Don't sleep with your drummer sample chapters

Don't Sleep With Your Drummer
©2002 Jen Sincero

May 24
They Came From The Classifieds
An Award-Winning Film by Jenny Troanni

FADE IN: Interior practice space - night
A large office filled with a drum kit, guitar amps, guitars, pedals, bubble machine, posters, and the rest of the usual rock-and-roll paraphernalia. Jenny and Lucy tune their guitars. Matt tweaks his drums and drinks a beer. Enter Cynthia. Leopard skin pants, biker boots, fully inked (lizards, snakes, daggers - more ink than skin), spiked blue hair, piercings all the way up both ears, killer body, T-shirt handed down from an infant, tits that could bash a man's head in half. You don't know where to look first.

CYNTHIA (nods in cocky surveillance of the room): All right, all right, this could work! This could totally work! Let's kick some fuckin' ass!

Cynthia plugs in and proceeds to turn her bass up so loud it alters Jenny's heartbeat. She has all the moves - leg up on amp, head banging, jumps, twirls, back-bends. She can even play the bass with her tongue. She insists on screaming the backup vocals even though she knows neither the words nor the tune, and tries to bond with the eye-contact/snarl-and-nod thing. She is fascinating, but Jenny is genuinely scared of her.

CYNTHIA: All right then. Whew, I mean, I'm not crazy right? You guys had to feel that too?

High fives again. Because one can never have too many. Cynthia slams the door and howls her way out of the building.

FADE IN: Interior practice space - same bat time, same bat channel. Next night.
Enter Derek, deceptively WASPy looking, and in his early twenties. He is carrying a lawn chair, a martini shaker, and a glass.

Derek starts setting up his lawn chair and making himself comfortable. The other three look at each other in bewilderment.

DEREK: Why, I'm Derek! I made an appointment for five o'clock to be your bass player.

DEREK: I didn't bring my bass. I don't play for just anyone. I'm here to observe you tonight. See if I'm interested. Start whenever you're ready.

After that came James. Tight, acid-washed jeans, Van Halen tour shirt with the sleeves cut off, moderately inked (a chick, a panther, a sun with blood and tears dripping off it), black sneakers, and, of course, the mullet (straight bangs, back section straight on top, curly on bottom - perm growing-out version). He brought a six-pack of Bud and his girlfriend. Nice guy and a great bass player but it was quietly understood: he wasn't for us. We weren't for him.

Next was Rodney, who needed me to go pick him up at his Mom's house because he didn't have a license. I almost didn't bother, but we were getting desperate. Unfortunately, he was even a young-looking seventeen - superscrawny, with a baby face and long, greasy brown hair. You could tell once he filled out and got rid of those braces he was going to be a real cutie, but at that moment I found it nearly impossible to not pat him on the head and feed him a cookie. He goes to the same high school I did, so we bonded on how nuts Mrs. Garza is and how crappy the burritos are in the cafeteria. Not exactly the kind of conversation I'd expected to have with a prospective bandmate.

But the kid could play. He said we rocked pretty hard for old people! I thought that was hilarious but he didn't laugh.

Then there was Whispering Alexa. Lanky, dyed black stringy hair, looking for Goth in all the wrong places. Her bass was wider than she was, and the five words she spoke - "what key is this in?" - were breathed as though they were her last. Her playing was okay, but I've never seen anyone so spooked in my life. Her ink consisted of a serpent peeking out from her cleavage. She smelled like wax. She gave me the creeps.

When we got to the Palace, there was a line around the block of punks, badasses, rockaholics, and murderers, all of them ready to rock, and all of them expecting to see a different warm-up band. I was terrified. Suddenly the fact that we'd practiced only once together wasn't a minor detail. It was a hippo-sized Achilles' heel.

This was a mostly male, mostly underage audience, which meant raging hormones and pent-up anger. Suddenly our pseudoglam white dress theme seemed glaringly wrong, about as cool as showing up in Western wear. We looked like a bunch of sissies. Dinner was about to be served and we were the main course.

EMERGENCY NOTE TO SELF:
It is better to have rocked and lost than never to have rocked at all.

We had to fight to get backstage. No one believed we were the warm-up band until some high-strung wanker on a cell phone nodded to the gorilla at the door to let us in. Then he screamed at us to hurry the hell up and get out there. Keep it short and don't touch any of the equipment that's already on the stage or he'll sue our asses. Scott was cool as a cucumber. Rodney was desperately looking around for band memebers. Lucy was doing drunken imitations of the wanker. He glared at her and she glared back. He looked at me and said that we had a half an hour. Lucy said, "I know you are but what am I?"

We set up, and I could feel the crowd on the other side of the curtain heaving like a caged ape. WE all strapped on our instruments, held hands, and agreed that no matter how much we sucked, no matter how hard they threw their bottles at us, we would just rock harder. The defense is a good offense. Then we started playing. We didn't even wait for the damn curtain to come up.

The wanker appeared off to the side of the stage and motioned for us to stop. "What the fuck are you doing?" he mouthed. I screamed that we only had half an hour and turned up my amp. Then the curtain yankede up and the crowd stared in surprise. Confusion. Horror.

I wonder if this is what soldiers feel like when they're forced to charge the enemy. All-out reckless fearlessness, panic so intense it's completely calming. I felt like I was on painkillers. Every time I looked at Lucy she was laughing hysterically. Rodney sprouted an I Can Do A Split In The Air Gene. These were his people. This was his show.

Scrott fucked up right and left but did it with such conviction, it sounded great. On one song, he didn't realize that it had ended, so he covered up the fact that he was still playing by unleashing a massive drum solo. He silenced the boys in the front row. They stopped throwing stuff and screaming obscenities. "Take it off!" was replaced by "Fuch yeah!" At some point there was a shift in the crowd, and all the girls who'd been lining the wall in the back took over the front row. Tami and a slew of her friends were suddenly there, red-faced and raise-fisted. When the wanker motioned that it was time to stop, we'd won over the majority of the crowd.

Sometimes I think I was put on this earth to screw up seating arrangements at weddings. My table consisted of four couples and me, and while they all merrily chatted away about vacation packages, I looked longingly at the kiddie table. One little girl was stuffing ham up her nose while her brother rolled around under the table, aiming his fork at people and making shooting noises. Not one of them was talking about what a lovely wedding it was or how pretty Carla looked. They were making sculptures out of butter balls. They were taking their pants off. They were the party table.

Carla did me a major service by not asking me to go out and buy a five-hundred-dollar doily-posing-as-a-dress and be in the ceremony. She either noticed that the shower nearly killed me or realized that it nearly killed her and thought it best for both of us this way. I thanked her. She said it was her pleasure.

The whole thing was held at the "house" of a high school friends of Carla's who's now a rich Beverly Hills trophy wife. Her husband is some big movie producer guy who's a hundred years old, and there were pictures of him everywhere with his arm around various movie stars. At the end of the night, I found Mom standing in front of one of these in the living room, swaying back and forth to the music of the band, her half-full wineglass leading the way. It was a picture of Mr. Big Rich Geezer with Bette Midler, Mom's idol. "Bette is a great, great lady. What pizzazz!" she'd always say. "I'd push you in front of a bullet meant for her, if it ever came to that. My own child. That's how much I love her."

"So are you gonna steal it or what?" I asked, sneaking up behind her. She jumped, causing a splash of wine to come flying out of her glass. "Oh, now look what you've done!" she cried, licking the wine off her arm. "Jeez, Mom," I said, looking around the room for a cocktail napkin to wipe it up with.

I didn't see one. Instead I saw something even more disturbing than my mother licking booze off her arm. I saw my father sucking face with Mrs. Paskow behind the grand piano across the room. He was bent way over, due to the fact that he's a good foot taller than she is, and I was treated to an unobstructed view of her pudgy hand gripping and releasing his left butt cheek. I froze and somehow stifled a scream.

"Close your mouth, Jenny. You look like an imbecile," said my freshly-groomed mother. Then she followed my terrified gaze over to the barnyard scene in the corner. It took a second to register but then Mom, unlike me, was unable to control her emotions. "Oh! Oh!" she wailed, putting her hand over her heart and nearly collapsing onto an eighteenth-century French loveseat. She steadied herself and marched up to the happy couple, now no longer smooching, thanks to the bucket of cold water her scream had tossed on them, and stood there with her ams folded across her chest.

POINTS OF NOTE:
• Theirs was not an amicable divorce. Mom kicked him out and swore that if she ever saw him again, she'd see to it that he paid dearly for wasting the best fifteen years of her life.
• Mom and Dad haven't seen each other since Carla's graduation. And even then we managed to skillfully keep the two camps separate.
• Up until this moment, Mom had no idea that Mrs. Paskow even existed.
• Mom is still mad at Dad.
• Dad is still scared of Mom.
• Everyone involved is drunk.

"Marie! Why, look at you! You look exactly the same," my father said, cowering behind Mrs. Paskow.

"How dare you come here and embarrass me like this!" my mother shrieked, ensuring that anyone nearby who might have missed the show was now informed it was starting.

"Okay, Mom, why don't you give me your wineglass," I said, imagining my father with the stem sticking out of his forehead. I somehow managed to pry it out of her hand and put it safely on the table behind me.

"You! Acting like a teenage boy with this - " she turned to Mrs. Paskow and searched her horrified face for an adjective. "-this-this beanbag!"

"It's a disgrace!" Mom said, turning to her audience. "Acting like animals in this house, where Bette Midler herself has been!" I held Mom by the arm, partly to calm her down, and partly to prevent her from throwing a punch. I smiled at the crowd and said, "It's fine. Everything's fine."

"Dad, could you please leave now? And take Mrs. Paskow with you?" I said, now holding both of Mom's arms. For the first time in his life, Dad actually heard what I said and started pushing Mrs. Padkow toward the door.

"Oh no. Not until she apologizes. I am no beanbag!" Mrs. Paskow said, holding her ground. Great. There was going to be bloodshed over an insult that didn't even make any sense. Dad was now looming over the tiny Mrs. Paskow the same way I was hovering over Mom, holding them back like we were at a cockfight waiting for the whistle to blow.

"Hah!" said Mom, thrilled by her success. None of the ten or so audience members offered to help, and I was moments away from just dragging Mom out by her hair, when The Life Of The Party suddenly came crashing into the room. He's the drunk guy at every wedding who makes long, not-funny toasts and inevitably ends up onstage, taking over the lead vocals for the band. He was about twenty-five, and I recognized him from the wedding party as one of John's friends. He came screaming into the living rooom followed by a throng of followers with his tuxedo shirt unbuttoned and his bow tie wrapped around his forehead.

"I'll be taking requests and tips," he announced, taking a seat at the piano as people filed into the room. Nobody seemed to notice there was about to be a rumble, and before I knew it, a large crowd had come between the two contenders. "I'd like to begin with an old favorite my mother taught me back in the day. Gather round and don't be afraid to sing!" He started playing the old classic, "You Do Something To Me," which, shockingly, was Mom and Dad's "song." I couldn't believe it! I imagined a loud, dramatic howl spilling forth from my drunken mother as she tore herself out of my kung-fu grip and lunged for my father's windpipe.

But much to my surprise she started singing, and when I let go of her arms, she walked over to the piano and snuggled up next to Mr. Entertainment on the bench. Moments later Dad was by her side, his hand resting on her shoulder out of old habit. And she didn't even take a bite out of it! In fact, they started singing together, causing Mrs. Paskow to storm out of the room in a huff.

Carla must have heard the song begin because she burst into the room in a panic, only to stare drop-jawed at the bizarre thing happening on the piano bench. She made her way over to me and gripped my arm. "What the hell is this?" she whispered.

"I don't know but I don't trust it. Be prepared to run defense when the song's over," I said. But it was truly a miracle. The song ended and my parents were so caught up in the moment, they actually hugged! Carla's nails dug into my arm as we watched The Impossible Embrace. Both of them stepped back, suddenly embarrassed.

"Very nice to see you, Marie," Dad said, scared again. But Mom looked completely confused and somehow tinier than ever. All the fight had drained out of her.

"Jenny, I'm ready to go now," she calmly said, and headed through the crowd and out of the room.

I think in the normal world this is what they call closure. She spent the entire car ride home chatty and happy! It was like she'd been body-snatched. All she said about the incident was, "I can't believe it. That's who I've been getting terrible stomach gas over for all these years. Incredible." I had no idea she still thought about him that much. I wonder if this means Mom will finally spend some time doing something other than being pissed off.

Aside from this slight slip into an alternate universe, Carla's wedding turned out to be like every other wedding. The bride sobbed her whole way down the aisle, drunk married men made passes at me, and the band played a terrifying version of KC and the Sunshine Band's already terrifying hit, "Celebrate!"