When the Drumming Stops

By Steven Wishnia

Author Steve Wishnia is an award-winning editor and journalist whose work has appeared frequently in The Nation, The Progressive, and Alternet.org.

Author has won two New York City Independent Press Association awards.

Author was bass player in the False Prophets, a punk band that released two albums on Jello Biafra's Alternative Tentacles record label in the 1980s.

Author has had work appear in many anthologies the forthcoming Long Island Noir (Akashic).

Author's non-fiction title, The Cannabis Companion (Running Press, 2004) sold more than 40,000 copies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manic D Press, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9781933149714

Book preview

Chapter 1

The ’00s / July

Kryptonite? Where ya at?

Twenty-fifth and Park.

All right. Come on back to me.

The other phone popped.

Headcheese. One-forty Liberty.

All right. Pick-up at Emerson, Lake, Fifty-five Water, twenty-third floor. You’re going to Nine West 42nd. It’s a rush.

Underend Vicodini needed a cigarette. Three in the afternoon, lunch two hours gone and quitting time at least two and a half away, and his eyelids drooping like he was back on dope. He slumped sideways in the chair, caressing the pack of Newports in his vest pocket. The summer’s second big heat wave wasn’t helping either. His black t-shirt was stained with sweat from the last time he stepped out. The pores of his nose oozed with grease from the mushroom pizza he’d had for lunch.

The phone popped again, beeping him out of his lead-headedness.

Zap Messenger, he rasped.

Rayo.

Donde estás, papi?

Feefty-nine y Lexington.

Underend riffled through the stack of quadruplicate tickets on the fake-wood desk, glanced at the computer monitor. Okay. Pickup at Sony/BMG Records, Fifty-fifth and Madison. You got two packages, one for Rolling Stone at 745 Fifth; one for Spin, 205 Lex.

Sony/BMG. They owned the rights to the third and fourth albums by Underend’s old band, the Gutter Astronomers, which had come out on Permanent Records, a short-lived boutique subsidiary of RCA back before RCA got swallowed by BMG and BMG got swallowed by Sony. Underend hadn’t played much on the fourth album. The memory of the A&R man’s voice stabbed. You don’t count for shit. He didn’t remember much else about that record, part from liquor and drugs, part from whatever brain-chemical miracle cauterizes bad memories.

The phone beeped again. Mobile at 46th and Madison. Black Dave at 75 Varick. Checked the e-mail, see what runs were coming in, filled out tickets. Headcheese again, at 30 Rock, send him to 1290 Sixth. Critical at 19th and Fifth. Wipeout at Citicorp. Terry T at ABC on West 67th.

Five-fifteen finally rolled around. The phones slowed except for a few last-minute runs. The messengers drifted in, sweaty, drained, animated, cell phones clipped to their waists, handing decks of tickets to Underend. Headcheese, a hillbilly anarchist with long brown dreadlocks tied back over baggy rags of indeterminate gray/black/green, his voice an East Tennessee twang seasoned with hip-hop Brooklynese. Kryptonite, from the Bronx River projects, dressed in serious cycle-geek gear, padded spandex shorts and a skintight, lurid yellow, round-collared top with a Pirelli Tires logo. His white counterpart, Critical, who’d argue vehemently about toe-clips and Bush’s role in the 9/11 plot. Reek, a crusty punk in a skull-graphic t-shirt and duct-taped boots, from the same Brooklyn loft as Headcheese. He’d gotten his name after a woman at an ad agency sent over an e-mail complaining about having to share an elevator with a messenger who had an aroma of personal hygiene inappropriate for a place of business. Billy Zap the owner couldn’t keep from laughing when he read it to Reek, even as he suggested that he take a shower at least enough so ya don’t bother my customers. Black Dave and White Dave. Mobile, a big hip-hop dude with baby dreads in a Miami Dolphins jersey. In last after catching a run to 110 Wall was Rayo, a short, wispy-mustachioed Mexican cat the color of an upright bass, sweating through a burnt-orange ING Financial Services t-shirt.

Underend separated the tickets—one copy for the messenger, one for billing—and handed them back, clipping them into individual piles for Billy to give to the accountant. Shut down the computer, the screen going black with relief.

He stepped out of the storefront and lit a cigarette. The menthol cooled his mouth; the nicotine cooled his nerves. Down the block he walked past three homeless men dozing on piles of dirty bedding under a construction scaffold. He headed for the subway, joining a river of office workers, women in long rippling skirts and upscale flip-flops, women in thin white pants outlining their asses. The Stones played in his head, his mood dripping matte black as he watched the girls in their summer clothes. He flowed downstairs to the L train, into the harsh oven air on the narrow, crowded platform. Five minutes later there was light at the end of the tunnel. A Brooklyn-bound L. It was already too crowded to get a seat.

Four! Stops! Till Brooklyn! Good old Beastie Boys, I don’t need an iPod, I got a jukebox in my brain.

Underend edged into the car’s aisle, grabbed a spot on one of the sidebars, stared up at the ads. DON’T LET IMPOTENCE RUIN YOUR SEX LIFE … GIVE YOUR FOOT A BREAK FROM PAIN … 212-MARGARITA … LOS ABOGADOS NUMERO UNO PARA LOS HISPANOS HERIDOS EN ACIDENTES … MINIMALLY INVASIVE BUNION SURGERY.

The window was riddled with scratches that vaguely formed a name, a pathetic echo of old-school graffiti. He missed the old days of graffiti, not the black marker inside-the-car scribbles, but the murals that covered the train sides, big eye-popping balloon and slanted-block letters in ghetto-floral shades of purple and yellow and red and green. The other side of the car had a greenish strip of posters for Mitchum Anti-Perspirant. An old Velvet Underground song clicked on in his inner iPod, about an aging actress once in a movie with Robert Mitchum and now forgotten by everyone except an obsessed fanboy.

Yeah, I’m over the hill, too, but not looking for love. Not with any effort anyway. Too hard to find and too much melodrama when you do, quickly succumbing to boredom or civil war.

He got off at Lorimer, debated whether to walk or wait to take the G one stop. Laziness won. He was tired. Eyeing his reflection in the window as he got up, a hangdog-looking dude with thinning, closecropped gray-black hair, olive skin, a gray pinstriped vest over a black t-shirt looked back at him.

He lived just north of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway on a block of old brick tenements and hospital-green frame houses. He didn’t feel like cooking so he just copped a pastrami sandwich and a quart of orange juice from the corner bodega. The Mets game was on at seven. St. Louis. In the street a bunch of girls jumped rope and chanted to a boombox blasting Hollaback Girl. He’d never seen much in No Doubt—weak pop-ska-punk band, why listen to them when there were the Specials and the Skatalites?—but this Gwen Stefani tune was catchy as fuck, like an ’80s hip-hop jam. And no woman wants to be a guy’s second choice.

He unlocked the red door to the building, climbed the last few steps of his journey to the third floor. The pills clanked in his pockets. He’d found out he had hepatitis C back in ’98, three months after he’d finally gotten seriously clean.

Yeah, they got me on all this pharmaceutical shit now. No more dope, not one speck of China white or Afghani brown. No more booze, wine, beer, Jack, tequila, vodka. Not a drop. No more coke. No more reefer—well, that one wasn’t as strict, but it was still a slip. My liver can’t take any more. Well, thank whatever higher power there is that I didn’t get the HIV.

It’s Paxil and Klonopin time now. That shit can knock you out as much as dope, especially the Klonopin suppositories they prescribed for severe anxiety attacks. You won’t panic, you’ll just… sleep. And coffee and cigarettes at the meetings. Weeknights weren’t bad. He was usually too tired to be bored. It’s the weekends when there’s two days to fill. That’s when he usually went to meetings, getting jacked up on burnt-tasting coffee, stepping out for cigarettes.

The apartment was peacefully sunny. The fire escape window looked west from the back of the building onto a courtyard of weed trees and an old Polish woman gardening. Underend twisted the chair so it faced the TV, moved the table closer so he could have the food within reach, unwrapped the sandwich and opened the juice. When he was finished he collected the garbage and threw it out, washed his hands, and got out his bass, a sixties-vintage black hollow-body. He strummed idly while watching the game.

Two and two to Pujols. Curve ball—just misses. Three and two. Martinez’s got good velocity tonight but he’s a little wild. Here’s the payoff—Line drive hit to third! Wright’s got it.

The screen faded to a Cadillac Escalade commercial. Led Zeppelin’s Rock and Roll. The drumbeat they stole from Little Richard. Zeppelin were shameless thieves, nicking licks from anyone from Muddy Waters to an obscure Bleecker Street singer-songwriter named Jake Holmes. Now here they were shilling one of their best songs for luxury SUVs. Underend hammered out the bassline. The hollow-body sounded thin unplugged, but what did he need more for? Music really sucked these days. It was boring. The last time he’d felt any excitement was around Nirvana but that was ancient history and the hype around them was fuckin’ annoying. No wonder the kid offed himself. That other band, the Slip Kids, the one everyone said was the best band to come out of New York since the ’70s—they sounded like an ’80s Bowie rip-off, not even one of his good albums. No energy and lots of attitude.

What was the point? It was like when you’re fourteen and everything about girls, about sex, is this magical mystery. You wonder what a pussy feels like, what a nipple feels like, just what do girls think about and what do they feel? Rock’n’roll was like that, too. You’d hear somebody playing guitar and you’d wonder how they got that sound. You’d have no fuckin’ clue, like a little kid looking at a computer. It was magic and you wanted it. Like when your girlfriend slipped her tongue into your mouth, you wanted it to go on forever. When you heard Mott or Lou Reed or the Stones and you wondered what made it move like that, what made it wail like that, what made it bite like that. Now you’re just a played-out old hooker; it’s all transactions, A to B to C. Ho hum, another squelch session.

It was magic. Like what was it that made Pretty Vacant sound like all the fury in your brain boiled down to sound, way more than just a couple of A octaves thumped out on a P-Bass and a Les Paul, and it still made you want to live? It’s all product now, like that fuckin’ billboard with the guy who looks like Joe Strummer at [e-mail]. Hey, if they wanna be really bad-ass, they could have made it 666. Yeah, then they’d get accused of encouraging Satanism, and Hillary Clinton starts a Congressional investigation.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change. Well, the reality is that I can’t change shit. Stinking thinking. Stop it.

He was better off than Rayo, who had a wife and two kids in Oaxaca he hadn’t seen in a year and a half, sent them whatever money he saved by sharing a room with three other guys in Sunset Park. Underend had to be grateful to Billy Zap for hooking him up with the job. Billy knew him from back in the day when Underend was in the Gutter Astronomers and Billy was drummer in the Flaming Roaches, doubling on guitar. Billy hadn’t been much of a user, just a little coke, but everybody else in his band got high. Unlike most people who didn’t use, he had some compassion for the ones who did. Or at least he could sense that Underend was serious about getting his life back, not just trying to conjure up some juice from a sucked-out well of trust.

Bottom of the fourth. Vizcaino dives to his right to stop a shot by Endy Chavez, then flips to second for the force. Top of the fifth. Pujols hits a solo homer. St. Louis up 1-0.

We really need punk rock now, he thought. All the apocalyptic shit we were singing about back then is true. War all over the world. Religious fanatics crashing planes into buildings. Soldiers with machine guns in the subways. Media made for morons, propaganda brainwashing and celebrity spew. No future. No future for you. Underend played a verse and a half of God Save the Queen, then flopped his hand away. We need it, maaaan.

Billy Zap still played around, doing gigs with jazz and rockabilly bands, occasionally a recording session with a singer-songwriter. There wasn’t any real money in it—these days, you couldn’t even get a gig in a pass-the-bucket bar-blues band—but he liked to keep his hand in. Wipeout did, too—well, Wipeout would play any gig anywhere. He used to be the couch-surfing embodiment of the What do you call a guitar player without a girlfriend? Homeless! joke. He’d even been gigging five weeks after the accident that got him his name. A woman from Cresskill, New Jersey, panicky about piloting 5,500 pounds of Chevy Tahoe up Sixth Avenue in light snow, had bulled into a right turn. She’d stopped short in time to avoid obliterating Wipeout, but knocked him skidding onto a patch of ice, breaking his left arm in two places. It was like, ‘Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha—wipeout, baby!’ he’d recounted at the office later.

Underend didn’t want to play like that. Too much hassle for a few crumbs. It was dark outside. Martinez went to 3-and-2 on Rolen, then got him to fly out to right. Underend lit another cigarette. Encarnación struck out.

Yeah, Step Nine. They say you’re supposed to apologize to everyone you fucked over while you were using. I wasn’t a thief so I didn’t rob my friends… well, no one I cared about anyway. The only one I really owe it to is Tina, and that wasn’t drugs, or at least it wasn’t because she was in between me and getting high. It was because I didn’t have the guts to leave too after the rest of them drove her out of the band. What good would it do now, other than make me feel like I tried? The damage is long since done and it ain’t getting undone.

Bottom of the fifth. José Reyes hit one up the middle for a single. Underend bent some high notes on the G-string. Lo Duca up. Takes two balls, fouls one back, and then rips one into the gap for a double. Second and third, none out, all right! The crowd at Shea is getting into it. The Cards gather on the mound. They walk Beltran to load the bases for Carlos Delgado.

Underend slid up to the D a few times, twanged the Spoonful F-D riff, then hit a low F as Beltran trotted to first and Delgado trudged to the plate. C’mon, ya fuckin’ has-been. Who you calling a has-been? Look in the fuckin’ mirror. The first pitch was a ball. Delgado fouled the next one off, high back of first. Another ball, low and away. Reyes led off third, leaning toward home.

The phone beeped. Fuck. Let the machine see who it is. This is Underend. You’re rolling after the beep.

Hey, Underend, how you doin’. This is Mickey. I’m out in L.A. Jesus fuckin’ Christ. The lead singer from the Gutter Astronomers. The fuck he want?

Underend picked up midstream. A cold shell instantly surrounded him. Hi, he said from deep within it. He knew he sounded really sullen. Delgado swung and missed. Underend took a swing at being sociable while protecting the plate. What’s up?

I got an offer for us to do a reunion tour.

You what?

Mick jumped into full-on spiel. "Yeah, I was in the club a couple nights ago, and I ran into Alan Bryson. He’s been in the business since way back, he used to work for Lizard Records back in the day. He used to book Pulaski Hall before he moved out here, and he remembers us. He said we were one of the most underappreciated bands of the ’80s, said the time is ripe. And you know we were. You hear people say the Slip Kids and the Strokes are the best bands to come out of New York since the ’70s. Well, what about us? He told me, ‘I could name a whole bunch of great bands that never got what they deserved, but you guys stand out. You were really unique, people should totally give you your props, and the time is now.’"

Fuckin’ Mick. Always gotta give you the sales pitch before he tells you what’s going on.

…And he’s got a new label. He said, ‘Every band from back then is doing reunions. There’s a whole new generation of kids who are hungry for it. Why don’t you get the guys back together?’ He said they’d love to reissue the old stuff and hook us up with a tour this fall. I already talked to Scott, and he’s down.

I can’t really quit my job. I’m fucked without one. My rent’s $950.

You still working for Billy Zap? He’s a musician, he’d understand. He’d be glad to let you go out for a bit.

I can’t just leave it to go sleep on people’s floors again.

Alan’s got connections up the ass. We’re not going to be playing holes in the wall. People out here, people who come in the club, they remember us all the time. We could get hall shows, not little dive bars. College gigs, too, they pay really well. Anyway, what are you doing now that’s better?

I don’t even have gear anymore. All I’ve got’s an old Hagstrom hollow-body bass, and a little 10-watt Peavey practice amp. My old amp’s busted.

What happened to that old Epiphone you used to have? The red one? That was a fuckin’ awesome-sounding bass.

I sold it for 250 bucks.

Aw, maaan! You know how much those are worth now? Easy a grand. I heard one went for three grand on eBay.

Well, I was in a bad way. And I got it for $125—remember when I found it in the pawnshop on Atlantic and Fourth? So I came out ahead.

What about the other one? The black one?

The Tele? I sold that first. I got six bills. I wasn’t so bad off then.

Mickey Sapirstein couldn’t understand. From his lead-singer perspective, these guys treated their instruments like a cross between their cocks and their cars. They’d spend hours nattering about arcane details of gear—split-coil pickups! chickenhead knobs!—and if you asked them to turn down so you wouldn’t blow your throat out screaming by the third song, they’d act like you wanted them to cut their balls off with a broken bottle and auction them off to raise money for the PMRC censorship campaign. And then they’d let them go for next to nothing. For what? Two weeks’ worth of pizza and beer and dope money?

Don’t be too hard on him, Mickey thought, I need this, too. His own luck hadn’t been so spectacular either since the band broke up. One solo EP that got a few decent reviews but didn’t sell much, some acting gigs, another band that gigged around L.A. in the ’90s, getting signed and doing an album but never hitting the alternative jackpot, and now this bartending gig at the Moto Lounge in Silverlake. It paid well, better than music had most of the time. He could make $300 in tips on a good night. And lots of people—some pretty big—remembered him and the Gutter Astronomers. But nobody was going to immortalize him for mixing Cosmopolitans and Dirty Martinis.

Well, you can get a decent bass cheap now, right? And it’s not like it used to be, when we had to hump gear all over the country. A lot of the clubs and venues rent backline now, they get a couple Marshalls and an SVT and a drum kit.

Who’re we going to get for a guitar player? Tina’s not going to want to do it, and I don’t want to play with Jen or Jack.

That was the tough one. Getting Scott Crowley the drummer to re-up was easy, Mickey thought, he’d never quit playing. That Underend had asked who we are going to get and not who would we get was telling—he was in, he wanted it even though he wouldn’t admit it yet, he’d say no if you asked him flat out. Tina had barely spoken to either him or Underend since she quit the band—the acrimony possibly stemmed from Mickey calling her an incompetent slut. And Underend had never really gotten along with Jack, the guitarist who’d superseded Tina during the sessions for their fourth album, or Jen, the keyboard player they added around the same time.

Listen, this is about the future, not the past. We need to move on. We don’t want to spend our whole lives wallowing in bitterness, stabbing ourselves to death with old grudges. This is about whether we’re going to play the music for a new generation of people, whether we’re going to get the Gutter Astronomers the place we deserve instead of being in the dustbin of rock’n’roll history. So I’m not gonna ask you to say yes or no right now. But think about how we can make this happen in a way that’s best for all of us. Okay?

I guess so, Underend strained out.

All right, cool. I’ll give ya a call soon.

Underend dropped the phone, missing the cradle. He bent over to pick it up, an awkward stretch, cursing. His heart was hammering like a death-metal kick drum. What the fuck did I get myself into? It was like when you had an ex you swore you’d never speak to again, out of revenge or self-preservation. She’d fucked around on you, cut you down in the way that only somebody really close can, and now she’s back and you ease into it like it’s the most comfortable thing in the world. Even though the senior voices in your head are intoning DON’T TRUST THIS DON’T TRUST THIS, there’s other voices, clear strands of infatuation filament wrapped around you and pulling back in. You remember what it was like when it was good and you haven’t been that far above the ground since. There was a magnet sucking him in, like the tattoo on the left side of Amanda’s chest that started in the hollow below her collarbone and inexorably led down into the whirlpool around her nipple. And he was getting hard thinking about it. It’s like hepatitis. Once it gets in your blood you’re never the same.

On the TV it was the bottom of the seventh, the Mets down 5 to 2.

He shoved a Klonopin up his ass and went to sleep.

Chapter 2

1979

On the day in 1979 when he rode a Long Island Railroad train from Ronkonkoma to Brooklyn, Underend had felt like he was Muddy Waters arriving in Chicago. Leaving the boredom of suburbia as the train coursed through Bed-Stuy, clicking past blocks and blocks of abandoned buildings, the burnt-beamed ruins of an African-themed bar, and the station platform where B.T. Express posed for their Do It Till You’re Satisfied album cover. The city was a walking disaster and a wonderland. It was a place that teemed with life, not like the Island where everybody was locked up in their cars and televisions. He remembered waiting for a subway on the way home from CBGB one night and there were three black kids dancing on the platform to Chic’s Ahh—Freak out! song on a boombox the size of a Fender Twin Reverb amp. Block parties popped with conga drums. And coming out of the crumbling tenements of the Lower East Side was the most exciting rock’n’roll ever, music that shook the rails like the West Side IRT express train, and he was going to be part of it.

He sat by a window, clutching his blue-sparkle Univox bass—a cheap knockoff of the Mosrite Ventures guitar Johnny Ramone played—and keeping an eye on his other possessions, a frayed green backpack and a small Fender amp. The city wasn’t like people on the Island said it was, but you still had to watch your back. People on the Island bragged about how long it had been since they’d been to the city. They acted like if you rode the subways you’d never be seen again, that your charred bones would be found at the bottom of an iron pot in a rubble-strewn vacant lot where they cooked honky chitlins and arroz con blanquito. But you still had to be careful. The lowlifes could smell when you were from out of town, when you were spacy or lost, when you had something to take off. Like the scene in The Harder They Come when Ivan comes to Kingston and the guy runs off with his stuff. Underend had the bass, the amp, $300 in cash, and a check from his mother for $500 more. That was supposed to be his apartment money when he got a job.

He got off at Atlantic Avenue and trucked underground to the subway, heading out to his grandmother’s apartment on Avenue P. The plan was that he would sleep on her foldout couch until he got an apartment. He hoped that was soon. There was no privacy, it was an hour from the city at night, and she nagged him all the time.

Why do you have to wear black all the time? It’s summer, it’s so hot.

I’m not that hot. It doesn’t bother me.

When are you going back to school? she demanded. You don’t want to be a nothing all your life.

Grandma, I’m going to establish residency in the city, he said back, tinged with exasperated whine. Then I can go to Hunter or City or Brooklyn.