One...two...three...four...

I was un-cool. I knew it, I cared, but there was nothing that I could do about it. I had red hair, freckles and was just over-weight enough to attract the unwanted attentions of schoolyard bullies. I read comics like the X-Men (LONG before the movies made them acceptable) and my grades were pretty good. That was another bullet in the chamber for my enemies for sure.

I played sports too though. I was good at soccer and baseball. Basketball not so much, but I did make the Junior Varsity football team. So at least some of the jocks were my friends and kept anything really bad from happening to me. Then I got hurt at football practice. Nothing serious but enough for me to establish that pain was not something I wanted to grow too accustomed to experiencing.

My parents were both very into the arts. My mother was Irving Berlin’s great, great niece so music was always around. My father, a former child opera singer, was an Industrial Designer with a penchant for airplanes, the military and anything by Gilbert and Sullivan. He used to grab his old Kay acoustic and sing folk songs to my sister and I when we were kids. “The Great Wreck of the Titanic”, “Rahdy-Do-Dah!” and “Greensleeves” were household staples.

When I turned ten my folks wanted me to play an instrument for at least a year. That way I would be exposed to music and spend enough time with it to know if I really wanted to pursue it on my own or not without feeling as though it were a punishment. My icky older sister Jodi was playing guitar at the time so there was no way I was going to do the same thing as her! But what was I going to play? I would have to spend some time on this one.

One day my parents dragged me to a party some friends of theirs were having. Other than me, there were no other kids there. It smelled like sour tobacco, everything was polyester and shaped like something straight out of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. I was b. o. r. e. d. I sat on the couch kicking my black and white checkered Vans up and down trying to figure out how to tear a new hole in my Tough Skins. Bored I tell you!

Fortunately my dad’s friend Mel had taken a liking to me and felt bad that there was nothing for a ten year old to do. “Want to see something neat?” he asked and smiled.
“Sure. Ok.” So I stood up and followed Mel and my dad up a thin wire staircase winding around and around in circles up to the attic. Not too much neat or cool up here as far as I could tell. Just a bunch of old furniture, some paintings and generations of dust mites flying around looking for somewhere else to be too was all I could see.

“May I?” Mel asked and my dad nodded. He reached over to a blanket that I hadn’t noticed yet. It was not covered in dust like the rest of the attic so when he pulled it off it was clean and beautiful. Just like the old silver and white Slingerland drum set it had been protecting. It felt like it brought all of the air back into the room. I’d seen drums before, but never this close up. I was enraptured.

“Wow.” Was all I could say. It came out long and slow like there was no breath left in the world. It took me a few minutes to realize that my dad and Mel had left me alone up there. I was in my own world. I was in love.

I went downstairs and to the car in a daze. Everything had somehow shifted. Colors even looked different on the trees as they blurred past the window. The radio played sounds like I’d never heard before. My folks were talking and I asked them to be quiet and please turn back to that weird music with no singing again! My dad smiled and turned the dial back to KKGO. At the time I didn’t really know it, but I was listening to the drums for the first time.

The way they danced around the time and still created forward momentum. I had never felt anything like it before. Everything had a rhythm. My heartbeat, the way my parents talked and even the tires rolling over cracks in the road. I couldn’t get away from it. I heard drums everywhere. And they eventually lulled me to sleep in the backseat of that old Honda Civic wagon.

I don’t remember much else about that night except bits and pieces. It was almost like floating in and out of a dream. Forty five mile an hour ghosts of streetlights floating above the windows as we passed. Miles Davis turned into Chick Corea turned into Bill Evans. Tony Williams turned into Steve Gadd turned into Paul Motian. I didn’t know the names yet, but I knew the sound. The rhythms.

As my mom woke me in our driveway with a smile she said, “I think I know what instrument you want to play.” Leading me towards my bedroom door and the comfort of my bed, it became even more like home when she suggested “You should play the drums.” It wasn’t more than a few days later when we walked into Action Drum and Guitar and signed me up for weekly half hour lessons.

Now my first drum teacher…he was cool. He was the absolute pinnacle of cool. The drum room in the back of Action had a double window that looked out on to the store. Looking back on it now it was probably put there so the manager could keep an eye on the store when he was giving lessons. But for me, it was there to further my education.

John was a grown up. He was about six feet tall, skinny as a rail and had long flowing brown hair down to the middle of his back. He had a warm and welcoming smile than really made those on its receiving end feel like they were the most important person in the world. He was loose, he was free, he was handsome and he was probably all of eighteen years old. As far as I was concerned he was the coolest person I had ever met.

Every Thursday afternoon at six I would ride my skateboard down the hill past the local Alpha Beta video store and Pioneer Chicken with practice pad, sticks and lesson books in hand. I’d open the door to the music store and make my way through all of the electric guitars and new fangled Casio electronic keyboards. I’d wave to the owner behind the counter who was always surrounded by a cloud of strange and exotic smells and seemed to be a bit too itchy to make anyone feel comfortable around him. Then I would push through the Tommy Iomi and Asia posters to enter the drum section of the store.

The girl whose lessons were before mine would usually be getting ready to wrap things up or if they were already finished, John would be hanging out over the counter changing the radio station to find something with a good groove to it to listen to. “Hey Al!” John would smile when he saw me. (By the way, I am Alex. Not Al. Ever. I hate Al. Always have. If you try to call me Al, there will be extraordinary amounts of pain involved. Mostly headed your way. But John could call me Al and it never bothered me. THAT’S how cool he was.) “You ready to groove my friend?”

We would head back into the lesson room filled with posters of Stewart Copeland, Buddy Rich, Louie Bellson, Tommy Lee and the ever present Neil Peart. He would sit on his stool to my right just behind the floor tom and would ask the first question of the week, “So… did ya practice?”

“Sure did! At least a couple of hours every day.” I would smile back as I adjusted the drum throne to fit my stubby ten year old legs.

“Great!” Then John would lean forward onto his pale skinny legs and look straight at me. “But did you practice your lessons?” Silence. He had me. And he knew it. It was the same every week. He would teach me something new each time and I would be able to play it by the end of the lesson. Then I would go home and play along with Genesis or Rush or Styx for hour after hour and never work on it again.
“Okay Al. Play #27 for me. One…two…three…four…”

I would breathe out dejectedly and get ready to start flailing at last week’s lesson. Just as I was getting ready to play there would come a knock on the door to save me. “Yeah man. What’s up?” John would say.

“Visitor bro.”, a disembodied voice would say. “Should I tell her you’re busy this time?”

Then I would feel John’s hand squeeze me firmly by the shoulder, “Naw man. I’ll be right out.” He would stand up and sneak behind me too the door, “Hey Al, why don’t you warm up for a few minutes. I’ll be right back!” John would give me a wink, walk out of the lesson room and call through the closing door, “One…two…three…four…”
The door would close and instantly I would jump up trying to get a look through the window between all of the drums stacked up for sale in the room. I would look to the right and see if I could catch a glimpse past the Roto-toms. Nothing. Then I would look to the left and there she was, John’s hot squeeze of this week. I could hear muffled voices say things like “Hey girl! What’s up?” or, “How’s it going beautiful?” He always seemed so calm and self-assured. I could never be that cool around girls. They would always be beautiful, thin and smiling as if the sun rose and set around him.

Then it would be quiet and I would see him start to turn around. Fumbling for the sticks I would start playing my lessons so as not to interrupt his flirting. I would see his hand go up and count down the numbers “One…two…three…four…” He wouldn’t even look. A few minutes later I would glance up and the girl would be hugging him. When she leaned up for a kiss he would smoothly turn his head and gently press one into her cheek. It would always land on the cheek. Every time.
She would end up smiling a little sadly and wave as he headed back toward me in the lesson room. John would wink as he caught my eye and start walking faster as if to make up for the time he had taken away from this week’s lesson. I would still be repeating the four bar phrase as he walked in behind me and sat down. By then I would have usually remembered how the lesson was supposed to sound and had it sounding just close enough to think he would be fooled into believing I had actually spent some time on it.

“Good man. You did practice.” He would pat me on the back and I would stop playing. Then the real lesson would start. You see, these weren’t only drum lessons. They were life lessons. John taught me everything. How to meet girls…How to get dates with girls…How to get girls to kiss you (and later on he showed me how to get them to do even more than that!). For every twenty minutes about girls, there was maybe five or ten minutes of drums thrown in there. It was the best night of the week for six years. John was just a teenager at the time, but to me he was the only grown up in the world who thought I had the potential to be cool. And that meant more to me than gold.

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