, too. When I do well, he smiles serenely and nods. When I mess up, he just says, “Again.” He never sounds mad, or frustrated, or disappointed in you, Jordan. And the way he is so nice about it just makes me want to do even better.
I have been practicing on my dictionary every night. I am pretty sure I am getting kind of good at my rudiments, because every week I am getting a bit faster with them, and I almost never bang my sticks together or drop one. I am even starting to get the hang of reading music. I can read whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, and even eighth notes! (My mom seems to find it funny when I sit in front of my dictionary and hit it in patterns while counting “One-and-two-and-three-and-four-and” out loud, but I am proud, because I am learning the secret language of musicians.)
I feel like I am getting pretty advanced until Mr. Stoll tells me it is time to work on keeping time. Now that my wrists and hands kind of know what they are doing, he says it is time to go from just banging on my dictionary to making music. I don’t know how this is supposed to work. When real drummers like Mr. Stoll make music, they have all different kinds of drums and cymbals to hit in order to make different noises. What am I supposed to do—set up an encyclopedia and some paperbacks around the dictionary to make a little set?
Mr. Stoll says that keeping time is the essence of being a drummer. He makes me switch seats with him so he is in front of the drum set, and puts an album on the record player behind us. I don’t know what the music is at first, but from the opening note, I feel like my life has changed. I can’t explain it, but hearing this song makes me feel like I have only been seeing black and white all these years, and now the world has color.
The song is called “Drive My Car.” The band is the Beatles.
There is a short guitar introduction. Then Mr. Stoll plays a roll on two of the tom-toms before starting to play an amazing beat. I don’t know how he does it all! One hand is on the snare drum, the other is playing a pair of cymbals called the hi-hats, which open and close if you push your left foot down on a pedal, and his right foot is working the pedal that hits the bass drum. Every time the bass drum thumps, it is like a bright blue shock in the center of my chest. There is also a clanking noise on every beat of the song that lights up the inside of my mind in dark red pulses. I have no idea what that sound is, but it makes me feel wild, like I am about to jump up out of my chair and yell.
Sometimes the drums stop for a moment and then start again. Sometimes Mr. Stoll breaks out from the steady beat to do another wild roll around the tom-toms. Sometimes he turns and talks to me in the middle of all this. But he never, ever stops being in perfect time with the record.
When the song finishes and Mr. Stoll picks the needle up off the record, I want to clap. I want to cheer. I am overwhelmed.
Mr. Stoll says, “Now I am going to play the song again, but you are going to keep time.” He hands me a weird blocky metal thing that looks like one of the bells you might see around a cow’s neck in a cartoon, and tells me I am going to hold it in one hand and use my other hand to hit it with a drumstick.
“What is this thing called?” I ask.
“A cowbell,” Mr. Stoll replies. Well, that makes sense. “Did you hear the clanking sound on every beat of the song?”
I nod.
“All you have to do is hit the cowbell along with the clanks, and together you and I will be a percussion section.”
I smile. A percussion section sounds like something a professional musician would be in.
“Ready?” he asks.
I nod, and he puts the needle down onto the beginning of the song again.
“I’ll tell you when,” he says.
I hold the cowbell in my left hand, and a Fibes 5A stick (with nylon tip!) in the other. The guitar chimes through the speaker, and as Mr. Stoll’s hands flash across the tom-toms, he sings out, “Now!”
I try to hit the cowbell in time with the song, but that is much harder than it sounds. I could hear the cowbell on the record perfectly the first time the song played, but as soon as I start making noise, I drown the recorded cowbell out. When my time starts to drift, Mr. Stoll looks over at me and counts out the rhythm: “One! Two! Three! Four!”
This happens a few times, but Mr. Stoll only smiles and keeps counting.
The third time through the record, Mr. Stoll doesn’t play. He just watches me and counts. I think I am starting to feel the rhythm on my own. It feels like lightning flashing in my brain.
I like it.
We work on my double stroke roll for a while after we are finished with the Beatles, and then comes a moment I know I will remember for the rest of my life. Mr. Stoll carefully takes the album, Yesterday and Today, off the player and carefully puts it into its protective paper sleeve, then slides the sleeve inside the cardboard album cover and hands the whole thing to me.
“The Beatles,” he says. “So good. John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Ringo is the drummer. You can learn a lot from these guys. Take this for the week, and practice hitting your dictionary in time with the different songs. You have a record player at home, right?”
I nod. Really, I don’t exactly have a record player, but Lissa does.
“Just promise me you’ll take care of the album. You know how to hold it by its edges, right?”
I nod again, very enthusiastically. I will treat this album like a precious jewel. I will treat this album like gold. I will treat this album like I treat Hectoria. I won’t even think about hurling it across Lissa’s room like a Frisbee, the way I threw her Saturday Night Fever soundtrack record when she wouldn’t stop calling me names that one time.
“Great,” he says. “I trust you.”
My drum teacher trusts me.
I walk out of there feeling so excited I might explode. I am holding “Drive My Car” in my own two hands. And there are ten more Beatles songs on the record, just waiting for me to discover them. On the way home, my mother stops at my favorite Italian restaurant, Pal Joey’s on Forest Avenue, to pick up takeout for dinner. She has ordered fried chicken for me, with a side of ziti.
Normally, fried chicken and ziti from Pal Joey’s would be enough to make my night. But tonight, I just wish we could skip dinner and head straight home. I have an appointment with John, Paul, George, and—especially—Ringo.
By the time Christmas vacation rolls around, I really need it. My family celebrates Hanukkah, and on the first night I get a small rectangular box to open from my parents. Most years, Lissa and I sneak around when our parents aren’t home and find all our gifts ahead of time, but this package is a surprise because it was already wrapped by the time we dug it up from behind all the shoes on the floor of our parents’ bedroom closet.
It’s a metronome! It is the kind that looks like a little radio, and it comes with a battery and a little earplug that attaches to it by a thin cord. Now I can find out what these things are for! I quickly put the plug in my ear, jam the battery into the compartment on the back of the metronome, and turn the volume dial on top until the thing clicks on. In my ear, there is a steady succession of TOCK-TOCK-TOCK noises, like someone banging
a stick on a block of wood. I turn the other dial that is next to the volume control, which says TEMPO and has a bunch of tiny numbers around it, and the rhythm of the clicks gets faster and faster. Then I turn the knob the other way, and the clicks get slower and slower. I guess tempo means something like speed.
My parents are staring at me eagerly. “Wow, thank you! This is exactly what I wanted!” I say. I try to sound extremely excited, but I am not sure it totally works. I hadn’t exactly understood what a metronome was for, but now I know.
Woo-hoo. I am the proud owner of a clicking machine.
Then Lissa opens her present, which is a shiny new pair of custom-made ice skates. New skates are a big deal for her, because she is a competitive figure skater. I have spent two or three afternoons a week at one of her training rinks since I was a little kid. My favorite is War Memorial Rink on Staten Island, because it is right near our house, and because I am great pals with Louie, the skate rental man. He is an old guy who was in the navy during World War II. I sit on top of the railing in front of the rental booth that’s there to keep people lined up, and he tells me amazing stories about D-Day while he smokes cigarettes and sharpens skates on the big machine behind the counter. The machine is very complicated. It has several spinning wheels attached to it. There is a cross-grinder for getting the blades flat and shiny, and a couple of different finishing wheels for hollowing out the bottoms of the blades and putting a sharp edge on them. It is the coolest thing ever! Sparks from the machine fly all around Louie’s head the whole time, but he never stops talking or smoking.
In third grade, I did a project on Greek mythology, and one of my favorite Greek gods was Hephaestus, the god of the forge. He made all the weapons for the other gods. Louie reminds me of the illustration of Hephaestus in one of the books I used, because Hephaestus worked with flames and sparks all around him.
The Boy Who Failed Show and Tell Page 6