Chapter 1
Okay, so I admit, the whole “Uncle Lucky playing Russian roulette in front of me when I was six” thing was kind of intense. But it’s true. And it’s important because it was the moment that pretty much changed my life. So let me finish telling you what happened.
Spit took a long pull on a joint and let the stinky smoke float to the ceiling, while Uncle Lucky cocked the gun and lifted it to his head. Then, Uncle Lucky, with his finger on the trigger, closed his eyes and said:
UNCLE LUCKY
Lucky, lucky, lucky.
And then he pulled the trigger. But don’t worry, no BAM! Just a click, and Uncle Lucky and Spit started howling like lonely dogs and laughing like psychos.
And then my mom came home. And then all hell broke loose.
Well, not really hell, because my mom just isn’t the type of woman to come in the house and start knockin’ heads, which Uncle Lucky should’ve been grateful for.
Because had it been anybody else, Lucky would’ve been turned inside out. But lucky for Lucky, he got all the rah-rah between him and my mother. My mom was the softy of the two, which is why Lucky, the crazy big brother, was living with us in the first place.
He was crazy, and not really the rent-paying kind, but was also like the protector of the house, so she let him crash. But when my mother saw Uncle Lucky, who by the way had been babysitting me since I was born (this wasn’t the first time I saw them do this with the pistol), holding that gun, laughing his head off, and me staring at him, holding the cordless phone with my finger on the 9, she told him for once and for all he had to get the hell out.
And that sucked.
Why did that suck? you ask. It seems like Uncle Lucky was a bad influence, right? Well, yes, but he was my uncle. My mom’s brother. He was nuts, but he was always there and he never disrespected my mom in any real way, because she was his baby sister. I know it sounds weird, but he looked out for us. And when he moved out, this guy Dom moved in.
But Dom didn’t come right away, thank goodness. Mom and I had about ten years to ourselves, and that’s when I learned to play the drums.
See, my mother, in all of her sweetness, was actually a mean drummer in a band when she was younger. Her and my dad, whose nickname was Bottom.
ANNOUNCER
We are the Bud-Stuy Magic Dusters.
A punk band. Mom said back then, punk bands were all about being tough, and since they were a black punk band, they had to be extra hard to be respected and not seen as black kids just trying to be white.
So they named the band after some old New York street gang, the Hudson Dusters, and threw Bed-Stuy at the end of it so white boys wouldn’t try them, especially since my mother was such a chump. And a girl.
STUY’S MOM
And punk takes no pity on the pretty.
I always figured Magic Dusters had something to do with magic dust, though. Of course, my mother has denied this many, many times at this point, but I know she used to get high. Everybody did back then. And she played punk . . . come on! I’m young, but I ain’t dumb.
By the time I was born, the band had already split, mainly because she got pregnant with me. Once she told everybody she was having Bottom’s baby, things changed. Well, really just one thing—my father vanished. He didn’t show up to any more practices. He wouldn’t answer his phone. He was never home. Nothing. And instead of replacing him while my mom’s belly was steady growing, they just decided to call the band quits. The Bed-Stuy Magic Dusters were a wrap, and so was my mother’s music career.
Later, Mom heard that the boys in the band started another band, and all moved to California. She always believed the whole split was a way to out her and protect Bottom from his responsibilities as a father.
She said she always felt like the Dusters wasn’t nothing but a boy’s club with a girl drummer. I can believe that. I can also believe that Bottom might’ve been on the run from Uncle Lucky. Now, you would think that a woman who was a failed musician, and whose child’s father was a deadbeat musician, wouldn’t necessarily want music to play such a major part in her child’s life. It’s like people who work in politics, or people who are famous movie stars. They usually don’t want their children to do that same thing only because they’ve seen all the ugly sides of the business. The drugs, the wild parties, the lies, the scandal. All the stuff that blows lives.
But my mother took a different approach. She pretty much drowned me in music after Lucky left. I don’t know if it was her way of trying to fix me after seeing my uncle put a revolver to his head a few times, or what. All I know is, once he was out, Mom started taping pictures of famous musicians and bands to the walls in my room, like Sly Stone, and Bad Brains, and Bob Marley. Always playing different kinds of music in the house, from jazz to blues to soul, and of course punk rock. And because it was just the two of us, there were a lot of dance parties and fake singing sessions where she’d be wailing into the hairbrush and I’d be doing (very embarrassing) steps behind her, singing backup.
She didn’t really play much of the Dusters’ stuff back then, though. Probably because it was too painful. But when I got old enough for her to teach me how to play the drums—around seven—then she started introducing me to their stuff, crappy cassette recordings of grimy live shows, mainly because she wanted me to hear what she used to sound like on the kit. Loud and fast.
Drumming started simple. We used the kitchen table as the snare drum, and our fingers as drumsticks. Once I learned how to keep rhythm, she started showing me other things, like how to use my hands and my feet at the same time. She would take pieces of tape and make X’s on the kitchen floor. She would color one red and the other blue. Then she would sit in front of me with her hands out, like she was waiting for me to give her a double five. In her left hand she held a quarter, and in her right hand a penny. Then she would say:
STUY’S MOM
Red, red, red.
And I had to use my right foot to step on the red X three times. Then she’d say:
STUY’S MOM
Blue, blue, blue.
And I would step on the blue X with my left foot three times. Then it was:
STUY’S MOM
Quarter, quarter, quarter, penny.
And I would use my right hand to slap the hand holding the quarter, and my left to slap the hand holding the penny. We would practice over and over again, her switching up the patterns to make it harder.
It was like some weird, ghetto Dance Dance Revolution, except she wasn’t teaching me how to dance. She was teaching me to use all my limbs at the same time. It wasn’t until I was ten that I actually sat at a drum set. It was her old drums that our landlord let her keep stashed away in the basement of our building.
She put a red tape X on the high-hat pedal, and a blue tape X on the bass drum. She put a photocopy of a penny on the cymbals, and one of a quarter on the snare drum. She had a box of sticks that she was saving for some reason, stuffed in one of her drawers. She gave me two and told me to get to it. It was the most natural thing I think I had ever done.
From there came playing in school. High school band isn’t really the coolest club in the world. That’s for sure. I mean, either you’re the band geek, walking around with a huge black case carrying a trombone, an instrument that no one really knows or cares about in high school, unfortunately. Or a band dummy, also known as a percussionist, which is short for “I can’t really play anything so they gave me the triangle and a shake-shake thing and call me a percussionist to make me feel more like a musician, when really I’m just a noisemaker.” And if you’re a drummer, like me, which is usually a cool instrument in bands, you were stuck playing marching rhythms and stupid “pat-pat-pats” on a snare, and that’s it. Not exactly drumming.
Then there was the “in a band” guys, who usually walked around school with guitar cases, and since the high school band didn’t have any guitars in it, that was a sign that people with guitar cases were actually in a band. A real band. Not some janky school band. School bands have recitals. Real bands have shows. But because my mother felt like it would be good for my drumming and would keep me off the streets, she made me join the school band.
But it wasn’t pat-pat-pat for me all four years. My junior year, I ended up convincing the band director Mr. Rochester to let me bring my set in. It wasn’t much. Just a bass, snare, high hat, and tom. It was all we could fit in our small two-bedroom apartment (the basement got too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter), and even that was still a bit much. Not to mention I couldn’t really play loud at home, only because my mother didn’t want our neighbors to complain to our landlord.
We couldn’t afford to get kicked out. She had been kicked out of a few places when she was playing with the Dusters, but back then she said it was okay because it was all about the music, and you could always find a couch to crash on and a can of sardines to slurp down.
But with me, she said she just couldn’t risk it. I loved the stories about her toughing it out, letting the music rule every decision, but I was glad I wasn’t crammed up on no couch, and I was definitely not into sardines.
Mr. Rochester let me bring the set in and said I could leave it at the school for the year and practice there whenever I wanted, as loud as I wanted. The next full band practice, I sat behind the set and brought some life to whatever drab song we were working on. Mr. Rochester was so impressed that when our big recital came, I had all kinds of drum solos.
After that, high school changed for me. I was cool. I would walk around twirling my drumsticks, which of course, girls liked. I would make beats on the lockers, and my friends would freestyle, and before you knew it there would be a crowd of people, including teachers, who were supposed to be stopping the whole thing but couldn’t because, well, what can I say? I’d be rocking! Everything was sweet. Until February of my senior year, when my mother met Dom. Or as I call him, Dummy.
I didn’t even know she was dating anybody until Valentine’s Day rolled around. Every other Valentine’s Day we had spent together, but this one was different. I came home with some sweetheart candy for her, but when I opened the door of our apartment, there were roses all over the place.
SG
What’s with the roses?
I closed the door. She sat there on the couch with her face buried in them, sniffing like some kind of drug addict.
STUY’S MOM
They’re from a man I work with at the call center.
My mother traded in her drumsticks for a job at a 911 Emergency Call Center. She’s the lady who answers the phone whenever you call with an emergency. I mean, it’s not music, but she’s got one of those soothing voices that works perfectly for a job like that. But I wasn’t so sure about her dating a man with a voice like that. Seemed like a setup.
Copyright © 2026 by Crown BFYR. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
