IN WOOL GLOVES AND A DOWN VEST, I BIKED OVER ON A COOL gray Tuesday to the practice space, a rented chunk of warehouse in North Portland—old brick and big black iron windows, a view of the train tracks and glimpses of the river between silos, a dusty space heater whirring in the corner. Ryan sat me behind a stripped-down practice set: a snare, a tom, a kick drum, and a high-hat. True to our old rule, we did not process.
Flynn was right. I had no skill. My foot moved and my arms jerked into action a half second later. “Why did you tell her drum lessons?” I moaned.
“It was the first thing that came to mind.” He was trying not to laugh at me but soon gave up.
I pointed to my head with a drumstick. “Haircut!”
“I don’t know, I cut Flynn’s hair, I didn’t think to cross the wires. But look, here you are. Stop kicking for a minute.”
I had been thumping on the kick drum. Ryan made me take my foot off the pedal and focus on my hands first. He broke it down: tap, tap, tap, tap with one hand, then tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap with the other. “Just go steady until it feels like a part of you. Then bring in the kick.”
I obeyed. The beat smoothed out. It stuttered sometimes when I added the kick, but Ryan sat down at his full kit and hit the snare rim like a metronome. I caught on, kept up. He threw in some fills. I kept going with my basic tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap, he let me lay down the beat, and he started to embellish it.
We sounded all right, the two of us playing. The good parts were all him, but I was at the base of it too. Each hit traveled through the sticks and up my arms. My whole body was doing this work. The sound filled me, for once a sound I was making.
“I never knew I could do this,” I shouted over the beat, and immediately lost it. “I mean, I can’t yet, but.”
“You can. Now you just need a band.”
Meena always said a band is only as good as its drummer, and I told Ryan I didn’t have the heart to bring anyone down like that with my anti-skills. “What if we were just a band like this?” I said.
“Two drummers?”
“Yeah.” I sneaked in a crash of the cymbal and lost my footing for a second. “You’re going to have to sing.”
Ryan waited until I found the beat again and then skipped into a familiar galloping rhythm I couldn’t quite place until he started to sing the first verse.
“Stop it!” I cried.
“When times go bad, and you can’t get enough—”
I gave in and hollered along, “Won’t you lay me down in the tall grass and let me do my stuff,” and then I tried to knock the stick out of his hand with my own.
“Torture!” I said. “No fair!”
He was still laughing and I was too.
I remembered that I liked hanging out with him, how it could feel easy like that. He didn’t try anything with me, and this—being friends, teacher and apprentice, playing together—seemed to neutralize the disturbance of our affair. I’d defeated the aberrant sexual thing that had briefly threatened to destabilize my life. We had normalized: the lesbian and the straight guy, just friends, as God and nature intended. What a relief.
He sent me home with a set of drum pads and I practiced in my room, tapping along to records. I put on “Schizophrenia” by Sonic Youth and there it was, that boom-boom-BOOM-boom-boom-boom-BOOM. And I was not only listening but playing along. The song filled me to all corners all over again. The simplest beat can get you just like that. The simplest beats of all keep you going every day—your footsteps down the sidewalk, the pulse of your blood through your heart.
The Cold Shoulder van pulled up in front of my house after two weeks of lessons. Ryan got out and started unloading a set of drums, a root-beer Gretsch kit.
“Got room for these in the basement?”
“Yes. But wait, no, I can’t take those.”
“Sure,” he said. “I like to live light. You need to practice. It all works out.”
I was too delighted to feign protest. “Promise you’ll come get them if you ever need them back.”
He promised.
Those drums! I was smitten. I wanted to play all the time. My improvement was negligible, but I loved hitting them. When I played, I could think of nothing else, as every part of my body and my mind jostled together in the effort of making a steady beat. My palm skin thickened. I ran my fingers over the calluses while I sat behind the counter at the record store or Artifacts. I was turning into one of those people who’s always tapping on things.
“He gave you his drums?” Meena said, and frowned. “What does he expect in return?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“I wouldn’t be so sure.”
She had a point. I did not want to owe him. That’s when I got the idea for the guitar.
It lay in its case, now a coffin, under the living room couch. Ryan had left me a spare key when he toured last summer and it still jostled on my overstuffed key chain. I thought I could arrange a trade with a guy I knew at The 12th Fret, either for printing jobs for his band or use of my employee discount at Artifacts.
Late December. Ryan’s thirtieth birthday approached. My chance. I took it.
He came down to the basement for my lesson that day. The small high windows were dim with grime and the gray afternoon, but I’d hung a paper shade over the ceiling bulb and stapled a string of Christmas lights along the bare beams, and the soft light transformed the junk around us into homey clutter. I sat him down on the drum stool. “I have something for you,” I said. I handed him a Polaroid I’d taken of the broken guitar before I had turned it over to the luthier. It leaned against the backdrop of a black-painted wall at the shop, the splintered neck gleaming like bone at the break.
“What’s this?” He turned over the Polaroid as if the black back would explain something.
“You’ll see.”
“It might have to be the cover of the next Cold Shoulder record,” Ryan said. “Can we use it?”
“Of course. It’s yours. But that’s just part one. Wait here.”
I ran up to my room and came back down with my angular sheet-wrapped bundle. “Close your eyes,” I called from the steps. He obeyed. I set it on his lap. “Open.”
Ryan unwrapped the sheet and there was his beautiful blue Telecaster, restored, back from the dead, all the well-earned old scratches and scuffs still visible but the neck sleek and glossy and intact. “Holy fuck.” He ran his fingers down the length of it, turned it over. “What have you done?”
“Is it okay?” I said.
He looked like a kid whose lost dog had been found. “Yeah, it’s okay. How’d you do this?”
I told him I’d sneaked in while he was at practice and stolen it out of the case.
“You criminal.” He grabbed my shoulders.
“That’s right.” Criminal: it flushed me hot. We locked eyes. I shrugged out of his grip and pushed him down to the floor. The guitar slid onto the carpet remnant. He flipped me onto my back and held my wrists above my head, pinned them there against the cool concrete with one hand, and with a single swift twist of the other my jeans opened.
“You went into my house,” he said.
“Yeah, I did.”
“You still want in?”
“Only if I need to.” I tried to steady my breath.
“Anything you need right now?”
“Maybe.”
“It’s always maybe with you.”
I pulled one hand free and pushed his head down to my zipper.
The Christmas lights blurred.