Drummer's Downbeat

I'm coiling cables again. That's my whole life lately, coiling cables and making sure nobody loses a pedal wrench. The band's been in this studio for six hours and we're on take eleven of a song that should've taken two takes. The guys are in the live room arguing about a bridge, and I'm back here in the storage room with the amps and the dust, being the reliable one. Frank, the guy who fixes things. Frank, the guy with the clipboard energy.

I sit down on the old couch that smells like dust and old foam and listen. Through the wall I can hear Robby counting off again, one two three four, and the drummer's version of complaining, which is hitting his snare too hard on purpose. He's twenty-six, four years younger than me, and he's the only person in this band who has never once needed me to fix anything for him. I like that about him more than I probably should.

Here's my confession, since nobody's listening. For the last three weeks Robby has been looking at me sideways. Little looks. During load-in he held the door and said "after you, boss" with this grin, and during soundcheck he watched me over the top of his cymbal stand for a full verse. I told myself it was nothing. I'm good at telling myself things like that. I've been good at it my whole career, if you can call thirty-something hookups with strangers in strange cities a career.

But tonight I'm tired, and tired is dangerous for me. Because when I'm tired I stop being the guy with the clipboard and start being the guy who wonders what it would feel like to just let go. To do something dumb on purpose. To grab the wrong end of the night and see what happens.

The door opens and it's Robby. He's got sweat on his neck and he's wearing that sleeveless shirt he wears when he's been hammering the kit for an hour. He heads straight for the shelf by the amp wall, the one where we keep the random tools, and starts digging.

"You seen the spare drum key?" he says over his shoulder.

"Bottom tray, under the tape." I point without getting up. Very helpful. Very clipboard.

He digs, finds it, and then doesn't leave. That's the part I keep coming back to later, the part where he found it and just stood there, turning it over in his fingers like it was a coin.

"You know you've coiled that same cable three times, right?" he says. "I've been watching you through the crack."

"You've been watching me?"

"Well, the door's open. It's not my fault you're back here doing inventory in the middle of a session." He grins at me. "God, Frank. Loosen up. The song's a turd either way, we all know it, and you're back here alphabetizing extension cords."

"I'm not alphabetizing."

"Close enough." He sits down on the couch, right next to my coiled cables, right next to me. "Why are you so serious all the time? Genuinely. I've been wondering."

I don't have a good answer, so I give him a shrug. "Somebody has to be. If I don't babysit the load-out schedule, Dev leaves his bass at the venue and we drive three hours to come get it. That happened in Dayton. I don't talk about Dayton."

"Yeah, yeah, dependable Frank." He leans his head back against the couch cushion and looks at the ceiling. "You ever get bored of it?"

"Every day," I say, before my brain can stop my mouth. That's the truth, and it surprises both of us a little, judging by how fast he turns his head.

"Huh," he says. "So what would dependable Frank do if he weren't being dependable? Hypothetical."

I look at him. He looks at me. And there's a second, an actual measurable second, where I could say something real. Something like, hypothetically, he'd come over there and find out what your neck tastes like. Instead I laugh and say, "He'd probably get a normal job and sleep eight hours."

"You're such a liar," Robby says, but he's still smiling, and the smile has changed. It's smaller now, more sideways. "You know what I think? I think you like rules because breaking one scares the hell out of you."

"That's a cheap shot from a guy who broke a bass drum pedal in Knoxville."

"Different thing entirely." He tosses the drum key up and catches it. "So. Bridge take. They're gonna call us back in five and argue about it for another hour, and then I'm gonna hit things until they give up, and then we eat gas station food and drive to the hotel. That's the night, that's the plan. Exciting stuff."

"Thrilling," I say.

"Right?" He stands up, pockets the drum key, and pauses at the door with his hand on the frame. He doesn't turn all the way around, just enough that I can see the edge of his grin. "Hey, Frank. When the session wraps, I'm gonna be back here. Not looking for a drum key, either. Just saying."

Then he's gone, and I'm sitting on a dusty couch with my heart doing something unprofessional in my chest, and the whole room smells like dust and him, sweat and drum oil, and I pick up the same damn cable for the fourth time because my hands need a job that isn't shaking.

* * *

The bridge gets fixed. Of course it does, because that's my job, I walk into the live room and say the magic words, "What if the bass just holds the root," and suddenly everybody's a genius and the take is good. We do two more for safety and then Dev calls it, and it's past one in the morning and everybody's packing up. I handle it all on autopilot. Cables, cases, road cases, the whole ritual. Robby takes his time tearing down, which he never does, and I catch him glancing at me twice over the kit while he's loosening his hi-hat clutch.

By the time the last of them is out the front door, Dev honking goodbye from the van like a lunatic, the studio is quiet except for the dying hum of the console fans. I tell the guys I'll lock up after one last check of the back rooms. That's even true. Mostly true.

The storage room light is on. Robby's sitting on the couch, drum key on the shelf where it belongs, hands in his lap, looking way calmer than I feel.

"So," he says. "Dependable Frank. Last chance to alphabetize something and run."

"Shut the door," I say, and my voice comes out lower than I planned.

He shuts the door. Then he just looks at me, and I can tell he's giving me the out, one last one, because Robby's a lot of things but he's never once been a guy who'd push somebody into anything.

"You sure about this?" he asks. "Because once it's us, it's us, you know? Band's gotta see each other every day either way."

"Nothing about the band or the job rides on this," I say. "If either of us wants to stop, any time, we stop and we're still bandmates. Separate."

"Separate," he agrees. "Good."

"I've been sure since soundcheck," I say, which is a lie, Dayton was the bass, but he laughs, and then I cross the room and sit down next to him and the couch cushion dips and his knee is against mine.

"Okay," he says softly. "So what do you want, Frank? Say it. I want to hear you actually say it."

And nobody's ever asked me that before, not like that, not plain. I take a breath and I say it.

"You," I say. "I want you. I've wanted you for three weeks and I've been pretending it's about load times." My face is hot. I don't care. "There. Said it."

Robby grins, that slow sideways grin, and turns his whole body toward me on the couch. "Okay, see, that wasn't so hard, was it?"

"Shut up."

"Three weeks?" he says. "Frank. It's been three weeks for me too. You walked into the load-in with that clipboard and that little frown and I thought, oh no. Oh no, that one's trouble." He's closer now. I don't remember him getting closer, but his shoulder is touching mine and his face is inches from my face and I can smell the beer he had at ten, one beer, that's all any of us had, so his eyes are clear and steady on mine. "You ever get tired of being good on the road?"

The question knocks the wind out of me a little, because it's the same one I was going to ask him, the one I rehearsed in the van like a moron. "All the time," I say. "Every hotel. Every soundcheck. I do the math on everything, rooms, gas, setlists, and it's fine, it's safe, and I hate that it's safe."

"So break something," he says quietly. "Small one. Just one."

I put my hand on his hip.

That is the entire move, my hand on the warm skin above the waistband of his jeans where his sleeveless shirt has ridden up, and he doesn't pull away. He leans into it. He actually leans his weight into my palm like my hand is something he's been waiting to rest against, and he lets out a breath, and I feel it, the little give of his body.

"Oh," he says. "Okay. Yeah. That's..."

"Good?" I ask. "Tell me if it's not."

"It's good. Don't stop, I didn't say stop, I said..." He laughs at himself. "Man, I've watched you coil cables for three weeks and I had a whole plan and now I can't remember any of it."

"Was the plan good?"

"The plan was you doing exactly this."

"Then the plan's going great," I say, and I slide my hand around to the small of his back, and he comes off the cushion an inch toward me, and now we're doing that thing where two guys are three inches apart and both waiting for the other one to close it. Except he asked me to break something, so I do. I lean in and I kiss him.

He kisses back immediately, no hesitation, one hand coming up to the side of my jaw like he's done this a thousand times, which I'm pretty sure he hasn't. His mouth is warm and he tastes like the gas station coffee he nursed through the last two takes, and his other hand finds my forearm and grips it, hard, like he's anchoring himself.

We break apart for air and he's got this look on his face, half laugh half something hungrier. "Okay," he says. "Okay, wow. So the hypothetical guy. The one who'd find out what my neck tastes like." He tips his head to the side, offering, and my brain whites out for a second. "That was a hypothetical, right? Earlier?"

"You heard that?"

"I hear everything, I'm a drummer." He pulls his shirt over his head in one motion, no ceremony, just does it, and his chest is right there, warm from six hours of hammering a kit, a little sheen of sweat still on him. "Go ahead. Break the rule."

So I lean down and I put my mouth on his neck, right below the jaw, and I feel his pulse jump against my lips, and he makes this low sound that goes straight through me. I work my way down, slow, letting myself take my time because the band is gone and the door is shut and nobody needs anything from me for the first time in what feels like months. I get to his collarbone and he's got his fingers in my hair now, not pushing, just holding on.

"Frank," he says, and it comes out rough. "Hey. Tell me what you want next. I keep saying yes to stuff you haven't asked yet."

I lift my head. He's flushed, lips a little red, and he's watching my face like the answer matters to him, which does something to me that I'll be thinking about in hotel rooms for a long time.

"I want to get my hands on you," I say. "All of you. And I want you to touch