“But …” I whine, trying not to let her hear the shakiness of my voice. “I’m trying to make my report thorough. You said we had to be thorough. I’m not trying to copy. I am trying to be good.”
Miss Tuff puts her hand gently on my shoulder. “Oh, Jordan, what am I going to do with you? You are good. I see it every day.”
I look at her in disbelief. “I’m not good every day.”
“Your behavior might not always be perfect. But you are a good person. Now, here’s what we are going to do …”
She tells me to stop what I am doing, jot down a few major events for each page of the encyclopedia entry, and then just write a paragraph in my own words to describe each event. I can’t believe it! My mother was right, and I could have saved hours and hours of work.
Stupid jotting down.
I ask Miss Tuff if I can have the weekend to finish my project, even though that means it will be a day late. She says, “Of course. I think it is great that you are so conscientious.”
Wow, I am conscientious! I can’t wait to look that word up so I can find out what it means. But before I do that, I have one last question: “Miss Tuff, do I have to go back and redo everything I have already written?”
When she says no, I feel like crying again. Just then, the other kids come back in from recess. Miss Tuff rubs my hair and walks away. As I place the encyclopedia in my backpack, I realize something: I haven’t pulled my hair at all for weeks! I haven’t even thought about pulling it.
I feel pretty sad about this stupid project, but I also kind of want to smile, because Miss Tuff thinks I am conscientious. I sit up and puff my chest out a bit—like the ruffed grouse, Pennsylvania’s state bird. Maybe this is what it is like to be kind of happy.
My parents are fighting. It starts when my mom’s Chevy Nova breaks down on the way to Rutgers. The car is really old, and the mechanics at Sam & Nick’s on Forest Avenue say she should buy a new one. My parents decide she should get a hatchback so it has room for a lot of stuff if we go on long trips. Mom wants either a VW Rabbit like her best friend, Judy Friedman, has or a Honda Civic like the one her boss, Lou, drives. Mom says those cars are more reliable than American ones, and they get better gas mileage. Dad says that our family buys American cars. Also, the Rabbit and the Civic are both stick-shift cars, and he points out that she doesn’t know how to drive a stick shift. He tells her she needs to buy a Chevy Citation, which is a totally new hatchback model.
I don’t care what she buys, as long as she doesn’t get stuck on the highway in New Jersey again. That’s how the mom of one of those kids I knew died. She was pulled over on the shoulder of the road and got hit by a car while she was waiting in the dark for a tow truck.
Mom takes Lissa and me out for two test drives of the stick-shift cars. When she is driving Judy’s car, it stalls about a million times. Also, when we are moving, the car keeps jerking and feels like it is about to explode. The same thing happens when she takes Lou’s car out for a spin. Lissa and I make each other laugh the whole time by making throw-up faces in the back seat, but it really does feel like we are going to get thrown out through the roof any second. At one point, she tries to park on a steep hill near her office by the Staten Island Ferry, and the car starts rolling backward. Lou has to grab the emergency brake lever and yank up on it to keep us from zooming into an intersection.
Judy and Lou both say my mom will be a stick-shift master if she just practices a few more times. Dad says there’s no point, because she is buying a Citation. I can see Dad’s point about the stick-shift issue. On the other hand, Mom is right that her Nova, and my dad’s even older bright orange one, breaks down a lot. And they are both Chevys. It would be very comforting to know she was in a car that would make it all the way to Rutgers and all the way home every single time.
Between the arguments and the constant thought that my mother’s car doesn’t work right, I start pulling my hair out again. It gets so bad that my mom notices. We have a long talk about it one night when she gets home super late, comes in to say good night, and finds hairs all over my pillow. Well, we don’t exactly have a talk. It’s more of a cry.
Mom tells me she is safe and I don’t have to worry about her. Then she makes me promise I won’t pull my hair out anymore. I make the promise, but we are both lying. She is not safe, and the very next time she has class, she comes home twenty minutes late. I try not to pull, but as the minutes tick away, I panic and can’t help myself. When she gets home, I run to the door and say, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I pulled again!” Mom starts to weep.
Good, I think. Maybe now she’ll drop out of graduate school and stay safe.
I’m not sure whether my dad knows about the pulling, because he is not very observant. I think he probably wouldn’t notice anything was different about my hair unless it was actively on fire in the middle of dinner. Which is pretty improbable, because he is almost never home for dinner.
But whether he knows about my hair problem or not, my father starts bringing up the possibility of her quitting grad school again. He says, “You wouldn’t even need a new car if you didn’t put so much extra mileage on it going back and forth to New Jersey!” Half of me is cheering for him, but I am shocked to find that the other half of me agrees with what she says next: “Harv, I’ve come this far. I have to finish now, or it will all have been for nothing.” I kind of do want her to get the doctoral degree after all this. I have sacrificed my hair for this degree! If I had to be miserable all this time, and my mom doesn’t even get a diploma at the end, I will be even more disgusted than I already am.
I also realize that what I think doesn’t matter, because as soon as my father even raises the slightest possibility of her quitting, I know my mom will never, ever do it. All that happens is that she gets more determined, which makes them fight more, which makes her even more determined. I feel like I am trapped in the back of a lurching VW Rabbit, with no end in sight.
The fighting doesn’t exactly stop. It just sort of dies down as each of my parents gets something they want. Mom keeps going to school, and Dad makes her buy a Citation. So everybody is miserable, but we have a shiny new vehicle. At least my mother knows how to drive this one.
For a week, I sleep well. Then the new car breaks down on the New Jersey Turnpike.
* * *
I have always loved drawing little cartoons, especially during class. I have a whole section at the back of my loose-leaf binder full of page after page of spaceship battles, X-Men fight scenes, illustrated jokes, and funny comic strips. One day, Miss Tuff catches me drawing an episode of my newest creation, Stubby the Triple Amputee and His Two-Legged Dog, Skip. The joke behind every Stubby and Skip cartoon is that instead of regular artificial hands, feet, or paws, Stubby and Skip both have curved hooks at the end of each cut-off limb, Captain Hook–style. Anyway, I am very absorbed in the fine details of Stubby and Skip Go Fishing, drawing bait worms impaled on each of the characters’ hooks, which are stuck in the water over the side of a rowboat. I don’t notice my teacher standing over my shoulder until she asks, “What are you drawing there?”
I tell her the whole Stubby and Skip story, and frankly, I am quite surprised when she doesn’t laugh. All she says is “Very interesting.” Then she asks me whether she can borrow my art for a while.
Later that day, I hear my name over the intercom. I am being called down to the office, with my things! This is terrible! All the kids go, “Oooooooooh!” and stare. Then there is the long, terrifying walk down the stairs and up the hallway, which gives me plenty of time to worry about what I have done wrong.
I can’t think of anything.
A big, tall guy with glasses, a bald spot, and a gigantic belly is waiting for me at the office door. This is weird—he isn’t Mr. Levy or the principal, Mr. Savitz. I can feel the panic rising in my throat. I haven’t been called down to see the assistant principal. I haven’t been called down to see the principal. What’s even more powerful than a principal? I wonder. I
s this guy the super-principal? The principal of principals? What if this man is the legendary New York City chancellor of public schools, Dr. Frank J. Macchiarola?
Whatever I have done, it must be something even worse than the Great Crayon Melting of ’78.
The man introduces himself as Mr. Greenberg, shakes my hand, and leads me into a small side room with no windows. It looks like the kind of place where the cops go when they want to interrogate a prisoner. I don’t know who this Greenberg character is, but as he takes a seat facing me from just a couple of feet away, I vow he isn’t going to break my will.
“Jordan,” he says, “you’re probably wondering why I’ve called you down today.”
I say, “Um, I guess so.” But really, I am thinking, No duh!
“It’s about your artwork. I am your school guidance counselor. Do you know what that means?”
I kind of have a vague idea. “Uh, you talk to kids?”
He laughs and then says, “That’s about it. I talk to kids when they are sad or worried or mad. Can you tell me about this picture you drew in class?” He takes Stubby and Skip Go Fishing out of a drawer in his desk.
One edge of the picture has gotten creased. Grr.
I take a deep breath, force a smile onto my face, and tell Mr. Greenberg all about Stubby and Skip. I am in the middle of explaining why fishing with foot-hooks is funny when he cuts me off.
“Jordan,” he says, “do you think maybe you might be angry about something? Because this picture seems kind of angry to me.”
This is weird. I didn’t make this cartoon because I was mad. I made it because I thought it would be funny. It’s a good thing he doesn’t know about the story I wrote in Mrs. Dowd’s third-grade class. It was called “Love Luck,” and it was about a series of people who murder each other while out on dates.
Mrs. Dowd never said anything about the story. She just stamped GOOD on top of my paper in red.
Anyway, I don’t think I’m mad. I’m scared my mother is going to die. I’m worried that everyone in the world will decide I am nuts because I can’t seem to stop pulling the hair out of my head. I don’t like it that my parents have been fighting more than usual. I wasn’t thrilled when Mrs. Fisher whacked me across the face. And, I mean, there were those two fights I’ve gotten into in my first six weeks at P.S. 54, but I didn’t get into them because I was mad. I got into them because bigger kids wanted to hurt me. You’d smash a kid in the face with a lunch box if he wouldn’t let you walk to your mom’s car in peace, too. Wouldn’t you?
Wouldn’t you?
Okay, maybe I am a little irritated. But I tell him, “No, I’m not mad. I was just making a joke.”
“Are you sure?” he asks.
I swallow. “Yes, I’m sure.”
Just then, the phone on the desk rings. I jump. When Mr. Greenberg picks up, I can hear the secretary say, “Jordan Sonnenblick’s mother is here.”
They called my mom? I think. Now I’m mad!
But I don’t think this goes the way Mr. Greenberg had expected. He gives a whole speech about how the “school intervention team” is concerned about me, how I might be working out anger issues through my “disturbing” art, blah blah blah. Then he shows my mother the cartoon.
She reads it and cracks up. That pretty much kills the meeting.
The next day in class, everybody wants to know why I got called down to the office and what happened. I don’t reveal anything. Stephanie Casella puts her hand on my shoulder in the hallway and says, “Was it really bad?”
I nod solemnly. “It was awful,” I say.
It’s kind of fun being The Kid Who Got In Big Trouble. I should be mad at Miss Tuff for turning my cartoon over to the big dude downstairs, but I am kind of grateful that she didn’t just yell at me in class and rip it up like Mrs. Fisher would have. Instead, she tried to get help for me, which means she really does care.
And hey, I enjoy being a famous outlaw for a while.
I hate my left hand. It is a useless lump. My right hand likes playing drums. It cooperates with my brain. When I tell my right hand to hit a drum during a lesson, or the dictionary at home, it obeys. And if I tell my right hand to hit the dictionary twice in a row, it can do that for me, too.
But the left hand sometimes hits the drum twice when I want it to hit only once. Or it hits three times when I am trying to play a double stroke roll, and then I am like, Stupid hand. Why do you think they call it a double stroke roll? Does the word double have any meaning for you at all? It is quite frustrating having an idiot attached to one of my arms.
The difference between my right hand and my left has gotten more and more noticeable as the weeks and months have gone on and Mr. Stoll has made my practice assignments harder. He does this by using the metronome, which has turned out to be a tool of evil. The way it works is that you set the speed of the clicks using the knob on top, and then that becomes the beat you’re supposed to play along with when you practice. Whenever I get the hang of a rudiment or a reading exercise, Mr. Stoll figures out how fast I’ve been playing it and sets the metronome five or ten beats per minute faster for the next week.
Usually my right hand is totally fine with the new speed, but my left hand starts flapping around like it’s been set on fire.
So this one week, when I can’t get an exercise in Stick Control for the Snare Drummer up to the right speed, I just give up and quit practicing. Not only that, but I decide that I might as well skip the new page I am supposed to learn in Rolls, Rolls, Rolls. I feel like a percussion delinquent. The next thing you know, I’ll be smoking cigarettes and then putting them out against the cover of my dictionary.
I still practice the easier things, like my latest Jedi assignment: the long roll. A long roll is just a double stroke roll that you start very slowly and then gradually speed up until you are playing as fast as you can without messing up the right-right-left-left pattern. Mr. Stoll says eventually I will be able to get as fast as he is, but I don’t know. By the end of Mr. Stoll’s long roll, the tips of the sticks are too fast for my eyes to follow, and the noise doesn’t sound like the sticks are individually hitting the drum. All my ears can hear is a smooth zipping buzz, kind of like somebody is tearing a very long piece of paper. I don’t mind working on this rudiment, though, because after a while, I don’t even have to think about it. My wrists just know what to do.
The other thing I absolutely don’t stop doing is listening to the Beatles album and hitting my dictionary on the beat. As long as I do this with only my right hand, I feel like I am becoming an expert at keeping time. At my lessons, Mr. Stoll gives me a chance to sit at the set and keep time on each of the different kinds of cymbals. He tells me that the more relaxed I am while I do this, the more I become a true timekeeper.
A true timekeeper. Nothing in the world could possibly be more heroic than that. Someday, when I die, I hope my widow gets it carved on my tombstone.
HERE LIES JORDAN SONNENBLICK
A HUSBAND
A FATHER
A TRUE TIMEKEEPER
If only the pathetic left hand would get with the program, I’d probably be a true timekeeper by now. But if I relax that sad hunk of meat for even a second, I am likely to lose my grip, sending a drumstick flying across the room. Mr. Stoll says everybody naturally has a dominant hand and a weaker hand, and that the more I practice, the more equal my hands will become. But I have already been doing this for months, and the left idiot is not exactly jumping on the equality train.
Once I start letting my practice routine slide, it gets easier and easier to skip everything in my drum books. Soon, you can practically see a layer of dust forming on top of Stick Control.
Finally, Mr. Stoll notices. I start to play the week’s assigned page in Rolls, Rolls, Rolls, which I haven’t even looked at. He can tell right away that I am trying to read the notes for the first time, so he cuts me off. His blue eyes, which are usually super mild and friendly, bore into me as he asks, “So, Jordan, how many times h
ave you gone over this page?”
I look down at my lap.
“Haven’t you practiced it at all?”
If I had heat vision, my lap would be in flames by now.
Mr. Stoll sighs. “Jordan,” he says, “your mother asked me whether I think you’re ready for a snare drum of your own. I told her I thought so, because you’ve been working hard. But if you don’t keep practicing, then you won’t really be earning the drum. Besides, I don’t feel right taking your parents’ money if you don’t want to put the time in.”
I feel terrible. Mr. Stoll hasn’t raised his voice or anything, but I would almost feel better if he had. This is awful! He has trusted me with the best album in the whole world. He has been totally patient with me and my failure of a left hand. He has told my mom I deserve a snare drum. And I have thrown it all away.
I picture myself sitting in the cold waters of Fairview Lake with Louise Boily. I know what she would say, and she would be right. I am not zee kind of boy who lets go of zee rope. Getting up on skis looked like a magic trick, but really it was just about hanging on. Maybe drumming is like that, too. Maybe even though it looks like magic, it’s really work.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Stoll,” I say to my lap. Then I force myself to look my teacher in the face. “I do want to put the time in.”
“Okay,” he says. “From the top. Slowly.”
I am starting to think our coach, Mr. Dave, isn’t a very good strategist. In every game, he puts Garth, Scott, and me all in a row in the batting order, hitting seventh, eighth, and ninth. This is a terrible idea, because we are almost guaranteed to make three outs in a row—which is kind of a rally killer. Also, batting all in a row makes it even more obvious to the rest of the team, and the parents in the stands, that the three of us are awful.
One game in May is the absolute worst. Going into the bottom of the last inning, Lockwood Plumbing is down by one run. The fourth, fifth, and sixth hitters all get on base with no outs. This brings Garth up to the plate. Everybody is screaming and yelling. Our whole team is hanging off the mesh fence that protects the dugout, shouting our favorite team chant at the top of our lungs: “We want a pitcher! Not a belly itcher!”
The Boy Who Failed Show and Tell Page 12