Lost in the moment, bomp diddy bomp, Ginger lives in his drums. Spiral galaxies of sweat drops spin from his hands. Tom-tom trembles, high-hat hissing overhead. Rhythms appear behind his eyelids masquerading as trucks, herky-jerky driving across wavy waist high grass. Big red and black trucks wearing night-tinted windows.
Lost in an ever-changing rhythm, Ginger squints at the dark windshields. Bomp debomp, red eyes gaze back, plastered against the glass. Big eyes, blinking with free flowing patterns, stormy eyes, ancient pupils, and blood vessels pulse with his left foot bass drumming.
Ginger jerks his arm, deliberately leaving the upbeat empty air. A thousand trucks rumble by, swishing the debomp bomp grass. Grass like he's never seen, scrubby trees dancing in the distance. Almost he finds it. Teeth tearing at his lower lip, hands flinging, desperately clenching sweat-slick sticks that move on their own. Not a rhythm but a pulse, not a beat but a feeling, he hangs on in white-knuckled desperation.
Almost, bompdy, got it, another hundred hits to Nirvana. Ginger lashes at the cymbals, hammers the tom tom, and sizzle-burns the snare. Ancient eyes full of primitive secrets, blood red pupils, peering from the truck. Ginger grins up at them, cheeks crinkling three-quarter wonder beats. Left hand zipping at the cowbell he....
"For crying out loud, motherfucker." Marlin appears beside him; paint-worn Fender Stratocaster clenched to his breast. The air throbs with ringing feedback. "Jeeezuuus. What the hell are you doing?" The pipe-thin black denim Marlin stomps up to the drums. Black hair, chalk white skin, an undead version of Jerry Lee Lewis, charring holes in Ginger's concentration. The rhythm dissolves, lost, kaput. Windswept grass full of trucks segues, like a bad sitcom, into the dust-smelling rickety wood of the garage.
Ginger blinks. "What's wrong, man?" His three-quarter time question spills through the surprise 'O' mouth.
"The song, remember?" Marlin leans over the drums, Stratocaster threatening to impale Ginger's chest. "That was supposed to be "Time and Time Again" by the Smithereens. It's in four four. Classic rock and roll, my man. Classic drive it to the max beat. That's what I thought we decided to play. What were you playing?"
"Guess I got off." Ginger looks down at his hands, thinking of red and black trucks.
"No shit." Marlin about faces, marching to his Marshall amp, feedback bellows till he hits a switch. The garage echoes, echoes, echoes into silence.
"Hey, I'm sorry." Ginger tosses his sticks onto the snare, hearing a two beat whisper echo in his own mind. His butt lifts from the stool, plastic squelching in the sudden quiet. The garage sighs with him. Traffic noise drifts in from the real world; trucks, sounding slow, and red, and black.
"That's the third time today," Marlin reaches for a half-empty coke bottle. "Are you fucking with me? What the hell kind of beat is that anyway?"
"It's not a beat." Ginger stares at the dust-covered floor.
"Just stop playing it, all right?"
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