Rimshot
Fiction
Rimshot (n): a drum stroke in which the stick strikes the rim and the head of the drum simultaneously, creating a cracking sound.
The neighbors were pissed. It wasn’t technically Raf’s fault, but he didn’t know that.
Raf lived in the suburbs of a midwestern city with his parents, his older brother Frankie, and his younger sister Tina. Their neighborhood was built in the early 1960s: rows and rows of ranches and gently sloping lawns. Now, thirty years later, plenty of fortunate families had built additions. Extra rooms on the side, in the back, and sometimes on top. Raf’s house had no additions. Sitting in his front yard was an unhitched Airstream camper. Raf thought the Airstream was much cooler than an addition, because he got to go camping right in the front yard anytime he wanted. As long as it wasn’t a night where his mom slept in the camper. She preferred to sleep alone.
Raf didn’t have any friends in the neighborhood. His parents didn’t, either. But that was because they worked at night and slept during the day. His dad did, at least. His mom didn’t work at all. She slept all the time.
On the weekends, he and his siblings would stay in the city with his Aunt Cathy and his cousins, Anthony and Aaron. They had an above-ground pool that took up almost their entire backyard. Sure, their backyard was tiny, but that just made the pool seem huge.
Anthony and Aaron were older than Frankie. They always joked that Raf was named after a Ninja Turtle. To impress them, Frankie would imitate Michaelangelo’s surfer dude accent: “Woaaaah, Raphael. Cool it, dude!” Raf hated being called dude and hated being called by his full name even more. He’d try to clarify, “it’s just Raf,” rhyming with “raft,” emphasizing the short “A” sound. Coming out of his mouth, his name sounded like a rimshot.
Raf first thought of playing the drums on one of those weekends with his cousins. They were up late, sneaking MTV, when Kid Rock’s “Bawitdaba” music video came on. Kid Rock always excited the boys. They gathered around the TV every time he appeared, like when Aunt Cathy delivered hot dogs and Pringles after a long day of swimming. But Kid Rock wasn’t bringing hot dogs. Kid Rock didn’t even bring Pringles. He was just screaming at them. Anthony, Aaron and Frankie loved it.
At the end of the video, Kid Rock performs a live concert. His drummer, a black woman with wild blonde curls, brings her sticks down with earth-splitting force. A sly confidence spreads across her face. She knows exactly what she’s doing, and she’s doing it the hardest and loudest.
Raf hadn’t ever seen a black woman play drums before. She was the only woman in the video who wasn’t wearing a bikini. Even though she was behind the drum set and looked so much different than the other band members, she seemed like the leader. Like the rest of them would kneel to her if she told them to. He wondered at her power. How did she more than fit in? How did she dominate them, being so different?
Raf was not a black woman. He was, in fact, a ten-year-old, second-generation Italian American boy. But the drummer was the one who spoke to him the most. She had some secret to surviving the 1990s, surrounded by angry white boys when you weren’t an angry white boy. Maybe that secret was drums.
Now, Raf only had to convince his dad to buy him a drum set.
He’d have to catch his dad in the late afternoons, before leaving for his gig cleaning nearby office buildings overnight. He always worked in a different building, and he’d leave the building’s name and address on the fridge each night before he left:
“GenCon Building, 333 Frontage Rd.”
“Avista Park, 431 Swallow St.”
So many office buildings were hidden in the suburban streets, each containing whole ecosystems of workers doing who knows what.
“Can I get a drum set for my birthday?” Raf asked his dad, who was scribbling tonight’s address on a post-it. Raf knew it was a long shot. His birthday was in a couple weeks. Not enough time for them to save up for such an expensive gift.
“Where would you play it?” his dad asked, his voice sloping down from a higher octave, shedding doubt not only on the plausibility of Raf obtaining his drums, but also on the whole concept of desiring the set. What was he thinking even bringing up something like drums?
His mom might understand. She liked to play video games. One time, she took the SEGA controller from him and burned through four levels of Terminator when he and Frankie couldn’t make it through one. She probably got a lot further than that too, but Frankie left. He was bored because she wouldn’t share the controller. Raf followed him out shortly after. His mom was acting weird and she smelled bad — like burnt plastic. It had given Raf a headache. So, while his mom might understand why he wanted the drums, he probably won’t bother asking her.
“If I had a drum set, I’d put it wherever you wanted!” Raf said.
He spoke in a whimper, afraid his voice would scare away the possibility.
“I’ll think about it. But it seems…loud,” his dad said.
No doy, dad, Raf thought.
Raf didn’t get a drum set for his birthday that year.
He had two extra long pencils that he started using as drumsticks, tapping on every hard surface in the house. He wanted his dad to know that refusing to buy him a drum set would not rescue their family from being constantly annoyed.
A year and a half later, after tapping on every surface of the house and never letting up in reminding his dad about the drums, Raf woke up on Christmas to a four piece drum set — including a ride and a hi-hat. The encounter lacked climax; he drew his pencils from his pockets and alighted upon the kit. His dad, focused and serious, unsmiling, gracefully replaced the pencils with real drum sticks just in time for Raf to make contact, like a cartoon switcheroo.
Raf’s stick hit the lip of the snare, sending a shockwave through his hand, into his wrist. A numbness worse than pain, like when Frankie punches him in the leg with his middle knuckle jutting out.
After nearly dropping the stick, Raf gripped it harder.
He knocked around the drums, smashing the cymbals without grace or technique, desperate to hear what each instrument sounded like. He didn’t know how to hold the sticks. He didn’t know where on the drum to hit. He did it all anyway, in every configuration, in every rhythm and every volume he could manage.
Tina, who received a ukulele from Santa, grabbed her instrument and played along. Their father still did not smile. He looked around the room. Raf didn’t notice his mom’s absence, even on Christmas morning. They had become used to it.
The sounds the children produced, even as horrific as they were, did not justify what came next.
A long, low, moaning crescendo sounded from the distance.
“Raaaaphael don’t you do that inside now!”
His mom’s uncanny, thrown voice, filling the house directionlessly, brought to mind Raf’s name’s angelic connotations. His mother was God: disappointed, burdened, and omniscient.
A long winter of conflict followed. When he played, his mother wrapped herself in a sleeping bag and hopped out the front door to the Airstream — a cocooned creature knocked from its perch. She wouldn’t come back in even after he finished practicing, so when he was done playing, he had to bundle up and head out to try to coax her back into the house so she didn’t freeze to death in the metal box.
As the weather warmed, things got even worse. In the summer, his mother blasted the window unit in his parents’ bedroom, keeping the door locked with a towel stuffed in the crack below the door. But even over the sound of the AC, Raf’s drumming outraged her.
“I don’t want him playing in the house anymore,” Raf’s mom said to his dad one night when he was getting ready for work, scribbling another address on another post-it. She spoke loudly in the kitchen. She didn’t seem to mind Raf overhearing; he was in his room with the door wide open.
“Where’s he gonna play, Sue?”
“I don’t know. Anywhere. In the yard,” she said. “It was your idea to get him the fucking drum set. Put it outside for the summer. Fresh air is good for kids.”
The next morning, Raf found his drum set outside, under the little metal awning jutting over the window on the side of the Airstream. A Gatorade—red, his favorite flavor—sat on the throne. An apology from his dad.
Raf spent the long summer days practicing. He loved how when he gripped the sticks, his tan knuckles turned white. His body began to transform, harden: his hands blistered from gripping the sticks too tight, his wrists bruised from striking himself. He even smacked himself across the face with a stick once, causing a blood vessel to burst in his eye. He couldn’t afford lessons, but he figured he was learning technique the more authentic way. Like his gym teacher said, pain is weakness leaving the body.
He began to crave sitting behind his set. It wasn’t just the sticks that felt like extensions of his body; the whole set felt like parts of him. The snare his fingers; the toms his elbows; the cymbals his shoulders; the bass his thighs.
Tina was always nearby, sometimes playing her ukelele along with Raf’s rhythm. He always outlasted her. She’d fall asleep in the sweltering hotbox of the Airstream. Raf would stop and check on her every so often to make sure she wasn’t dead.
Raf began to notice that neighborhood passersby slowed down when they reached his yard. They’d have their dogs or their husbands or wives; sometimes they’d have their strollers. Many of them stopped for a moment to listen to his music before moving on.
Raf believed he was developing a fanbase. Perhaps, he thought, someone would invite him to join their band soon. A record deal was around the corner.
One night, while his dad was scribbling a new office building address onto a post-it, Raf heard a knock at the door. He walked out to the hallway and peered around the corner. He saw his dad drop the pen and run to the door.
A middle-aged lady and her husband, both with stark-white hair and billowy pastel button-ups, stood on their doorstep. Raf recognized them. Fans. They stopped to watch him sometimes. Sometimes, they even came out of their house just to enjoy his music. They lived in the biggest addition on the block: a whole second floor with a bathroom and two whole bedrooms.
Raf watched them standing in front of their dad in the doorway.
“Mr. Russo?” said the man, half-speaking and half clearing his throat.
“Yes? It’s Deborah and Michael, right? Would you like to come in?”
“No. That won't be necessary,” Michael said. “I know that you and your wife haven’t appreciated our predicament. The drumming is simply not neighborly and we can see that neighborliness isn’t a value that your family holds highly.”
“The trailer in your front yard showed us that much,” Deborah added.
“Deborah, I can handle this,” Michael said quietly, turning his head slightly toward his wife, like this was something they’d discussed earlier.
Raf watched his dad’s jaw dropped open. His dad’s head started to shake, and Raf heard him utter little gasps, as if he was trying to find a moment to interject on the couples’ rehearsed monologue.
“We’ve tried discussing this with you rationally, but since you’re not budging, we’ve come to inform you that if the boy plays his drums in the yard again tomorrow, we will be contacting the police,” Michael said.
“The police!?” Raf’s dad cried. “But I’m just hearing of this now!”
“That’s simply not true,” Michael said. “Now, we’re here give you a heads up. We hope you make the right decision so that we don’t have to file the report.”
Raf’s dad stared as they turned to walk away.
Raf ran to his bedroom window to watch the pair leave. Deborah slowed as she and her husband walked past the Airstream. She looked it up and down as if to shame it before Michael grabbed her arm and dragged her out of the yard.
They had assumed that if they talked to Raf’s mom, his dad knew about it too. Raf imagined Michael and Deborah at home. They must talk to each other like normal people, unlike his parents. They came in with a plan to talk to the Russos, and they mostly stuck to it. That’s what functioning people do, Raf guessed.
That’s when he heard the shouting. It even woke up Frankie, who slept almost as much as their mom. Before long, Tina appeared in the brothers’ doorway, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“You’ve been getting calls from the neighbors and you didn’t tell me?” Raf’s dad said.
“It’s our business. They can fuck off,” said his mom, who was standing in the doorway of their bedroom. Raf knew this was a serious discussion because she was letting out all the cold air.
“It’s everyone’s business! If Raf is disturbing the whole neighborhood, we need to do something about it!”
“Nice job, Raphael,” Frankie said, jabbing Raf in the ribs. But Raf could see that Frankie was scared, holding Tina in his lap and rubbing her shoulders as she cried. Raf didn’t mind this once letting Frankie call him Raphael.
Despite Frankie’s teasing, Raf didn’t feel guilty for causing the fight between his parents. If he felt guilty, it was because he didn’t feel scared like his siblings, holding onto each other for comfort. He didn’t need to be comforted. He just felt impatient. He didn’t want this drama to get in the way of practice tomorrow.
“Well he’s not bringing the drums back into this house. It’s too loud,” Raf’s mom said. “What can they do if he keeps playing drums? We’re not renters. We bought this house.”
“We?” said Raf’s dad.
After a pause—it must’ve taken Raf’s mom a moment to realize what his dad was implying—she cried in disgust: an “Oh!” stabbing downward into a growl.
One door slammed, then another: the bedroom, the front door. The three kids ran to the window and watched their dad leave. He didn’t finish writing on the post-it. Who knows where he was off to—Vertex Tower? One Synergy Place? Commerce Plaza?
Raf slept uneasily, worried he wouldn’t be able to play drums tomorrow.
When Raf woke, he ran to the window to make sure his drum set was still there.
It was gone, and so was the Airstream.
He never considered that the Airstream could actually move.
Raf ran out to search for his drums. Where could they be?
Tina and Frankie were still sleeping. No one in the kitchen. No one in the backyard. He ran throughout the house—his dad wasn’t home yet, and he couldn’t call him because the address he wrote on the post-it wasn’t complete: “The Business Con—” was all it said. Cone? Condo? Condor?
Raf felt his body leaving him.
He approached his parents’ bedroom and knocked quietly. No reply. He turned the knob and peeked in. The smell of burnt plastic filled his nose and gave him an instant headache. But he had to push forward. The AC unit was gone and the room was even messier than usual. Light from the lamps, still switched on, filtered through red sheets draped over the lampshades. The bed was unmade, strewn with knitted blankets, none covering the full width of the bed.
Yellow-brown burns marked the mirrored surface of her nightstand.
Raf knew vaguely that his mom smoked crack. He didn’t know what that meant, though, nor even exactly what it looked like. Crack wasn’t a drug to Raf; it was burnt smells, burnt glass, and burnt teeth.
Her closet was empty, but some random clothes — a bra, a pair of sweatpants — spilled from a dirty clothes hamper. She was gone.
When he opened the door fully, he revealed his drums near his dad’s side of the bed. By leaving the drums there, she seemed to be telling Raf’s dad that they were his problem now.
A red Gatorade sat on the throne. Somehow, she’d known red was his favorite.
Hey, Brenden! Just discovered you on Substack. I read your article Electric Childhoods first, which led me to Rimshot—and I love them both! Your writing is super accessible and engaging; I love your voice and the way you build out context (in EC) and characters (in Rimshot). Really looking forward to reading more of your work!
love your ability to write about a complex family dynamic—each character is fascinating and fleshed out. but i also want to know more, particularly about the parents! great read, thank you for sharing your fiction here :)