30-Pockets

Despite all the mishegoss of brain chemistry and sexual misalignment, Tom and I lived in each other’s pockets, as his father repeatedly pointed out. So it should be no surprise that my flute non-proficiency non-withstanding, we both wanted to figure out a way to make music together. We did, but not soon enough for Mr. S. to witness before he passed on.

Scene: I was in the back of a piano bar somewhere not all that far from Western States University College of Law, which is only important because I learned so much from the Dean during my short employment there as an evening receptionist. It was indeterminately late, and the former vocalist with the dynamite voice who now waited tables because her singing career had died in the car crash that messed up her face, was done dealing with the handsy regulars and had gone home for the night.

Tom still had another set and a half to go. I’d not yet launched my drinking life, so I was nursing a hamburger and wishing the guy sitting in on the house drums would, for the love of God, figure out how to count time. It wasn’t so much that he couldn’t keep the beat; he couldn’t find it. He came close a few times, which only made his contribution all the more nerve jangling. The guy who owned the kit had already left to get drunk at some other gig. An off night, to say the least.

Tom hit the opening riff for “The Pink Panther,” his favorite “out” tune, and I slithered from the booth to join him on his last break. He lit a joint; I stuffed my hands in my pockets. My pot-smoking life never launched. To this day, I’ve never taken a drag on a cigarette or a hit off a joint or pipe. Legalities aside, the stuff terrified me. I couldn’t take the chance of losing even a scintilla of control. I had so little to begin with.

Tom vamped about the vocalist’s voice—what a travesty, to lose her whole career because of her shattered looks. “Wasted talent is like mutilated babies,” he said, not for the first (or last) time.

I responded with something snarky about the sit-in drummer not having to worry about that—no talent, no waste. “At least he could try to find ‘one,’” I groused, tired, cold, and wishing we could just go home.

But Tom stopped and stared at me. “That’s right! You play drums!” he shouted, as only his lungs could. “You’re gonna take over when we go back in!”

A single semester. I’d switched from flute to drums for one semester in sixth or seventh grade because I’d lost my “whoof” when a blood blister wrapped itself around my left tonsil. It happened during the only band recital my father ever attended, which happened because my mother was in the hospital having back surgery she regretted for the rest of her life, which happened because one of her friends had had surgery, so she needed to even the score.

I know that sounds mean, and I wish it was, but alas, it was the fact, jack. My mother was very proud of having had nine surgeries in her life. Most were unnecessary, a few medically unsound, and two she decided were cancer after the fact. She never had cancer, she never had cancer surgery, she never had radiation or chemotherapy. But she did have a lot of scars to show off.

Her absence at the band recital gave rise to my father actually coming into my room that evening to ask why I was crying and making his speech about why he hadn’t been able to talk to me before—i.e. I’d been too young (and girl)—but now, since I was ten, he could. Despite my remembery problems, I distinctly recall thinking, “Too little, too late, Dad,” and not answering him. I hadn’t suddenly developed a spurt of gumption; my throat hurt too much, the result of losing my whoof to the blood blister.

The only other part of this ridiculous story was its outcome. The Ear, Nose, and Throat doctor who removed said blister also took out the attached tonsil, logically—but not the other one. Claimed he didn’t believe in removing healthy tissue. He left me with a lopsided throat that’s been a source of amusement for every doctor who’s depressed my tongue ever since.

My band teacher wasn’t happy that I couldn’t play flute anymore—I’d been second chair even though I couldn’t hold the instrument at its proper angle—so he grudgingly agreed to let me join the percussion section, which had been my first instrumental choice. My second was clarinet. Mom had nixed the woodwind because I already had an overbite and the drums because, duh, I was girl.

When I switched from front-row, second chair to standing in the back, I wanted to learn the snare, but nay, nay—I was too late to the game, the teacher said. Too weak-limbed, too musically oriented… lordy, he had a lot of euphemisms to avoid saying “too girl.” I ended up on glockenspiel and timpani, hating the former, kinda jazzed about the latter. But the following semester my mother vetoed any and all drums, saying it was just as well I stopped trying to play an instrument; I didn’t really have any musical aptitude, anyway.

Back to that night outside the piano bar or, more accurately, back inside, where I timidly eased myself behind the kit. Anxiously excited, I did my best not to knock anything over. The sticks were grimy from the myriad sweaty hands that had handled them.

(Mental note: if I ever get my own drumsticks, clean them off now and then. Confession: never did.)

Ignoring the bass pedal, I concentrated on riding the cymbal and hitting one on the snare when Tom launched into some tune or other, and damn! It just grooved. Between songs, he leaned over and said, “One and three on the bass, two and four on the snare,” so that’s what I did. Where did that hands-feet syncopation come from? I had no idea, but I loved it. I used the brushes when he hit Pink Panther to close the night, and snugofanun—I got applause!

Tom immediately saw us playing Vegas. “We have to get you a drum set! This is gonna be great!”

And it was—even better than driving, which I still loved. My mother wasn’t happy about the news, putting a cherry on my sundae.

Tom made friends as if it was an easy, natural thing to do, so the next day he got on the phone and followed a referral trail to a small, independent music store where we bought a cheap, sad-looking drum kit that only needed some new hardware, a couple of non-warped cymbals, a throne, and a paint job. What's a few hundred dollars we didn’t have when we could be the next Carpenters sensation?

Well, they were brother and sister superstars, not husband and wife newbies; she had the voice of an angel, not the squawk of an as yet-to-be-identified female tenor; and they’d been playing together all their lives. Except for all that, a perfect comparison.

Next thing I knew, we were back at Sis’s place so I could get free drum lessons from her live-in lover/drummer. He definitely knew his stuff, but he didn’t know me, and our sessions were, shall we say, minimally fruitful. On to an actual drum teacher, whose lessons I couldn’t afford, which was just as well because my right hand/arm was not about to paradiddle anymore than it held my flute up properly. But I learned enough to get by playing behind Tom’s eclectically non-commercial set list. We always had music on the record player; now I started listening past the vocals, guitars, and horns to catch the bass and percussion lines.

I would eventually figure out how to use the same isolation technique to “read for purpose” rather than pleasure as part of my ghostwriting Creative Analysis methodology. And I’d recognize how connecting those two personal efforts was an example of its Abstract Reasoning.

Tom needed me to sing and play at the same time, so I did… but not well. I had to create a new workaround, because dagnabit, no matter what tune what he pulled out, I couldn’t sing the melody. Everything came out of my mouth as harmony.

Why? Hell if I knew. I didn’t know why I couldn’t stay on key, either, which drove him out of his mind.

Neither of us knew the same non-stamina that kept me from running (“You can’t run. Seriously. I mean it. Just stop trying. It’s painful to watch.”) impeded any diaphragmatic lung support. By the time I learned about and addressed my congenital heart congestion, Tom had been dead for eight years. So kinda too late.

Still, I had an adequate four or five-note range and my somehow-always-accurate warbles behind his slight Neil Diamond-esq gravel worked. To compensate—or maybe just because he was on his way to becoming a musician’s musician after starting life as a minor prodigy—he decided we’d do full-harmony renditions of “Misty,” “Taking a Chance on Love,” and “New York, New York.”

I think there were others as well, but our dual-voiced “New York, New York” was a showstopper and tip-jar filler. We once repeated it three times in a row at the end of a night in some slime bar, where the sole remaining patron couldn’t believe we could do that to a song and kept feeding us $20 bills to play it again. Then again, he may have just enjoyed watching me stuff those bills down my sequined tube top. Gender confusion non-withstanding, I knew how to game the audience as eye candy.

But back to those first days of my new, light-weight, bright-green-painted drum kit and Tom’s 250-pound Fender Rhodes that seemed to need new tines every other week. We would set up in the so-called living room (sans living-room furniture) of our miniscule apartment with its unshadable western exposure to learn new material, devise new harmonies, and rehearse ourselves into a viable thirty-song set list. Things got pretty warm in that hothouse, and tempers got pretty high when the guy below us kept screaming, “You’re breaking my chops!”

One stifling, neighbor-bellowing afternoon, Tom stripped off his shirt against the heat. Closer to the sliding door that would not be filtered no matter what we did, I followed suit and stripped off mine.

“You can’t do that,” my husband said. “You’re right in front of a glass door. Somebody might see you.”

They woulda needed a pair of binoculars, but I was too hot and pissed for that kind of rational thought, so I just snapped, “Tough shit. If you can’t figure out how to set up a fan in here, I’m gonna take off my jeans too and play naked.”

A showdown. We had them all the time. Equally venomous and meaningless, as if we fought just to fight. He had lung power, upper-body strength, and truth-justice-the American-way on his side. I had intractability, pragmatic logic, and brimmed with Tigger-pouncing anger. So words were spat. Fists got balled. Full-out war posed three syllables away.

Honestly, it was a comedy act. At no time and in no way would either of us ever leave the other, and we both knew that in the depths of all depths. So no matter the provocation, I never called him an asshole and he never shot me with “Bitch!” Neither of us ever threatened divorce; neither threw ex-lovers at the other. We bickered bitterly about such stupid things that I recall them not.

Were he alive here and now, he’d no doubt recite every argument we ever had, verbatim, thanks to his fucking perfect memory—knowing full well I couldn’t counter a word since mine didn’t even retain the topic. This is called “weaponizing your wife’s disabilities,” and don’t think he wasn’t up to doing just that ‘cause it was probably one of the things we fought about.

But I’m not sure… I just don’t remember.

Anyway, with nothing really sinister to throw at each other, we usually ended up getting something to eat, having sex, and taking a nap (him) or doing laundry (me) until whatever it was passed enough to throw ourselves into each other’s arms. We did, after all, live in each other’s pockets. To an outsider, it must have looked like the most ludicrous marriage ever consummated. To us, it was, well, yeah—exactly that.