“I get it, Zahler.” I sighed, angling my dogs away from a hot-dog cart. Of course, practicing yesterday had hurt—but so did getting a tattoo, or watching a perfect sunset, or playing till your fingers bled. Sometimes you just had to sit there and deal with the pain.
Pearl had rubbed me raw, but she knew how to listen. She could hear the heart of the Big Riff, and she hadn’t done anything I wouldn’t have if I’d been listening. I’d had six years to figure out what she’d recognized in six minutes. That’s what made me cringe.
That and the whammy she’d put on Zahler. He wouldn’t shut up about how brilliant Pearl was, how she was going to make us big, how things were finally going to happen. Like all those years with just the two of us had been a waste of time.
Zahler had a total crush on Pearl—that was obvious. But if I said so out loud, he’d just roast me with his death stare. And talk about wasting time: girls like her were about as likely to hook up with boys like us as Zahler’s dogs were to pull him to the moon.
“Okay, I thought you said she was a drummer.”
“What?” Zahler cried above the rumble. “You don’t call that drumming?”
“Well, she’s got drumsticks. But I thought drummers were to supposed to have drums.” I shook my head, trying to keep my three curious dogs from surging into the rapt crowd of tourists, Times Square locals, and loitering cops surrounding the woman.
“Yeah, well, imagine if she did have drums. Listen to how much sound she’s getting out of those paint cans!”
“Those are actually paint buckets, Zahler.”
“What’s the diff?”
I sighed. Painting had been one of my shorter-lived jobs, because they just gave you the colors to use, instead of letting you decide. “Paint cans are the metal containers that paint comes in. Paint buckets are the plastic tubs you mix it up in. Neither of them are drums.”
“But listen, Moz. Her sound is huge!”
My brain was already listening—my mouth was just giving Zahler a hard time out of habit and general annoyance—and the woman really did have a monster sound. Around her was arrayed every size of paint bucket you could buy, some stacked, some upside down, a few on their sides, making a sort of giant plastic xylophone.
It took me a minute to figure out how a bunch of paint buckets could have so much power. She’d set up on a subway grate, suspending herself over a vast concrete echo chamber. Her tempo matched the timing of the echoes rumbling up from below, as if a ghost drummer were down there following her, exactly one beat behind. As my head tilted, I heard other ghosts: quicker echoes from the walls around us and from the concrete awning overhead.
It was like an invisible drum chorus, led effortlessly from its center, her sticks flashing gracefully across battered white plastic, long black dreadlocks flying, eyes shut tight.
“She’s pretty fool, Zahler,” I admitted.
“Really?”
“Yeah. Especially if we could rebuild this chunk of Times Square every place we played.”
He let out an exasperated sigh. “What, the echoes? You never heard of digital delay?”
I shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the same. Wouldn’t be as big.”
“Doesn’t have to be as big, Moz. We don’t want her playing a gigantic drum solo like this; we want her smaller, fitting in with the rest of the band. Didn’t you learn anything yesterday?”
I glared at him, the anger spilling out from the place I thought I’d had it tucked away, rippling through me again. “Yeah, I did: that you’re a total sucker for every chick who comes along with an instrument. Even if it’s a bunch of paint buckets!”
His jaw dropped. “Dude! That is totally unfool! You just said she was great. And you know Pearl’s fexcellent too. Now you’re going to get all boys-only on me?”
I turned away, thoughts echoing in my brain, like my skull was suddenly empty and lined with concrete. Between the Stratocaster that wasn’t mine, the other guitars I couldn’t afford, Pearl’s demolition of the Big Riff, and now the thought of paint buckets, it’d been too many adjustments to make in forty-eight hours.
I almost wished it was just Zahler and me again. We’d been like a team that was a hundred points behind—we weren’t going to win anything, so we could just play and have fun. But Pearl had changed that. Everything was up in the air, and how it all came down mattered now.
Part of me hated her for that and hated Zahler for going along so easily.
He kept quiet, wrangling the dogs while I calmed myself down.
“All right,” I finally said. “Let’s talk to her. What have we got to lose?”
We waited till she was packing up, stacking the buckets into one big tower. Her muscles glowed with sweat, and a few splinters from a stick she’d broken rolled in the breeze from a subway passing underneath.
She glanced at us and our seven dogs.
“You’re pretty good,” I said.
She jutted her chin toward a paint bucket that was right side up and half full of change and singles, then went back to stacking.
“Actually, we were wondering if you wanted to play with us sometime.”
She shook her head, one of her eyes blinking rapidly. “This corner is mine. Had it for a year.”
“Hey, we’re not moving in on you,” Zahler spoke up, waving his free hand. “We’re talking about you playing in our band. Rehearsing and recording and stuff. Getting famous.”
I cringed. “Getting famous” had to be the lamest reason for doing anything.
She shrugged, just a twitch of her shoulders. “How much?”
“How much… what?” Zahler said.
But it was obvious to me. The same thing that had been obvious all day.
“Money,” I answered. “She wants money to play with us.”
His eyes bugged. “You want cash?”
She took a step forward and pulled a photo ID card from her pocket, waved it in Zahler’s face. “See that? That’s from the MTA. Says I can play down in the subway, legal and registered. Had to sit in front of a review panel to get that.” As she put the card away, a little shiver went through her body. “Except I don’t go down there anymore.”
She kicked the upturned paint bucket, the pile of loose change clanking like a metallic cough. “Seventy, eighty bucks in there. Why would I play for free?”
“Whoa, sorry.” Zahler started to pull his dogs away, giving me a look like she’d asked for our blood.
I didn’t move, though, staring at the bucket, at the bills fluttering on top. There were fives in there—it probably totaled a hundred easy. She had every right to ask for money. The world was all about money; only a lame-ass bunch of kids wouldn’t know that.
“Okay,” I said. “Seventy-five a rehearsal.”
Zahler froze, his eyes popping again.
“How much for a gig?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. One-fifty?”
“Two hundred.”
I sighed. The words I don’t know had just cost me fifty bucks. That’s how it worked with money: you had to know, or at least act like you did. “Okay. Two hundred.”
I held out my hand to shake, but she just passed me her business card.
“Are you crazy, Moz? Pearl’s going to freak when she finds out she has to pay for a drummer.”
“She’s not paying anyone, Zahler. I am.”
“Yeah, right. And where are you going to get seventy-five bucks?”
I looked down at the dogs. They were staring in all directions at the maelstrom of Times Square, gawking like a bunch of tourists from Jersey. I tried to imagine rounding up customers, going door-to-door like Zahler had, putting up signs, making schedules. No way.