Featherless Bipeds (13 page)

These are the great unanswered questions of history

The great unanswered questions of history

I wonder if Einstein ever worried about

The zits on his face, while he made out

Had the cops in the campground heard the noise in the tent?

Had he saved enough money for his college rent?

These are the great unanswered questions of history

The great unanswered questions of history

I wonder if Freud got weak in the knees

When a girl like you began to tease

Would you be there beside him when he woke up?

Would you head for the sunset with him in his pickup truck?

Here tomorrow, gone today

History seems to work that way

Here today, just you and me

As for History, we'll just wait and see

“Whoa!” cheers Tristan, “That was great!”

Jimmy nods, “Not bad, but . . . ”

“Not bad?” I yelp, “That was amazing! Who knew that we had
four
singers in the band?”

“Five, including Lola,” Jimmy T is quick to add. Usually he only sucks up to her when she's around to hear him; maybe he's feeling a subconscious twinge of guilt for flirting with the chickadees.

Now my stomach is telling me that I may have played too hard on that last song. I am sweating profusely, and my digestive system sends a few pre-emptive discharges of bile up my throat, which taste like those super-spicy ‘meat ‘n' bean ‘ burritos. In the days before refrigeration, people used to use spices to cover up the taste of rotten meat.
Uuurp
. . .

The small crowd remains on the dance floor, and, since the original songs seem to be working well with them, I start us into another, called
Yearbook
, by singing
a cappella
:

I'm looking at the inside cover of my grade twelve yearbook

I'm reading the inscriptions from the girls I thought I loved

I whack my snare drum, and we kick into the song in earnest.

Here's one from Margaret — We'd already broken up

I thought we had a good thing, but I somehow screwed it up

“Hey” she wrote on the page, “One day I'm gonna blow right past you”

Then she scribbled out the word “blow” — she didn't wanna leave any innuendo

Akim tosses in another bassy harmony line on the chorus, and it sounds great. He sounds like a leaner, meaner version of Barry White.

Here's to you Margaret — When I say this I really mean it

Any girl that woulda had me then,

I wouldn't wanna know right now, anyhow

Here's another one from Cindy — a handwritten confessional

She talked a lot about God, but used her hands like a professional

She wrote “We had a lot of fun,

Together we attained a lot of knowledge”

I took her to the prom — she dumped me for a guy at Bible College

Here's to you, Cindy — When I say this I really mean it

Any girl that woulda had me then,

I wouldn't wanna know right now,anyhow

Oh no . . . when I sang that last “anyhow”, I nearly spewed on the mike. I am sweating buckets now, and it's all I can do to keep the Mount Vesuvius in my gut from erupting full force. I'll never order a burrito in a bar again for as long as I live! I sing on, gulping down the pre-eruption bile, begging my stomach to be still.

Today I bumped into a girl named Angela

We split a beer and talked about the future (uurp
. . .
)

The only thing she wrote in my yearbook

Was “Good Luck” (ulp
. . .
)

We've still got a lot of things to talk about

Here's to us, Angela

You thought I was a clown (glurp
. . .
)

So you didn't like me then —

here's to now

The band flies into a great instrumental bit, and I realize there is no longer any way to stop the vomit comet from bursting through. Not wanting to puke all over my entire drum set, I grab frantically with one hand at my open-bottomed floor tom, and flip it upside down on the stage beside me. I stop drumming for a few beats as I hurl liquid fire into my drum-turned-bucket. I manage to kick my bass drum to the beat as the second volley hits the drum skin. I wipe my mouth, grab a fresh pair of sticks, and manage to finish the song the way it's supposed to end.

Jimmy flashes an annoyed look in my direction, then he turns to his mike and says, “Well, folks, our drummer really screwed up on that one! Hey, I've got a joke for ya . . . what do you call someone who hangs out with musicians? — A drummer!”

A few people in the crowd laugh.

“Why are the band's breaks limited to thirty minutes?” Jimmy continues. “So you don't have to retrain the drummer!”

So he's a stand-up comedian, is he? Well, now that I've unloaded the poison that was once in my stomach, my strength is returning. I start kicking a rhythm on my bass drum . . .

Boom, Boom, B-Boom-Boom-Boom

I begin chanting into my microphone, along with the rhythm I'm creating with my right foot:

“You know how to make a drummer's girlfriend drive really fast? — Put his drums in the middle of the road!”

More people in the crowd laugh, a few more gather on the dance floor to listen — they think this is part of the show. Jimmy T does not look impressed that I am stealing his thunder, which is incentive enough for me to continue. I speed up the rhythm a little.

Boom, Boom, B-Boom-Boom-Boom

“What did the drummer get on his IQ test? — Drool! How can you tell when the drum riser is level? — Drool comes out of both sides of the drummer's mouth!”

With that, I toss in a wild Buddy Rich snare fill. People hoot and cheer. Many of them have begun to clap along to the bass beat, and newcomers are heading straight to the dance floor to watch and listen. Tristan and Akim nod along, grinning, clapping to the beat. Jimmy T stands off to one side of the stage, feigning boredom. His girlfriends are clapping along, too.

Boom, Boom, B-Boom-Boom-Boom

“You know how to stop a drummer from playing? — Put some sheet music in front of him! What's the difference between a trampoline and a drummer? — You take your shoes
off
to jump on the trampoline!”

I throw in a monstrous fill here, hitting toms, cowbells, cymbals, and rims . . . a tricky bit I learned by listening to Neil Peart drum solos over and over and over again as a teenager. The crowd is becoming frenzied . . . I love it! Akim has put his guitar down now, and is standing on the right-hand side of my drum set, clanging out a simple beat on the ride cymbal with a stick he's grabbed from inside my gig bag. To my left, Tristan is clapping his hands over his head along with my drumming, leading the audience along. Jimmy T removes his guitar and leaves the stage.

Boom, Boom, B-Boom-Boom-Boom,

“What's the difference between a drummer and a vacuum cleaner? — You have to plug one of them in before it sucks! Aaaaaaaaand. . . . ”

(I throw in a HUGE drumroll here . . . )

“Last but not least . . . How is a drum solo like a sneeze? — You can tell it's coming, but you can't do anything about it!”

And with that, I cut into the biggest, fattest, loudest drum solo I've ever played; there's some Neil Peart, there's some Ginger Baker, there's some Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa, there's a little bit of every drummer I've ever studied.

As I bring the solo to a climax, Jimmy T climbs back onto the stage in front of my drums, if only to absorb a bit of the applause for himself.

“And here's one for the road, before we leave you for the night,” I add, feeling that my vengeance is not totally complete, “How is a drummer like a stagecoach driver? Both sit behind a horses' ass!”

Jimmy T scowls. There is applause and laughter as we step down from the stage. The place is loud with hooting, clapping, beer bottles clinking on the bar tables. We'll get an encore call for sure.

“We'll be right back in a few minutes, folks!” Tristan shouts into his mike.

Jimmy storms from the stage, does his best Hyde-to-Jeckyl transformation, then joins the two girls at their table, grinning suavely. As I walk past them with my floor tom full of vomit, one of the girls shouts out, “Hey drummer! That was awesome!”

“Thanks!” I say, giving her a Jimmyesque wink, which I know will bug him.

I am almost to the stage door, when I hear the other girl say, “Jeeze, Jimmy, you're a great songwriter, and it sure was nice of you to let the drummer sing a couple of your songs!”

“Well,” mutters Jimmy, quietly enough to sound modest (and also to avoid being overheard by me), “it's his birthday.”

I set the floor tom down by the door and stomp back over to where Jimmy and the girls sit.

“My birthday is in
December,
you idiot!” I bark, then, to the girls I say, “Sorry to disappoint you, ladies, but I write the lyrics, and Akim and Tristan over there write the music. Jimmy can't write a friggin'
set list.
”

Illusions are shattered. The two girls wanted so badly to believe that the good-looking guy with the nice clothes wrote all the songs. They look like they might cry. Jimmy, on the other hand, looks really pissed off, because his chances of fondling their young breasts have just decreased significantly.

“Anyone can write a rock song!” he rages, “
Anyone
! You think you're such hot shit! You're just a
drummer
. A damn
metronome
! I could write a better song than you in five minutes if I felt like it.”

I reach into the back pocket of my jeans, and toss a stub of pencil onto the napkin in front of him.

“Okay,” I say, “you've got five minutes.”

The two girls look hopeful. They believe that their handsome hero can do it. I walk outside to empty the barf out of my floor tom.

Jimmy does, in fact, have something written on the napkin when I return. He waves it at me as I approach.

“See, I told you anyone could write a song in five minutes. And what's more, we're gonna play it tonight.”

“Oh, come off it, Jimmy,” I say. “We can't write music
that
fast.”

“Oh yeah?” He hollers out to Tristan, who is cleaning his guitar on-stage. “Tristan! Come here!”

Tristan must be finished tuning his bass, because he walks over immediately, which reinforces the Leader-of-the-Band image Jimmy is trying to cultivate with his two young groupies.

“For our encore, wanna play the blues with some lyrics I wrote?”

“Well, I guess,” says Tristan hesitantly, “but let's see the lyrics, first.”

“Let me read 'em to you,” Jimmy says. He clears his throat and recites:

Girls are hot

like 'em a lot

I like 'em a lot

yeah, girls are hot

I like 'em in skirts

I like 'em in jeans

I like 'em on their backs

or down on their knees

I like girls

when they moan

I like girls

on the phone

“Wait! Wait!” Jimmy T hollers, scribbling out the last line on the napkin, “I've got something even better! Listen to this!'

He continues:

I like girls

when they moan

I'm a dog

and they gimme a bone!

He crosses his arms and waits for the chorus of admiration.

“What the hell was
that
?” laughs Akim, who has wandered over to the table, “
Horton Gets Horny
, by Dr. Seuss?”

“Well, Jimmy,” says Tristan, in an attempt at diplomacy, “I'm not sure it fits our musical style. Maybe you can sell those lyrics to Aerosmith or something.”

“C'mon, Tristan!” Jimmy says, “It's the
blues
! We can do the
blues
!”

I decide to put an end to the horror. The crowd is chanting for an encore, and I suppose Jimmy has suffered enough for his sins. All he wants is to impress the girls, so I'll let him have his wish.

“Hey, listen, Jimmy, for our encore I think you should do most of the singing . . . my throat is pretty scorched from puking onstage, you know.”

“Oh. Okay. I can do that. Hear
that,
girls . . .
I'll
be singing lead for the rest of the night.” Then he looks back at me. “You puked
onstage? When?
”

G
LASS
H
ALF
E
MPTY

A
fter three weeks away on a road trip through Northern Ontario, playing at taverns in crossroad towns none of us have ever heard of before, we're almost home. One last stop just outside the city, and we can finally sleep in our own beds again. We're playing a bar just off a Highway 401 exit ramp, a big, cinder block building in the middle of a warehouse district. It's called Rockin' Rob's Roadhouse, but the suburbanites who frequent the place call it the “Triple R”.

Mid-term exams at the university are over now, so Zoe, Veronica, and Sung Li are venturing out tonight to listen to the band, and to celebrate their continuing academic survival. Akim has been missing Sung Li, Tristan has been missing Veronica, and of course I've been missing Zoe, even if I'm not yet entitled to the physical benefits that Tristan and Akim will receive from their impending reunions. Tristan is so excited to see Veronica he's forgotten to set up his video camera to record the show.

We've positioned our equipment across the bar's ample stage, and we're about to do a sound check. Akim, Tristan and I are onstage, plugged in, cranked up and ready to go, but Lola and Jimmy T are still cavorting behind the black curtain between the stage and the ten-by-ten foot space that passes for the band's dressing room.