cymbals, anyone?

by Patricia Wentzel

AFTER I GRADUATED from high school in 1974, Dad got me to enroll in some classes at Long Beach City College and said I could take whatever classes I wanted. So I took botany, which was cool because we spent a lot of time drawing pictures of plants. I also joined the speech team and the choir as well as the Viking marching band because I had been in choir and marching band in high school. I was pleased with my schedule, and Dad didn’t ask any questions, which was probably a good thing. We lived about a mile away, in a house Dad was remodeling on Graywood Avenue—walking distance as far as Dad was concerned. I was the one doing the walking, so I hadn’t embraced Dad’s perspective about that.

One evening, I told him I had a marching band away game the following night. I did Dad’s occasional bidding, mostly grocery shopping and picking up roofing tacks from the lumber yard, so this was fair warning he would be on his own for the night. He waved his spoon at me in acknowledgement and went back to eating the vanilla ice cream that was his favorite and flipping through a tool catalogue—toothpick sticking out from behind his right ear—a sure sign he was thinking about the house.

Dad was obsessed with the house. I didn’t take it personally and the change from Mom’s microscopic, repressive supervision was liberating. She and my three younger siblings were, thankfully, 168 miles away, still living in Lompoc while my brother finished high school. The house held his attention, not me, which only made sense since the house was a small two-bedroom wreck with the back half and most of the roof torn off. Lots of other things didn’t make sense to me back then that do now, but his focus on fixing the house wasn’t one of them.

For example, I didn’t tell him I needed a ride home because it seemed obvious to me that I would be counting on him for one since I’d be coming home well after dark, but I think Dad figured I could take care of myself one way or the other.

After sleeping for three restless hours, I got up the next morning before sunrise was a gleam in a spotted owl’s eye, probably around 5:00 am. I had slept a grand total of about fifteen hours all week, something I would view with alarm these days but back then shrugged off as unimportant. Despite the early hour, I was so full of excited anticipation about the marching band’s trip to Cerritos College, in nearby Orange County, that I felt like a rain-booted toddler who’s found a big puddle.

I spent the day at school. I hit the bookstore first, where I bought a bunch of art supplies for my botany class that I didn’t really need and a couple of T-shirts and a sweatshirt with the school logo on them exactly like the four T-shirts and at least one sweatshirt that I already owned. Dad’s probably explosive reaction to my charging $113 on his credit card without asking wasn’t on my radar, along with the fact that the excessive shopping might be a problem. After that, I tried all the pianos in the practice rooms in the music department and had a blast playing and singing “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair” and “Anything You Can Do” over and over because they were the funniest songs I knew. I ordered three hamburgers and fries and a shake in the cafeteria and bought two bags of granola and four Snickers bars to take on the bus.

Finally, it was time to go, and while I waited in line to board the band’s bus, I crooned some Gloria Gaynor and did the Hustle. When I got on the bus, I fidgeted in my seat and nattered at my seat mate, Lily, who played the flute and had become known as Lily Light Foot for having outrun a schnauzer that ran out on the field during halftime and chased her clear to the end zone. I thought having a nickname like that, with a story like that, was pretty cool, and since I had been working on a speech about chewing gum for a couple of weeks, I took the opportunity to tell Lily everything I knew about chewing gum, which was a lot. When I got to the part about how exactly they made Juicy Fruit so intensely banana flavored, she got up without a word and moved to an empty spot in the back of the bus. I shouted after her I would tell her the rest later, then turned around and bounced in my seat.

When I got bored with bouncing, I started singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in a low enough key that I could really belt out the high notes. The band members seated in front of me yelled at me to shut up. I shrugged and began singing “Here Comes the Sun,” but I only knew a few of the words, so mostly I sang la-la-la. There was more grumbling from the seat in front of me, but I ignored it. Everybody seemed to be in a bad mood. I was in a great mood, and I would not let them bring me down.

I was happily hypomanic and didn’t know it. Hypomania is a seductive state of being; you are productive (think sixteen-hour days), the life of the party (think lampshades and table tops), and, often, make poor decisions (think buying a banana-colored Mercedes convertible on credit while unemployed). You feel terrific, like you are in the zone and nothing bad can possibly happen to you. If I were having these problems today—not sleeping, impulsiveness, pressured speech—I would be on the phone to my psychiatrist in a panic. But I hadn’t yet been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. That wouldn’t come for another thirty years, and I didn’t realize my behavior was bizarre, nonsensical, and downright annoying.

When the bus arrived, I darted into the chaos of unloading to retrieve my instrument: the cymbals. I adored the sound of them crashing together! The sheer volume! The sheer joy! My whole body vibrated when they rang out, and this fed my wild energy like dry oak feeds a flame. I banged my cymbals together before, during, and after the game, whenever I felt like it and whether I was supposed to or not, and I let them ring and ring instead of muting them right away.

Give your rowdy, impulsive seven-year-old a pair of cymbals and see how long you last before you take them away and sell them to some other first-time parent. Give those cymbals to a rowdy, impulsive college student, well, let’s just say I’m surprised the band director let me stay in the band after that trip. But it didn’t matter to me one way or the other. If people didn’t like my cymbals, they could go buy some ear plugs.

The glare of the stadium lights on my gleaming cymbals entranced me, and I could see my gleeful face reflected in the polished metal. I twirled them high and angled them so the light reflected on my legs and the backs of the people in front of me. The other band members whispered and shifted positions until I was alone at the top of the bleachers. I laughed and stretched out now that I didn’t have to worry about hitting anyone when I twirled.

After the game, the drum major—whose name was Ken and who was almost as tall, broad-shouldered, and tanned as you’d expect him to be—made me put my cymbals away, and on the dark ride home, the delight I had felt all day drained away and left me as pissed off as a caged raccoon who’s been tormented by a small child with a stick. I growled at the band members in the seat behind me when they laughed together. The rattling noise of the windows was as maddening and inescapable as static on a weak FM radio station playing Sibelius, and the rancid smell of the bus that I hadn’t noticed earlier turned my stomach.

Back at school, everyone with their own car took off once we’d ditched our fancy hats and the instruments in the band room. The rest of us lined up outside the bare-bones phone booth near the parking lot to call our rides. The parking lot lights made everyone look gaunt and tormented and the black, blood red, and white Viking logo on our black uniforms seemed malevolent. When I finally reached the head of the line, the parking lot was nearly empty. I dialed the number for home and listened to it ring and ring. At last, Dad answered in a bleary voice. When I asked for a ride home, he cursed, told me to walk home, and hung up.

The edginess that had been with me on the ride home grew into a firestorm of rage. I slammed the phone down and strode away trying to keep myself from screaming. How could Dad do this to me? He was selfish and lazy and a lousy excuse for a father. It wouldn’t take much for him to come get me. He didn’t really love me, didn’t give a damn about me. I growled and ground my teeth and, unable to contain myself, shouted at the magnolias bordering the parking lot in crude language nearly foreign to me.

I started for home, aggressively swinging my arms, my hands balled into fists. I was oblivious to the hushed suburban neighborhood of post-war single-family homes as I stormed along in a Venn diagram of darkness broken by circles of light from the streetlamps.

Three blocks from school, the shadows suddenly grew darker, and the neighborhood took on a sinister air. My steps faltered as an overwhelming revelation flooded me. I deserved to be treated this way. I was a horrible person. I was worse than horrible. I was tainted with evil, had always been evil, would always be evil. I could almost smell the stink of it, the putrid smell of spoiled meat left out to rot. It was plain to me that everyone else knew there was something wrong with me and knew enough to keep their distance. That was the reason I had no friends. That was the reason my own father wouldn’t come and get me. The obvious conclusion I came to? My soul could never be redeemed, never cleansed of evil, and I had to rid the world of what I carried inside of me.

There was this all-night drugstore two blocks from our house, and I could get what I needed to kill myself there. I remember inside the store there was a big bin of Halloween candy next to the register. I remember there were Laffy Taffy bars and little bags of candy corn and small boxes of jellybeans, and on the next rack were Pop Rocks, the newest candy sensation, and Hershey’s Bars. I remember buying a family-size box of Dramamine and a ten-ounce bottle of Orange Crush to wash it down.

I remember feeling sure of myself, that I was on the right path, the only path.

The cashier’s nametag said Dan, and he had frizzy gray hair and a little pot belly, and he didn’t say a word to me. Maybe he had teenagers wearing marching band uniforms coming by to pick up a box of Dramamine and a soda at 2:00 am on a weeknight all the time.

Outside, I settled on the bus bench in front of the store that read “Katie Brown, #1 Realtor in Long Beach” and featured an apple-shaped blond in an unflattering Farrah Fawcett hairdo and brown polyester pantsuit—Katie must have posed for her own ad. The Plexiglas walls of the phone booth next to the bench were so discolored and cracked I couldn’t make out the artful drawings and phone numbers scribbled on them. The black rotary dial phone’s cord was twisted into a knot, and the paper phone book hanging below the phone in its battered metal sheath was missing pages. I took all the little blue pills in the box (they tasted bitter) and drank the bottle of Orange Crush. I sat on the bus bench and tried not to notice that I was cold. I looked forward to dying.

For a while, I rocked in place, a rigid, chunky marching band Barbie doll, my formerly stiff uniform top now stretched out and sweaty after the long bus ride and my rage-fueled walk from the school. I got up and paced back and forth, six feet this way, six feet that way until I began to feel sleepy, finally, and I sank down on the bench again.

Suddenly I jerked awake, and panic gripped me. I still felt like I was some kind of hideous creature, but the feeling was an ashen coal barely warm now. I realized I didn’t want to pass out there on that bus bench. But what could I do? Who could I call to come get me? I just needed a place to crash for the night. I wasn’t going to die, Dramamine wasn’t going to kill me, how stupid of me to think it would.

I scrabbled in my purse for a quarter and my little blue phone book. I called this girl Cecily, who I knew from choir. We both sang alto. I was better than her, but her voice was okay. We didn’t know each other well but had hung out together a little at choir camp, and she was the only person I could think of to call. She wasn’t pleased to hear from me, but she accepted my explanation of a fight with my dad as my reason for calling. I struggled to stay awake while I waited for her to arrive and told her nothing about my suicide attempt when she picked me up in her red VW bug. When we got to her apartment in nearby Bellflower, I stumbled inside and collapsed onto her couch. I kicked off my black shoes but gave up when I thought about taking off my uniform top. I tipped over on the couch and fell deeply asleep before she turned off the light.

I woke to Cecily shaking my shoulder and calling my name. I must have slept all day because it was dark outside, and she informed me she was taking me home and for me not to call her again. I was barely able to string two words together and muttered something about being sorry. She probably thought I had taken illegal drugs.

Ceciley delivered me to my house and roared off in her red bug and, when I got inside, I fell into bed without undressing. My uniform would definitely need a trip to the dry cleaners after this.

When I woke up the next day, I felt fine, normal again, as if nothing had happened.

Dad didn’t ask where I had been or how I got home. I don’t think he knew I hadn’t come home. Sometimes I wonder how things might have turned out if he had come for me.

What had happened seemed like a dream now. The driven feeling that had overwhelmed me had dwindled like Shrinky-Dinks in the oven and lost its power. I hadn’t really wanted to kill myself. It was really no big deal.

I went on with my life, went to school, only played the cymbals in the right places during “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and won the speech tournament with my chewing gum speech. But a part of me, biding its time until it was set free again, knew I was evil, and death was the only answer. Nothing could change that. But I was fine, everything was fine, and my teacher gave me all A’s on my colorful, detailed drawings in botany.

About the author:

Patricia J. Wentzel lives in Sacramento, California. She is a mental health advocate, writer, artist and singer. She has been previously published in Braving the Body Anthology, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Pleiades, The Monterey Poetry Review, the Journal of the American Medical Association and others, and was a finalist for the Sublingual Prize for Poetry and for The 2023 Prose Poem contest. She is currently working on a memoir and has been a participant in the Pacific MFA Residency Writers Conference.