I Am Drums

by Mike Grosso

  He walks up to me and points a finger at my chest. “You don’t think I could be a good drummer, do you?”

  “I never said that,” I say, wondering what this has to do with anything.

  “Maybe not, but you thought it. You knew I wanted to be in the percussion section during the instrument fittings last year, and you think I chose saxophone because I bombed the rhythm test.”

  I can’t resist chuckling a bit. “I honestly don’t think about you that much, Danny.” Not anymore, at least.

  “Let’s say I did. Suppose I had a bad day and couldn’t even pass a stupid rhythm test that didn’t even make sense in the first place.” Danny shakes his head in disgust. “Then I have to spend all year watching you and Scott like you’re best friends all of a sudden, like you and I haven’t gone to school together since kindergarten. Maybe I couldn’t have beaten you at drums, but Scott? I could have wiped the floor with him.”

  “It’s not a competition, Danny.”

  “Says the kid who got a massive round of applause tonight. You think the saxophone players got anything close to that?” He eyes the drumsticks in my hand. “I would have been awesome in the percussion section.”

  I want to tell him he still can be. I could tell him about Wanda, and hope he doesn’t take offense at being compared to an eighty-three-year-old lady. Instead I say, “It’s never too late to learn.”

  “And hang out with you apes in the back? Never! I’m a sax player all the way.” Danny sees his father waiting by the doors leading inside. He leans in close and whispers, “For the record, your rhythm still sucks. Do us both a favor and buy a metronome over the summer.”

  I whisper back, “Only if you learn the difference between a brass and a woodwind.”

  We both laugh. Not exactly a friendly laugh, but a true one. I doubt Danny and I will be civil to each other by the time seventh grade starts, but at least we’ll understand each other better.

  Pete is shaking his head when I return to him. “If you’re done flirting with Coltrane, we can get going.”

  It takes me a moment to realize he means John Coltrane, the famous saxophonist. That means he really meant Danny. The thought immediately grosses me out. “That is not what was happening!” I shout.

  “Relax, rock star,” he says with a grin. “I was kidding.”

  Neither of us speak again until we’re in the car. Once the doors are closed, Pete says, “I really thought one of your parents would show up in the end. I’m sorry that’s not what happened.”

  “It’s okay. I’m glad you and Ms. Rinalli came,” I say.

  Pete turns the key in the ignition and drives us back to Eastmont. We don’t say much during the ride. Each of us has a pretty good idea how the other one feels.

  He parks in front of my house. I’m opening the door to get out when he says, “You’re still in my schedule for Monday at three thirty. Does that still work?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t mention it. Just make sure you’re there. I’m planning something special.”

  I say goodbye and shut the door to his car. I take a long look at my house before walking up the sidewalk and opening the front door. My mom is waiting for me at the dining room table. She’s drinking a cup of coffee and reading a newspaper.

  “How was your recital?” she asks.

  “It was good,” I say. “I wish you could have seen it.”

  “Me too.”

  I scan the next few rooms for my dad, but he’s nowhere to be found. “Where’s Dad?”

  “Upstairs,” she says, and motions to the chair next to her. “Sit down, Sam. We need to talk.”

  I do as she says. I swallow hard and say, “Did you tell Dad about tonight?”

  She nods. “He’s not happy about it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  My mom takes a sip of her coffee and holds up her hand. “Don’t be. Your father is a good man, but he has trouble accepting other people’s decisions. Probably because he regrets so many of his own.”

  I nod, even if I still don’t get why that would make my dad so mad. Nothing new to that​—​I’m never really sure what my dad is going through.

  “Did the meeting with his friend go well?” I ask.

  “Yes.” My mom rubs her eyes, looking exhausted. “He’s starting a new job next week. It’s not what he wanted, but it will keep a roof over our heads.”

  That feels good to hear. But I know that’s not all she has to say. If it was, my dad would be sitting at the table with us.

  “Is he okay with me taking drum lessons?” I ask.

  My mom sighs. “No, he’s not okay with it at all. But for a little while, at least, it won’t be his decision.”

  My heart skips. “Why not?”

  Another sip of coffee, like she’s stalling every time I ask a question she doesn’t want to answer. “Your father and I agreed that we both have a lot of things that need to change, and he should live somewhere else while we figure that out.”

  I bite my lip. “So you’re getting divorced.” My temper flares at the word.

  “No, Sam. Just separated for a while. He’s moving in with a friend while he sorts out a few things. We both need some time to figure out why this hasn’t been a healthy living situation. We want what’s best for you and Brian.”

  I want to tell her she doesn’t have the slightest clue what’s best for me. Or for Brian, who doesn’t even know what’s happening yet. But then I think about the recital and how I thought of nothing else while my parents were at home, arguing over how to break the family in two.

  “Can I talk to him?” I ask.

  “If you’d like,” my mom says. “But understand that he’s not exactly himself right now. You shouldn’t expect more than a quick goodbye.”

  I nod and stand up from the table. I breathe in and out, multiple times, hoping with each gasp I’ll calm down. But Pete’s breathing trick doesn’t work for this sort of thing.

  I head to the foyer and stand at the foot of the stairs. The lights are off in the upstairs hallway, but I can see the soft glow of the light from my parents’ bedroom. I climb the stairs slowly. Every time a step creaks, I lighten my footsteps, convinced that less noise means less disaster waiting at the end. I finally reach the top of the stairs and open the door to their bedroom with a squeak. My father is inside, sitting on the bed and staring into an open suitcase.

  “Hey, Dad,” I say.

  “Hello, Sam,” he says, still not looking at me.

  He’s silent for a while after that, so I say, “Mom says you’re moving in with a friend.”

  “Just for a couple of weeks.” Finally he turns to me, his eyes red and filled with fatigue. “We both agree it’s for the best.”

  I swallow hard. “Could it be longer?”

  “It could be. I want to be a different person when I come back, and that could take a while.” He stands up from the bed and walks over to me. He puts an arm on my shoulder and squeezes. “You need to be good to your mother while I’m gone. No lying. No fighting with other kids at school. No sneaking around behind her back. Just because she agreed to drum lessons doesn’t mean you get to walk all over her. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  He takes his hand off my shoulder and walks back to the bed. His fingers grip the top of the suitcase and flip it closed. The latches click into place, louder than I thought possible.

  “We should probably head downstairs,” he says.

  I nod in agreement. The two of us exit the bedroom and walk down the staircase into the foyer, following the bright lights into the kitchen. My mom is waiting there, her back against a counter and her arms folded in front.

  My mom and dad look at each other. There’s a soft exchange of glances between them, quickly followed by hardened stares.

  “I guess I’ll be going,” he says.

  “I guess so,” my mom says.

  I look at the floor. It all seems so dumb. And totally my fault, no matter wh
at anyone says. I want to know more. I want to ask my dad why he’s leaving, why the two of them can’t figure out how to be nicer to each other, and what I did to make things even worse.

  Most of all, I want to tell him how stupid this is. And I don’t want to tell him through a headphone jack. I want to say to his face, with real words and real anger, that he’s stupid for leaving. But when I think about it, he left a long time ago.

  My dad opens the back door. It swings out slowly, and he disappears behind it, the dark night swallowing him as the door slams.

  The tension in my mom releases the moment he’s gone. She crosses the tile floor of the kitchen and wraps me in her arms, giving me a long hug. “I’m very disappointed in you for what happened at school. And about the lying. But I still love you, and so does your father.”

  I bury my face in her shoulder and try to calm down. It’s not easy. Not when everything is falling apart around you, and you lack even the slightest morsel of power to fix it.

  It’s weird. Drum lessons are exactly what I wanted, but now that I have them, I feel ashamed. It’s like getting my wish has destroyed the wishes of everyone else in my family. My mom says I had nothing to do with it, and that the awful feeling will pass in time.

  I sort of believe her.

  I call Kristen first thing Sunday morning. I’m still expecting her to be mad, so it’s extra amazing when she’s excited to tell me everything about her pool party. It sounds like it was a lot of fun.

  She asks how the recital went, and I tell her everything I can remember except the part about talking to Danny Lenix. I’m keeping that weird conversation between Danny and me.

  “What about your parents?” Kristen asks. “Does this mean they’re okay with everything?”

  Silence on my end. My breath catches in my chest, and I’m unable to speak.

  “Sam?”

  Her voice is worried this time. A tear escapes my eye, and I start sobbing into the phone. She sounds like my best friend again when she says, “Start walking to my house. I’ll meet you halfway. I want to know everything.”

  I hang up the phone and walk out my front door, following the same route I’ve taken to Kristen’s since we first met. We’re not the same people we used to be, but at least there are parts of our friendship that haven’t changed.

  Scott’s nowhere to be seen when I enter the lunchroom on Monday. I see him in class, but he’s even more distant than usual. It’s not until band at the end of the day that I’m finally able to corner him between songs.

  “I didn’t get a chance to thank you,” I say.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he says, his face growing redder by the second.

  I pull the Vic Firth sticks out of my bag and show him the fresh dents from Pete’s cymbals. A few nicks from several snare rim shots are farther down. “I waited until the recital to use them. They were perfect.”

  He takes a quick look at them and smiles. “I’ll tell Jessica you liked them.”

  I shake my head. “Sure. You go ahead and tell her that.”

  I put them back in my bag and take a seat behind the bass drum. I close my eyes and breathe deeply as the booms and cracks of the percussion section lift me into the air and swallow me whole, tossing me back and forth through my rhythmic imagination.

  I head to Pete’s house after school on Monday for my regular three thirty lesson. I never want to be the musician who doesn’t show up on time.

  Pete is in his basement when I arrive. I hear the loud sounds of drum cases being moved, so I head downstairs to find him unpacking a brand-new drum set. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s shiny and new, and that alone impresses the heck out of me.

  “What’s this?” I ask.

  “I’m giving you a drum set,” he says.

  My heart leaps so quickly that I nearly barf right on his floor. “You bought me a drum set?”

  Pete gives me a disgusted look. “Are you out of your mind? Do I look like I’m made of money? This new one isn’t for you!” He points to the corner, where the decrepit remains of the old, beaten-up student set is dismantled and covered in dust. “That one is yours!”

  I look at the set I’ve played at each and every lesson. I imagine it displayed in my room, on the verge of toppling over from disrepair, but just as loud and brutal as ever.

  “You’re really giving this to me?” I ask, my eyes welling up with tears.

  “Oh, come on!” Pete says. “Don’t start crying on me. It makes me sick.” He sets up a ride cymbal on the shiny set and says, “It’s not a big deal. I’ve needed a new student set for years. It makes sense that you should have the old one. You can’t beat on Calvin and Hobbes for the rest of your life. Just keep quiet about it. It’ll be a headache for me if another student finds out I gave it to you. If anyone asks, I’ll tell them you stole it. Got it?”

  I nod, and even though it will make him sick and I’ll never hear the end of it, I let myself cry. Just a little. Pete sees me nearly breaking down in his basement, walks over to me, and gives me a small hug.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he says. “Just know that if you quit on me now, my head is going to explode, and it won’t be anywhere near as entertaining as it sounds.”

  “I’m not going to quit.”

  “You’d better not. Now go home and convince your mom to let you bring this pile of trash home.” He pulls an envelope out of his pocket and hands it to me. It says Mrs. Morris on it. “And give that to your mom, okay?”

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “My official terms for continuing to teach you,” he says. “Something we all can live with.”

  My wrists move and my arms fly across the set. Thumps and crashes bounce off the walls. The bright windows to the outdoors rattle and shake with the vibrations of the nastiest, rustiest set ever.

  Brian barges in and starts disco dancing to my beat. His finger points to the air and back, looping within his other hand each time.

  I stop playing and shout, “Get out of my room! Mom only lets me practice until four thirty!”

  “I was just trying to enjoy your drumming!” he says.

  “I wasn’t playing disco!”

  “I was like John Tramolla!”

  “It’s Travolta, and I wasn’t playing disco. Get out of here!”

  He kicks over one of my cymbal stands and runs like mad out of the room. I don’t even bother chasing him. He’ll be back to kick it over again within the hour. I reach across my bass drum to pick up the stand and set it up again.

  Now that my mom is letting me keep Pete’s old drum set, my brother has been asking her for odd things of his own, arguing that it’s only fair. Things like keeping a Komodo dragon in the house, giving it free rein the way you might a puppy. The week before, he asked her to install a catapult on our roof and a bin of hay in our neighbor’s yard two houses down. Thankfully, she said no both times. I suspect next week he’ll ask for something even worse.

  I’ve seen my dad a couple times since he moved out. Once at his new apartment, and once at his therapist’s office, where we talked about things that make him angry and how it’s his job to work on his temper and his relationship with Mom. I asked if he would ever see me play drums, and he said he would eventually. That made me happy until I asked if he was ever coming home. He hoped so, but couldn’t promise anything.

  I guess that’s all the assurance he can give. I’ve asked Pete a similar question​—​how do I know if I have what it takes to be a professional drummer? How do I know I won’t starve when I grow up and find myself with no one to listen? He said I’ll never know until I put in the work and give it my best shot. Then he added that if I wanted a guarantee on how my life would end up, I should work on Wall Street, because then I’d be guaranteed to end up in jail. Very funny, Pete.

  I do know one thing for sure​—​I love drums. It might not be the headphone jack in my head I’ve always wanted, but it’s kind of the same thing when you think abo
ut it. It lets you say something you can’t express any other way.

  I still hear drums in my head​—​while I’m at school, or when I can’t sleep, or when I’m totally asleep and jamming out in my dreams. But it’s not so frustrating anymore.

  Because now, when I hear drums, I’m the one playing.

  Acknowledgments

  I wish I had a headphone jack in my head to appropriately thank everyone who helped bring Sam’s story to the world. In its absence, drum dedications will have to suffice.

  I was lucky to be born into a musical family, so a snare rim shot goes out to my mom and dad, Mary Grosso and Jim Grosso. They were my first music teachers, and the kind of parents Sam could have used. Also to my brothers, Adam Grosso and Gabe Grosso, for leading by example and showing me the freedom and catharsis of rock music.

  A thunderous cymbal crash goes to Eddie Schneider, a rock star agent if there ever was one. He pulled Sam’s story out of obscurity and believed in it every step of the way, including through some rather intense turbulence. Also to Joshua Bilmes, Krystyna Lopez, and the rest of the lovable characters that make up JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

  I ring the ride cymbal for my phenomenal editor, Anne Hoppe, as well as Rachel Wasdyke, Dinah Stevenson, and the wonderful people at Clarion for taking a chance on a little book about drums after it lost its first publisher. Anne understood exactly what I was trying to do and helped me discover much better ways to do it. I couldn’t have asked for a better place to land.

  I play a fill on the toms for my first editor and fellow band geek, Jordan Hamessley, and also Margaret Coffee, Andrea Cascardi, and the amazing former staff of what was once Egmont USA. They were a caring and supportive team.

  A rhythm on the hi-hat plays for my numerous band mates over the years, but of significant importance are Erik Iwersen, Seth Koenig, Kevin Scheuring, Dylan Hicks, Ari Sznajder, and Jonathan Beverly.

  I stomp the bass drum for music teachers everywhere, especially Don Skoog, who’s much nicer than Pete, but just as inspiring. Also to Katrina Shenton for practical advice about recitals and the profession as a whole.