Let Us Pray

There’s a church across the street, or rather their choir, that assails me – ASSAILS me every Sunday morning from 8AM to 11AM. I gotta tell you, if moral salvation depends on the ability to properly intonate, these people are in serious trouble.

The Story of My Life

Why so many men - male musicians to be exact - decide to turn the simplest things into big giant pissing contests is beyond me. I’ll elaborate: one of my ‘missions’ for this trip has been to connect with Lagotian musicians, since Lagos is to Nigeria what New York is to the U.S - in terms of being a center for the arts anyway . . . I’ll not bother to mention all the ways in which that analogy falls flat otherwise. In any case, I figured meeting with fellow musicians would be a great way to: a. get access to a drum kit and b. have an opportunity to hear music being made in ways previously unknown to me. For me, one of the greatest ‘successes’ from this trip would be to build lasting musical friendships that transcend the span of the Atlantic.

Unfortunately, I’ve encountered my fair share of flakiness in the past month and a half (flaky musicians – no WAY!) and so I eventually resolved to continue making the most of it with my current set-up (my snare placed in a chair that faces sideways so that I can use the back of it as my hi-hat) and settled on returning to my full kit, and jam session fantasies, in March. I was saying as much to the one they call Blue the other day, and I was a bit surprised to hear her disappointment. Apparently, she’d been sharing the same visions of awesomeness that I had originally possessed, and so she ever so gently urged me to continue on my quest.

Fair enough, I was officially re-motivated.

For the past week or so, on my way to the market, I’ve been spying an ad for a guitar tutor. I decided it was a not-so-long shot to hope that a professional guitarist might know a drummer/drum kit, and so I took down the number and gave it a ring. Sure enough, the guitarist (I forgot to ask his name) didn’t hesitate to put me in touch with his friend, Victor, who met with me the same day. Victor turns out to be a very young (just taking his college entrance exams), very non-creepy drum player who has access to a drum kit at his church, which is about a 30 minute walk from where I live.

Super score!

He generously offers to escort me to his church anytime there’s no service underway and let me have at it. I’m totally grateful, but by now am much better at formulating my own Lagotian precautions, and so I decide it’s best not to go it alone; I ask my cousin, who also lives in the city, to tag along and he agrees.

Now, Victor has already asked if I was looking for drum lessons, to which I replied that I was not. I let him know that I’m simply looking to play on something that doesn’t sound like wood and vinyl so that I’m not completely without the feel for a kit when I get back to the States. I just want to practice.

OK, deep breath . . .

We get to the kit (hooray!) and I get my sticks out and start to go into some beats that I want to remember. I knew it wasn’t like I was going to have complete privacy, but I certainly didn’t expect for Victor to be standing directly next to me, watching my every move, ready to critique:

“You need to use your wrists more . . . hit the bell . . .”

“I don’t want to hit the bell.”

“Oh.”

He doesn’t move.

I’ve been playing for all of 3 minutes when he asks me to get up so he can “show [me] something.”

Here we go . . .

10 minutes later my sticks are handed back to me but I haven’t been playing for 5 minutes before I’m asked to get up AGAIN. Now when he sits down he instructs me to repeat what he’s about to demonstrate.

Sigh . . .

I’m starting to tense up a bit from frustration but then I say to myself, “You know what? It’s all good. He’s been playing for ten years, you’ve been playing for three. It never hurts to learn. Be a good sport. And besides, he’s been so kind to help you out and not ask for anything . . .”

And so I become Victor’s pupil – not entirely whole-heartedly, but what the hey.

No sooner had I made this resolution than in comes Victor’s friend, another drummer, Sampson.

He plops himself directly in front of me and begins to move the parts of the kit around, “Don’t you want it closer? I like when it’s right on top of me.”

He hits me in the knee with one of the toms as he shoves it towards me. I slowly push it away, “That’s a little too close.”

Sigh . . .

Now he’s staring at me.

“Do you want to play something?” I ask him.

“Me? Oh nooo! I just got here, I want to see you. Play something.”

Sigh . . .

I oblige, but when I’m finished he looks a bit confused. Maybe even indignant, like he’s been served tuna salad when he paid for steak.

“What is that style?”

“People say I play melodically . . . really I just play what I hear . . . ”

“Is that all you play is that band stuff? Don’t you play any jazz, funk . . .?”

Sigh . . . . . . where’s Katy Otto when you need her?

“Why don’t you play something?” I suggest.

He smirks and gets up with a leisurely sway. We switch out. He starts to go, and not to my surprise, he’s wonderfully talented. As he plays, he looks at me occasionally, unabashedly gloating.

Really?

What part of “I’d just like to practice” translated to all of this? What is it about men and female musicians???

And believe me, this is not an isolated incident by any means. This is just one of the many, MANY episodes of male musician muscle-flexing that I’ve endured since I started playing the drums. It’s like there’s some gene that needs to be expressed in men when it comes to music. Some ‘jerk’ gene. Maybe for all of the years that women weren’t encouraged to be musical badasses and settled for quietly taming the flute and the French horn while our male counterparts were blessed with amps and overdrive pedals at their bris', the gene grew more dominant, it’s expression more intrinsic.

But you know what, it’s about time to start breeding that shit out of the DNA. Thank GOD for Girls Rock! band camp!!! I figure that by the time our graduates get to be my age, they would have come up against enough of the ‘jerk’ gene (and respectfully ripped it a new one) to put the recessive wheels swiftly in motion.

(smiling) And how.

Pavlov’s Dogs

They’ve got us trained quite well:
- Boil some water (to store in flasks)
- Plug in your chargeables
- Find a fan to sit in front of/under
- Run through your mind (quickly) of anything you’ve been waiting for electricity to help you do

Iron a shirt, maybe?

It’s some nonsense over here: Nigeria, ‘The Giant of Africa’ in terms of natural resources and skilled industry, supplies electricity to other African nations, most notably Ghana, who just celebrated 10 years of uninterrupted service - WE supply THEM . . . and we’ve had a total of 5 hours of electricity (generously estimating) in the past 72 hours.

“Start a revolution!” (what Blue tells me)

Uh . . .

(hahaha)

. . .

OK, how?

. . .

and there goes the light again . . .

. . . here come the generators . . .

And So It Is . . .

Ah! My wishlist – that’s what I don’t want to forget! So if you happen to be my Fairy Godmother, or perhaps have her beeper number, take note please:

1. Consistent electricity, or at the very least a schedule of when it will be available so I can plan accordingly
2. A nearby bakery, specializing in warm gooey things
3. A washer and dryer, but just a washer will do really
4. Quiet mornings – until 11am at least.

On that last wish I’ll elaborate. So my father, being officially in the geriatric classification, arouses no later than 5:30am. Our rooms our separated by an extremely flimsy bit of a door, and so all of his morning shufflings and phlegm expulsions sound as though they are taking place directly next to my head. I’m getting more and more used to these sounds and most likely will be able to sleep through them in the next couple of weeks, but I’m not certain of my ability to stay asleep during what I’ve come to experience as the morning’s dynamic duo of sonic intrusions, which begin just after my father has settled:

1. A woman who walks down our close* crying what sounds like ‘Ay-ba-RAY-BAY!’ every 4 and-a-half seconds.

2. No more than 5 minutes away, and sometimes simultaneously, an old-fashioned bicycle horn, sounding out continuously, pausing every now and then for about 2 and-a-half seconds.

For about the 1st week I was here I was consistently snatched into reality, yanked from my hard-earned sleep (jet-lag was a real son-of-a) by these two sounds. I could not understand how people EVER got used to them, and then one morning I spied from my window a man spitting some venom at ‘aybaraybay’ woman about her early morning cries and I thought to myself ‘Damn straight. Glad it’s not just me.’

When re-telling the exchange I witnessed to my father, he gave me some much needed perspective, however. The woman is selling bread that some people will take in the morning on their way to work. The horn-honker is selling the newspapers. Throughout the day a tailor, dish-seller, meat-hawker and others parade up and down our close, crying a special cry or making a distinct noise (the tailor klinks together his scissors for instance) to let people know they’re around. Itinerants, my father calls them. This is their livelihood, their survival. If the horn-honker doesn’t sell his newspapers in our close at 6AM someone else will.

Fair enough, but I’m still not taking number 4 off my wish list.

* an enclosed street with duplexes on either side – about 30 total- that’s free from traffic and actually has a security gate that stays monitored by guards from about 9PM to about 6AM