(Excerpted from my novel THE BATS)

IT WAS SEMANA SANTA, spring break. She was twelve, and her father had brought her along to Palenque to translate where his Spanish was lacking. He had come to shoot a new inscription find, the last step in a project for INAH, the Mexican anthropological agency, documenting Mayan sites in southern Mexico. The money he was to receive was already spent on the satchel of restoratives he now carried with him everywhere.

Liana heard her father rattling around in the hotel room next door all night, muttering to himself. That morning he burst into her room when she was coming out of the shower.

“Come on, Lia. I’m going to show you something.”

She would have been content to stay in the little air-conditioned hotel, feeding the caged toucan and watching Mayan women in indigenous dress reading the daily news on TV in Tzotzil. But she knew that when her father got like this you didn’t stand in his way.

They bumped through the rutted early morning streets of Palenque Town in the mud-caked Land Rover, past women from the highlands in their colorful huipiles, folded woven scarves on their heads. “They still speak Chol on the streets here,” Peter said excitedly. “The descendant of Cholan, the language you see in the inscribed temple texts.”

He sped up the winding jungle road towards the site of the ruins, his fingers knotted around the wheel.

“Why are we going back here again?”

He just nodded and grinned, his jaws grinding.

In fact it had been a little bit thrilling being with her father on this trip. Peter had seemed in his element. She felt his passion and mastery, his wide learning and skills. His flowing mane going white now, he appeared the magnetic director of theater and film she’d been to young to know.

Threads of mist twined along the Chiapan hills, the air already warming. Liana rolled down the window, watched Mayan farmers level grass fields with machetes.

“Writing is speech made visible, Liana. Started with the Sumerians 5,000 years ago, the Egyptians right behind them. Later, these we call the Mayans.”

He pulled into the forested parking area at the top of the rise and spun to a halt beneath a tree. He tipped a trinket seller to watch the Land Rover then bounded off, light meters and a heavy-duty Eveready flashlight dangling from his flak jacket. Liana hurried to keep up.

The short, steep climb brought them to Palenque’s wide, grassy plateau and the first three visible structures, set aside each other against a hillside of dense forest. They overwhelmed all human presence.

The Temple of the Inscriptions, where Peter had done most of his shooting, was beautifully intact. Pyramidal, with steps leading up the center, it divided into eight platforms as it rose some seventy feet, framed against steep forest, to its summit: a roofed, six-columned, limestone pavilion.

Peter stood before it transfixed. “The most beautiful structure I’ve ever seen,” he said softly.

She thought it pretty too. In her schoolbooks, Mayan temples appeared stony and cold, geometric monoliths bereft of the colors that once covered them, but this alabaster marvel breathed harmony, purity, proportion. Inside the upper pavilion, Peter said, paneled murals bore inscriptions narrating the city’s history - its rulers, its divine origins – and the 617 glyphs he had been shooting.

“King Pakal is buried here,” she said. “We learned about in school.”

“You’re a smart cookie.” He put his big arm around her and squeezed her shoulders. “He ruled for sixty-eight years, a golden age.”

She gazed up its sixty-nine stairs where two days earlier a tourist had toppled to his death. To die is to “enter the road,” the Mayans say. Liana, watching the poor lifeless man being borne away on a stretcher, had wondered if the road he was entering was any more than the winding two-lane stretch to the cemetery outside Palenque Town.

“The entire temple was built as a conduit to the afterlife,” Peter said, with a sweep of his arm. “But that’s not what I want to show you, Lia. Come.”

She trailed him across the park-like agora. The heat was turning fierce. Peter ducked through a sprawling warren of arches, niches, platforms, courtyards and murals known as The Palace, then veered right and disappeared into the forest wall itself.

She followed him up stone steps through dense trees then continued along a narrow trail. The air was cool and damp, the light dim. There was nobody in this corner of Palenque, no markers on the path. “It’s spooky here,” she called.

“Turn and look.”

They were high enough to see back across the green forested plain that ran all the way to the eastern coast of the Yucatán. The tips of smaller edifices not yet named but only numbered jutted above the level forest.

“Uncountable cities,” her father said, “spread across four countries. The chicleros, the gum harvesters who work the forests, keep finding more. All built out of rock and limestone and mortar.” Liana saw below them the shining, sun-washed upper platform of the Temple of the Inscriptions, with its stone narratives. She understood enough to know that this was Palenque’s true magnetic center - what had obsessed the explorers, the linguists, the anthropologists, and now her father.

They climbed further until, swallowed by foliage, they couldn’t see the flat expanse they’d left, or anything beyond the forest they were in.

“Are we almost there?”

Peter turned, red-faced, too winded to speak. He pointed ahead to a set of narrow, broken stone stairs, coated with wet leaves and moss. Clutching gnarled vine roots for support, they began to climb. She couldn’t get a grip with her sneakers. Peter reached out and pulled her to the next step.

“Lean in, Liana. Remember that man who fell.”

Reaching the top, they scrambled onto the floor of a roofed stone pavilion.

“Edificio XIX,” Peter said. “Discovered only last year. A rare creation myth sequence. We’ll be shooting it this afternoon. Then they’re going to move it to a museum.”

Her father was weaving. He stank of alcohol and sweat. She moved to steady him.

“Do you see how light barely penetrates these temples, even when the sun is high? The murals and inscriptions would have lain in darkness.”

They dropped onto their knees and peered under a ledge.

“This frieze will be brightly lit and easy to see when it’s transferred to a museum. But look how they positioned it, Lia. They would have needed torches to see it.”

She could just make out Mayan figures - warrior kings, nobles, servants - and the blocky, complex glyphs she’d come to recognize as Mayan writing.

Peter turned on the flashlight. Slowly he began to rake the panel with light, section by section.

It was a long, horizontal frieze of extreme drama and beauty. The mural seemed to move, the figures leaping into motion as the light crossed them.

“You come into this shaded pavilion. You sit and wait in the dark, expectant. Then the pictures are lit, the story is revealed.” Her father peered at her. “What does that remind you of, Lia?”

“The movies.”

“That’s right. The Mayans went to the movies. At least the priests did.” His great haggard head was lit from below now by the flashlight, a bloody-eyed ghoul. “The stone figures came alive by the flame of the torch.”

He turned off the flashlight. The darkness was absolute. Frightened, she reached for his arm and held it.

“The movie is over,” Peter said.

Moisture dripped onto the wide fronds, the stones. The frieze had lain invisible for twelve hundred years.

In that moment at Edificio XIX Liana glimpsed something of what her father was about, what drove him through photography, theater, cinema, and the film he longed to achieve. Some mad attempt to renew the creation of the world. It terrified and excited her.

*

The following morning she heard Peter bellow her name from the next room. She found him trembling and shirtless on the edge of his bed, his bloodshot head hung down, a mezcal spilling from his hand. “My feet. I can’t feel them.” She’d never seen him this bad. Outside, a driver waited to take them to Villahermosa and their plane. “Help me, Liana.” His medicine satchel lay open next to him, a strew of needles and vials. He pointed to one. “Just do it. Stick it in.”

She found a maid to bring a tub of hot water and then she rubbed his feet.

She wanted this vacation to be over. Her father worried her, his passions were not hers. She didn’t care about the ancient Maya in the same way. She saw that her father was veering out of control, that it would get worse, and that it would fall to her to protect herself and her brother.

She saw too that the great ruin her father had exposed to her was himself.

Friday night I arrived a little late for a birthday party at La Fragua, an old bar next to the Parroquia church. In a side room at a long wooden banquet table, 40-odd people raised toasts to Elenita, the celebrant. She and her husband, Carlos, have a store specializing in folk art and artifacts from around the hemisphere: Mexico, Guatemala, Peru. Carlos, florid and long-haired, has a fondness for philosophy and drink. Elenita, pretty but plain by choice, her hair drawn back severely, has an almost saintly sweetness. In California they’d read as gentle, educated, ‘60s idealists; in fact, through them I’d learned more of the epochal events of 1968, when just before the Olympics police shot at demonstrating students in Mexico City’s Tlacelolco Plaza - Elenita and Carlos among them - killing many. Merchants now, they still vote for the PRD, the opposition party that never wins, and read La Jornada, the paper of the left. They champion the preservation of indigenous cultures through their work at the store, exhibiting yarn paintings and beaded masks crafted by the Huichol, peyote-ingesting indigenous people who live in the deserts north of here.

I slid into an empty seat at the far table. Margaritas seemed to be the drink of choice, and a meal of corn soup, carne asada (beef with tomatillo sauce, avocado, potatoes, lettuce and carrots), and flan. I fell into conversation with a silver-haired gringa sitting next to me.

She was pleasant enough, well-spoken, not untypical of some other retired foreigners I’d met here. Some bore surprising resumes not always evident from their appearance: diplomatic corps, doctor in Ghana, ex-director of Versailles. There would be something a little odd or different about them that they’d end up late in life in this rather remote mountain town of unusual beauty but with modest medical facilities. Some reminded me of Tennessee Williams’s or Paul Bowles’s people: odd, touching, a derelict gleam in their eyes. I surmised from this woman’s red rebozo shawl and the turquoise ring on her right middle finger that she frequented Carlos and Elenita’s store.

She lived alone, she said, in a small house on Calle Aldama. Her two American children were grown - one a doctor, the other the owner of a restaurant. They called occasionally, seldom came to visit. Her husband had passed away seven years earlier. She found herself quite alone, an American woman in Mexico, trying to meet the challenges of each day. She volunteered at the local library, helped at the orphanage on Calle Zacateros, spoke a little Spanish. Her maid, Luisa, an Otomi woman from the countryside nearby, often commented on her solitude, she said, and seemed to feel sorry for her. The woman resented this, felt misperceived. How could her maid, poor and overburdened with work and too many children, with a husband who was never there but across the border in Texas and sent scant money home, pity her, an independent woman of means with options and the wherewithal to make her life comfortable?

The week before, her maid Luisa had invited her to a birthday party for one of her seven children. It was for today, Sunday, out on the ejido, the communal ranch where she lived. The woman politely declined. Every day the maid asked, and again the woman said no. It seemed inappropriate somehow, la patrona going out to some poor ranch somewhere in the campo. But the maid wouldn’t let up, and finally the woman agreed to go, if for no other reason to silence Luisa.

“This afternoon,” she told me, “I had a taxi take me to this ranch about five miles out, off the road to Guanajuato.” At the head of our table there was laughter, another toast to Elenita, more margaritas. The noise died down and the woman continued. “There must have been sixty people, all relatives or friends of some sort - old people, nursing infants, ranch hands in boots and hats. They were poor, but there were tamales to eat, and pork and tortillas all cooked outdoors, and corn drink, and beer. Everyone seemed so comfortable together. A little band played the sweetest music - an accordion, I think, and that big thumpy bass guitar.”

“Guitarrón.”

“Yes. And an out-of-tune fiddle player, yet so marvelous and lively. Some nephew of Luisa’s who couldn’t have been more than eight played the drum.” She laughed and brushed back her hair, seeming to liven at the recollection. “Adults held the infants who never cried, not a peep. The old people spoke among each other, and younger ones sat with them and listened. There was so much…” She turned to me, her eyes shining. “warm, simple love.” She fished in her purse for a handkerchief. “It was the best time I’ve had in years,” she said, dabbing at her eyes. “There’s something…criminal about that, don’t you think?”

Around us, the table was emptying as people got up to dance to the norteño band in the other room. We remained in our own quiet space.

“Where have we gone wrong?” she said suddenly. “Alone in our houses with televisions and newspapers and books and computers, crowing the whole time about how much freedom we have. The sexes are either terrified of each other or at each other’s throats. We’re frightened of commitment. We marry then divorce, preferring our private satisfactions, our careers, to enduring with one another.” Her eyes earnestly searched mine. “We’ve gone off track somewhere, don’t you think?”

She looked away, flushing.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “This is supposed to be a birthday party for Elenita. There, you see? Selfish. Taking your attention.”

“It’s all right,” I said, grateful for the confession. I wanted to say something in return but didn’t know quite what. She romanticizes, I think. Mexican campesinos’ lives are hard: the grind of poverty, babies needlessly lost to dysentery, women to abuse, men to drink and joblessness. This woman wouldn’t dream of trading lives with her maid. Her position here, like mine, is of privilege. Yet she’d cut to the quick of something.

The Parroquia’s big bell sounded, deep and sonorous. Through the window beside our table, I could see the crowds emerging into the forecourt from evening Mass. In the next room, the band’s two-beat corrida cut across the bell’s aftertones.

“Maybe that’s why we come here,” I said to the woman. “To try to tend to the part that’s missing.”

The party was dispersing around us. We stood to go.

She looked at me doubtfully. “But it’s too late, isn’t it?”

(To read previous episodes of DRUMMING, click on slingerland and talent test and hands and honey and honey2 and vignettes and Montmartre and Bud and jamboree)

“To play, I need to go to my subconscious level. I don't want to think deliberately about anything, because I can't think and play at the same time.” - Sonny Rollins

It was a Hollywood recording studio, an all-star session for a forgettable folk-rock duo. The guitarist Ry Cooder was on the date, I remember, along with Lowell George, founder and leader of the band Little Feat. I was playing hand drums, tablas. I’d been studying with a North Indian master percussionist and that was the sound they wanted.

After the gig, I drove all my equipment to a drum supply emporium on Santa Monica Boulevard. If Dick Shanahan’s drum shop - where my father had taken me at ten years old for a talent test - still existed, I would have gone there just for the symmetry. But it was long gone, and for all I know so was Dick Shanahan. I unloaded my kit - cymbals, hi-hat, snare, tom toms, the supporting paraphernalia and the boxes containing it all - and hauled it into the drum shop. I took what they offered me for all of it and drove away.

There was no nostalgia, no regret. Only a sense of necessity, of inevitability. Drumming had lifted me up and now it was setting me down. The time had come to shed those skins.

I was 29 years old. The six years since my return from Europe had been as tumultuous and fitful as the decade framing it. The Barcelona fever dream of becoming a Jungian psychiatrist had lasted through some pre-med courses at Berkeley then quickly withered when my father withdrew support. A relationship with a girl I had known in college resulted in a pregnancy, an abortion. There was a job packing books at a warehouse, a brief stint at a university press. There were some psychedelic voyages, some drumming gigs. I married the girl from college, and a newfound interest in Buddhism led to a two-year teaching interlude in Kyoto. I didn’t take my drums to Japan and didn’t miss them. I had explored sound, now I sought silence. I began writing in earnest.

I wanted to describe the world I saw, inside and out, deploying fiction’s forms. I was casting about for some language of the self, a self still obscure to me.

Return to California, and the arrival of a baby daughter. Musically, jazz had moved to the margins, torn between a dissonant avant garde and bebop traditionalists. I could become a studio musician but I didn’t want that. I wanted to write. By the time I sold my drums I had completed a novel and placed it with an agent. I wanted to see my work out in the world.

It would take some more years before I would get there.

Epilogue

Once many years later, at the invitation of a good musician I knew, I agreed to play a restaurant gig for a week with a quartet. I placed myself behind a borrowed drum kit and picked up the sticks. The group was playing mostly standards and it wasn’t that much of a challenge, but I was shocked to encounter a feeble ghost of my former drumming self. I couldn’t fathom how I had ever mastered the four-limbed virtuosity good drumming demands. It was a mystery I wasn’t that interested in solving, but if I had, it would have taken me all the way back to the twenty-six drumming rudiments - the flam, the ruff, the paradiddle, the ratamacue, the rest of the drumming catechism - Dick Shanahan had shown me that first day.

When the gig was over, I put the sticks I had bought for the occasion in a drawer and never touched them again.

Drums had offered me a path out of a fraught childhood: an instrument of desire in every possible sense. It was my portal to sex and romance, art and the creative life, and a rare chance to work with some of jazz’s greatest practitioners during a high water moment in the art form. In writing’s solitude I was sole master of my fate, but I often missed the inspired, telepathic interactions with other musicians. Later I’d become a lyricist, working that juncture where words and music meet, collaborating with the jazz pianist Chick Corea and others.

But it was the drumming that had given me life.

(To read previous episodes of DRUMMING, click on slingerland and talent test and hands and honey and honey2 and vignettes and Montmartre and Bud)

When I was a drummer, I never knew what the night held in store - where the music would go, who would come to hear it, whom I might go home with afterward. My brief encounters with daylight passed in that mute haze of anticipation every performer knows - a state akin to fear, near to rapture. My colleagues and mentors - expiring virtuosi and rising stars, strange geniuses and hoary legends - imprinted me no more or less than other madmen, criminals, and beauties who peopled my days and nights.

I’d been drumming since I was eleven - half my life - in school bands and orchestras, at dances and weddings, in murky bars and jazz clubs, in strip joints and lounges, in cavernous rehearsal halls and muted recording studios, on outdoor bandstands and overlit concert stages. Drumming had shaped and defined me.

One day when I was twenty-nine I’d leave a recording session, drive to a drum shop, and sell my last set of traps. Choice had little to do with it.

There were two incidents that prefigured the end of my drumming life, though neither explains it. The first took place that Christmas in Barcelona.

In the photo, I’m standing in a plaza in snow. There’s a Gaudi street lamp behind me, and a wrought-iron bench. I wear a threadbare black sports jacket over a dark turtleneck sweater, cheap slacks, and worn, pointed Italian boots. A pair of scuffed drumsticks protrudes from one of my pockets, from the other a small leather notebook. An arch frames a neon sign that says: Club Jamboree.

Beside me in the photo stands a young woman with round cheeks, sloe eyes, and dark bangs. She is grinning and appears to be beating her mittened hands against the cold. The fact that Eva is in the picture means someone else must have taken it: Memphis Slim most likely, or Guitar Murphy.

Turning the creased black-and-white snapshot over, I read: Barcelona December 21st, scrawled in light-blue ink. A week before my twenty-third birthday. The snapshot had floated up from among my mother’s things when she died.

A freak snowfall had hit northeastern Spain that week, I remember. Hawkers sold mittens and scarves along the Ramblas, shovels became sleds, and in the plazas children built their first snowmen. I was working the Club Jamboree, a cave in the Plaza Real off the Ramblas, with the blind jazz phenom Tete Monteliu and blues master Memphis Slim. Six nights a week, four sets a night, I fueled Tete’s sleek, witty jazz investigations of “Stella by Starlight” and Monk’s “Straight, no Chaser,” then laid down a backbeat for Slim’s throaty vocals and rolling piano on “Kansas City” or “Goin’ to Chicago” - a bruising double shift, pitting creative exhilaration against the body’s exhaustion and the spirit’s confusion. Underfed, underslept, overstimulated, I hovered on the edge of collapse. The slightest breeze from any direction would have pushed me over the edge.

This is the gaunt six-foot wraith with the bad haircut, bony face, and unreadable gaze I revisit in the snapshot.

It had been two months since I’d left Copenhagen, hitchhiking and taking trains south with Eva, bearing my letter of introduction to the poet Robert Graves. We’d arrived in Barcelona, bought tickets for the ferry to Mallorca the next morning, then wandered up the Ramblas in search of a hotel room. We found one on the Plaza Real - by chance, across from a jazz club called The Jamboree.

It was a cavernous, subterranean dive with lavalike walls, graffitied columns, and Technicolor lighting. Eva and I stood at the long, dim bar, listening in astonishment to a blind pianist with a cherubic marble face and black wraparound glasses tear through the jazz repertoire, leaving his Swiss bass player and German drummer in the dust. Tete Monteliu, twenty-six then, and still unknown outside of Spain, was about to establish himself as Europe’s great jazz pianist.

After the set, I approached him at the bar and asked if I might sit in. Relying upon the reassuring cache of my recent work in Copenhagen (like all pianists, he idolized Bud Powell), he agreed.

Afterwards he called the club boss over and told him to fire the German drummer and hire me. I protested that I was on my way to Mallorca. “No, man,” Tete insisted in his burry Catalan accent, tugging at my sleeve. “You stay and play with me.”

Suddenly the club startup with Robert Graves that had nudged me south was pitted against the offer of a real job with a thrilling pianist. Eva said she didn’t mind; she was along for the adventure.

The next day the club owner, a local syndicate capo named Carlos, found us a room in the Roma, an old Art Nouveau hotel across the plaza from the club. I was given a small weekly salary, a per-diem for food, and membership in the local musicians’ union. I began working as the drummer for the Tete Monteliu Trio, my letter of introduction to Robert Graves yellowing in my pocket.

*

In early December, the American blues artist Memphis Slim pulled in with his sidekick Matt “Guitar” Murphy and no drummer. From then on I drummed for both Tete and Slim every night from 7:00 to 2:00 - an elating, exhausting regimen.

By mid-month, the Hotel Roma’s pipes had frozen, coal deliveries had stopped, and Eva and I had taken to sleeping in our clothes. As Christmas approached, I felt unmoored emotionally, losing musical focus, coughing and sneezing with pneumonia’s onset.

On Christmas Eve, the Jamboree was packed with revelers. I sat at a table before the first set with Memphis Slim, a scarf around my neck, sipping tea and sneezing. If there’d been another decent drummer around I would have canceled that night. Slim, hearing my hacking cough, said, “Flying low tonight, schoolboy.” He’d caught me scribbling in my notebooks one day and I’d been “schoolboy” ever since. “Sounds like you’re coming down with something evil.”

I liked Slim, and I greatly admired the potent economy of his lyrics. A tall, sophisticated man with an ebony baby face and a stripe of white hair that swept back from his forehead, he’d recently settled in Paris, purveying his deft, shouting blues of ominous irony to appreciative Europeans. Drumming behind him was easy, his rumbling two-fisted piano obviating much in the way of percussion help.

“You know, schoolboy,” Slim said, sipping his Scotch, eyeing me ruminatively, “You’re a good drummer - don’t get me wrong - but lately you’re in it but you ain’t of it.” He drained his drink and stood up.

Slim’s perception smote me like a curse. He wasn’t talking race; great musicians seldom do (though “white drummer,” a cliche disguised as an oxymoron, would later dog me back in the States.) It’s all about what you deliver on the stand. Slim’s comment alluded to matters of heart. To play music is to commit to live it. Some invisible force was leaching me away from the instinctive center to the watchful edges. I was detatching, not being there. Slim knew it, I knew it.

I was becoming thoughtful, earnest. My eyes were open when they should be closed - as in kissing, or sex. I was marking time, not making it; and drumming is nothing if not about time. Memphis Slim had unearthed a spy in our midst, a stranger on the very ground where we stood - and it was me.

Somewhere I’d come across a quote by Tony Williams, Miles Davis’ young drumming prodigy. He said: “If I could tell you what I was thinking about, I wouldn’t have to play the drums.”

The problem was that, increasingly, I could tell you what I was thinking about. Lurking inside the drummer was a second, larval character: the writer, watching the player, my creative abandon now coolly observed by a voyeur with an inexhaustible subject at hand - myself. When the physical and moral extremes of my life as a musician threatened to annihilate me, the writer, rapt witness, would do nothing to save me. This parallel personage, locked in his own creative tumult, complemented and vied for my soul. (Eventually it would capture it, leading me to shed those skins, abandon the world of unpredictable conflagrations for one of small, carefully tended fires, put myself at a safe remove. But this would come later. ) The writer was eating the drummer.

After the first set, I stumbled to the bar in a sweat. Tete was sitting at his usual stool, dressed impeccably in suit and tie and cufflinks, smiling one of the strange smiles of the sightless. He brushed back his jacket sleeve, flipped open the glass casing of his wristwatch, and felt the hands. “You are stoned tonight, Tony?”

Pot or hash, Tete claimed, tended to pinch my attention to a tiny point - a cymbal sound, a drum tap - whereas a drink or two loosened and socialized me. I swung harder, more freely, he’d say. I’d tested his theory and concluded he was right - further reason to distance myself from drugs at that point. The club’s four-free-drinks-a- night policy (one thing Carlos the boss was generous about) helped the process along.

I looked into Tete’s black glasses, which reflected the club’s lurid revolving lights. “No, Tete,” I said. “Not stoned. Just sick.”

For the next five days I lay in bed, drifting in and out of consciousness, coughing and shaking, wracked by anxious dreams of guilt and punishment. I awoke long enough to take penicillin and hear news arriving by way of friends and the daily newspapers. Each day the keening voice of the legless beggar in the Plaza Real rose through the window. “Limosnas, por favor.”

I have to get out of this life, I thought. I’m trapped in some toxic bacchanal with no exit. All of this struck me with the force of judgment. The quota of human waste had exceeded the allowable. I wanted desperately to crawl my way back to sunlight, to feed life and be fed by it.

Before I’d gotten sick I’d been reading Jung’s Memories Dreams, Reflections. Now, in a fever dream one night, I was an enlightened doctor/psychiatrist/writer - some saintly combination of Jung, Schweitzer, and Gandhi - ministering to an ill, unfortunate patient who was also me.

At last one morning I awoke to find sunlight pouring through the curtains. Children’s cheery voices drifted up from the plaza. Water ran through the pipes again. My fever was gone.

I sat up in bed and said to Eva, “I’m going to become a doctor.”

By New Year’s I was back drumming at the Club Jamboree. Slim and Guitar Murphy left for Paris the following week. The Tete Monteliu Trio continued playing smart, virtuosic jazz, but the magic was gone. In February, I saw Eva off on the train back to Copenhagen. Through tears we vowed to reunite later in the spring, when the gig was over and the pressure was off. Things would be better then, we told each other.

*

Hunkered against the vibrating hull of the SAS cabin, I pulled the blanket around my shoulders and pressed my forehead to the window as we flew into the setting sun. I was twenty-three years old, coming back to America after two years away.

The plane banked down over a vast, tilting sea of light. From above, L.A’s gridded extent, so tawdry by day, looked like a jeweled carpet. The pilot cut the engines. Descent narrowed the spooling diorama to a tracking shot of streets, parks, houses. Down there - among the flats and canyons, the streaming freeways, the wide table of the ocean, the rickety pier - lay youth and memory. As the wheels hit the tarmac, dread gripped me.

I lurched off the plane, carrying a box of hardening Danish pastry I’d brought as a gift. Emerging from the terminal, I saw my father, his hair grayer, standing at the curb, waving.

(Sections excerpted from the memoir NATIVE STATE (Random House))

(To read previous episodes of DRUMMING, click on slingerland and talent test and hands and honey and honey2 and vignettes and Montmartre)

(Note: Portions of this post appeared earlier under the title “The Empty Suitcase.”)

The Montmarte had been buzzing with the imminent arrival of piano legend Bud Powell, scheduled to debut the following Tuesday. Then during our last set on Sunday, Dexter Gordon unexpectedly announced him from the stage. From my seat behind the drums, I watched Bud Powell emerge from behind the bar in back. He was wearing a beret, an overcoat a little long at the sleeves, a suit and tie beneath. He looked to be about forty (he was thirty-eight), stout, with a mocha complexion and a thin, trimmed mustache. He strode deliberately through the club toward the bandstand with an expressionless mien, his left arm swinging slowly at his side, seeming to part the applauding audience like water (a space-altering effect celebrated in Thelonious Monk’s tribute “In Walked Bud”).

He stepped onto the Montmartre stage and took a seat at the piano. He began playing the intro to “Celia,” a graceful, lyric composition of his, and Niels and I slid into an easy groove.

Of course I knew his work from the epochal recordings of the late 1940’s and early ‘50’s, flights of conceptual fluency and drive that modeled the language every jazz pianist since has been obliged to use. Only Charlie Parker rivaled his improvisatory powers. His early difficulties were part of jazz lore - epic tales of art and betrayal, martyred genius, drugs and alcohol, asylums and jails, mental breakdowns, heroic performances (“Were you there that night at Birdland when Bud Powell played 44 choruses of ‘Cherokee’?”). The mordant titles of his compositions - “Dance of the Infidels,” “Oblivion,” “Glass Enclosure” - suggested a mind off in its own strange corner. He’d moved to Paris in the late 1950’s - a shadow of his former self, some said - and often worked there with his trio at the Blue Note.

Bud began his solo in a welter of lapses, flubs, fluffs. Slowly he gained footing and moved forward; still, I heard only an echo of his recorded brilliance. At best he sounded like a slightly fuzzy Bud Powell imitator. From time to time he looked balefully up at Niels or me, lost in a cloud, it seemed.

We finished up the tune to polite applause. It was an awkward, disturbing, unpersuasive debut.

I laid my sticks down on the bass drum, my mind full of questions. Perhaps Bud’s seeming flatness was an illusion. Had his disciples so thoroughly imitated and absorbed him that the original sounded weak? Maybe the next generation, into freer forms, had buried the mainstream bop innovators’ message beyond recognition. Yet Dexter Gordon was from the same era, and his intense, integral improvisations still commanded; Miles Davis’ still broke new ground.

Backstage I found Bud sitting with his hands in his lap, a puzzled, bedraggled expression on his face. A large black woman in a hat was standing over him.

“That’s it for you, Bud Powell,” she railed. “I’m leaving!” She turned and stormed out.

Buttercup, Bud’s common law wife and court-appointed caretaker, furious that Herluf, the club’s owner, had given Bud an advance (which he’d used to get drunk) instead of turning it over to her, left for Paris that night, taking Bud’s suitcases with her, leaving him with nothing but the clothes he was wearing.

Herluf quickly appointed Petrus, the Dutch pianist and Bud Powell acolyte, to be Bud’s caretaker. Each day Petrus went to Bud’s apartment near the club and saw that his lone suit and shirt were pressed and that he was shaved and ready for work, then fetched him a taxi to make sure he arrived at the club on time.

A week earlier, I’d come downstairs to find a girl cleaning the club kitchen. Eva was nineteen , an art student, just back from London, where her relationship with an English musician had gone bad. Herluf had given her a job in the club while she figured out what to do next before art school resumed.

Eva was part Inuit, with wide cheekbones and sloe eyes beneath jet-black bangs. Smart, inward, and alluring, she had no shyness. Our first lovemaking, at a friend’s apartment where she was staying, was frank and guileless (so different from the tortured, ambivalent sexual battlefields of my American youth).

Weeks passed in creative ferment, each night brimming with intense beauty and peril. I drummed with the ad hoc Dexter Gordon Quartet (me, Niels, Petrus) and the Bud Powell Trio (me, Niels), then Dex again, then Bud. My recent troubles seemed insignificant beside the heavy baggage Dex and Bud bore, and its effects in performance - the oxygenating flight, the sudden sickening dips. Aware of the extraordinary circumstance I found myself in, I practiced daily, wanting to live up to the music.

The Montmartre was packed every night. Musicians and fans, drawn by the great double bill, arrived from all over Europe. Louis Armstrong’s band stopped by, and the musicians from Art Blakey’s unit. Bud Powell, delivered from Buttercup’s harangues, gained consistency in his playing, and some nights there were glimpses of the old inspiration. When this happened, luxurious inventions of purity and force poured forth from a clear, unnameable source outside of ordinary time.

Bud’s playing exuded a sense of danger, as if at any minute the entire web he was weaving might collapse, or as if he were (that comment often made about genius) struggling to translate from some language no one else heard. Sometimes a solo fractured into incoherence, and we’d be left plowing through shattered glass, bar by bar, limping to the tune’s battered end. One night Bud stopped dead in the middle of a solo, hands raised a few inches above the keyboard, staring into space - as if the transmission from the home planet had simply dropped out. Neils and I glanced at each other in alarm, continuing to vamp, play time. The audience began to stir. Just when we’d begun to wonder if we should simply stop and escort Bud off the stage, he reconnected and tore through the rest of the performance.

Offstage, Bud could do little for himself. In between tunes or backstage, he’d sit very still - blank, passive, in some impenetrable haze, only his fingers moving in his lap. Sometimes he’d hum snatches of favorite Beethoven themes. When he did wander out into the club between sets, it was usually to coax a beer from a stranger - a ploy he’d cultivated in Paris, since Buttercup never gave him any money. (Bud’s flat, wheedling “Buy me a beer” was legend across Europe.) He reacted terribly to alcohol, which collided with Largactyl, one of the ferocious tranquilizing drugs he’d been prescribed after his New York breakdowns and incarcerations. One beer and Bud was stumbling.

“Hey, Tony. Buy me a beer.”

“I can’t afford it, Bud.”

“Why not? How much do you make?”

“A hundred kroner a night less than you make.”

“How much do I make?”

All of us at the club were touched by Bud. Speculations on the mystery of his condition dominated conversation. I knew he’d been a prodigy, absorbing and performing in recital most of the classical and jazz repertory by age ten. Then when he was nineteen, a vicious clubbing at the hands of police had left him with headaches, blackouts, disorientation. Mental hospitals had followed, and a panoply of dubious treatments - electroshock, restraints, experimental drugs - that only seemed to worsen his condition. Intermittently he’d emerge to stupefy the jazz world with epic, nerve-shattering performances, extending into the stratospheric reaches of high bebop and beyond, then drift back into the medical twilight. To visitors at Creedmore, the psychiatric institution in upstate New York where he spent several lengthy periods, he’d complain, “They’re destroying my mind. I can’t compose.”

One night I was sitting quietly beside Bud between sets when he suddenly took my hand in his and began stroking it gently. Looking deeply into my eyes, he said, “Tony, I love you.”

I was caught completely off guard. Emotion welled up. Bud’s declaration, so open and childlike, collapsed all the distance between us. It was as if some broken thing in him parodied or imitated the “normal” world of feelings, which he was very far from by then, and came out in an attempt to talk to us in our emotional language. At the same time, it felt perfectly pure and sincere. I felt stripped bare, as if Bud had seen to my very core.

“I love you too, Bud,” I said, fighting back tears.

Petrus and I would often speculate about Bud. “Maybe he’s just a reflection of ourselves,” he’d venture. “What we love, what we fear. What they call in the East an avatar. Someone whose passage through life reveals others to themselves.”

On one of his last nights at the Montmartre, Bud suffered one of his lapses mid-solo and simply stopped playing. Niels and I, used to this by now, just kept playing time, waiting for him to resume. Bud remained gazing deep into space, his mouth open, his hands suspended over the keyboard.

Minutes passed. The audience grew restive. Finally we just stopped playing. I stood up, walked over to him, and whispered, “Bud.” Gently I took his arm and led him offstage.

He sank onto a chair backstage. I’d never seen him look so sad, so beaten, so collapsed. Herluf the owner arrived and called a doctor. It looked as if Bud was finished for the night.

I walked out into the thronged club. A couple of New York jazz hipsters were standing at the bar in back in dark sunglasses and cool clothes, loudly disparaging Bud. He’s finished, they said, washed up. They mentioned several younger pianists whom on a good night Bud would have left in the dust.

No, you’re wrong, I wanted to protest. Bud can be as good as he ever was. But on the evidence these guys were right. It was so sad.

Music arose from somewhere in the noisy club. I noticed that the crowd up front had begun to quiet down. I saw Bud sitting alone at the piano.

He’d begun to play a ballad, “I Remember Clifford,” written in memory of the trumpet genius Clifford Brown, who’d died in an auto accident at twenty-five - the same crash that had taken Bud’s younger brother, the pianist Richie Powell.

The noise in the room subsided. The bartenders stopped making drinks. The waitresses froze along the walls. Bud rendered the stately, dolorous dirge with full command, filling the room with a deep, aching beauty.

When he finished, the club was silent as a church. There was no applause, only soft weeping, blowing into handkerchiefs.

It was the saddest, loveliest, most moving performance I’d ever heard.

Bud stood up and walked slowly offstage. I looked over at the hipsters, their heads bowed in contrition.

I hurried backstage. Bud looked lost, drained. Petrus was helping him on with his coat. “Today would have been his brother Richie’s birthday.”

*

Bud was scheduled to leave for Paris by train on Monday. Sunday night, before work, Herluf said, “Bud, I want to buy you a going-away present to celebrate your time with us here at the Montmartre. What would you like? How about a suitcase?”

Petrus and I looked at each other, trying not to laugh. We knew Bud had nothing to put in it. Buttercup had taken everything back to Paris. Naive Herluf had been in the dark about this.

Bud looked at Herluf, deadpan, and said, “Yeah, I’d like that, Herluf. Thank you.”

The next afternoon we gathered in front of the club to wish Bud goodbye. He came walking slowly towards us in his lone suit, hat and overcoat, looking straight ahead, his left arm swinging softly at his side, carrying in his right hand the expensive new suitcase Herluf had bought him. He bore it with great solemnity and care, as if it were packed with suits, ties, bottles of the best cologne. There wasn’t a single thing in it - not a razor blade, not a handkerchief, not a pair of socks.

Bud gravely shook each of our hands. A few hugged him and wept. We were all going to miss him terribly. Now he had to go back and face Buttercup’s wrath, resume his gig at the Blue Note in Paris. (Three years later he’d be dead in New York, officially of tuberculosis.)

“How’s the suitcase, Bud?”

“It’s very nice, Herluf. I like it. Thank you,” he said in his empty, polite voice.

The taxi pulled up. With what seemed an exaggerated show of dignity, Bud handed the empty suitcase to the cab driver, who, after a slight show of surprise at its weightlessness, put it in the trunk. Bud, betraying no expression, got in the taxi.

Petrus and I looked at each other, overwhelmed by love, sadness, confusion, hilarity, fighting not to bawl like babies.

“Goodbye, Bud,” we all called as the taxi drove off.

Bud never looked back.

*

The days were growing short, the weather was turning cool. Dexter Gordon left for an engagement in Germany. A Swedish unit was booked into the Montmartre for November. The great summer of jazz was over. It was time to move on - somewhere south, preferably, where it was warmer. Eva said she wanted to come with me.

Herluf had a new partner, an American named Harold who had owned a jazz club in San Francisco. Harold had this idea about opening a second Montmartre on the island of Mallorca, off the coast of Spain. His partner would be the great English poet and mythophile Robert Graves, who lived in the little village of Deya, about an hour from the capital of Palma, where the new Jazz House Montmarte would be. Graves, a jazz fan and amateur drummer himself, was apparently keen on this idea.

Harold proposed that I go south and set up the new club with Graves, then stay on as the house drummer. Acts would be cycled down from Copenhagen to stock the fledgling club. Graves, deep into middle age by then, would be the resident spirit, and I’d let the venerable poet sit in and flail away from time to time. I had a little saved up from the summer, which Harold supplemented with enough seed money to get Eva and me to Spain. He promised to send down additional funds and my drum kit as soon as I established myself in Palma. More interested in meeting the author of The White Goddess and Goodbye To All That than running a jazz club, I agreed.

We left Denmark, hitchhiking south through Germany, bearing my letter of introduction to Robert Graves.

(To read previous episodes of DRUMMING, click on slingerland and talent test and hands and honey and honey2 and vignettes)

“If I could tell you what I was thinking about, I wouldn’t have to play the drums.” - Tony Williams

A winding series of misadventures took me back up through Spain, then to Paris again, and finally to London, where I hoped to find work drumming.

On my second night in London, I headed for the city’s one good jazz club, Ronnie Scott’s. It was spring, I was free from the military draft, and I was ready to establish myself in England as a musician if I could. I stood at the bar listening to a tightly rehearsed English big band run through a few standards. Predictable, light-years behind. I was told to come back on Sunday afternoon when there were open jam sessions.

On the way out, I passed a poster advertising the imminent arrival of the tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon. Gordon, one of John Coltrane’s primary influences, had just recorded a fresh, thrilling series of new albums for Blue Note I’d heard blasting out of the boites of Paris.

Sunday afternoon at Ronnie Scott’s, I jammed with energetic Caribbeans, European strays, and local talent. Afterward the owner, a decent saxophonist himself, suggested I stick around London, wend my way into the local scene, perhaps do the odd night at his club. I told him I needed to work full-time. British labor laws, he said, made it near impossible for an American to get a work permit unless he was contracted for a fixed appearance.

“Does Dexter Gordon have a drummer?” I dared to ask.

“Kenny Clarke’s coming over from Paris,” he said, ending the conversation. Clarke, one of modern drumming’s great innovators, had left New York for Paris and now worked regularly with Bud Powell at the Blue Note.

My plans to drum in England were adding up to little. Soon I’d run out of money. I was desperate to find a way to survive in Europe - anything to avoid returning to California and some meaningless straight job, as my father in his letters was extorting me to do. I began to think of Copenhagen, where I’d played when I first hit Europe, as my last hope.

I arrived in Denmark, broke and discouraged. Without enough money to rent a room and still eat, I began sleeping nights on benches in the central train station. Policemen rotated through the place every twenty minutes, and though I’d try to remain sitting up, inevitably I’d drift back down and curl up, only to be startled awake and upright by a rude rap on the sole of my shoes. I’d slump back down, and the cycle would continue until dawn. I’d order a cup of coffee and a pastry and write or draw in notebooks, trying to stay awake until it was warm enough to find a grassy spot in one of the city’s parks. I kept my backpack in a coin-operated storage locker in the train station, filched cigarettes from public ashtrays, hovered outside bakeries scrounging for stale throwaways.

On the night I realized I was down to my last $50 travelers check, I found the Jazzhus Montmarte on a quiet side street. I slipped inside and stood at the bar in back. The tables were packed with attentive Danes. If Paris had been the first to welcome American jazz artists fleeing racism, economic oppression, and indifference, now other European cities had thriving clubs as well. Copenhagen’s Club Montmarte was heading into its first great jazz summer.

On a small stage in front, the Dutch pianist Petrus was etching his witty, Monkish stylings, along with a precocious Danish teenager, Niels, on bass and a local drummer. Two Americans - Benny Bailey, an expatriate trumpeter living in Berlin, and Herb Geller, a quicksilver altoist from California whose work I knew - were playing. Their solos sizzled and soared. After the set, Petrus spotted me at the bar and introduced me to them. On his word, they invited me to play the next set.

I mounted the stand gingerly, weak from hunger, and sat down behind a worn Ludwig kit. The sticks were, reassuringly, Slingerlands, with the new plastic bubble tips that made them last longer.

Benny called off “Night in Tunisia,’ Dizzy Gillespie’s artful piece of bop exotica. I made a pattern with symbols and tom-toms, blending echoes of the Gnaoua rhythms of Marrakech. To my relief, idea and act coalesced: the music leaped forward. Blood rushed to my head as I drove the tune through its sustained release, setting up the solos. Benny flew through his choruses, riding time’s current; Herb sliced the air with flashing thought. After Petrus bounced and clumped through his solo, I exchanged four bar solos with each in turn - then eights, sixteens. At some point the others had stopped and I was playing alone, time flowing through my hands, gripped by that sensation when the mechanics drop away, rhythm accesses something beyond itself, and you feel as if being played, not playing.

We rode the tune out to waves of applause. Benny and Herb were grinning. I felt shaky, dazed. Petrus was rubbing his goatee mischievously, as if to say “See?”

At the bar, Herluf the bearded Dane who owned the club, said, “That was great. Come and play again.”

“Yes,” I whispered. “Thank you. I will.”

Then I was out in the cold night again, alone.

*

In the days to follow, I wandered the streets until nightfall, living for the hours when I’d sit in with the band at the Montmarte.

Finally Herluf proposed that I work alternate nights with the Danish drummer. When I told him I didn’t have a place to stay, he offered me a tiny room upstairs at the back of the club. I didn’t ask how much money I’d get, and I didn’t care.

My room had a bed, a sink, and a light to read by. After the streets, it was paradise. At night, when work was done, I’d eat leftovers in the club kitchen then go upstairs and fall happily asleep. I’d awaken around noon and meet Petrus for pastry, smørrebrød, and coffee, then go to the nearby baths for a soak. Afternoons I’d practice on an old drum set in the club basement, putting my technique back together. Sometimes I walked the city, past parks I’d slept in, or down along the Nyhavn docks where I’d wandered nights with a blanket, looking for a doorway. The relentless undercurrent of agitation that had been with me since the draft physical in Paris began to abate. I started writing again in my notebooks.

Long midsummer nights exploring the ruminations of Thelonious Monk, the weightless skywriting of Charlie Parker, the abstract interstellar voids of Miles Davis. Surely art redeems. The revelations in performance, the telepathic convergence of improvising minds, the listeners’ responses - all that later, in writing’s solitude, I’d miss most.

The musicians changed continually as new artists booked in for a week or two, or others passing through Denmark sat in. Only the music mattered now. I wrote home and asked my father to ship my drums to Copenhagen.

Drumming is, almost by definition, a tool of seduction - I’d learned that long ago that first night at the YMCA dance - and soon long, pale, pretty Danish girls, lost in crushes from their seats at tables in the club, would find me at the bar between sets, or come see me afterwards. Sometimes they’d stay with me in my little room above the kitchen, or take me the next day to their favorite cafes or parks in the city.

One Saturday night, I came offstage to find Dexter Gordon sitting at the kitchen table in back where the musicians gathered, a saxophone strap hanging from his neck, sucking on a reed. We were introduced; then the tenor legend unfolded himself - all six and a half feet - from his chair and walked to the bandstand. Niels and I followed.

He counted off a familiar standard tune. After a clear statement of the melody line, he began his improvisation. His invention unfolded like a Japanese scroll, one line woven flawlessly into the next, each chorus more fluent than the last. Dex, as he was called, would hang near the tonic note, vamping with his large sound, until picking up the next wave of thought and spinning another long, lucid line, rich with emotional logic. He played more than a dozen choruses. It was the most commanding jazz performance I’d heard excepting Coltrane’s in New York, which was of another order.

Dex was 36 at the time, recently released from prison in California for heroin possession, and about to take up a 15-year residency in Copenhagen with the Montmarte as his base. If Coltrane was taking his influence to the next level of possibility, Dex, a bridge from swing to bebop (such a trivial name for such a serious music, he’d say), was content to range richly within the wide standard repertoire. Musically, he was at the height of his powers. Bearing a vast musical encyclopedia inside his head, he interlaced his improvisations with quotes, allusions, and witty asides from every imaginable musical source. Neils, Petrus, and I were his rhythm section, the carpet on which he rode, and we had to be attentive and unflagging so as not to break the spell.

Offstage, Dex was witty, ironic, veiled. Even with a fresh start in clean Denmark, he hadn’t entirely licked heroin. Drug dealers from Germany would hover along the walls of the club, happy to provide. Sometimes after his solo, Dex would sink slowly into a crouch, eyes closed, until I’d wonder if one of us should rush forward and grab him before he fell off the stage. Then he’d slowly rise back up to his full height, his horn finding its way to his mouth, and enter on cue and execute perfectly.

With Dexter Gordon installed at the Montmarte, every great jazz figure touring Europe that summer - Horace Silver, Cannonball Adderly, Louis Armtrong’s band - stopped by to visit. I played with many of them. I couldn’t believe my good fortune.

That summer at the Montmarte, far from home and lost to it, I was challenged, exhilarated, happy. With barely enough money to eat, I worked every night at a strenuous level of performance with artists of supreme emotional and technical intelligence. The long days and nights of playing and listening, reading and writing, seemed like a reprieve, a wild gift, patterning a possible adult artistic life to be attained.

Word came that my drums from California were waiting down at the customs docks. I claimed them, set them up in the Montmartre basement, and began practicing with a vengeance. Each night with Dex the music rose another increment; and lurking around the club bar were other good drummers from New York, Chicago, or Paris, waiting to move in if I faltered.

I’d been playing at the Montmartre almost a month when Herluf, the owner, drew me aside and told me the piano legend Bud Powell was arriving from Paris to play the first two weeks of September, alternating sets with Dexter Gordon. Herluf wanted me to back both artists - a prospect beyond my wildest dreams.

(To read previous episodes of DRUMMING, click on slingerland and talent test and hands and honey and honey2)

“If I could tell you what I was thinking about, I wouldn’t have to play the drums.” - Tony Williams

Since taking up drums at the age of ten, I’d never been away from them. Each new town or school had a scene, a milieu in which drumming conferred acceptance, companionship, sustenance: a self. After graduation I left California, headed for Europe with only a backpack and a blank notebook. I felt barren, underequipped, a naked stranger on the road. Nothing could have suited me better. Las Vegas, looming out of the desert, exemplified the tawdry American surface materialism I was ready to disavow. In a Nebraska motel, I began a notebook that would spawn years of them, full of truths and lies.

In Manhattan I slept on the floor of a dancer’s apartment, spent nights at the Village Vanguard listening to John Coltrane: creation at full intensity, both sacrificial and prayerful, loosening the bonds of form, heralding a new age. Listening to Elvin Jones’s incendiary percussion tumult, I felt I’d arrived at some holy shrine on the journey begun back in Dick Monahan’s drum shop.

Ten days later, I stepped off a freighter onto the cobbled Dutch streets of Tenheuzen. I hitchhiked to Copenhagen, where in a club I sat in with a young Danish hard bop quintet. Afterwards, the leader asked me to stay and work with them, but it was too soon; I had some money left and I wanted to travel more. Still, I’d learned that drumming was a currency that crossed borders.

*

I spent that fall in Paris. A draft notice had arrived back home, bearing news of my induction into the Army. I was to take my physical at a US military base outside of Paris the first week in January. I was a young man with no future, then, soon to be cannon fodder for the dogs of war.

Church bells rang through the quarter on Christmas Eve, tolling my misery. Alone and far from home, I crept out of my cheap hotel room to buy a bag of frites when I ran into Petrus, an impish, goateed Dutch pianist I’d played with in Copenhagen. Excitedly he dragged me off to hear an intense group of New York musicians from the touring company of The Connection, an American play about jazz and heroin addiction. Before the last set, I asked to sit in.

Sitting in can be a delicate matter. The bandleader is obliged to make a judgment on the spot, often based on little or no evidence. Club owners tend to not like it. If the musician isn’t good, everyone suffers; on the other hand, sitting in freshens the music, invites discovery. A white drummer asking to sit in with a Black group is forcing the odds: it’s assumed he won’t be any good. The tenor player, probably thinking I was French and it would be rude to refuse, said yes.

I took my place behind an unfamiliar Gretsch drum set, picked up a pair of new sticks that felt too light. I hadn’t practiced or played in months. I adjusted the position of the snare, bass drum, and high-hat cymbal to accommodate my limbs. I tapped the snare a few times, loosened the tension knob to make the sound less brittle. Abruptly the pianist counted off “Cherokee” at a lightning tempo - a quick way to weed out a bad drummer, and a move I could take as hostile.

Sketching the tune’s frantic pulse with my right hand on the large ride cymbal, I divided it into twos and fours with my left foot on the hi-hat. And suddenly there it was: the groove, jazz’s global constant. Miraculous, that strangers from half a world apart can assemble such a complex musical creation on a moment’s notice. Hands and feet responded, whether from the pent-up desperation of recent weeks, or in response to the New York nights absorbing Coltrane’s tumultuous innovations. I dared the music out along thought’s edges, inciting the players. Shared American griefs and certainties, both grave and joyous, took us to the marrow of this music as intimate to us as breath. The pale French listeners fell rapt. By the third chorus we’d achieved that state of controlled abandon Duke Ellington meant when he described jazz as “an accelerated lack of concern.”

When “Cherokee” was over and the applause in the smoky cave had died down, the musicians’ tight nods let me know it had been good. Afterwards some were going to The Blue Note on the Right Bank to hear the brilliant, disturbed piano icon Bud Powell, now living in Paris. Having no money for the cover charge, I went instead with the bassist, the tenor player, and a few girls to the nearby Hotel Louisiane, where in a turretted room we sat around drinking wine and sharing a joint.

A few weeks later, I managed to fail my draft physical, thanks to a pair of bad knees. I was elated. The following day, I headed south to Morocco.

*

I’d been in Tangier a month, in a kif-induced haze for much of it. One night I climbed to the roof of a villa overlooking the harbor. The sky was lit with stars. There was one other person up there - a hulking, dim German known around the plazas as Mad Ludwig. His mind deeply furrowed by drugs, Mad Ludwig had stopped talking several weeks earlier and now only communicated by tapping on a little clay hand drum, nodding and leering, or occasionally writing a few words on a pad.

Mad Ludwig stopped playing and looked at me. His idiotic, obsessive noodling must have produced some kind of expression of distaste on my face. He scribbled something on his notepad and handed it to me.

“You think you’re the drummer,” it said, “but which one of us is playing?”

I stumbled downstairs, fled the villa, and followed the winding path to the harbor. Dawn was breaking over the straits, the low mountains of Europe still veiled in mist. I paced the sand in torment. Is a drummer who doesn’t play still a drummer? No, Mad Ludwig was right. Surely the stoned rants flooding my notebooks were of no possible merit either. What was I, then?

*

Inside Marrakesh’s high, crenelated walls, in the great Jamal el Fnaa square, a troupe of Gnaouan musicians made a visceral thunder in the rising red dust of sunset, surrounded by a wide circle of onlookers. Wearing loose white robes and colored babushes, they loudly beat wood drums, hung from shoulder straps, with curved mallets wrapped in goatskin. Others played metal hand cymbals, chanted, and danced. An older member of the troupe and a boy sat to the side, making mint tea and filling the pipes.

Individual drummers improvised variations against a surging, repetitive rhythm - a six-eight pattern with accents on one and four - sustained by the others in unison. Chanting and dancing rose then subsided as the pulsation shifted. This drumming resembled less the hypnotic repetition of Arabic percussion than something closer to what I knew as jazz. I stood mesmerized at the edge of the circle, borne on the throbbing current until nightfall, when the drums finally faded into silence.

The next day, the Gnaouan drummers began mid-morning and didn’t stop. When one drummer or dancer tired, he sat down for tea and a pipe and another replaced him. The old man played for short periods, and then the boy was allowed to join them. Before long the drummers, realizing my special interest, beckoned me into the circle. I sat sipping mint tea, supremely content, a drummer among drummers. I knew I could play with them, were I to ask, but I wasn’t here for that.

Inside the vital Gnaouan circle of drumming, I was linking up disparate bits of musical teaching, connecting threads running back through those tonic rhythms that had first stirred me in youth: Jack Ross’s vaudeville licks on my father’s piano top, the thunder in Dick Monahan’s drum shop, Gene Krupa’s maniacal poundings, bop drumming’s quicksilver polyrhythms. Here were the cadences, figures, and motifs I’d heard Elvin Jones play in New York with Coltrane, embedded within a continuous culture: drumming as conversation, healing, and sustenance. Preserved through exile and slavery, the Gnaouan drummers still exorcised and entertained in the markets and oases of southern Morocco. The rehabilitating energies of the drums acted directly upon me, assuaging months of drifting and doubt. Emotions rose and receded, mixing with tears and smiles. I felt restored, filled with a new desire to play. I’d arrived at what I’d come south to find.

(To read previous episodes of DRUMMING, click on slingerland and talent test and hands and honey)

Hardcore devotees of the lascivious stayed away from Duke’s on Saturday nights, deferring to the raucous rubes who crowded in from the outlying areas. Louise always made the talent work the floor between sets on Saturdays because it raised the take, the customers buying the girls expensive drinks poured from separate, illegally watered-down bottles. So when, minutes later, I saw Honey emerge from the dressing room and head for the bar to circulate, I pushed through the crowd and stepped outside.

I stared up at the full moon, inhaling a Kent. If I didn’t make it with Honey, Jack the bartender would spread it around. If I did and it went badly, the same thing would happen. Either way, I was on the spot. Desire and terror, counterpoised: youth’s leitmotif. I had no real lover’s skills. My sexual immersion at Duke’s had consisted so far of feelups, a few quick throwdowns on mattresses or beds, and gropes in the club washroom, but had yet to include a serious session with a woman who expected her partner to know what he was doing.

I heard Remo’s racetrack trumpet flourish from inside, summoning us back to work. I flipped my Kent onto the dark asphalt and stepped back inside the club, still irresolute, and uneasily mounted the bandstand.

After the last set, flush with the confidence performance brings, I waited until Remo and Art had passed through the dressing room, then whispered in Honey’s ear that I was having a little party after work the next night at my place. Would she come?

“Wah ah’d love tew,” she said in the mirror.

Having some people over to my place, I figured, would socialize my date with Honey, take a little pressure off. So after work I invited some of the club regulars over the next night, as well as a few of my artist and writer friends from college. (Word had already circulated that I was “dating a stripper.”)

The next morning, a Sunday, I was awakened early by my mother, calling to remind me that she and Dad were driving up for a visit that day. Deep in the throes of my obsession with Honey, I’d completely forgotten. They planned to stay on to hear me play at my “summer job.”

*

Over Louise’s special pasta at Duke’s that evening, Mom said, “We’re looking forward to the show.” On the phone I’d tried to intimate more than once that “supper club” encompassed a little more territory than the term might suggest, but sensed that I wasn’t getting through.

My parents considered themselves worldly types, having spent their twenties in rough-and-tumble prohibition New York; and of course Dad’s big showbiz years in Manhattan and Hollywood qualified him as a sophisticated character, certainly in his own eyes. But they’d spent recent years in the sequestered calm of the Southern California suburbs, ministering to my mother’s separation from drink, and it wasn’t possible for me to measure what their response would be to the scene at Duke’s. Then there was Honey, and the party afterward. Thank God my parents were returning home that night.

My dad was holding forth about a summer job playing saxophone at a resort in the Poconos when he was in college - an oft-repeated account illustrating his” wild” youth - when the lights dimmed, my cue to report backstage.

The opening act was Smokey Whitfield, a Black comedian who stood at the mic in a cloud of smoke telling sex and dope jokes. I remained on stage during Smokey’s performance, punctuating his lines with drum rolls and cymbal crashes. Smokey was genuinely funny, and even after a week of hearing his repertoire I still liked to watch him shade his delivery to the room he was playing to. I laughed when he hit his lines, and not just to play the shill. The jokes intended to involve sexual mix-ups: A man gets on a train but climbs into the wrong berth, mistaking a man’s toupee for his wife’s crotch. Smokey’s pot jokes featured a couple of paranoid stoners driving around avoiding the police. (An entire subgenre of this material existed on the chitlin circuit before Cheech and Chong refigured it as hippie humor).

I glanced down at my parents, sitting stiffly at a corner table, Mom working a Chesterfield and a Coca-Cola. I thought how hard it must be for her to be in a liquor-steeped room, a main tenet of her sobriety being to avoid temptation.

Honey’s routine that night was a whoop-dee-doo cowboy number that began in Stetson, boots, a lariat, and a little wooden horsey she made good erotic use of as the routine wore on. Remo and Art blew “I’m an Old Cowhand” while I tapped something laconic and equine on the wood block, gradually steaming it up on snare and tom toms. The Western gear began littering the stage and the tassels went into orbit. Near the dance’s frenzied end, Honey began shooting me hot glances and doing things with her tongue, premonitory allusions to our night ahead, I figured. I peered down into the darkness, searching for my parents, wondering if they’d noticed.

Afterward I joined Mom and Dad at their table. Mom fiddled nervously with her hands. “You’ve become quite good at this,” she said, the ambiguity of her comment thickening the air. As Honey passed by on her way to the bar, I watched my father’s eyes hang on her sequined, swiveling butt.

”We were thinking it would be safer not to drive home tonight,” my mother said. “Your father has had a few drinks.”

“No, no. I’m fine,” Dad protested.

Panicked, I flagged down a waitress and ordered him a coffee. I had an extra room at my place and they knew it. If they insisted on staying over, I’d have to call off the party. At the same time, here was an easy out if I wanted it, a chance to bail on my assignation with Honey. But I’d already invited the club folk and my friends over, and our heated flirtation during the floor show had left me aching for her.

I told Mom I’d be happy to put them up but a friend was staying over in my other room. Then I went to the club phone in back and booked them a room at a nice motel a few blocks away, by the beach.

By the time I came back, Smokey Whitfield was heading backstage for the second show. I walked my parents to the parking lot.

“Good night, Mom, Dad. Thanks for coming.”

“So long, son.”

During the second show, Honey mimed rabid sex under the spotlight in my direction. The wooden horsey she rode was me. Each whack of my stick was a pelvic thrust. The rest of the band and the audience that disappeared, and I was one bucking buckaroo back there behind the drums.

Afterwards I waited in the parking lot for her to come out. We didn’t dare hook up inside the club, where nothing escaped Louise’s radar gaze. Honey emerged at last into the warm night in a light, clinging summer dress, her hair teased up, some sparkle still on her face, and kissed my cheek. She smelled like magnolia and musk. We climbed in my car, and the gang from the club - Smokey, Lisa the singer, Art, Remo, Scarlett O’Hara - followed me home.

Entering the small hillside college with bags full of ice and liquor, I found my scruffy boho poet and painter friends already there, half drunk and curious to see who I’d taken up with. As the sounds of Ray Charles spun out into the jasmine-tinged night, my college friends and the show folk mixed. Talk floated in the kitchen, couples danced on the porch overlooking the field in back. Mick, a sculptor and amateur wit, traded drunken routines with Smoky Whitfield, while Remo Bono danced with Moira, a zaftig poet, his face buried in her bosom. Scarlett O’Hara sang a filthy sailor’s song a capella, rotating her girth and pulling her skirt up to flash her chalky, dimpled thighs, sending everyone into howls. Honey and I hovered along the wall, talking, whispering, holding hands.

At last people cleared out, leaving us alone. We fell hotly to each other against the bedroom wall. My hungry hands swarmed over this body I’d drummed into motion night after pounding night - the taut Texas flanks, the tassel-twirling breasts that seemed already mine somehow. Our kisses grew deep and sloppy, clothes fell away. We stumbled toward my bed.

So far I was in familiar territory - petting’s slow, curvy foothills. Working my way south with kisses and licks, I arrived at my first surprise. Strippers, like all dancers, shave so the G string won’t expose hair, and to avoid rashes from the sweaty gyrations. Some leave a narrow tuft, others razor it all off. Honey’s was as bald as a baby.

She began calling out instructions - where, when, how much, and with what: tongue, lips, fingers. Her exhortations grew more precise, technical. Slavishly I followed her commands, fumbled to meet her requests. Then grabbing my ass with both hands, Honey began rotating at the egg-beater speed she deployed in her “Night Train” finale at Duke’s. Taken hopelessly off guard, I bucked a couple of times, then went abruptly off.

If a woman can pretend she came, there’s no way a man can pretend he didn’t. My attempts to disguise my sudden bang, with his attendant whimper, were to no avail. Helplessly I shrank away. I lay atop Honey, a beached seal, panting, the silence in the room a shriek.

“Oh, sweetie,” Honey said, coming to. “We was just getting started.”

Vainly summoning language’s dissimulation to my aid, I whispered, “I haven’t been with anybody for…forever.”

“It’s all right, drummer boy,” she said softly, stroking my head as if I were some abject child.

Honey didn’t mope for long but, intent on getting her own pleasure, found other things to do with me until I was up again - a very brief interval because I was young, and crazy with desire. I did things she told me to do, she found things I liked and did them.

Our investigations lasted through the night. We coiled and uncoiled like wrestling snakes, and at sunrise we were still awake, mining sensation. We must have slept for a few hours, because I remember waking to midday light, and she was awake too. We did it again, raw and sore, running the edge where pain and pleasure meet.

At last we arose, shaky-legged. Heading for the kitchen, I thought I smelled smoke. I stumbled upon Mick, passed out on a bed in the next room. I’d thought everyone had left the night before. In the kitchen I found coffee already made. A lipstick-rimmed Chesterfield was burning down to its nub in an ashtray with a note beneath it.

“Didn’t want to wake you, dear,” the note said in neat penmanship. “Just stopped by to say goodbye and drop off a few fresh clothes for you.”

Had Mom peeked in and seen us? A discreet woman, she’d never tell. My mother’s son, I knew I’d never ask.

I found Honey out on the porch in her summer sundress with nothing on underneath, looking out across the field. She looked almost plain without the makeup and fake eyelashes. In the sunlight I could see little flaws in her body and her skin, signs of wear, which made me like her more somehow.

I embraced her from behind, kissed her shoulders and neck. She threw her head back and purred.

“You sure have a lot of books around your place,” she said.

“College.”

“You read them all?”

“Most.”

We sipped coffee between silences.

“I grew up in a place that looked sort of like this field,” she said. “Outside of Port Arthur.”

“Is that where you started dancing?”

“Yeah, in a local little bar. I was fifteen.”

“How did you end up there?”

“You don’t want to know,” she said. “I had a kid.”

“At fifteen?”

“Fourteen.”

“Were you married?”

“Actually, I was.”

“Where is the child?”

“Jimmy’s with my mom. I send her most of my earnings to raise him.”

“What about the dad?”

“Oh, he’s long gone.”

“How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

I was stunned. I’d figured Honey for twenty-five at least. She seemed so assured, so experienced. Impossible that she was younger than I was.

“What’s your real name?”

“No matter. Honey’s fine.” She shrugged, then turned around and took my hand and looked at me. “You have a girlfriend?”

“I did.”

“You do it with her?”

I blushed. “Not the same as with you.”

She giggled, then reached over and patted my butt. “I like you, drummer boy. You keep up a good beat.”

I told her I liked her too, and I meant it.

She nestled her head on my shoulder. “You made me shy, you know that? Back in the club I couldn’t get up my nerve to tell you I was sweet on you.”

“Why?”

“You’re so damn good on your instrument. You really know how to pound those skins. Me, I’m just messing around up there.”

“That’s not true. You drive men crazy.”

“You think so?” She looked at me uncertainly. Honey Bare, shimmering icon of desire, barefoot in a print dress in my garden, had no more confidence on stage than I did off.

“Maybe we’ll see each other again, “she said, putting it more as a question, I thought, than a declaration of fact.

“I’d like that.”

Honey laughed and turned away. “Gawd, I’m so sore.”

We showered together, then I drove her to the club so she could sneak into Louise’s rooming house out back. Luckily Louise was at Mass (she went every day).

Monday nights, the club was dark. When I came to work Tuesday, I passed Jack the bartender, setting up his station. He gave me his knowing smirk and said, ”So how was she, kid?”

“Great,” I said distantly, as if it was none of his business, or something I’d practically forgotten by now. Yet even saying that much, I felt I’d betrayed an intimacy. I realized then that I really did want to see Honey again.

Before work, Louise showed us a publicity shot a photographer had taken of Honey and the band for the local papers. In the glossy 8-by-10, Honey Bare poses in her buckaroo outfit, twirling six-shooters, flashing a pile of cleavage. Remo, Art and I stand behind her in our white tuxedos, grinning, arms thrust wide, as if presenting The Texas Bombshell to the world.

During the strip that night, Honey and I shared few looks. Our night together seemed to have turned us paradoxically shy. It wasn’t so much what had happened in bed but afterwards, out on the porch, in conversation. The few words seemed to have unmasked more than the hours of sex. Now our performance - the strip, the drums, the dance, even the lovemaking - seemed the true disguise. Maybe taking it off was just a way of putting it on.

After the second show, I went backstage to find her. I had no plan, I just knew she’d be leaving for an engagement in Reno at the end of the week and I wanted to be with her again. I opened the door to the dressing room. She was already dressed and gone.

Back out on the club floor, I found Eddie, the second bartender, closing up the registers. When I told him I was looking for Honey, he nodded in the direction of the side door.

I hurried over and opened it in time to see Jack the bartender guiding Honey to the passenger side of his Chevy Impala.

I stepped back into the doorway so they wouldn’t see me, burning with humiliation and disappointment. What had I expected? That she meant it when she said she wanted to see me again? Clearly I didn’t understand something. Maybe I’d waited too long. Jack had just hustled her away from me.

I stood alone in the empty parking lot, as I had a few nights earlier, smoking and looking desolately up at the waning moon. Ridiculous, I told myself. She’s just some stripper, come on, you’ve already had her. But Honey must have touched something in me, more than anyone else I could think of. The embalmed world of suburbia; the contests and talent tests and marching bands; the evasions and subterfuges of family and school life; the icy, daunting literary Brahmins I was apprenticing to. I’d never felt much human contact, let alone unabashed, guiltless delight in pleasure. Watching the taillights of Jack’s Impala disappear, I felt wildly bereft.

“Hey, Antonio.”

Remo Bono was beside me, holding his trumpet case in one hand, pulling off his bow tie with the other.

“Guess what? There’s two new broads coming in next week. One I seen her, Fatima. Used to dance for King Farouk. She’s a contortionist, with a body like you never seen. She can suck her own snatch, fer chrissake. And Jenny Lee’s coming in. The Bazoom Girl, Miss 44d. A legend in the business. We’re going to have a double strip show. Louise must have cut a deal with the cops. How about that?”

Remo shoved his bow tie in his tuxedo pocket, then reached up and pulled off his “toop.” He held the grimy headpiece in his hand, his slick pate gleaming in the moonlight.

“The hits just keep on comin’, don’t they, kid?”

As Remo walked off to his car, I saw a figure hovering in shadow against the building up front. Stepping out into the neon glare of the DUKE’S SUPPER CLUB sign was the girl with the violet lipstick and bangs who came in alone every night and watched me play. She turned and blew smoke from a Parliament into the colored light, her dark, doleful eyes steadying on me.

I hesitated for a moment, then walked toward her.

(To read previous episodes of DRUMMING, click on slingerland and talent test and hands)

I’d always drummed summers - at a jazz club if I could, or else a hotel, a cocktail lounge, a restaurant. With my junior year of college drawing to a close and no gig in sight, the prospect of having to find a straight day job loomed uncomfortably.

The previous fall, I’d transferred from Stanford to the University of California’s Santa Barbara campus. Stanford, an attempt to please my father’s ambitions by proving I could do well at the “Harvard of the West,” had been stultifying, conformist, better suited to engineers and Young Republicans. If Berkeley and San Francisco stirred with alternative culture and political protest, Palo Alto could have been a thousand miles away. Only trips to San Francisco to hear Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley, and Charles Mingus live at The Blackhawk and The Jazz Workshop had gotten me through. Stung by literature, I’d come south to Santa Barbara to join a hungry interdisciplinary wolfpack feasting, in tiny seminars on campus or at teachers’ houses, upon a stunning colloquium of literary minds, among them Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, and the brilliant Pound and Yeats scholar Hugh Kenner.

The week before finals, a jazz pianist I’d been working with around Santa Barbara called me for an audition. Just bring sticks, Art said; there’s a drum kit there. The next afternoon, I drove to a sleepy stretch of one-story establishments on the south end of town and pulled up in front of a long, narrow stucco building. A sign on the roof, in neon letters entwined with a martini glass, said: Duke´s Supper Club. Beside a green naugahyde padded entry door, a poster invoking the draconian authority of the Alcoholic Beverage Control sternly warned anyone under 21 (I was 19) against entering. I opened the door and passed into the rancid, melancholic dim of every nightclub on earth by day.

As my eyes adjusted, I spotted Art on a raised bandstand in a corner behind a runway jutting out into the room. A bald, chubby man in a Hawaiian shirt was running sloppy scales on a bruised trumpet. Art introduced me to Remo Bono, who ran the house band at Duke’s. Remo needed a drummer and a pianist for the summer. There’d be no bass player, which meant Art would have to play a lot of left hand and me a lot of bass drum. I’d have to lie about my age, and we’d have to join the local musicians’ union - if we passed the audition.

I sat down behind a worn drum kit. Remo ran us through a few standards - ¨When You’re Smiling¨ (shuffle rhythm), ¨Just a Gigolo¨ (same). Then a tall young woman in shorts, halter top, and black beehive hair stepped out of the shadows and clumped up to the stand in high heeled pumps. She passed sheet music around. Remo introduced her as Crazy Legs, a stripper from New Jersey.

¨Exahtic dansah,¨ she corrected Remo.

Crazy Legs begin to walk us through her routine. I just tried to hit something hard every time her hips moved.

¨Theah. Hit it theah,¨ she kvetched. ¨No, da bump comes heah. Can’t you read music or what?¨

Remo turned to us and rolled his eyes, made the gesture of masturbation.

Later, when Art called and told me we’d gotten the gig, I drove to the local union building, wrote out a dues check, swore allegiance to James Petrillo, the national union boss, and agreed to attend two general meetings a year. At the Salvation Army I bought a used white tuxedo, a ruffled shirt, a snap-on black bow tie, and black pants: the outfit I’d wear every night for the next three months.

During finals week, I shuttled between Duke’s and classes, composing severe critical papers on Chaucer, John Donne and Wallace Stevens; etching dense commentaries on Benjamin Whorf´s studies of Hopi linguistics; writing pithy exegeses of Beckett, Ionesco, Sartre and Pirandello plays - then banging the kit for Crazy Legs and a Lenny Bruce-like scatological comic until after midnight. When school was over, I moved to a small cottage closer to town. Afternoons I spent with Art, intently decoding the new Blue Note jazz LPs pouring into the record bins weekly, and getting in some practice on my drum set at the club, always empty by day. At nightfall, Duke’s neon sign lit up again.

During that era, a visiting foreigner, horny salesman, or furtive cleric could scour nearly any town from one end to the other and encounter no allusion to sex in any form. College students and businessmen privately circulated phone numbers of a few local prostitutes, abortionists, drug contacts. Aficionados were known to hoard little stashes of grainy 16mm black-and-white stag films that cost a fortune to buy. Homosexual life was near-invisible by necessity, and harrowing to those who lived it. Laws against any manner of perceived deviance were tough and unforgiving, curfews strictly enforced. State and local agencies closely monitored liquor sales and licenses; and possession of a joint, let alone paraphernalia, could mean many years in prison. Those in search of something illicit usually headed for a bar or a club, some place where there was live entertainment and liquor was served. These were the provinces of the lonely, the restless.

Duke’s Supper Club was Santa Barbara’s lone outlet for such soft sin. Dinner was served until the show started, though few came just for the steak and seafood with breadsticks and a side of Louise’s special pasta, served on red tablecloths with fat candles glimmering in frosted glasses. The nightly floor show consisted of a legit act - a singer, a ventriloquist, an off-color comedian - and a stripper or two. This mix of naughty and nice kept Louise the proprietor from incurring the wrath of the city fathers, who visited Duke’s on occasion themselves. Jack the bartender took nasty delight in pointing out a city councilman, a church deacon, a police captain. Once, Louise told us to be at a well-known restaurant off State Street the next afternoon with our instruments; there, in a private back room, we put on a floor show with a stripper who took it all off for a klatch of red-faced, whooping Rotary Club stalwarts.

Louise was a chunky, florid Italian with a businesswoman’s brusque manner. She always dressed in the same tight black dress and high heels. It was rumored that some lesser Mob figures has set her up with a little spot out on the coast for unnamed favors, and twice during the summer, groups of Italians appeared unannounced from “back east,” to be ostentatiously dined by Louise, then set up for discreet dates after the show with the “talent.”

The “talent” - excepting those who had enough money or contacts to lodge elsewhere - stayed in a two-story clapboard structure behind Duke’s, a warren of tiny rooms accessed by way of a rickety exterior stairway. Louise lived there too, functioning as den mother and chaperone. This might sound peculiar, considering what the girls were doing for a living; but they often needed protection from customers who developed rather frightening, obsessive interests in them, and from the local vice squad as well.

I pulled into the parking lot next to Duke’s on a balmy midsummer Saturday night. A full moon hung over the sputtering neon sign in red, the martini glass in green. Entering the noisy, lit cavern reeking of smoke and alcohol and lust, I felt my stomach tighten, my loins tingle, a kindling anticipation fill me.

I slipped through the dressing room, mounted the bandstand, and settled behind the kit. Below me, the wooden runway snaked out into the darkened room. Rough-handed cow punchers from the Ventura ranches, in for a Saturday night whoop-up, clustered along the runway’s apron, which was also a bar. Shadowy figures gathered at tables in the rooms’ dingy recesses. Cigarette smoke billowed up through tiki mesh hung from the ceiling and green, red, and blue cellophane spotlight gels.

The lights dimmed. I gave a drum roll, a cymbal crash. Suddenly, from behind the black curtain, shaking to “One Mint Julep” like some divinity-blinded dervish, Honey Bare, The Texas Bombshell, hit the boards. The runway barflies, their lust-dulled eyes running up her glistening thighs, reached for their wallets.

The Gino Bono Trio downshifted into a slow, sinuous “Harlem Nocturne.” The lights went blue. Honey, in Daisy May pigtails and cut-off jeans, her gaze cast out into the lights, was all legs and pelvis now, a good girl gone bad. Her shiny, plump breasts spun aloft the pasties, little helicopters revving up. I let out backbeats, bass drum thumps and cymbal shimmers like an angler feeding line.

Settling on her haunches, Honey ground the customers one by one, working her way clockwise around the runway’s fringe, getting those bucks up on the bar - just the way Louise liked it. Remo Bono’s embouchure dripped, his toupee jiggled as he pumped his bent trumpet into the air. My rim shots were pistol cracks. We segued into “Tequila,” Art grinning at me from behind the piano. Honey, streaming sweat, painted lips puckered with sex’s seriousness, shoved her g-stringed moneymaker at the gaping, slack-jawed marks.

Seen from a nightclub bandstand, the world is a strange place. The shape of human need reveals itself in the flow of the action below: the customers entering and leaving, the acts moving on and offstage. Here comes old white-haired Hetty and her young escort Eugene, taking their regular table, trolling for a little naughty party play after hours. And here is the mysterious dark-haired girl with violet lipstick and bangs who comes in alone every night and sits at the bar, sipping Singapore slings through a straw, gazing up at me through long false lashes, lost in some crush.

From my vantage point above the action, I watched Jack the bartender run a short change routine on a customer. The mark orders a whiskey sour, lays $100 down. Jack says, “Your change, sir,” and while the man’s eyes tunnel into Honey’s squirming fundament, Jack counts out against the edge of the bar 10, 20, 40 - a 20 floats down to the floor behind the bar - 60, 70 - another floater - 80, and 100. “And I thank you, sir!.” The blurry customer leaves Jack a fat tip to boot. Each night after closing time, Jack and his partner, Eddie, lift the floor slats and scoop up the extra take - often running into the hundreds - and split it. But one of a dozen observable scams being run out on the floor.

“Night Train” was Honey’s finale, the bumps built into the melody, sharp and pelvic. I jockeyed her home with bass drum bombs, cymbals, flams. She caught my eye, flung me a thrust. As the Remo Bono Trio held sustenato, Honey Bare pulled the black velvet scrim at the back of the runway around her butt, shook it, then disappeared to drum roll, cymbal crash, applause.

Slowly the customers came to, stirring as if from a dream. In the vacuum left by the dying shimmer of the music and the dance, the bartenders’ glasses clinked, the cash register rang. Waitresses in fishnet stockings and teased hair began their drift through the room to settle tabs, take fresh orders. Cigarettes flared, men stumbled off to the restroom or the exits.

In a second-rate joint like Duke’s, everything was an imitation of someplace else. The decor was modeled after some nameless sleaze parlor in Reno or Atlantic City. Our band mimicked Louis Prima’s fabled Vegas lounge unit. Honey Bare’s routine was an unabashed knockoff of a bigtime Texas stripper known as Jenny Lee, the Bazoom Girl. Lisa, a blonde local singer who sometimes worked with us weeknights, aped June Christy’s sultry crooning style on “Something Cool” and even bobbed her hair the same. Smoky Whitfield, a Black comic, was our cut-rate Redd Fox. Miss Scarlett O’Hara, “300 lbs of Joy,” chalk-white with dyed orange hair, was a pint-sized Sophie Tucker, feet planted wide on the stage, belting “Bill Bailey” and “After You’ve Gone” and “Nobody Loves You When You’re Down and Out.” Lord knows where Louise found these people. Strippers, dirty comedians, ventriloquists, crooners, bird acts, contortionists - second-line acts mostly, between gigs in LA, San Francisco, Vegas, Reno. Young hopefuls on their way up, or old headliners on their way down, booking in for a week or two for some extra cash, or a little stay by the sea, or perhaps because they owed Luise or her Italian pals a favor.

I didn’t know who I was supposed to be imitating, but I’d become a pretty good strip drummer. I’d learned to lock snare and cymbal, tom tom and bass drum into the female anatomy, guide the dance. It’s all a matter of emphasis: you get to know the girl, blend with her music, her cues. You become her telepathic lover across a dozen feet of space, help her ascend the ladder of fake orgasm. Just as with the real thing, you incite her irritation with a missed stroke, or raise her another notch with a well-placed bass drum kick. Glances across the space during performance between dancer and drummer set up resonances that sometimes play out offstage later.

The night’s first floor show was over, and the stage went dark. Remo, Art, and I slipped offstage. Parting the black curtain, we descended the three rickety stairs into the cramped dressing room behind the runway. Honey Bare sat slumped, out of breath, on a metal soda-fountain chair before the cracked oval makeup mirror, half its bulbs dead. The table was strewn with used lipsticks, communal cold cream, crusted nail polish jars, wads of tissues and cotton balls, stale drinks with puckered lemon rinds floating in them. Glitter glistened in Honey’s teased, damp hair. Pulling the tassels off your nipples, the girls said, gives you a rash.

Honey looks solemnly at us in the mirror. Remo made an obscene sucking sound and mugged at her. “Fuck you,” Honey said. She couldn’t stand Remo’s lechery. Then, as Art and Remo passed on through the door into the club, Honey’s eyes snagged mine in the mirror. She reached back and tugged at my tuxedo sleeve.

The night before, after work, Jack the bartender - a gaunt ex-sailor with an anchor tattooed on his forearm that said “Yokohama Mama” - had told me Honey was hot for me. “Don’t miss the chance, kid,” he said, polishing his bar glasses, white shirt sleeves rolled up, black bow tie hanging unfastened. “You think she sizzles on stage. I bet she’s dynamite in the sack.” I thought about her later that night in my own bed, and not for the first time.

At Duke’s that summer I lived in erotic overdrive, regularly invited to engage in acts I’d barely dreamed of. Women - and on occasion men - approached me backstage or out in the club, expressing their desires in the most unabashed ways, rubbing their bodies up against mine, or grabbing my crotch and importuning, “Hey, whaddya got in there?” or “How about a little action tonight?” I found this crude, overt sexual communication disconcerting, scary, exciting. The confidence of the women, the clarity of the transaction: Nothing could have been further from the delicate minefields of high school and college erotics I had tiptoed through. I’d had more sexual encounters in my first six weeks at Duke’s than in my entire life up to that point. One night Lisa the singer told me to “stop by after work, I’m having a few friends over,” and when I got there she greeted me at the door in sheer negligee, fell to her knees, and began fellating me. Sex simply because you wanted it: What an idea! Another night I was invited to a party at Eugene and Hettie’s where an amateur stripper danced to full nudity for a small circle gathered about her as if she were a campfire, then took them one by one into the adjacent bedroom to deliver the implied culmination of every strip act. There was seldom a night at Duke’s that didn’t involve an invitation to an erotic transaction, large or small.

Honey Bare was a vision of lust incarnate, clearly a voracious sexual acrobat, far beyond me in experience. I, suave purveyor of innuendo, urgings, and accents behind the safety of my drums, remained shy and callow offstage, easily intimidated. How could I possibly take her on?

In the cramped dressing room behind the runway, Honey’s hand dropped from my sleeve and drifted across my butt. Her red fingernails traced my thigh through the tuxedo pants. She turned from the mirror and looked directly up at me, parting her ruby lips.

“Ah fancy you, drummer boy,” she said.

I mumbled an awkward, unheard retort and lurched through the door into the crowded club, the trace of the Texas Bombshell’s hand on my ass.

(Next week: Honey 2)

(To read previous episodes of DRUMMING, click on slingerland and talent test)

I am standing beside a bass drum as tall as I am, dressed in a military-looking uniform with braid and epaulettes, at the back of our junior high school concert band. We are posed in a semicircle on ascending risers. The photographer must have been mounted on a very tall ladder among the school auditorium seats to shoot us like this. The panorama, printed on thick matte paper, unfolds like a Japanese scroll.

We were highly rated among school bands, I remember, our concert programs of military marches, light fantasias, and reworkings of Gershwin favorites sure to fill school auditoriums. When we marched at halftime in football stadiums to snappy street beats and updated arrangements of “Stars and Stripes Forever” and “Colonel Bogey’s March,” I experienced a kind of release: the trombone’ blurry bleats, the saxophones honking in the wind, the trumpets smearing the air, the swaying tubas’ shiny wide bells mirroring the whole scene in miniature as rows and files turned in tight formation. Passing before the parade-reviewing stand, we exuded the proud, beefy aroma of American moral uplift, proof against the twin enemies of lust and disorder.

This concert band picture, in its staged symmetry, represents that very American center that would not hold. Already the skinny 13-year-old at the back of the school band photo, bass drum beater in hand, was in the grips of shadowy, nameless desires destined to subvert the dictated order.

At thirteen, I was trying to read some kind of pattern into the larger elements arrayed around me. Family, school, society: each seemed to have something in mind for me, but I couldn’t connect with any of it. I felt like a Martian or a spy set down among a world of strangers. Viewing the noisy, self-important dramas around me through a watchful filigree of detachment, I couldn’t fathom what made my family or schoolmates laugh or weep, what moved them. If I could slip through a day unnoticed, without being jostled onto the stage of events, I was content.

There was nobody - had I even been able to speak of it - to whom I could confide any of this. My parents’ problems preoccupied them utterly, leaving me on my own much of the time. Junior high school, outside the band room, was a bright, shadowless panorama of anxious sexuality and physical confrontation. Girls in tight skirts and fresh breasts pushing out of pink angora sweaters wriggled across the schoolyard, making it impossible to concentrate in class. I lived in a seething erotic stew, alert to sudden violence or sexual confrontation.

At night, in a private theater all mine, I reviewed the girls at school, mentally undressed them, envisioned doing things they’d never consent to in reality. My dick was a summoning wand, a goad to imagination. This new rhythmic activity (a “single stroke” on the Table of Rudiments) fused somehow with drumming: things to do with my hands that bore me away from the dismaying realities of family, school, community.

While my sexuality burgeoned and my parents’ world shook, a drum teacher from Dick Monahan’s school dutifully arrived at the house once a week. I’d long since learned to play a roll, that blur of alternating taps which can sound like thunder, or water, or the churning of time itself. I’d mastered the flam, the ratamacue, the paradiddle, the rest of the Western percussion catechism. I made a great racket in the living room playing to my father’s 78 RPM record of Benny Goodman’s “Sing Sing Sing”, on which the gum-chomping Gene Krupa, famously arrested on marijuana charges, took a peerless drum solo.

My sound grew louder, my playing faster and more certain. I began to explore the dance band vocabulary; for surely my drumming future, if there was to be one, didn’t lie in school and marching bands. I learned how to play time, to keep the beat, to “swing.” Setting a pulse with my right hand on the big ride cymbal, clicking my hi-hats with my left foot on the off-pulse, I added embellishing thumps with my right foot on the bass drum and snappy comments on the snare with my left hand. I learned how to play “Latin” and waltzes and rock and blues, becoming a well-oiled, four-limbed percussionist, edging ever closer to going public with my skills.

This meant adding paraphernalia; and so in my thirteenth birthday picture there’s a pearl white bass drum and a big new cymbal atop it to go along with the snare and hi hats. I’m wearing a suit with wide lapels, my hair greased in a Presley waterfall. Smiling through braces, I lean over the kit, looking just a little bit more like those hotshot drummers I’d first seen in the photos on the wall of Dick Monahan’s drum shop.

Later I’d add a small tom tom above and behind the snare, then a big free-standing floor tom tom to my right. I’d add to that a wood block and a cowbell mounted upon the bass drum, a sizzle cymbal, a third tom tom, ever elaborating my kit. For a drummer, like a bicyclist or a drug addict, is nothing without his paraphernalia, whether it’s simply hide stretched over wood or clay or the tooled gimcrackery of late 20th century percussion. (Years later, on the day when I got rid of my last set of traps, I’d lose not only the act but the relationship to the tools: the carefully personalized equipment, the iconography, the brand names, the burnishing and cleanings, the rituals of setting up and tearing down.)

A saxophone player at school told me that a local dance band drummer had just enlisted in the Army and they were auditioning replacements. A few days later, a large, lumbering man of thirty or so dropped by school and tried me out on a few tunes in the band room during lunch. Afterwards he handed me a business card that said “The John Melli Orchestra. Dances Weddings Parties.” He told me to show up at the Beverly Hills YMCA Saturday night at 7:00. I’d get paid $7.

That Saturday, packing my drums for my first job, I was less worried about playing than the ignominy of having my father drive me there. Surely I’d be the only musician under driving age. Pondering this problem, I unscrewed the aluminum foot pedal from the wooden rim of the bass drum and fit the big drum into its black reinforced cardboard case, the ride cymbal into its cloth pouch - initiating that drummer’s ritual of dressing and undressing I’d enact night after night, down through the years, in clubs and bars and lounges, in theaters and auditoriums and recording studios in a dozen different countries, always taking longer than the other musicians. I fit the smaller cymbals and the snare drum into a cardboard case on wheels where an instant shelf, like a mechanic’s toolbox, held drumsticks and brushes, the hi hat stand and foot pedal, and the metal keys used to tune the drums.

As I finished packing, my father called me into his den, which smelled of cigars and pipes, the walls festooned with pictures of Uncle Jimmy, Uncle Paul, Peggy Lee, Al Jolson - anyone important who’d appeared on a radio show of his. I found Dad perusing an old book he’d pulled down from the shelf. There was a brief mention of Dad and a radio music show he’d produced, carefully underlined in red. After pointing this out to me, as he’d done a number of times before, he put down the book and lit his pipe. I wanted to leave but knew I shouldn’t.

“You know, your dad was a pretty good musician himself.”

Dad began to hold forth about his own early years as an amateur sax player in college. My first outing as a drummer seemed to have raised in him a compulsion to regale me with his past glories, real or imagined. This terrible need would worsen over the years, any sign of attainment on my part setting Dad to bragging about his own past. Still, there was nothing to be done. My father had begun the great unconscious project that would last the rest of his life: emblazoning himself in his own and others’ minds as a show business immortal.

That night, dressed in a suit and tie, I loaded the drums into Dad’s Buick. I told him the job started a half hour earlier than it did, hoping the other musicians wouldn’t see the novice drummer being delivered to the gig by his father.

Driving down the canyon into Beverly Hills, Dad continued reminiscing about his early days in music. I could barely hear him, swept by my own fears. I’d never played with a live trio let alone a 10-piece dance band of experienced men. When we arrived at the YMCA, I asked Dad to let me off in the deserted side parking lot.

“No, I’ll help you come in and set up.”

“That’s okay Dad. Really. I’ll see you afterwards.”

I entered the empty, crepe-paper-draped YMCA gym and crossed the polished wood floor. To my relief, none of the other musicians had arrived. While I was setting up on the stage, the other players began to assemble. They all looked to be in their thirties or older. They nodded to me brusquely or else ignored me, unhousing their instruments, sucking on reeds, spitting into mouthpieces, chatting among themselves.

The John Melli Orchestra used part-time musicians from LA’s West Side, the repertoire drawn from stock arrangements of standards or from fake books - illegally circulated compendia of popular tunes. The leader, a shaggy man with simian arms and a cheap suit too short at the ankles and wrists, handed sheet music around.

Young dancers drifted into the gym and hovered expectantly along the edges of the stage: shy boys in charcoal gray suits, girls in strapless pink and white gowns. The lights dimmed. I settled behind my drums, stomach knotting, hands trembling. John Melli, a tenor sax hung from his neck by a strap, raised his arm and gave the downbeat on “Moonglow.” Three saxophones, three trumpets, trombone, bass, and piano burst into sound. Music bled out into the gym, borne on my ragged pulse. The srtokes and routines I’d practiced at home for three years suddenly conjoined with nine other instruments: a total shock, like being suddenly dunked under water for the first time. I heard the various instruments, all facing away from me, as backdrafts of sound that didn’t quite blend together. From my perch above and behind the band, I felt alone, confused, powerful.

The first dancers took the floor, merged and swayed. I tried to keep time to “Monglow,” but the music felt disjointed, gluey, out of order. There was no problem with technique or repertoire; I’d already looked through the “charts,” the sheet music, or knew the tunes already. But playing along with drummers on record was nothing like being the drummer, making time for others; it was the difference between being driven in a bus and driving one. I’d greatly underestimated the concentration involved.

A tenor saxophonist turned and glared at me in consternation. Fearfully I fixed on John Melli, his palms pressed frantically downward, signaling me to slow down. My cheeks burning, I slavishly matched his arms as they hacked the air, trying to settle on the pulse.

By the second chorus, I seemed to have found a sort of sync with the band, both carrying and being carried by the rhythm. For a while I did nothing but focus on John Melli’s semaphoric limbs, trying to maintain the beat. Then, gradually, my attention began to drift to the dance floor. Balloons bobbed on the ceiling, stirred by the orchestra’s breath and the dancers’ motion. Girls’ skirts swayed and boys drew closer. As “Moonglow” wound to a close with its little stop-time coda, the dancers slowed, arced in time, clung to each other. Silence fell over the gymnasium; then scant applause trickled forth.

I looked down, expecting to meet the horn players’ angry eyes but they were leaning forward in their chairs, shuffling sheet music for the next tune. John Melli kicked off “In the Mood,” inciting some dancers into a kind of jitterbug, others into the more liberated “bop”. I rapped backbeats on two and four, dropped bass drum accents, more confident of tempo; but then the band seemed to gallop away from me, and there was John Melli’s arm chopping the air, urging me to speed up.

Alternating between my Slingerland 5a’s and brushes for ballads, I drummed on. John Melli’s glowers abated and his arms fell back to the sides. During the fifteem minute break at the end of the first hour, while the other musicians smoked and talked in the parking lot, I sat alone backstage on a metal chair, clutching my sticks and staring at my shoes, waiting to be chewed up by somebody. But I was simply paid no attention.

During the second set, I concentrated on keeping steady time; for a drummer, if he does nothing else, must keep time. The band began to fuse. Now I dared to look out again upon the scene of teen romance unfolding below: kids swaying in each others’ arms or flirting along the walls, the censorious chaperones rigid before the sexuality surging through the room. I wanted to make a tender, dreamy space for the lovers with the swish of my brushes, caress them with my cymbals. Alone behind my drums, having nobody to hold myself, I’d fuel their dreams with my own. A girl was looking over her boyfriend’s shoulder at me. I began playing to her. “Dream when you’re feeling blue.. Dream it’s the thing to do.” As we held on the final note, I single-stroked my mallets on the cymbal in a shimmering, sustained shutter of release.

The lights came up, the dance was over. The musicians began packing up their instruments, lighting up cigarettes or pipes, and chatting. A trumpet player nodded to me, betraying neither censor nor praise. John Melli passed out envelopes. I peeked in at the five and two ones, then shoved the envelope in my jacket pocket.

I disassembled my drums slowly so I’d finish after the other musicians had driven off in their cars. Finally, when it seemed I was alone in the gymnasium but for the janitors sweeping crepe paper into a corner, I noticed a pretty girl lingering at the edge of the stage, sparkle in her hair, a balloon tied to her wrist. Dreamily she watched me pack up the last of my kit. I looked down at her and smiled; she smiled back. Then her escort emerged from the restroom, a lanky, blond jock with a pomaded crew cut. As they walked off across the empty gym floor, hand in hand, the girl cast a quick glance back at me. I felt a flush of attainment, sensing another of drumming’s possibilities.

Dad was waiting in the parking lot by the Buick, smoking his pipe in the warm night air. I loaded my drum cases into the car.

“How did it go, son?”

“Okay,” I said as we drove off, quietly elated but reluctant to share the experience, either the good or bad parts.

“Get paid?”

I pulled the five and two ones from the envelope and held them up but Dad didn’t seem to notice.

“You know, on my first job - well, I don’t remember how much I got paid, but it was probably a little more than that. I was good, you know, in demand. I couldn’t read, but I could improvise on my C melody sax, so the bandleaders would let me take the “hot” solo. Of course, later on, when I produced my shows with all the greats - Dorsey, Teagarden, Satchmo - naturally I had an edge, because, hell, I was one of the guys myself.”

We drove through Beverly Hills, Dad lost in the pleasures of his own recollection, the names and cadences taking him back to a luminous yesteryear, a landscape already as tiresomely familiar to me as my own breath.

We wound through Coldwater Canyon to our little street. Drawing up the long driveway, I saw that the two-car garage door was open. Mom’s station wagon was gone.

Dad braked and ran inside. Slowly I began unloading my drums, hauling them up the long stairs to the house. All the lights were on inside, but Mom was nowhere to be found. Upstairs, my little sister, Meg, was asleep in her bed.

The call came in the middle of the night. Mom had plowed the station wagon through a bakery window on La Brea Boulevard and was in jail at the Hollywood station. Dad left me in charge of my sister and went down to bail Mom out and get her admitted to a clinic somewhere to dry out.

I sat up the rest of the night, filled with the thrill of the drumming and the dance - replaying the good moments, the humiliating miscues, the lingering image of the rapt girl at the fringe of the stage afterwards - while my parents’ lives tumbled through space.

(Note: This was my mother’s last bender, after which she stopped drinking for the rest of her life and became a beloved figure to her family.)

(To read the previous “Drumming” post, go to DRUMMING 1)

The drum studio was also a shop selling equipment, with towering mountains of bass drums stacked against the wall, gleaming rolls of metal kick pedals laid out like shoes on display, piles of whispery coiled snares, and cubby holes crammed with paired sticks of varying size and weights. Facile drumming exploded from behind closed doors: rolls and bangs, cymbals and booms. At length, a small, thin, gum-chewing man with slicked hair emerged from one of the rooms.

“Phil.” He reached out a hand to my father.

“Dick, this is my son, Tony. Maybe you could try him out on a few things, see if you think he has any potential.”

While the two men talked, I gazed about Dick Monahan’s drum shop. The cork walls were covered with glossy inscribed photos of drummers: “To Dick. Keep swinging. Yours, Buddy.” Or Shelly or Max or Art or Cozy or Sid. In most pictures, grinning drummers flailed at glistening arrays of equipment, hands raised in paroxysms of rhythm. In a few, they sat imperiously behind their sets, arms crossed, sticks gripped in their fists. About half the drummers were Black, a fact I registered without having anything to relate it to. Large bass drums tended to have the drummers’ initials painted in ornate Gothic script beside a brand name: Gretsch, Slingerland, Ludwig, Rogers. A cymbal called Zildjian seemed to merit almost every drummer’s endorsement.

“Come on in here, Tony,” Dick Monahan said.

He led me into a tiny, soundproofed room with, to my surprise, no drums. He seated me on a stool in front of a mounted square of wood with a round black rubber pad at the center. Sticks were introduced into my hands. Dick Monahan arranged them, the right one held like a hammer, the left cradled like a telephone receiver. (Over the years, as my hands and arms became strong, I‘d develop thick veins along the top of my right forearm and beneath on my left.)

Dick Monahan guided me through a stroke or two, his hands cupped over mine. I doubt he’d ever given a talent test before, because surely no such thing existed. How can you tell in a few minutes if a ten-year-old has talent on an instrument he’s never touched? My father had concocted this freighted ceremony in part - I sensed even then - to assert his eroding sense of self-importance.

Dick Monahan was like a lot of drummers I’d meet over the years - wiry, intense, with a hummingbird metabolism, seeming to be on coke or amphetamines whether they were or not. I could smell the Fan Tan gum he chumped, and whatever greasy concoction he wore on his hair.

‘Okay, let’s play the left.” He held my wrist, correcting my grip. (I can still feel the light pressure of teachers’ hands as traces in my flesh on forearm, wrist, palm. ) “Good. Now the right. Now left, right, left, right.”

I simply did what he told me, though my strokes had no force or evenness. Left, right. Left, right.

“Good. That’s called a single stroke,” Dick Monahan said. “Okay, now left left, right right.”

Left left, right right.

“When you do it fast, that’s a press roll.”

Then: right left right right. Left right left left. I played the asymmetrical pattern a few times awkwardly.

“That’s a paradiddle,” Dick Monahan said.

I looked at him.

“A paradiddle is one of the twenty-six rudiments every drummer’s gotta learn.” He pointed at the wall behind me.

I turned and looked up at a chart that said “Table of Rudiments.” There was a ladder with numbered rungs. Each rung had a cluster of vertical stick lines with little “x’s” between them - drumming’s form of musical notation - and enticingly playful names: flam, ruff, ratamacue. Midway down the ladder I found the paradiddle: right left right right. Left right left left.

“Look,’ Dick Monahan said, taking my sticks. He played evenly on the pad left right left left. Right left right right. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, until his hands were a blinding Mixmaster blur - left right left left right left right right - weaving a pattern whose individual strokes were no longer discernible, but making an effect clearly different from the single stroke (left right left right) or the roll (left left right right.)

“Okay,” Dick Monahan said. “That’s it.” He patted me on the shoulder. “You’re okay, kid.”

He led me back outside and said to my father, “Yeah, Phil. I think he’s got some talent.”

Dad nodded soberly, rubbing his chin. “Well, Dick, maybe we could start him out slowly with a few lessons. see how it goes. Don’t want to get him in over his head.”

While Dick Monahan and my father made arrangements for a drum teacher to come to our house once a week, I listened to the drummers crashing and clashing in the other rooms. They all sounded like virtuosi to me. Never in a million years would I be able to play like them. Surely they, not I, we’re blessed with that mysterious elixir, “talent.”

Once, years later, having drummed by then with some of the same artists as these masters in the glossy photos on Dick Monahan’s wall, I sat in the central square of Marrakesh for several days running, listening to a troop of African drummers, the Gnaoua. A boy who must have been ten or eleven sat to the side, making tea and filling the kif pipes for the players, intently watching them, absorbing it all. Near the end of the second day, they let him play for a few minutes. The boy’s eyes shone with excitement as he rose to join the troop. It seemed so natural, the learning and apprenticeship, the ripening of the boy’s desire. How different from my introduction to the drums - the family’s caution and reserve, the talent test, the mechanical rudiments and prescriptions - artificially framing the experience from the outset, my desire first held up to skeptical scrutiny, then quickly routed into a world of measurement and potential, of tests and exams.

This was how white folks got rhythm - or lost it. All around the country there must have been thousands of kids like me, drawn to rhythm’s mysteries. I’d see them in years to come, marching on the floors of football stadiums at halftime or in parades: uniformed rows and columns of them, whamming bass drums, smashing great cymbals together, rolling and slamming street beats on tubby drums suspended from epaulette- drenched shoulders, high-stepping behind arm-waving bandmeisters and scantily clad baton girls, making the thunderous noise of a mighty nation on the march. Later I’d see them - join them - behind kits in combos at dances and weddings, and in dark dives where another drumming lived: the alter-world of jazz, the thrilling, libidinous flow of syncopation that Black funeral-band drummers in New Orleans had released into the American bloodstream. John Philip Souza, subverted by way of West Africa and Baby Dodds, unleashing drumming’s call to passion.

I drummed in the junior high school orchestra, the marching band. I drummed publicly on the floors of coliseums and school auditorium stages. With time I’d pile my traps into the backs of cars and drive to Elks and Rotary clubs, Shriners’ conventions, weddings, fraternity parties. I’d keep a whispery brush beat for cheek-to-cheek couples at dances, slam rock and roll backbeats. I’d drum for cool-voiced thrushes and rockabilly shouters, suave crooners and blues honkers in little demo studios off Vine Street with egg-crate walls and 4-track consoles. I’d enact lightning ceremonies of bebop virtuosity in smoky dives. I’d come to understand drumming’s secret, oracular contract with the body: that drums - whether used to goad troops into battle, pulsate a listening experience, incite dancers to abandon, or induce ritual trance - are Eross, encoded desire.

“Well, son,” my father said in the car on the way home that day. “Dick says maybe you’ve got some talent at this.”

I tried to imagine Dick Monahan having dared to say to my father, “Sorry, Phil, your kid doesn’t have any talent.” On the basis of what? He’d simply suffered my father’s posturing enough to log another student on the rolls.

it was okay, though. I’d gotten through it. With Dad, I was learning, nothing would ever be simple.

That Christmas morning, beside the tree, I found a silver snare drum on a tripod stand, a swivel stool, a high-hat cymbal rig with a foot pedal, and a pair of Slingerlands 5a’s.

In the snapshot in Dad’s photo album, I’m sitting in a bathrobe before the snare drum, an elated grin on my face. Why not? Here was a road out, a way to effect distance from that murky undifferentiation of self and family, breathe my own air at last. Maybe by picking up those sticks I’d revive the family’s happy days, rekindle Dad’s fading fortunes, restore Mom’s beauty and joy, which were fast being sapped by drinking and despair. At the least, I’d get to hit something - punishingly, violently, stick to hide, stick to hide - bang my way out of the family’s narrowing walls.

In my parents’ end would be my beginning.

Morning sunlight seeps through the tall beige curtains of a Spanish Colonial living room in a canyon north of Beverly Hills. A pair of ash drumsticks rests on a shiny black spinet piano. A boy in a bathrobe picks up the sticks, examines their chipped teardrop heads, rolls them in his palm. He listens to the resonant clicks they make against each other, reads the red letters stamped on the side of each stick: Slingerland 5A.

In the hushed living room, I feel a shiver of transgression, invading adult precincts. My parents are still asleep. I am nine years old, no older, because before I turn ten Dad will lose his job and the family will move back to New York for a year while he looks for work.

The night before, crouched unseen at the top of the stairs, I’d watched my parents and their guests gathered around the piano. Songs, laughter, the clinking of iced drinks as Johnny Mercer, Bing Crosby, and Jimmy Durante regaled the assembled with song. My father played a bit of piano himself - Gershwin, Kern, Rogers - but he deferred to his betters last night. Dad was at the top of his game, producing and directing The Jimmy Durante Show on CBS radio, shaping comics, stars, gag writers, and musicians into a live nationwide program each week.

He’d bought the rambling two-story house in Coldwater Canyon from the actress Dorothy Lamour. Ever keen to impress upon me his involvement with celebrity, Dad referred to her as “Dottie,” just as he always wanted me to call the band leader Paul Whiteman “Uncle Paul,” and Jimmy Durante “Uncle Jimmy.” Sometimes he took me along to script meetings at Uncle Jimmy’s house on Beverly Drive, where I swam in the pool, observing through a water-spotted diving mask the great comic and his cohorts conjuring gags in canvas pool chairs. Some weeks, Dad took me to the studio, set me in a swivel chair in the glass-enclosed control birth during live shows, and let me hold his stopwatch as the radio actors and entertainment icons of the day - Jack Benny, Rita Hayworth, Orson Welles - stood before fat mikes, fingers to ears, shaping air into syllables that gripped a nation. This grown-up world, confident and smart and celebrity-rich, seemed to move on its own wide current, leaving me alone in its wake. Jerked from coast to coast, school to school, in a blur of train trips and lonely bedrooms, I experienced myself as a tiny shadow, or cypher, in the elaborated drama of my parents’ lives.

Later, when it was all over - when Dad’s entry into the Brown Derby on Vine Street no longer caused a stir, and show-biz luminaries didn’t recognize him or pay much notice - Dad would seem permanently diminished by this loss of success and easy access to fame, coming truly alive only when recounting his intimacy with the entertainment greats. (Once, decades later, he asked me to meet him at the Brown Derby for lunch, and I arrived to find him staring quizzically at a facade of graffiti-splashed plywood: the famed stars’ watering hole had closed its doors.) But that morning in Coldwater Canyon, fondling the pair of smooth drumsticks in the morning light, I must have understood them as tokens of energy, action, participation - access to the glittering grown-up world I observed from childhood’s shadows.

Uncle Jimmy Durante had an entourage of pals from his vaudeville days of working the joints, Lower East Side Italians and Jews of rough origin. They clustered on Uncle Jimmy’s patio, fetched drinks, roared at the comic’s malapropisms, made book on the races at Hollywood Park, Santa Anita, Del Mar. They were always friendly to me - Eddie Jackson, a chubby, grinning ex-hoofer; Jack Clayton, a small-time singer who looked more like a slick croupier in cream golf slacks and expensive wing-tipped shoes; a short, bespectacled one-armed man named Louie whose function was unclear but seemed to have something to do with “accounting.” My father, by contrast, presented a certain element of class among these Damon Runyon types - a dapper New England college graduate married to a beautiful former stage actress.

Among Uncle Jimmy’s cronies was a natty, silver-haired man in a blue suit who always had a pair of drumsticks protruding from his jacket pocket. No drum kit, just sticks. To this day I don’t know what Jack Ross did other than rap piano-top accompaniment to Uncle Jimmy’s “Inka Dinka Doo.”

In that early sunlit living room, I turned Jack Ross’s sticks, left behind after the party the night before, in my hands. White wood yellowed by varnish; narrow and tapered, with elongated knobby heads. They’d left a tracery of marks, like tiny hooves, on the black-lacquered piano top that didn’t dust off when I ran my fingers over them.

Casting about for instruments of desire, we can only choose from things at hand. These sleek, paired incitements to gaiety and laughter were artifacts from a world my parents found far more interesting than me. Slingerland: Where was that? I wanted to go there.

The night before, my mother had spotted me peering down at the party from the top of the stairs in pajamas and had come up to pack me off to bed. Leaning over me in the darkened room, enveloping me in the powerful penumbra of odors that always meant they were either going out or entertaining - the smell almost as strong as the dank, nutty one my parents’ sheets exuded when I crawled in with them in the mornings - she delivered the comfort of a good night kiss, then receded to the door. In silhouette from the light of the hallway she paused and said, “Good night sweetie.” I see her there, petite and elegant, dressed smartly for the party. then closing the door, leaving me in darkness with the lingering smell of lipstick, perfume, cigarettes - and the liquor that I will later learn she desperately wanted to hide. Through a rich gauze of loneliness and abandonment, I listened to the clamor downstairs: Johnny Mercer crooning Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe at the spinet, Jack Ross tattooing the piano top.

How could any of us have known this was to be the last party?

In the living room the next morning, absorbed in Jack Ross’s drumsticks, I heard my father coming down the stairs. Guiltily I set the sticks down on the piano top and stepped away. The Slingerland 5a’s clicked and resonated - impossible for those sticks to be silent, they were so alive - then rolled off the piano and dropped into the carpet’s dense, deadening plush.

I never saw Jack Ross again, that facile wizard who coaxed rhythm from available surfaces with such minimal, portable means. Over the years, as I moved from tabletop to practice pad to snare to full ensemble, entering the greater world of promise embedded in those ash drumsticks, I’d glimpse shadow visions of Jack Ross, chomping gum, summoning a clickety web of beats on piano top or tabletop, riding rhythm’s magical surge.

That fall, the Jimmy Durante radio show was canceled. Live radio, glamorous theater of the mind, was sliding silently into the dark. Tiny white faces flickered in silvery ovals in living rooms now. Dad was out of a job, and Mom was packing the family bags for the move back to New York. Through the control booth window I watched my father, stopwatch in hand, cue his last show, as a chesty announcer quoted doctors on the medicinal benefits of cigarettes, made a final call for Philip Morris.

In Manhattan we settled into an apartment in the East Fifties. After I suffered a schoolyard beating at public school, Mom enrolled me in a private academy with a headmaster and uniforms, where we played soccer instead of stickball and called the teachers “sir”. Through the closed doors of the apartment I heard my parents’ muted quarrels. I took buses around the city alone, tasting my first independence.

A year and some months later, the family had resettled in a reduced, less sunny California. Uncle Jimmy, Uncle Paul, and Uncle Bing were gone. The piano lay silent. Mom wandered about the Coldwater Canyon house in a bathrobe nipping gin, under the lash of some anguish I could feel but not see. Dad worked the phone, trying to land something in television, and took long trips back to New York.

The good times were over, for good.

*

As Christmas approached that year, my parents asked me what I wanted for a present.

“Drums,” I said.

Blinks, blank stares, polite coughs.

My announcement fell into a void for a while. Then at dinner one night my father said, “That’s fine, son. but before we invest in drums for you we need to find out if you have a talent for it.”

“Talent” was a big word around our house. Dad adulated talent, identified with it. After all, hadn’t he worked with the great talents of his day? Talent was a mysterious, god-given absolute that few people possess, like a high IQ. Some people were musical, others not. Some were funny, most not. Talent showed up early. If you had it, you were granted dispensation to pursue it; but if you didn’t, there was no way you were going to get it, so you shouldn’t waste your time or anyone else’s. My mother felt similarly, from a more severe, Calvinist angle: Do not be self-indulgent, vain, put yourself above others. Do not imagine you are great or smart or handsome, for probably you are not, and if you are, you shouldn’t gloat about it. Unless you’re a Picasso - and he’s a horrible man, from all reports - you have no business presuming to make art. Eschew personal glory. Make yourself useful. Help the starving, the poor, the less fortunate.

So my simple expression of desire was immediately pitted against my father’s self- perception as an arbiter of great talent and my mother’s stern disapproval of art’s self-indulgence.

This drumming business arose at a time of great shifts within the family, things I couldn’t possibly understand but could only experience, like changing weather, alterations in pressure and light, the arrival of clouds or sudden gusts of wind. That summer, my mother’s drinking had reached frightening proportions. My sister and I first noticed this when my father returned to New York to work on a television show. Possibly Mom and Dad had “separated,” though the word was never used, then or later. Suddenly Mom was different somehow, slurring and staggering around the house, lipstick cockeyed, smelling funny, dropping things. We’d run to the kitchen clamoring for dinner to find Mom lurching about in oven mitts, colliding with the appliances, sloshing scalding water over the countertop, burning the food. We’d withdraw to our places at the table in the breakfast nook to await the arrival of small hamburger patties the shape of tennis balls rolling about in the middle of the plate, seared charcoal black on the outside, cold and red inside. We’d nudge each other under the table, roll our eyes, scheme on how to slip the food to the dog, then raid the kitchen later for Graham crackers, Oreos.

As Mom’s binge flared out of control, neighbors discreetly looked in or took us to their houses to feed us. I was given whispered instructions and phone numbers just in case. Friends quietly removed the car keys from the house to prevent Mom from driving. My sister was farmed out to family friends. A doctor came to visit.

The drama spread like a stain through our days, Mom alone and utterly helpless, Dad back in New York trying to hack it in television. I’d come home from school to a silent house, the door to Mom’s room closed. Then she’d suddenly appear, looped out of her mind, purse on her arm, lipstick plastered in the vicinity of her mouth, having decided to drive down Coldwater Canyon into Beverly Hills and go shopping, insisting I accompany her. Even now, thinking about those car trips raises the hairs on the back of my neck.

That fall, things came to a head. Mom, drunkenly trying to steer the station wagon down the steep driveway, veered into the hedge of oleander bushes bordering the asphalt, nearly pitching the car into the neighbors’ driveway fifteen feet below ours. Hearing the crunch, I ran outside to see the car’s front end hanging precariously in space, the rear end up in the air, wheels spinning. Mom sat frozen at the wheel, a rivulet of blood running down her forehead, staring intensely at the dashboard, trying to light a Chesterfield. Neighbors came running and removed her just before the car toppled into the driveway below.

This incident brought my father back from New York in a hurry. Mom disappeared into a sanitarium for a while, and Dad began looking for work in Hollywood.

It was in the face of these developments, and with Christmas approaching, that I’d flung out my simple wish to take up drumming.

After some more days of demurring, Dad called a drummer he’d known at CBS during radio days and set up an appointment for me to take a “talent test” at a drum shop in Hollywood. I suppose he thought this might place a small obstacle in my way, a hedge against a kid’s passing fancy. With the family fortunes precarious and no new work in the offering, the idea of buying percussion paraphernalia, and lessons to go with it, must have unsettled Dad, ever prudent about money. Then there was the racket the drums would unleash in the house while Mom was “recovering”. Added to this was the whole heavy business of talent: who has it, who doesn’t.

On the Saturday before Christmas, Dad drove me to Hollywood in the big blue Buick. We parked on Vine Street and walked down an alley. The sound of clattering percussion from behind a high metal door flooded me with that gut-clenching admixture of excitement and panic that would stay with me for as long as I drummed.

The town of Santa Clara del Cobre lies in the Mexican state of Michoacán. Its real name is Salvador Escalante but nobody calls it that. Set in the mountains near a small, pretty lake called Zirahuen, it can be reached by way of a winding road leading up from the picturesque town of Pátzcuaro. Santa Clara is home to around 40,000 people, most of whom work in the town’s signature industry, copper (in Spanish, cobre), and as you traverse the main street you hear the steady sound of hammers ringing out.

Most citizens of Santa Clara del Cobre are ethnically Purépecha, people of the region who have been working with copper since before the Spaniards arrived. The copper once came from nearby, but today the thousands of tons arriving each week come from recycled copper wire and cable from electric and telephone companies in Mexico and abroad.

A decade ago, in the adjacent state of Guanajuato, S and I had just completed work on the second floor of a small casita - an open, loft-like room with a breathtaking view of our town - when she mentioned that she’d always wanted a copper bathtub and that the new space would be an ideal spot for one. What’s more, she said, it would complement an antique iron bed, imported many years earlier from a Paris flea market, that a departed friend had bequeathed us.

She wanted to go to Santa Clara del Cobre and buy a copper tub. That year, narco wars were raging across the state of Michoacán with such intensity that tourists and travelers were staying away. Roadblocks, kidnappings, executions, bodies hung from overpasses. State Department advisories warned travelers to avoid going there. Hotels, restaurants and highways were deserted. Still, S wanted to go.

She arrived by bus in Pátzcuaro to find it a ghost town. She checked into a hotel we knew. There was only one other guest, a journalist holed up there writing about the conflict. Fixtures were broken; the owners were raising chickens in the courtyard, which drew rats.

The next day, S took a taxi up the mountain to Santa Clara del Cobre. It was all but deserted, the workshops empty of customers. She had the run of the place, and eventually she settled upon a copper bathtub. A trucking company would bring it to our town in a matter of days.

She got safely back to Pátzcuaro and, to my relief, home.

A few days later, we got a call from the trucking company. They had arrived with the bathtub and were parked some distance away, as no car or truck can access the steep, narrow, winding alley (known as a callejon) leading to our casita. I explained to them how to get here, and after a while they called again. They were at the foot of the callejon with the tub. We, along with a man who was there to help us that day, went down to meet them.

It was a huge copper tub, big enough to bathe a family of four, I thought. It wouldn’t begin to fit through the gate to the house, let alone the narrow stairs leading up to the casita. The two drivers, drenched in sweat and breathing heavily, had taken a look at the thirty alley steps leading up to the entrance and now refused to go further.

This left us with the tub at the foot of the callejon. Desperate, we began enlisting help: a passing neighbor, a young student, a hardy campesino. (It is times like these when Mexico shows its generosity of heart.) We must have corralled a half dozen strangers to help us muscle the tub up the alley steps. Then with the aid of ropes and ladders, we hoisted it up and over the high garden wall. From there, we floated it on up to the entry. It wouldn’t remotely fit through the front door, let alone up the winding caracol stairs to the second floor. Earlier we had installed a pair of double doors in the exterior facade to accommodate the French flea market bed, and now we managed to levitate the tub to the second floor and lift it through.

It had taken hours, and the collective effort of some seven or eight people. But now it was in its place, and the next day plumbers came and installed drains and fixtures. The tub from Santa Clara del Cobre was ready.

Or so we thought. When we tried the tub, it flooded the downstairs kitchen and bathroom. The plumbers returned and made some corrections. We soon discovered that a tank of hot water just filled it halfway. When cracks began to appear in the blue cement floor from the weight of the tub, we simply patched them and carried on.

Over time, the tub has turned out to be as much a conversation piece as a bathing site. Recently I ran into a woman, a magazine editor, who had seen the casita once when we were renting it out for a while.

“The place with that big copper tub, right?”

“That’s the one,” I said.

(The most viewed post of 2025…)

Once at a dinner in San Miguel de Allende I was introduced to a tall, silver-haired woman in black. She was chain-smoking cheap, unfiltered Mexican Faros, huge rings on her fingers. She introduced herself as Bridget, her sepulchral voice emerging from a hollowed face with a thousand lines.

Bridget offered me a ride home, a dubious invitation as I could see she was very drunk. Our host discreetly suggested I take the wheel. We crammed into her decrepit VW bug, which didn't start until the others gave it a shove. I popped it into gear and we lurched off down the near-vertical street on brakes that barely gripped the cobblestones, Bridget cackling gaily.

I would get to know Bridget Tichenor in those years, and become fond of her, and learn some of her history. Born in Paris, the daughter of an Italian noblewoman and an English military man, she worked as a model in her teens for Coco Chanel and posed for photographer Man Ray. Arriving in New York during the war with Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp, she studied painting at the Art Students League with the legendary Paul Cadmus. After a stint as a high fashion model and Vogue editor, she took off for Mexico City in the 1950’s to devote herself to painting.

Surrealism didn't really catch hold in the postwar US, the art world dominated by abstract expressionism. But it was intrinsic to Mexico and flourished there. Many of the best artists were women: Frida Kahlo, English Artist Leonora Carrington, Spanish artist Remedios Varo, the Hungarian Kati Horna, and Bridget Bate Tichenor. All produced mysterious, startlingly original works that have surged in value on the world’s art markets in recent decades.

In the 1960’s, Bridget ran off to the then-remote state of Michoacán and bought a ranch, painting and raising animals there until anarchist squatters occupied her property and drove her off. Suffering from quadruple emphysema, she fled to San Miguel at the invitation of an old friend.

Elegant, irreverent, original, Bridget struck me as a last connection to a disappearing Mexican bohemia. That night, and other nights thereafter, we’d pull up in front of my house, Bridget’s long, blue-veined, ring-bedecked hands quavering like butterflies over the steering wheel, Faro ashes dripping on her black clothes. “Come and visit me soon, darling.” We’d trade besos and she’d careen off down the cobbles in her dented VW.

When news came that Bridget had smoked her last Faro, her pin-sized alveoli refusing to admit another gulp of smoke, friends gathered at a small chapel on calle Insurgentes to remember her, and a fabled, extravagant, eccentric Mexico that had passed with her.

For more on her work and extraordinary life, go to: https://surrealism.website/tichenor.html

(from November 2024…)

Those people out there,” Morrison said, gesturing beyond the walls at the street below, “don’t know they’re going to die.”

We were sitting in The Doors’ office at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and LaCienega. Morrison had a Nagra tape recorder in his lap that he was itching to use. The band had finished what would stand as their penultimate album together, Morrison Hotel, at the Elektra Records studios across the street. During a recent Florida concert, Jim had allegedly exposed himself to the audience and in the wake of his desperate theatrics, concert promoters had blacklisted the band. Grounded while awaiting his court trial in Miami, he had time on his hands. He suggested we alleviate the desultory afternoon by taking the Nagra out on the street and querying passersby as to their awareness of their own mortality.

A few doors down La Cienega, in a two-story stucco edifice called the Clear Thoughts Building, Morrison was overseeing the cutting of Feast of Friends, a film he was making with Frank Lisciandro, a fellow UCLA film school grad and the mutual friend who had introduced us. The Kem moviola spooled interminable takes of Jim in leather pants walking down a deserted highway outside of Palm Springs in wavery heat: The Lizard King in situ.

Morrison and I had become casual friends that year. Our educations and experiences were not dissimilar, and we shared certain literary and cultural interests - Blake and Rimbaud, European art films, jazz and essential blues. I found him good company when sober, more interesting artistically and intellectually than his detractors claimed - he read continually and deeply - if less than his rock adulators imagined. I’d try to catch up to him during the days, when things were calmer, saner, before afternoons inevitably slid into blowsy, incoherent nights at a bar a half a block away called The RainCheck, Morrison’s de facto clubhouse and watering hole. There the conversions grew fatuous, the circle of acolytes around the leatherette booths wider and drearier, and eventually I’d become bored and slip away. Still, I was in Jim’s debt that summer for he’d done me a true favor.

Desperate for money, I shamelessly (see Writing sex) began hiring myself out to pursue writing or music in any form. Coincident with this flurry of enterprise, a demo tape of songs I’d written had found its way to Morrison through our friend Frank, and Jim had arranged a songwriting grant for me through a foundation his manager had endowed.  I drove to his lawyer’s office in Beverly Hills and was handed a check for three thousand dollars, a lifesaving amount at the time.

It was on one of those smoggy summer afternoons that I ended up at The Doors’ office with Morrison. After we’d exhausted the idea of asking a few pedestrians on Santa Monica Boulevard if they knew they were going to die, we adjourned to the RainCheck, where before long we were joined by some of the regulars.

In retrospect, that afternoon takes on the aspect of a wake. Tom Baker, a handsome actor who’d achieved marginal notice in Andy Warhol’s film I, a Man, playing an inarticulate sex object - on the basis of which he’d come to Hollywood hoping for a career  in film - was there that night. He was soon to die of a heroin overdose. Also there that night was Tim McIntyre, a vastly talented actor who had fallen so deeply under Jim’s sway and example that, after Morrison’s death, he set out to imitate his idol and succeeded - dying of cocaine and alcohol excess. Journalist Jerry Hopkins would make better coin of his experience with Morrison, co-writing a bestselling book about The Doors, No One Here Gets Out Alive, before opting for the sensual life in Bangkok. Nico, the blonde German Warhol beauty and occasional singer, sat with us that night, silent and adoring, tangled in a futile obsession with Morrison that surely trailed her to her death in a motorcycle accident on Ibiza. 

After a while I left Jim and the crew. It was the last time I’d see Morrison. In November of that year he’d be convicted in Florida of “vulgar and indecent exposure.” There’d be a last Doors album, a brief Paris interlude, death in a bathtub, and poète-maudit immortality.

Of course I’ve wondered what Jim might have made of the years that followed had he not destroyed himself at 27. But this remains among other mysteries that have trailed me across my life.

In 1963, the artist Ed Ruscha made a book called Twentysix Gasoline Stations. It consisted of photos of 26 gas stations on the highway between California and Oklahoma, nothing more. It has become something of a Pop Art classic. I’ve sometimes thought of taking a photo of every bench in my town and making a similar book, though I suspect it’s one of those ideas that’s better left in the thinking stage.  

A poet I know has a particular bench he favors because it can’t be easily noticed by passersby, allowing him to see without being seen, affording him privacy to think and to write in his notebook.

At night, pop-up street stalls, puestos, turn the benches into restaurant seating.

Manufacturing these benches must have been a great gig for the foundry that does the work. Benches are still being added, replaced, or repaired.

The benches can be busy even in the dead of night. Once I had to leave my house at three in the morning to catch an early flight. I was surprised to find benches occupied by nighthawks smoking and chatting, reveling university students, and some passed-out drunks.

Meanwhile, I’m off to meet a friend at a bench nearby…

(A popular post from November 2024…)

The Mexican town where I live is studded, laced, festooned, garlanded with benches. They run from one end of town to the other, hundreds of them. The word is banco in Spanish, (alternatively: banca) and as you wend your way through streets, squares, parks and plazas, the benches invite you to break your journey, take a load off, sit and gaze or be gazed at, commune or just sit silently. Bancos facilitate a culture of pauses, pleasures, and participation. 

With a few exceptions (see below), the benches are all the same. Provided by the municipal government, they are made of iron and bear the same identifying plaque: a crown, what looks to be a cleric bearing a cross, and some other heraldry. 

Recent events obliged me to spend an extended stretch in California, an essentially benchless culture. Pedestrian life is incidental, and streets are mainly for driving to stores for supplies then returning to your dwelling. Shopping plazas and malls are all about commerce, and people sitting on benches aren’t spending money. Occasionally you’ll come upon a bench highlighting an ocean view, an overlook, a designated “vista point.” 

Where I live, many benches are situated, as you might expect, around the busy, picturesque central plazas and parks. But surprisingly, some are set in unlikely, nondescript spots. Wherever they’re located, people use them day and night. Both decorative and functional, the bancos animate civic life, embed you in the flow.

Some benches sit alone.

Others next to each other.

Some are close by each other but face away, allowing for privacy or solitude.

Others face each other so as to invite interaction.

Some benches occupy oddly remote spots. This one is next to a garbage dropoff and a parking lot.

It includes an anomalous single seat!

There is one park in the city where the benches depart from the norm. They look like this:

Of course lovers’ trysts are a staple of the bancos.

Some benches defy gravity.

(More to offer on this subject, but I’ll stop here because of an email length warning. To be continued...)

This light, diffusing through what William Faulkner once called the “vague high soft almost nebulous California haze,” aroused in him, and most writers who came here, a sense of menace. The painters, though - Hockney, Diebenkorn, Ruscha - reveled in it.

This morning I’m making a run to the storage unit in Glendale, where our remaining household goods lurk - imagined essentials from a climactic garage sale when we left L.A. for Mexico. I haven’t a clue what’s in there. Storage, in a city of low-slung dwellings with scant basements or attics, has become a growth industry, the rented unit an extension of the home. Even owners of sprawling, two-story spreads with large garages maintain storage containers for the spillover. Some use them as daily offices; others, I suspect, sleep in their concrete cubicles. These monuments to the conditional, the temporary, the transient, typify a town everyone is prepared to leave at any minute.

When I was growing up, my parents and their cronies used to parade the stock joke that they only bought Coke by the bottle, never a six-pack, because any minute they might be returning to New York, London, Rome, or Berlin. In fact, nearly all the ones I can think of stayed on and died here.

I roll the window down. East of the 405 interchange, the air abruptly loses its saltiness, warming by five or six degrees. Some days a gentle wind lofts the sea air farther inland; I’ve smelled it as far east as Chinatown, seen seagulls in Pasadena. People pay extra for view homes perched on the granite slopes of the Hollywood foothills, though many days the picture windows offer little more than a pall of particulate waste.

Accelerating, I feel the buffeting breeze rush through the open window. I think of Joan Didion’s Maria Wyeth in Play it as it Lays, daily driving these interchanges “as a riverman runs a river.” L.A. as sensory text, a kind of Braille for the sighted: a city in code, bearing letters in place of a name. But then freeways subvert the very idea of a city, which says: Slow down, enter the density, relate. Speed provides a substitute for experience - a quick release from history, especially one’s own. The on-ramp ascent, with its sudden velocity burst, is irresistible. The moment I got behind the wheel of a car at sixteen, I was lost to my parents forever. Every Southern California kid has the contours of this hurtling topography inscribed in his blood. Some lost it all driving (“Tell Laura I Love Her,” “Dead Man’s Curve”), the romance of road death conferring twisted, bloody immortality (James Dean, Carol Lombard). Surf rockers Jan and Dean were in my high school; Jan never did recover from his crackup.

Robertson, La Cienega, Fairfax. The off ramps fly by, each sign laminated with memory. We moved from house to house so many times - and I moved so often later on my own - I can probably claim a dozen neighborhoods as mine. Just before the LaBrea turnoff, I catch a glimpse of the hillside where one of our first L.A. houses stood - a two-story “Spanish” right above the Sunset Strip, a block west of the Chateau Marmont Hotel. My parents forbid me at six years old to walk the three blocks along Sunset to Schwab’s drugstore to buy comics, their fears of molestation or abduction unvoiced but keenly felt.

Past the Hoover exit, I bank left across the downtown interchange, the office towers ebony monoliths backlit by morning sun. In my years away, entire neighborhoods have been reconfigured by earthquake, riot, fire, erosion, ethnic shift, decay. (L.A.’s routine destruction in disaster movies is always considered a victory for civilization.) The smog has lessened over the years, though today’s toxins already gather at the base of the San Gabriels. When in 1934 Faulkner wrote his short story “Golden Land”, the term “smog” didn’t exist, though it was probably a chemical component of his California haze. Still, there was that baleful, noxious undertone in his description: too damn much sun. Perhaps Faulkner was describing a hangover, the kind he knew too well.

Downtown recedes, traffic clears ahead. Crossing three lanes at 70 miles an hour, I veer onto the Golden State Freeway. “The sun, strained by the vague high soft almost nebulous California haze, fell…with a kind of treacherous unbrightness…” Ominous, Faulkner’s description, partaking of a stylization he and Raymond Chandler and Nathaniel West didn’t quite invent but brought to a high gloss: California as suspect, ersatz Eden, needful of unmasking. It was LA’s good fortune to have had these alcoholic geniuses to deconstruct its Arcadian face, erect a counter-vision to the empty claims of developers, boosters, and hawkers: a literature of scorn. But nobody can scorn L.A. better than those of us who grew up here.

A block from the storage facility, I idle at a stoplight in the heat, inhaling the aroma of eucalyptus, exhaust, mowed wet grass. Across the railroad yard, in a vacant parking lot, a school marching band is rehearsing: “California here I come/Right back where I started from.” I watch a tumbleweed blow across the road until the light turns green. At the security gate, I enter a code and drive slowly down identical numbered corridors. I slip a key into a rusted lock, lift a corrugated metal door, and gaze helplessly at a tangle of driftwood washed up from a former life.

***

Once in an airport waiting room in the Vietnamese town of Hue, I came upon a discarded, week-old print copy of The New York Times. In it, I read a review of the new edition of the Merck Manual of Medical Information. It described a curious disorder called “dissociative fugue,” in which “one or more episodes of sudden, unexpected and purposeful travel from home (fugue) occur, during which a person cannot remember some or all of his past life.” I’d been struck enough by the article to cut it out and stick it in my notebook

Over the last few years, a spate of wanderings had picked up a momentum I couldn’t seem to arrest. I only felt comfortable while in motion. Sitting at a window seat as a plane lifted off a tarmac in Bangkok, Vienna, or Newark had a soothing effect that no amount of channel surfing or pumping iron could rival. Gazing across a Macedonian lake to Armenia on the far shore; staring into the thatched recesses of a Buddhist monastery ceiling in the Burmese hills; standing at Denmark’s northernmost tip watching the currents of two seas collide; driving too late and too fast at midnight down Big Sur’s Highway 1 - all these brought strange solace. If each journey had its raison d’etre - writing work, as often or not, or family matters - few had been truly unavoidable had I not wanted to go. Displacement as steady state; escape as arrival; flight as sanctuary.

Half seriously, half in jest, I considered the possibility that I’d fallen prey to some form of this disorder I’d read about in the airport in Hue. Certainly the wanderings that had beset me were often “sudden, unexpected and purposeful,” in Merck’s terms. Unlike the condition described, I seem to have no difficulty remembering some or all of my past life; in fact, I seem to remember more than I cared to. But then how can we know what it is we don’t recall? I didn’t mind thinking of my recent travels as a “fugue,” with its evocation of Bach’s divine inventions - fugue meaning, of course, “flight.” But the word also carried another definition: “a disturbed state of consciousness.”

The condition has a fairly high incidence, apparently: two people in a thousand in the United States are affected by dissociative fugue, according to Merck. “A person in a fugue state usually disappears from his usual haunts…” “Often the person has no symptoms or is only mildly confused during the fugue…” “During the fugue, the person may appear normal and attract no attention…” Shades of Hitchcock and Cary Grant, or a Patricia Highsmith novel: a madman on a train, calmly reading a newspaper. It sounded a little romantic, even.

Though often mistaken for malingering, Merck said, because it may enable someone to avoid an unwanted circumstance, dissociative fugue is not faked. Rather, “many fugues seem to represent a disguise wish fulfillment..”

“Most fugues,” said the Merck Manual, “disappear on their own.”

***

“A journey, after all, neither begins in the instant we set out, nor ends when we have reached our door step once again. It starts much earlier and is really never over, because the film of memory continues running on inside of us long after we have come to a physical standstill. Indeed, there exists something like a contagion of travel, and the disease is essentially incurable.” — Ryszard Kapuściński

***

“Man needs escape as he needs food and deep sleep.” - W. H. Auden

***

Once in Morocco, a friend and I hitchhiked out of Marrakesh, headed for Fez. The driver left us off in a flat, treeless stretch of scrub, as he was headed into the mountains to go back to his village. We waited for hours for another ride but there was little traffic on the road. It seemed it was some sort of holy day. The sun beat down mercilessly, and we grew ever more hungry and thirsty.

At one point, we noticed a tiny figure on the horizon, riding a horse or a camel. We couldn’t tell at first if he was headed toward or away from us. Finally it seemed he was coming our way. As he gradually drew closer, we saw that it was a man on a camel, a bearded man with a weathered face, wearing a djellaba. He greeted us - “as-salamu alaykum” - and touched his chest. Then he reached into a leather bag and extracted four dark, plump dates. He reached down and gave us each two. He never got off his camel. From a gourd he offered us water. Then he bid us goodbye.

Chewing hungrily on the dates, we watched him continue his slow journey across the scrub until he disappeared into the landscape.

Restored, we stood up and stuck our thumbs out at an approaching car. The driver pulled over and beckoned us in. He was going all the way to Fez.

***

“I don’t believe it’s true what they say, that as you travel you become a different person. What happens is that you grow lighter, you shed your obligations in your past just as you reduce everything you possess to the few items you need for your luggage.” - Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sepharad

***

The fact was that I no longer knew why I was out there traveling. I was out there because I was out there. In the grips of a pleasurable indefinition, floating in a brine of uncertainty, all notions of family, nation and work had become fluid, conditional. That seemed to me an entirely appropriate state, matching reality. I felt like I could carry on like this endlessly, moving from place to place. If there was some pathology at play or at work, it struck me more as a solution than a problem. “Episodes of sudden, unexpected and purposeful travel from home.” If “dissociative fugue” was flight away from, this felt like flight towards some ever receding horizon. My wanderlust had picked up a momentum I couldn’t seem to arrest, and I didn’t care…

***

“Over there everything is going to be different; life is never going to be quite the same again after your passport has been stamped and you find yourself speechless among the money changers. It is like starting over again.” - Graham Greene, Another Mexico

“What was mere romance to us has now become real memory.” - V. S. Pritchett