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wild hair up her ass and she just fell in love with rock ’n’ roll. She’d always have the radio blasting Elvis and Gene Vincent and Bill Haley and the Comets.
    But when I was about almost ten, I heard a song that my father was playing, Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing.” And the rhythm of Gene Krupa’s drums hit me like a lighting bolt from heaven. That was it for me. I wanted to be that guy playing the drums. Forget about being a fireman: I knew, deep down inside, that my destiny was to play drums. Even when I was five, I’d turn over my mother’s pots and pans, took her forks, butter knives, or wooden spoons, and began banging away. I got addicted to it. My father would complain that I was making too much noise, but my mom really liked it. “Let him alone,” she’d say. “There could be a lot worse things he’d be doing.”
    I became obsessed. When I wasn’t banging on the pots, I’d figure out ways to play real drums. Whenever I’d go to a relative’s wedding, I’d get my chance. They’d rent out the local Knights of Columbus hall and the women would bring cold cuts and potato salad and they’d hire out a little trio band. And as soon as they took their break, boom, I’d be up on the drums, banging away.
    When I was seven, my parents bought me a toy set of drums, endorsed by one of my favorite TV programs, The Rootie Kazootie Club . It was a bass drum with two drums attached. I broke the toy, I played it so hard. My next set of drums was a makeshift set that my dad assembled. He bought a busted-up old army marching-band snare drum at a hockshop and rested it on top of a wooden box. For cymbals, he took two garbage-can lids, attached some nails to them so you’d get that sizzle when you hit them, and soldered each lid to a thin mop stick. Then he put the sticks into buckets of cement to keep them stable. I put some stars and glitter on the front of the box and wrote out the name STARS , which is what I named my imaginary band. I would then sit on a chair on top of some phone books and play the snare with brushes.
    I set up the drums in my mother’s bedroom and I practically never left the room, playing along to the songs on the radio. When I was twelve, I came across a white doo-wop group that used to sing down the street and I hung around themTo add insult to injury, when ick until eventually they let me sit in and back them with my brushes and my snare and the garbage-can lids. These guys would be down in the basement singing “Da-da dom, ba-da dom,” and there’d be a little twelve-year-old kid back there playing away, those old C-F-G-minor oldies but goodies, over and over.
    By the time I was fifteen, I got a job delivering meat on the weekends for a local butcher shop. The owner knew I was into drums, and one day he told me, “I’ve got a set of Slingerland Radio King drums down in my cellar that I don’t play anymore. There’s a twenty-four-inch bass drum, a trap case with a snare, a couple of cymbal holders, and a tom-tom. They were made in 1935, and they were originally mother-of-pearl, but they turned yellow.”
    Slingerlands! The brand that Gene Krupa used.
    “You’re kidding me! Would you sell them to me?” I burst out.
    “Yeah, I’ll sell them to you for two hundred dollars,” he said.
    I rushed home and I asked my mom and dad if I could get those drums.
    “If you want them that bad, why don’t you work for them?” my mom suggested. “We don’t have two hundred dollars, but you can pay them off a little out of each paycheck.”
    So every weekend Joe would take fifteen bucks out of my pay, and he paid me a little more to mop the floors of the tenement building the shop was in, and eventually I paid them off. I’ll never forget bringing them home to my grandmother’s apartment. I was walking down the street with the bass drum on my back, kicking the trap case in front of me inch by inch with the tom-tom on top of it. I finally got the whole set up the stairs and into