CRUISING SPEED
From Exemplary Lives
Derek had been a drummer starting in high school. He was one of these people who would have had to invent drumming if it hadn’t already existed – whatever that means, that’s the kind of line people use in interviews when they talk about their careers. He was rambunctious, a bad student, fiddled around in class, made trumpet sounds with his hands, tapped his fingers on the tabletop. He was the kind of kid who was always being sent out to the hallway, which was a dubious punishment, since the teacher then had to chase him out into the hall and remonstrate with him for talking to kids passing by. He had long curly hair that shaded his eyes and he was convinced that that meant he could talk to anyone without the teacher noticing.
In retrospect, it’s surprising that it took him so long to find his calling. But then he did, he was in a band sometime around junior year, I think learned to play so that he could be in the band, and the band was terrific, headlined every school function, and was one of these prep school miracles – a small stuffy school with a completely different set of values that somehow produced a tight-knit set of artistic stoners, they made it a point of pride to get baked just before they started playing, to really work on their technique of getting baked so that there would be no discernible difference between how they played when they were sober and how they played when they were high.
The one time I hung out with them, and took my first puffs of marijuana, I was very taken with that – how, just as I was starting to really study the pattern of the living room carpet, they were taking positions, strapping on guitars, Derek sitting down at his set, inspecting, tightening all the knobs like he were a pilot at the controls of a jumbo jet, running his fingers lightly over the edges of his cymbals to pick up the slightest trace of grime. I was very taken too when I happened to pass by him at the bar that took our fake IDs – his girlfriend was a senior, she was remonstrating with him, he had his head down, his hand on the back of his neck, she was telling him something about how he had to shape up, had to stop flirting with other girls in her presence, something like that, he was practicing the trick I’d seen in class, shading his eyes with his hair so that he was pretending to look at her and really checking out a girl behind the bar.
Why was I so taken with both of these scenes? Why was I, in fact, jealous of what I saw in the bar, this apparently miserable relationship, this controlling girlfriend who wasn’t incredibly pretty, kind of emo, intense, at least a couple of inches taller than Derek? I think because it was a psychology that was completely different from mine, a set of issues, temptations to which I couldn’t possibly relate – the real risk, at age 16, of becoming a drug addict, the inability to stop flirting, the domineering older girlfriend, a very different set of concerns from what I was dealing with, I who took the subway home by myself every day, watched television by myself, read to put myself to sleep.
Derek went away to some third-tier liberal arts college, one of these places that seemed like a spa or a sanatorium as much as a school, close to ski slopes and, as likely as not, a couple of high-end rehab centers. His high school band had of course broken up through attrition and drug addiction and vague recriminations, but he became the drummer for a couple of bands when he was in college and one of them went on to become kind of big – I was walking in Whole Foods with a friend a couple of years after college graduation, a friend who had known Derek in high school, and she pointed up towards the ceiling and said, “Oh that’s Derek’s song,” and it was another of these glimpses of Derek that hit me with disproportionate force, since it just seemed to belong to some other kind of existence – I didn’t know any other C students mucking around in college, maladapting to adulthood, who were at the same time being piped through the ceiling of Whole Foods.
I went through the usual tumble of envy, google stalked him for a while, was somehow profoundly relieved to discover that he didn’t have a Wikipedia page. The band got slightly famous for some time – now I was on high alert for any mention of them – and I had the same deep satisfaction when it eventually became clear that they weren’t going to blow up. Sometime after that, somebody mentioned that they’d disbanded, the same hard-to-follow recriminations, the VH1-inspired stories about drug addictions, stolen girlfriends, the underlying reality of horrible management, incurable immaturity.
I’d assumed that Derek was just a figure from the outskirts of my life, somebody I’d smoked up with once, nodded to in the hallways of my high school, held my breath that he too – he of all people – wouldn’t turn out to be better known and more successful than I was – but then we needed an on-stage drummer for an off-off-Broadway play I was putting up, and one of the cast members, somebody I knew from high school – everybody I was doing anything with at this point was in-network, friends of friends, asking for favors – mentioned a really talented drummer she knew who would be perfect. “Oh, that’s right, you know Derek!” she said, like that really enhanced me – she lived accompanied by a kind of inner Rolodex, constantly indexing everybody’s status relative to one another.
Derek showed up, bearded, boisterous, his curled hair cut back a bit and starting to recede, no longer covering his eyes the way it had in school but still scruffy, still unequivocally him, the feeling that there was nothing in him that was a straight line, no chance that he could ever be tamable. He hugged me very deeply, like he and I had shared something really important that was beyond him to express. He spoke in this soft, reedy voice that felt like a hand-me-down from something he’d seen in a John Lennon or George Harrison interview. “This is amazing,” he said, looking around at our dinky black box theater. He was bobbing his head rhythmically like he was really and truly digging it. “This is such a cool space,” he said, “just really loving it here.” It felt like he was on some kind of downer, some mood stabilizer, the way he was talking seemed totally ripped off, the product of being around thousands of wonder-struck musicians. His girlfriend had come with him, she was sitting in the audience, staring suspiciously at the threadbare set we’d put together. She was different of course from the emo high school senior but clearly of a type, shrewd, sad, she’d taken Derek in hand like he was a fixer-upper she couldn’t bring herself to walk away from.
He was a relatively small part of the show. He came out on stage, sat at his set, he made the same gesture I’d seen in high school, during high band practice, when he was suddenly completely serene, focused, neurotic, wiped away the least trace of grime from his cymbals, sat back at attention like his work station was ready and he was waiting to be tapped to spring into action – and then, as called for in the script, he was supposed to suddenly deliver this energetic, virtuosic three-minute solo, which he did always extraordinarily well. The director had trouble with his entrances and his exits, how he carried himself when he wasn’t playing. “You are here to work, not to flirt,” she said, and Carianne, our mutual friend from high school, shouted out, “But Derek’s work is flirting.” And somehow that got a loud laugh from the rest of the cast, a kind of hangdog grin from Derek, even though he hadn’t really been flirting, hadn’t been doing anything, just smiled shyly towards the audience. It was like the action of flirting had gone out of him, been tranquilized or browbeaten out of him at one point or another, but the trace of it was ineradicable – Derek couldn’t help it, the director noticed it, the cast noticed it, the director’s concept was that the drummer would move crisply and inconspicuously to his set like a caterer to the drinks’ table, and, even though he tried earnestly, Derek couldn’t pull it off, he shambled, he smiled, he drew attention to himself, the director worked hard at it and eventually gave up, he was too boyish, too guileless.
Erin his girlfriend came to all of the rehearsals that week. She sat primly in the audience, she had a thing against the director, chewed on her lip every time the director took Derek to task for something. I was usually sitting in the audience, got sort of friendly with her. She worked as an AD on movie sets, worked 18 hours a day for weeks on end, then took several weeks off, I had the impression that she was very tough, a bo’sun, a ballbuster, our operation probably struck her as hopelessly slow and amateurish, another of Derek’s unfortunate whims. I took it as a real coup whenever she laughed at a line – a harsh spit of a laugh, rasping and unemotive, an acknowledgment of something off in the corner of her consciousness while the main part of her scrolled through her phone, kept a lookout for whatever Derek was up to. She was really hung up on the fact that everybody in the cast had a day job, that they were coming to rehearsals once their office work finished up, that I had to constantly juggle their waitressing shifts and babysitting gigs when I put together the schedule. One of the actors had to catch a commuter train to Long Island. He was a really good actor, really committed, always tried to rehearse until the last possible moment and then scrambled around the theater to grab his coat, his bag, his water bottle. That took Erin out of her cell phone and her torpor. She shouted at him as if it were a horse race, “Catch that train! Train’s leaving without you!” and the actor waved weakly at her as he kicked open the stage door, swam into his coat and scarf. She was really strange, I could imagine how she would rip into a slow-moving crew, how she would rip into Derek’s account book.
The show went really well. Derek was definitely a star. His role wasn’t so big but he showed up at a memorable moment in the action, his drum solo was definitely a crowd-pleaser. It was always expected that a group would gather around to congratulate him in the lobby after it was over. I couldn’t quite work out what the allure was – definitely, none of them remembered his band, it wasn’t like he was standing around saying witty things, just kind of bobbing his head, saying ‘thank you’ to everybody who complimented him, grinning in his tranquilized way. Erin was off to the side, an impatient minder, his coat draped over her forearm.
I was getting optimistic and ambitious, wanted to extend the run. It was Erin who spoke for him, said that, while that was a lovely idea, Derek was about to go on tour for the next couple of months. “I’m sorry man,” Derek said in his bobbing, head-shaking way, “I would love to, I would really love to.”
So he did still have some kind of a career. I had assumed he was broke, washed-up – why else would he be doing this gig with us. I thought his stock had really fallen, that was why he hadn’t even bothered asking if this was paid, just asked very shyly, a few times after rehearsal, if I could book him a cab to take home his drum set. But, no, he was considered a great drummer, he had his principal band, and then he was rented out to different bands as well. Erin rattled off all the cities he would be going to, Dallas, Phoenix, L.A., San Francisco, Sacramento, a long list, it was very difficult to believe that this could be his life, all these hotel rooms and crew vans and airport terminals and concert halls, and that that could be boring for him, routine, that it could be a real treat, as he kept saying, to do something different, be in a play. He made a face as Erin went down the long list of cities and venues, like the whole thing was just a schlep. “But I guess the thing is,” he said to me in his sweetly confidential way, like he was apologizing for something, “is that even the worst day of it is probably better than having a ‘real job.’”
On that trip, towards the back end of the tour, his rental car flipped over between Chicago and Milwaukee and he went through the windshield. I didn’t know why he was driving his own car, instead of being in the van, why he was between cities that Erin hadn’t mentioned – maybe another group had picked him up and he was flying in to join them. It didn’t seem appropriate to ask for details. Carianne, who told me about it, just mentioned that he – of course – hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt.
There was a shiva for him at his family’s apartment on Columbus Avenue. He was like no Jew I’d ever met, but there they were – all the yarmulke-wearing cousins and uncles, the plates of thick cakes and rolls, the murmured prayers, blandishments, as if he had been a completely different type of person. His mother Amelia recognized me from high school. She attached herself to me for a bit. She was a small, talkative woman with a quick-twitch energy that reminded me of Derek’s. She kept telling me about how brilliant I’d been at school, about how great it was that I’d gone to a good college, made a reasonable career – that was just a conjecture, she assumed that everyone who’d gone to the college I went to must, as a matter of course, be successful and well-off. She had a plate of kugel in front of her. She picked at it whenever she didn’t need her hands to gesture with. She was telling me about Derek’s ADHD, his difficulties with attention span, the absolute impossibility of getting him to do a chore, do his homework, write his college application. She was locked into a completely different phase of his life. It seemed not just cruel, also somehow irrelevant, to point out that he had been an incredible talent, everybody knew it, that he had found his calling while everyone else I knew was still flailing around, ‘searching’ for themselves. In any case, his achievements, his modicum of fame, had turned out to be more fleeting than I’d suspected. After he’d died, I’d googled him – of course I had – and, to my shame, there had been the same quiet satisfaction when I discovered that he still didn’t have a Wikipedia page, hadn’t had an obituary anywhere, there were just the usual facebook encomiums, a paid notice in The New York Times talking about his great heart, with information about his service at B’nai Jeshurun. “You had such a good head on your shoulders,” his mother was saying, “I could tell that you had an ability when it was time to do work to just sit down and do it – you can’t imagine what I had to go through getting Derek to be like that.”
Different people wanted to talk to her, pay their condolences, she was getting distracted – it was obvious where Derek had gotten that from. Erin was there, looking very out-of-place. She was on her cell phone, had a full plate of sweets, a glass of red wine in front of her. I sat beside her – for a moment, it was like we were in the audience again for my play, and it was possible to sit companionably next to one another for hours without saying much of anything, two very different people, watching over something that, in our very different ways, we were making together.
“You know, she’s wrong,” Erin said in her spat-out way. She had heard some of what Amelia was saying – her voice had a way of carrying. “She thinks there was something the matter with Derek, there was absolutely nothing wrong with Derek.” It felt like a futile protest, like the last flickers of a rebellion – a narrative was ossifying, there had been the turbulent adolescence, the break-up of the various bands, the churning through money, at the shiva I’d heard references to the drugs in his system or the alcohol in his system, the bids for sobriety, the damage that touring did to that – I didn’t want to press for details, although I’m sure people would have told me, everybody seemed to assume that this was part of the occupational hazard of being a musician, there wasn’t the sense of disbelief I’d experienced at funerals for other young people; in their head-shaking way, various people, even his mother, were saying that this was pretty much what they’d expected to happen, sooner or later. Erin seemed to have been beaten into retreat, this distant corner of the gathering, surrounded by these murmuring uncles and cousins, lawyers, stockbrokers, insurance agents, people she probably had never been in a room with before and certainly never would be again.
“You get to a place with a crew, a band, that’s like cruising speed,” she said. “You’re so connected, you’re so tuned-in, it’s just insane that life can be this way, that you can do it on command – over and over again.” Her voice was raised – she was like Amelia in this sense, she didn’t care who overheard her. Fortunately, Amelia had fluttered to the other end of the apartment. “I know that it’s not great that he died,” she said, heedless of the uncles and cousins, “and it’s not great that he died with the oxy in him, but it’s not like he should have paid better attention in school or some fucking thing, turned out just the same as everybody else in this room. If he could have done it all again, he would have done it exactly the same way.”
Oh man, I REALLY LIKED this story. So simple. Feels like a memoir/straight out of life - I think that's what I would have assumed if you hadn't said it was a 'short story.' I definitely feel like I know all these people. Everybody so broken and so determined at the same time. Keep it up!