I was about to be hospitable and invite this odd man in. Doug sat cross-legged on his bed behind me, white-knuckling a pair of sticks with his face in the next morning’s jury music, as Jim and I stood face-to-face in my doorway. I remember sort of bobbing my head, Southern style—yup, here we are—to fill the awkward silence, which was now going on too long. There was no how do you do or even my name is Jim and I get really nervous when tipsy—oh, and I heard there was a fire. Instead, he puffed up his chest, looked around as if calling an Iron John meeting to order. He took a hard, deep breath through his nose, the kind that nearly collapses the nostrils, and announced his intentions to hose my roommate with a fire extinguisher. He would then “kick his pussy ass,” he continued. Maybe he said he’d kick his ass first and then hose him down. Something like that. Whatever. It just seemed absurd.
I’m not exactly sure what came out of my smart mouth, but it got a good laugh up and down the hall. And then the air got even heavier. It had officially become Real™ on the ninth floor. And there was no turning back. Jim was the lion, and I was the small man in a loincloth waiting to die in the middle of a Roman coliseum. It was a National Geographic documentary featuring a boa constrictor and a small rodent, with Morgan Freeman narrating. And there’s no turning back once Morgan Freeman has spoken. Oh yez, it was on! And the shit would soon be going down.
Only I didn’t yet realize it was “on.” I may have been the only one who didn’t quite hear what Morgan Freeman said. I didn’t even get that rush of adrenaline and holy-fucking-shit-ness until moments later, when I was being pummeled. Back home my sense of humor had always kept me from getting my ass kicked. It always defused a situation like this. Joking in these situations can earn respect or break down the predator by making him laugh. Ah, let the kid go—he’s funny! Not this time.
It turns out that Jim was an amateur boxer who was attending college on a wrestling scholarship. My little quip that made the hallway laugh was sort of like a ringside bell for this guy.
Ding!
I just stood there getting beat up in the doorway, holding that damn trash can for God knows how long, until my limbic system suggested to my right hand that maybe it should, you know, let go. But, then, my teenage ego suggested I advance and swing like a maniac—in the general direction of Jim. Which, I’m told, I did.
Jim seemed to be beating my ass and conducting an interview all at once. He was asking me questions between jabs, like, did I want “another piece of this?”—pop pop!—and what did I “have to say now, chump?”—pop pop pop! This was the best day of Jim’s life. As he frothed in ecstasy behind a blur of fists, I reflexively hollered something I’d learned back home, like, “Yeaaaah, you little titty bitch, let’s go!” I also stepped closer, making me easier for him to hit.
I remember bleeding all over the elevator and getting a last blurry glimpse of Jim being held back by a few other kids. He was freakishly pumped up and loud, still high off his conquest, pounding his chest and yelling, “Yeah, I kicked your fucking ass! I kicked your fucking ass!” as the elevator doors closed.
All said and done, this was a brief affair. In the time it took you to read these last few paragraphs, the whole event would have occurred four times over. I was soon off to the South Dade Hospital ER. Dressing my wounds, the doctor asked if the attacker had worn brass knuckles. Doug told him no but that Jim had had some really fat rings on his fingers. I called my parents collect from the pay phone in the lobby at 5 A.M. for my insurance information.
In the end, the nail in the coffin of what was once my dignity—the thing that hurt at least as bad as all those blows to the head—was what I learned in this exchange:
ME: “Damn, they say my hand is totally broken! I must have put a hurtin’ on Jim too, right? He’s in the ER too, right? I can’t wait to see what I did to his face!”
DOUG: “Uh, he’s fine. You missed him and punched the wall.”
ME: “…”
DOUG: “Twice.”
Some said later that the loud snap of my second punch to the cinder-block wall, which had wildly missed Jim’s head, had made one of the onlookers sick to his stomach.
DRUMS IN A LAKE
LEAVING MY JURY, HEAD HUNG low, I knew that my scholarship wouldn’t survive my awful performance. My time at the University of Miami would soon be coming to an end. My friend Mark tried to hatch a last-minute plan to unlock some of his personal savings to help me stay in school, but I couldn’t accept that. No, I was cooked. So I did what anyone would do—I rolled my drums to Lake Osceola, which was right next to the music school, and tossed them in, one drum at a time.
This wasn’t completely spontaneous, though. I’d been dreaming of chucking these drums for months. The truth was, the whole set wasn’t even worth a bus ticket back home. The bass drum was so anemic that when a tom was mounted on it, it would collapse in on itself. I had to jam two pencils where the metal bass-drum legs had once existed, to keep the kit stable. But even then I’d have to steal resting moments in the music to pull the bass drum back in place, so it didn’t inch forward each time I kicked it.
I’d first unveiled these drums in front of a class called “Fundamentals of Swing 101.” Despite its insipid name, I found this class terrifying and intimidating, and it seemed to have been designed that way. The instructor, a gruff old-school jazz pianist, encouraged a sort of mean-spirited competition between students as a way to motivate us to improve. In an environment like this, my shitty drums were open season.
Each day, a few of us would be grouped into a small ensemble—usually piano, bass, guitar, and drums—and assigned a jazz standard to perform together. The rest of the class would critique. In fact, critiquing was most of the grade, so you’d have to say the right things when called upon, and the right things were seldom kind. The more scathing the takedown, the more catty the tone, the more delighted the teacher would become.
“Sound and balance, Mr. Folds?” he would call.
If Mr. Folds didn’t rip the band a new asshole for being out of balance, then God help Mr. Folds. Conversely, when Mr. Folds finally got his turn to play, the same musicians would be foaming at the mouth to turn their steely knives on his broke-ass drum set.
Eventually I got my first turn to play in an ensemble for Fundamentals of Swing 101, and a famous vibraphone player from a successful fusion band who was buddies with the teacher came in and sat in the back to watch. I nearly shat my pants. Anyone who’s spent any time in elevators has heard this guy. I must have gotten my teeth drilled to his music at least a few times, so I was starstruck. I’d never seen a famous person before. Well, there was that one local radio DJ at Hanes Mall when I was ten.
To be fair, as green as I was, as cheap as my drums were, I was no slouch of a musician. I was just more of a jack-of-all-trades than a technical monster. My creativity earned me my scholarship, but at music school it’s all about being a specialist, since you can’t really teach creativity. I was now supposed to be a technically proficient jazz-drumming specialist, I guess. My training had been orchestral percussion, but that wasn’t really the thing at Miami, and burning through a jazz standard was not my strongest suit.