The Drummer Yusipov

by Salvatore Buttaci

Dmitri claimed he had played in the Dave Clark Five back in the 1960s. He claimed it over and over. Truth was, his only fame rested on the fact that billions in the world did not know Dmitri Yusipov even existed, let alone his wingless aspirations hopping from one drum dream to the next. No one but a couple of his only friends were aware of his search for fame, fortune, and that old favorite of dreamers––immortality.

“I was the relief drummer,” Dmitri said. This in response to Jill the barmaid’s “You hardly touched your drink, D.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jill said, shaking her head. Even in my own slightly buzzed state, I marveled at the waves of her dazzling gold hair cascading sideways, caught by a sudden imaginary ocean breeze. Jill was beautiful and you never had to call for your next drink. She was right there, bottle in hand, smiling her white teeth like a woman in love with her job and with the world.

“Dave Clark said I could make those drums talk, but he just couldn’t let the regular guy go. Dave’s been apologizing ever since.”

Jill poured Smirnoff down into my tomato juice and over the two celery stalks, then gave Dmitri an affectionate big-sister kind of shoulder squeeze. “Hey,” she said, “maybe Paul McCartney needs a drummer.”

I laughed up a spray of Bloody Mary. “He’s got Ringo.”

“Yeah, except he never liked Ringo,” said Dmitri, man in the know. Rolling Stone’s self-proclaimed behind-the-scenes guru. “Paul and Dave are a lot alike. They know who’s good, who’s bad.”

Jill squeezed Yusipov’s shoulder again, let her pretty hand linger there long enough for him to snap out of the famous Dmitri Yusipov stare I’d been noticing a lot more recently, both in and out of Greg’s Grog Haus. Her touch was enough for him to derail his stare into space and wheel into a new stare, this one into Jill’s Irish-emerald eyes.

“All kiddin’ aside, D.,” she said. “It don’t matter if you had to lay down your drumsticks, wave Dave goodbye, pick up the bits and pieces and––”

“You think I’m making this all up?”

Here it comes, I thought. His feelings are in wound-mode again. He was my friend, but the guy had the thin skin of an amoeba. And now he had ratcheted up the volume of an equally thin voice, letting the words of indignation bob in the tear waters, swimming hard upstream from his constricted throat.

Jill’s hand was back at Dmitri’s shoulder again, but for the last time. He yanked himself free, leaving Jill’s hand to hover in midair, then flex its way back across the counter to a silent Jill.

“Dmitri, calm down,” I advised him. “Ok, you got everybody’s attention. Next, they’ll be wanting you to dance buck-naked up and down Jill’s counter here.”

He pursed his thin lips the way somebody who suspects tomorrow he may have to eat his words decides to chew the ones yet unspoken.

Then to really add fuel to the fire, one of the alkies, who I suspected owned a cot in the back and his own reserved Grog Haus stool, slobbers out from down from the other end of the bar, “Play ‘Li’le Drum’ Boy.’”

Using both my hands, I tried to keep Dmitri planted on his stool, knowing damn well two squirts of Crazy Glue to the seat of his chinos would’ve done a better job. Soon enough Dmitri was up on his wobbly legs, stumbling towards old Joe Buco who was still slurring song requests, this one for “Bang ’e Drumsh Slow’y.”

By the time Dmitri Yusipov reached Joe Buco, the old man’s gray-fringed bald head had already dropped onto the beer-stained counter, crushing the Planter’s peanuts he had moments before arrayed in a blooming flower design.

I ran stumbling right behind Dmitri so I could prevent him from doing something craptacular enough to warrant police interference. I stood behind Dmitri, the wannabe, the never-was, the never-to-be-has-been, the Dave Clark Five fantasy drummer. I was prepared to defend this 6 foot 5 inch Russian giant, even if it meant having my eyeglasses smashed or, worse, my nose. He was an oddball, true. My oddball friend. So I clenched my fists, ready for action but praying it never came.

Dmitri was warning the passed-out and snoring Buco, “I ever hear you pull that drummer-boy crap with me again I’ll drum your bony-ass body so hard you’ll swear off drinking! Now get up, Blotto!”

“Buco,” I whispered to Dmitri. “Joe Buco.”

“I know who the hell he is, but right now, Willy boy, he’s Blotto, understand?”

I understood.

Now Jill was on our side of the bar. Nobody was drinking. They had gathered into an amphitheater of spectators hungry for entertainment, but Joe Buco wasn’t cooperating. The old man who couldn’t hold his liquor knew quite well how to sleep it off.

To the accompaniment of Buco’s snoring, Jill raised her voice and said, “This stops right here! Let old Joe sleep. And you, D., go back to your stool and sit down or walk the hell outa here now. Just knock it the freakin’ off! Joe don’t mean nothin’ by all that. But even a drunk who hears the same freakin’ song over and over again is gonna remember some of the words. And you been singin’ that drum song till every eardrum in the place is ready to bust!”

With posture exaggeratingly erect as if he had shoved a yardstick down his throat, Dmitri nodded in surrender. The fight that ended in default had seeped out of him. He would retreat for a week or two, hunker down in his parents’ basement where, behind a makeshift wall of blue fleece blankets doubled over a clothesline, he would maniacally drum all hours of day and night. A kind of catharsis, an obsessive beating out from him the demon that seemed to alienate him from life’s joys.

He was my friend, nevertheless. Having come from a happy home where laughter was a staple and sadness a rarity, I pitied him more than I wanted to. He who boasted a bloodline, however distant, with the tzarist Romanovs, was a rather lonely man. His immigrant parents were not only old for as long as he could remember, but also old in their monarchistic ideals which they tenaciously held onto despite the assassinations back in 1918 of Nicholas II and his entire family, and the usurper dictator-tzar Josef Stalin who, along with his red butchers, had destroyed Mother Russia.

Too taken up with bemoaning Russian history, his parents paid their only child little to no attention. Not ever. Which explained the drum set in the basement. Loud banging, drum rolls, snares, crash cymbal, floor tom, bass drum, snare drum, hi-hat ––and they had managed for years to endure all that incessant noise. It was easier than showing love. And Dmitri was no fool. He knew he was the unloved stranger in the basement, the Dave Clark One, the Dmitri Yusipov whose drumming managed to suspend him high above reality where he could tell himself his life somehow meant something. That the drums saved him from the loneliness of day and night dreams.

In 1980, I moved from Brooklyn to Chicago. Dmitri and I were fast barreling towards forty. We had been born on the same March 15, 1941. The Ides of March. Something we joked about all the time. He said we were both kind of like Julius Caesar, trying to make our way to our destinies but the world of Brutus and Cassius and those other knifers got in our way. I never saw it like that, but he had no one but me to talk to. It was easy to nod, agree we were two men doomed somehow. Then we’d put the maudlin to rest with raucous laughter and enough beers to make Dmitri sad again and me wonder whether I missed something, that maybe my own life, like his, was worthy of crying the blues.

That same year Nina and I, along with our two boys, were settling down and telling ourselves Chicago wasn’t as bad as critics painted it. We could learn to like it. After all, it came with the life-changing promotion. We could make the best of it. Anyway, Brooklyn was not so far away. I thought about it all the time.

Then one day I got a phone call from my sister who was still back in Brooklyn.

“I got bad news for you, Will,” she said.

I panicked. Mom? Dad? Who has left this world while I was out of town?

“What is it?” I asked, gritting my teeth like stoics of old.

“Your old friend Dmitri.”

“Yusipov?”

“He killed himself.”

When she said “Dmitri,“ I had braced myself for “He died,” but “He killed himself” caught me by sad surprise.

“No,“ I argued with Donna, “that can’t be. The guy had an ego big enough for everybody on Graham Avenue!”

There was quiet on the phone for a painful moment. I remembered how Donna used to ask me why I hung out with Dmitri. “He’s a loser, Will. That guy could bring down Happy the Clown. Stay away from the guy, Will.“ But I laughed her off. Dmitri was a dreamer, not a loser. He loved his drums, but his drums could not love him back. I was his friend. I made him laugh. I was there when life got so damn heavy for him, he was afraid his shoulders would give out and he’d end up flattened somewhere in Brooklyn, totally alone, defeated, empty of drum songs.

“He stepped in front of a train,” she said, to break the silence. “Some guy out with his dog saw him walk onto the track seconds before the train came roaring towards him. He told the cops he waved at the man on the tracks, screamed at him to stay clear, but the man waved back. Afterwards, the newspaper said he had a stick in his hand. They found it near the tracks. It was––”

“A drum stick.”

“Yeah. He was waving at the man with the dog just before he… poor poor soul!“

I couldn’t speak. Tears flooding my eyes locked down my throat. Whatever I had to say would not be said, till finally Donna, weary of holding the phone, gave a quick goodbye and that phone went dead except for the dial tone that buzzed without pause, the telephone saying, “Go ahead and make a call.” But to whom? The Yusipovs were all dead and gone. I returned the phone to its cradle, then idiotically stared at it for a few minutes pretending Dmitri would call and say something crazy to me, like, “Willy boy, it wasn’t me under that big black train. I was at the recording studio with Dave Clark and the boys laying some new tracks for a shot at a comeback. I told you I was a damn star, didn’t I?”

#

Salvatore Buttaci

709 Straley Avenue, Apt. 4

Princeton, West Virginia 24740

sambpoet@yahoo.com

http://salvatorebuttaci.wordpress.com

BIO

Retired from teaching, Salvatore Buttaci is an admitted obsessive-compulsive writer who plies his craft daily. His work has appeared widely in publications such as The Writer, New York Times, Cats Magazine, U.S.A. Today, Christian Science Monitor.

His new book, a collection of 164 short-short stories, Flashing My Shorts, is available at

https://www.createspace.com/3426696 or from

http://www.amazon.com/Flashing-My-Shorts-Salvatore-Buttaci/dp/0984259473

He lives with his wife Sharon in West Virginia.