The Drummer's Confession

I flubbed the fill for the third time and I knew it before Jared even stopped the tape, because my sticks had gone into the toms a half beat late and my hands felt like they belonged to somebody else, some nervous stranger sitting behind my kit wearing my rings. The red light went off in the booth and through the glass I could see Jared take his glasses off and rub his eyes, which is what he does when he's counting to ten, and I've watched him do it maybe four hundred times over the three years he's been engineering for us, so I knew exactly where I stood.

"Let's take fifteen," Vern said from the couch by the mixing desk, and he said it in that flat calm voice that I have learned, over six years of working with the man, to be more afraid of than shouting. "Sherman, come here a minute."

Ben glanced over at me from his spot by the amps with his guitar still hanging off his shoulder, and he gave me a little look, and I gave him a little look back, and then I walked across the studio floor feeling about four feet tall. I'm forty-three years old, I've been playing drums since I was nineteen, and walking across a room to get chewed out still makes my stomach do the thing it did in gym class.

Vern pulled me over near the coffee machine in the lounge area, out of Jared's earshot, and he stood there with his arms crossed and his reading glasses pushed up on his head the way he always does, like someone who's about to give you bad news and wants to be fair about it. "Sherman, I'm gonna say this once and then we're gonna drop it," he said. "We've got one day left on this booking. One. The tour is booked, the label is calling me twice a week, and you have flubbed that same fill three times this morning. What is going on with you?"

"Nothing, man, I just had a rough night, I'll get it on the next take," I said, and even as I said it I knew it sounded exactly like what it was, which was a dodge.

"Sherman." He took his glasses off his head and folded them, which is a thing he does when he means business. "I hired you six years ago. I put you and Ben in the same band because I heard something there. You've been roommates on every tour we've done and there's never been one ounce of drama out of either of you, and I thank God for that every day. But I need you to hear me. If you can't get your head in the room by this afternoon, I will bring in a session drummer and you can watch the summer tour from your couch. I don't want to do that. But I will."

And there it was, laid out on the counter next to the coffee machine like a dead thing, and all I could do was nod at it. "Yeah. Okay. I hear you," I said, and he patted my shoulder once, twice, the way your dad does when he's done yelling, and he walked back out to the floor to go stand near the desk and look important.

I didn't go back out with him. I went the other way instead, into the lounge, and I shut the door partway and sat down on the old couch that smells like forty years of other bands' takeout food, and I stared at the wall where somebody from a band I've never heard of had pinned a setlist from a show in 2011. The vending machine hummed. Somewhere out on the floor Jared was talking levels with Ben, their voices muffled through the drywall, and I sat there doing the math on my own life, which is a bad habit of mine and always has been.

Because here's the actual problem, the one I wasn't going to say to Vern, the one I've been carrying around for four years like a stone in my boot. The fill I keep flubbing is in the bridge of a song Ben wrote last winter, a slow one, and it's not even a hard fill, any second-year drum student could play it. But it comes right after the line in the second verse where his voice drops low, the line about wanting something you can't ask for, and every single time we get to that spot I look up through the glass and Ben has his eyes closed and his head tipped back a little, and my hands stop being my hands.

That's it. This is the complete ugly truth. I have been in love with my lead guitarist for about four years now and I have said nothing to anyone, not to him, not to my sister, not to the guy who cuts my hair, nobody, because saying it out loud would wreck the one good thing in my life and I'm too much of a coward to gamble with it.

So instead I flub fills and get threatened with replacement in a break room by a man holding folded reading glasses, and the universe finds that very funny, I'm sure.

I got up and fed quarters into the vending machine and bought a coffee that tasted like it had been brewed during the previous administration of this building, whatever decade that was, and I sat back down and kept doing the math. If I lose this band I lose the band, fine, I'd survive, I've got a day job I could go back to full time and an apartment I like okay. But if I told Ben and it went bad, I'd lose the band anyway, and the roommate thing, and the six years of friendship, and the way he texts me dumb pictures of dogs when we're apart, all of it, gone in one conversation. Versus the current situation, which is me slowly rotting from the inside on a couch in a warehouse lounge at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday.

Real good options, both of them.

The door opened and I looked up expecting Vern coming back for round two, but it was Ben, and he had two of the little paper cups of coffee in his hand and his guitar still slung on, pushed around behind his back like a shopping bag. He's forty-one, two years younger than me, and he still has all his hair, which I hold against him regularly, and he looked at me sitting there slumped on the couch with my vending machine coffee and his whole face did the concerned thing.

"Vern's on the phone with the label," he said, shutting the door behind him with his hip. "Jared's resetting the mics. So we've got maybe ten minutes where nobody's watching." He came over and set one of the cups on the arm of the couch next to me and then sat down on the other end, turning a little to face me. "Okay. What's going on with you? And don't give me the rough night thing, because you've said that three days in a row and I was at your place two of those nights watching you fall asleep on the couch during Jeopardy."

I picked up the coffee cup mostly so my hands would have a job, and I looked at him, at this man I have shared hotel rooms and tour vans and a bad futon with for six years, and I felt the stone in my boot moving up toward my throat, and I thought, well. Here we go, one way or the other.

I took a sip of the coffee and it was somehow both lukewarm and scalding at the same time, which I didn't know was possible, and I said, "It's the song, man, the bridge, I don't know, I keep rushing the fill. It's a mechanical thing. I'll fix it."

Ben didn't say anything to that, just sat there with his paper cup balanced on his knee, and I know this man, I have watched this man across a drum kit for six years, and I know what his silences mean, and this one meant he wasn't buying a word of it.

"It's not a mechanical thing," he said finally, quiet, the way he talks when he's been thinking about something on the walk over. "You've been rushing that fill for three days and you've never rushed a fill in your life. You play it fine when we run the bridge alone, and then when we go back to the top of the tune you fall apart again. That's not hands, Sherman. That's something else."

"It's hands."

"Sherman."

"Ben." I put the cup down because I was about to gesture with it and I didn't want to wear the rest of it. "It's fine. I'll get it today. Vern gave me one more day, I'll get it, we'll finish the record, we'll do the tour, everybody goes home happy. Let's not make it a whole thing."

"See, and that's the part I don't get," he said, and he set his own cup down on the floor and turned more toward me, one leg folded up on the couch, and his voice wasn't angry, which was somehow worse, it was just steady and a little tired. "You'd rather sit here and feed me a line about mechanics than just tell me what's actually eating you. Six years, man. Six years of rooms like this one. I've watched you puke in a parking lot in Tucson and you told me the truth about that by the end of the night. I've sat with you when your dad died and you told me things about him you don't tell your sister. And now there's this thing, this one thing, that's got you flinching every time I look at you, and you won't give me a single inch of it."

"That's not fair."

"Which part?"

"The flinching part," I said, and immediately knew I'd said too much, because his eyebrows went up a little, just a little, and I watched him decide whether to let it go, and he didn't. Of course he didn't. He wrote the line about wanting something you can't ask for. The man knows what a buried thing looks like.

"You do flinch," he said, softer now. "Every time I close my eyes during the bridge. I've felt it for days. I thought I was doing something, singing it wrong, some production thing, and then I watched you from the control room this morning and you weren't even looking at your kit, you were looking at me, and your whole face was," and he stopped, and rubbed his jaw, and didn't finish the sentence, and thank God for that, because whatever my face was doing this morning I don't think I could have survived hearing it described out loud.

"So what was I doing," I said, and it came out sharper than I meant, defensive, ugly. "Go ahead. Diagnose me. Since everybody in this building's got a theory today."

"I don't have a theory," he said. "I've got a question, and you can hate me for it if you want, but I'm gonna ask it anyway, because we've got ten minutes and I'm not spending them pretending. Is it me? Is the thing you can't say about me?"

And the lounge went very quiet, just the vending machine humming and Jared out on the floor doing something with a cable, and I sat there with my rings suddenly feeling very heavy on my fingers, doing one more piece of math, the last piece, and the answer came out before I could vote on it.

"Four years," I said. "It's been four years, and I never said anything because I didn't want to blow up the band, and I didn't want to blow up us, the roommates thing, the dogs, all of it, and instead I've been flubbing a fill any drum student could play because you wrote a line about wanting something you can't ask for and then you go and close your eyes like that and I can't, Ben, I literally cannot keep my hands working when you do that." I heard myself laughing a little, this awful dry laugh. "So yeah. That's it. That's the thing. I'm in love with you and I have been for about four years and apparently it costs me my job today, so, congratulations to everybody."

I looked at my coffee. I looked at the setlist from 2011. I did not look at Ben, because I had just emptied out the entire contents of my chest onto a couch that