Jimmy tunes my drums and talks to me about apricots. He’s been eating a lot of them lately. He tells me they’ve been great for his eyes and have improved his digestion, which has been knotty since he stopped doing drugs. He tells me they’ve cleared up his skin, and I can’t help it — I scan him for imperfections, finding them everywhere. It’s been fifteen years at least since the last time we saw each other in the bar that was also a laundromat where his band played their last gig before moving to a bigger, dirtier city; he looks like he’s unzipped his skin and draped it on the skeleton of a slightly smaller person.
He’s sitting on my drum throne with my high tom on his lap, inspecting the shell inside and out. He’s got a drum key on a chain around his neck. The shoulders of his black t-shirt are dusted in white specks, and he’s telling me how he eats dried apricots by the bushelful, how he can’t seem to get enough of them and that he doesn’t know why.
My wife and daughter are out of the house — I made sure to schedule his visit for a time when I knew they’d be away. It makes me feel guilty because I know that I love him and it seems like a transparent slight, but what am I supposed to do? I love them, too. If he notices the insult, he doesn’t mention it.
Jimmy holds the shell up to his face and breathes in deeply, keeps the air in his lungs, lets it out. His face is ecstatic. “Mahogany,” he says, opening his eyes. We laugh, and I’m glad that he came, sorry that his dad has died, sorry that I cleared the house before his visit, sorry that I didn’t reach out to him until I couldn’t avoid it.
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I passed him as I was walking into the arts center and almost didn’t recognize him. He was sitting on the concrete steps, waiting for a ride, intently reading Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking. I’d walked right past him but stopped and turned, then stood there studying the curve of his back, his thin white leg poking out of shorts, and wondered if I should just keep walking, pretend I hadn’t noticed him. The last thing I’d heard about Jimmy — the last thing almost any of us had heard about him — is that he’d crashed a borrowed car full of his gear on the way to a show, that the car had rolled completely over and come to rest wheels down in a cloud of road dust and then drifted gently forty feet into a ditch. The police found him gathering the destroyed fragments of his drums and hardware and cymbals with his good arm, his left arm bent at an odd angle at the wrist. Hearing that story, I thought about the time in high school when we stood in a circle in the shade of some trees, our marching drums in a heap at our feet. Something fell from the sky and we looked to find a baby bird, wrinkled like a tea bag, clutching at Jimmy’s shirt, its toothpick talons pulsing open and closed.
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To tune a drum properly, you tighten the lugs in a star pattern rather than going in order, either clockwise or counterclockwise. If you tighten one side of the drum but not the other, you can warp the shell and it will fall out of true. It will become untunable. I’d always been very careful to tune my drums correctly, even though I’d never really been able to make them sound all that good. The art of tuning a drum is in finding the right tension between the top and bottom heads so that when you strike the drum, the air between them hums and resonates. It’s tricky.
Jimmy does not tune my drums in a star pattern; he tightens the lugs in no discernable order, and he cranks each one so tight that the drumhead crackles as it stretches. I set my jaw and watch.
Jimmy had messaged me on Facebook. He wanted to get together. His father was dead, and he was home to grieve and sort out some business. But he was bored. He was twitchy. His arm had healed but his drums were gone, and his hands had started shaking — whatever viscous goo erupted and coated his brain when he played, he needed. “I am NOT on hard drugs,” he wrote, a sentence I scoured for subtext. He had no license, he said, but could get a ride. He sounded desperate, which made me hesitate.
He puts the meat of his hand on the new head and pumps it like he’s trying to resuscitate its heartbeat. He is not being gentle. The drum wheezes. Jimmy is sweating, and I can practically smell the toxins bubbling out of his body, along with whatever chemical he uses to stabilize his mood, which darkens. His face clouds over, and I begin to calculate how big a mistake I may have made in asking him to come into my house when I know so little about him, to do me the favor of tuning my drums. “They use too much glue on these things,” he says in a voice that seems to be eddying. He tightens the lugs some more, and it sounds like timber splintering.
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In my mind, after he’s gone, I make a catalog of tragedies. I know that it starts with Jimmy’s mother dying of cancer while we’re both seniors in high school but can’t decide whether it ends with Jimmy’s father succumbing to advanced liver disease ten days ago or Jimmy flipping someone else’s car and windmilling everything of value through the shattered windows and out of his life. Ultimately, I decide, it doesn’t matter which one comes last. I take his catalog of tragedies and set it like an overlay on my stable life of measured choices — compare the wreckage to the order — and wonder if the difference is that I always tuned my drums in a careful star pattern.
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In the light of my unfinished basement, Jimmy’s face has become concave, pointing inward. He is pallid and dewy, as if he might be sick — he looks like the kind of person you might find sleeping under a bush at three in the afternoon in a city you decide you are visiting for the last time. A dangerous stranger. He has not mentioned his father at all; he has not mentioned the accident or the drugs or the band, who have decided to support him by asking him to leave. He only holds the drum to his ear. With his thumbs, he taps the top head, then the bottom.
I write a monologue in my head and make a plan to deliver it before asking Jimmy to leave my house and never come back. It’s a beautiful monologue, full of sympathy and goodwill, that will dissolve my end of this friendship and release me from any further obligations. In the moment, it seems like the only responsible thing to do. Our relationship, I reason to myself, has been stretched too far on one side and not far enough on the other. I wet my lips. My wife and my daughter are set to return at any minute, and I tell myself that I need to preserve the good things that I have.
I blink my eyes to start my monologue, which begins with this lie: “Jimmy, I want to be your friend.” But he holds out an apricot to me, wrinkled like a tea bag, and I think again of the baby bird that fell from the sky and landed on his shirt, how he panicked and swiped at it, not knowing immediately what it was. How it hit the dirt at our feet, broken. And I have a vision of myself reaching out, of staying his hands and plucking the flapping bird from his belly. I see myself climbing the tree, finding the empty nest, gently tipping the bird back into it. These are the things I did not think to do until now, when it was already too late by years.
Jimmy chews and makes tiny adjustments to the tension of the drumheads. He breathes in concentration through his nose. The color returns to his cheeks as whatever seemed to afflict him has passed, and it occurs to me that in addition to the drugs and the hurt and the chaos and the loss, he is addicted to the sugar in the apricots. He has been cranked so relentlessly and so unevenly for so long, it doesn’t seem possible that they — or me or anything — will be enough to keep him from permanently warping.
But he sits up. He shakes the sweat out of his eyes. He taps the top head, then the bottom and I can hear that they are a perfect minor third apart. He puts the drum key in his teeth and smiles, holds the drum up by the rim. He zeroes in on my face as if to announce that I’m about to witness something miraculous, and when he picks up a stick and hits it, I am not quite prepared to hear that the drum strikes true.
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Joe P. Squance is a writer, editor, and teacher in Oxford, Ohio. His stories and essays have appeared in the Best Microfiction Anthology, Citron Review, DIAGRAM, Entropy, Everyday Fiction, Fiction Southeast, trampset, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. He currently teaches ELA at a small Montessori high school in Oxford, where he lives with his wife and their young daughter. A six-piece Drum Workshop drum kit in Stained Glass is currently collecting dust in his basement.