DROPPED AT EXAMS IN A COP CAR
FINAL PERFORMANCE EXAMS IN MUSIC school are referred to as “the juries.” The test itself is called “the jury,” and it’s adjudicated by the staff, but you don’t call them the jury—you call them the staff. It’s like the way we call the main course “the entrée” in America. Make sense? Anyway, the University of Miami, renowned for its jazz program, took this jury thing up a notch by providing a jazz ensemble with a full horn section to accompany the student as he/she performed prepared pieces, exercises, and some sight-reading. The band did not stop or slow down for the student if he/she stumbled. It was keep up or perish. I understood that I would need to ace my jury each semester or risk losing my scholarship. No problem, I thought. After a semester of stellar grades, an accidental suntan, and a few pounds back on my bones, I was feeling pretty good about this one last hoop I’d need to jump through before heading home for Christmas break.
On the morning of juries, anxious freshman performance majors trickled in to wait their turn in the foyer of the old Foster Building, glancing one last time at their music, while the provided combo, made up of grad students, casually talked amongst themselves. A small team of disheveled professors seated themselves in a row behind a folding table, organizing their notes. Back then, the front of the Foster Building was mostly glass and the students and jury had a clear view of everyone who approached the building. My approach was particularly conspicuous. I was dropped off in a Miami Dade police car.
* * *
—
I looked like I’d shown up for Walking Dead auditions thirty years too early, plastered with an assortment of bandages, patches of blood showing through. My head felt swollen and my nose and bottom lip were full of stitches. My right hand, in a splint, hurt even worse. I had what they call a “boxer’s break.” I tried to rustle up some dignity with a casual goodbye to the police officer, as if we were old buds or something, as I sensed the tilting heads and widening eyes of peers and professors from the other side of the glass. I shrugged in the direction of the music building. No book bag, no music, no sticks or mallets. Just a blurry hangover, of equal parts beer and adrenaline from the previous ten humiliating hours.
Still in last night’s clothes, which felt damp and permanently pasted to my skin, I hadn’t had a minute’s sleep. I stood up straight as I could, thrust what little chest I had forward, and walked the fuck through the big glass door. I made a beeline through my peers to my percussion professor. Everyone could hear every whispering word echo off the concrete walls as I begged for my test to be put off until the next week.
As it turns out, the University of Miami percussion department didn’t play that game. In the professional world, you see, you’d just be fired for showing up in such a state and asking for the night off. So that was that. I would have to perform soon. How I would’ve loved to at least change my clothes or brush my teeth.
“Hey, Mike,” I whispered to a kid next to me. “Man, I’m sorry, but would you mind if I used your sticks and mallets for my test?”
“Nah, sorry, Ben, can’t wait around to get them back. I gotta run and I need these sticks for my next class.”
“Okay, okay, that’s cool…” I muttered, searching for a receptive face.
“Hey! John, can you loan me your sticks for my jury?”
“Dude, you stink.”
* * *
—
This was it. The slaughter was nigh.
“Ben, turn to page five,” instructed the band director. “This one is called ‘Fusion Juice.’ Stay with me.”
He counted it off and the band burned through each measure. I did not stay with him. I was left in the dust, crawling around under the snare drum for the stick I dropped, as the band squeezed out some “Fusion Juice” with no drums. To this day, my Miami percussion professor, Steve Rucker, doesn’t think it was he who went all Whiplash (the 2014 award-winning movie about a struggling jazz percussion student and his abusive professor) at that jury. He suspects it was the senior percussion professor instead who made me play with a broken hand. But I think that I should damn well have had to perform, broken hand and all. Because that is life. And in my decades as a touring recording artist, I have personally canceled fewer shows than I could count on that broken hand. Cheap lesson learned. Either way, Steve and I both recall my jury for the disaster it was.
* * *
—
So, here’s the story of the previous night’s drunken idiocy that led up to all of this:
On that night, the eve of my juries, some guy named Jim had taken a special trip down from the eleventh floor of our dorm to my room on the ninth. Nobody on the ninth floor really knew this fellow. Jim’s ninth-floor trip, as we would learn, was quite premeditated. He was in search of someone his size to beat up (as you do) and had his eye on my roommate, Doug, who seemed to fit the bill. They were of equal builds, both a few inches shorter and thicker than I.
I imagine that in the hours before his trip to the ninth floor, Jim had been flexing shirtless in the mirror, with a cheap-beer buzz, making intense eye contact with himself, and whisper-shouting to his reflection. Getting himself stoked, psyched, and pumped, under a single bare bulb in his cinder-block bathroom. He seemed warmed up and mid-script when he made the scene.
I knew how important the next morning’s juries were, but I’d never found it useful to dwell or cram the night before an audition or performance. It just made me more nervous. I’d prepared my ass off anyway, and I imagined it might be a good psych-out technique to appear cavalier to the other musicians. I was competitive that way. So at midnight on jury’s eve, while the music students were practicing and commiserating about their jitters, the PBR flowed freely for the non-music students. And for me too. I took the opportunity to have a few beers myself while organizing my side of the room. I had just cleaned my desk and was coming through the door to empty the trash and, boom, there was Jim.
Jim was tan and jock-like and appeared a little anxious. His eyes were on fire and he was brandishing a fire extinguisher. It was all good, though. I was learning not to judge a man too quickly. Away from home for the first time, you discover that the way a fellow is when he’s drunk is not necessarily a good indication of the kind of person he really is. People who are normally soft-spoken can suddenly become boisterously loud after only one drink, like this kid Jonathan, a studious science major who lost his shit every weekend, yelling, “Nine sixteeeeee!” up and down the hall. Our dorm was called 960 Complex, and I guess he was really proud of that. Hell, I’d just had a few drinks and was now walking around with a trash can, so I didn’t think it was odd if a guy had a few drinks and went for a fire extinguisher. If that was his thing.