The Beat of My Own Drum (8 page)

We worked out line formations, dance steps, and harmonies to dozens of songs, including Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard it Through the Grapevine,” “Respect” by Aretha Franklin, the Isley Brothers number “It’s Your Thing,” “ABC” by the Jackson 5, and “It’s a Shame” by the Spinners.

Our stage was wherever we felt like dancing, complete with a transistor radio. In preparation for our next “show,” we’d rehearse for hours and argue over every detail. Then, whenever one of our favorite artists would come on the radio, we’d immediately assume our positions and sing our hearts out to passing cars.

I’m sure Moms encouraged our practicing because it was a far healthier way for us to play together than some of our other more daring adventures. Whenever she heard us perfecting our routines, she knew we were safe and could breathe a sigh of relief that we weren’t flying down the streets without stop signs in stolen shopping carts; exploring creeks and then tramping muddy shoes all over her carpet; or being chased by Juan as he hurled his nunchuks during his
Kung Fu
phase.

If we weren’t rehearsing, we’d probably have been distracting Moms with some elaborate story so she wouldn’t notice the other two trying to tape up the window, which had been cracked by a foul ball, or sneaking into her purse to find some change. If ever she caught us, we’d be in
big
trouble, and she was not averse to using a belt or her hand to slap us every now and again.

Both my parents smoked. Pops smoked pipes, and mostly when he painted, but Moms smoked cigarettes until she was forty. When I was seven years old, I stole one of her cigarettes and showed my brothers how to smoke. We were standing by the back bedroom window. Both Juan and Peto started coughing, and I looked up to see Moms standing at the window giving us that Gardere look. We were in big trouble.

We got spanked with a belt big-time. She folded us over her
knee as we yelped in pain, and we weren’t allowed out of our room. Sometimes she’d catch the back of our legs with her hand while we were walking past. I’m sure we deserved it most of the time, because we were bad—lying and stealing and taking money to buy soda or bubble gum. If we weren’t doing that, then we were yelling and fighting and getting into some other kind of trouble.

Pops was never a disciplinarian. Having suffered violence as a child, he could never raise a hand to us, which would have hurt him more than it hurt us. He couldn’t even kill a spider or a fly, and he usually cried about things more than we did. He didn’t want to be mad at anyone, hurt anything, or be hurt. Listening to us singing and dancing and laughing together was what really made him happy. That was all he’d ever hoped for when he was a boy, imagining a family of his own one day.

So we focused our energy on music and dance instead and couldn’t wait to show off our routines to him and Moms, who were always proud to introduce us at the next family gathering. Both parents got a kick out of our musical collaborations, but it was Moms who mostly encouraged us to perform for others, even if those “others” were our grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins—not exactly paying customers.

Not yet, at least.

“Okay, everybody, gather round!” she’d cry, clapping her hands. “The kids are going to do their latest number for you!” Guests at every party—at least once a week—knew they were going to get some entertainment from the Escovedo family, whether it was us kids, Pops jamming, or Moms tap-dancing, singing, or being goofy. It was a given that they’d be in for a treat.

None of us knew it at the time, but our childish song-and-dance impressions were setting the stage for our future careers. The way we learned to work, dance, and play together back then in
the sixties taught us invaluable lessons about being in a band that would serve us well for many decades.

In spite of her boundless enthusiasm for what we were doing, Moms was no stage mother and had little interest in our entering an industry she’d witnessed Pops struggle in. He, too, actively discouraged us from thinking of a career in music and constantly warned us how tough it was to live without a guaranteed income.

He sometimes went so far as to lock his instruments away when he left the house so that we wouldn’t be tempted to jam with them. It wasn’t hard to pick the lock, and Juan definitely had the knack. So when Pops left, we’d run to the closet, pull out his instruments, play our hearts out, then quickly return them the second we heard his car pull up. As he walked in, we’d exchange triumphant smiles, the beats still reverberating in our ears.

There was unlimited access to live music beyond our walls too. In Oakland back in the day, it was as if the streets had their own soundtrack. As a second grader, I became obsessed with a band that rehearsed in an apartment on the corner of the next block. Rather than play with dolls or try on my mother’s makeup—the preferred activities of most little girls my age—all I wanted to do was listen to that band rehearse. Whenever I heard the distant bass of their kick drum as they started riffing on a James Brown number, I was like a kid in a candy store and would race over to where they were.

The band rehearsed on the top floor of a house halfway up a hill. When I got there I’d listen for a while, and as soon as there was a break in the numbers, I’d yell: “Hey! Can I come up and listen?” or “Won’t you let me play?”

One of them would put his head out of the window and laugh at me, the skinny little kid on the corner. “You’re too young. Go home!”

He’d try to shoo me away repeatedly, but I couldn’t be deterred. The same way my father used to sit outside nightclubs as
a child, I’d sit on the curb and listen to the band playing whatever covers they were working on at the time. There was something about their drumbeat that really got to me.

Sometimes I sat there for hours, absorbing their incredible sound and tapping away in time on my legs. Listening to them made me so happy for a whole year, until they unexpectedly moved away. I never even saw the whole band. I only ever saw that one guy’s head out the window. They were so good, but to this day I have no idea who they were.

While we found all kinds of ways to enjoy ourselves, music was always at the heart of it. I learned to play a little guitar, but only James Brown barre chords. I could also play a bit of bass and some keyboard, too, and I did both later on. It was percussion that attracted me most, since that’s what surrounded me, but Pops saw my interest and became concerned that my focus would be too narrow.

“If you’re really serious about music, Sheila, then you must learn to play a classical instrument,” he told me. And so, in third grade, my violin lessons began. To my father’s mind, the violin was a more sophisticated instrument that would offer me greater opportunities, like playing in orchestras and symphonies or maybe scoring music for film.

I enjoyed the violin, but it never connected with me in the same way as playing the congas. Nor was it exactly cool, and I’d get teased for it at school or on the street, where bullies were beginning to dominate my life. The mean kids already had me singled out for the color of my skin or the state of my clothes. I wore my white shoes until I couldn’t wear them anymore. I used to polish them every night to try to get them whiter, but they were so worn and cracked that the polish wouldn’t take. I hated wearing those shoes and I was also embarrassed by my old dresses. Having a violin case was just another reason to be singled out.

The bullies would push me around and ask, “Why are you carrying that stupid case around all the time?” Or they’d try to grab it from me and say, “You think you’re special because you play some fancy violin?”

I tried to ignore them, but their words hurt, and I began to lose my enthusiasm for the instrument. Because I had a good ear and could easily mimic what I heard, I stopped learning how to read sheet music and got away with faking reading. I only needed to hear a piece one time and I had it—a trick I’d learned from copying my father.

I played pretty well in spite of that. Within a short space of time, I made it to the top of my class and became first violin in the school orchestra. I even received a scholarship offer from an elite summer music program.

Then one day my teacher asked me to start at bar eighty-three and play a certain line. Instead, I just started playing where I felt like. “No,” she said firmly. “I want you to read the music and play it as it is written.”

I hesitated. “Can you hum it for me?”

“No, Sheila. I want you to read the music and play it as it is written.”

I shook my head, and her mouth dropped open as she called me to the front of the class.

“Don’t you know how to read music, Sheila?”

“No, but my mom does.”

“That’s impossible! You’re my best student. How can you have got this far without reading music?”

“I do what I’ve always done. I listen to it and then I hear it playing back in my head.”

Learning to read music had always felt like a waste of time, but I knew I could never survive in a scholarship program without that skill, so I quit. My parents were very disappointed, but I told them
I was giving it up because it was too “square.” They tried to persuade me to stick with it, but by then they had to pick their battles.

Putting away my violin for good was the first indication of the defiance yet to come. The classical instrument they’d picked for me didn’t go with the hip, tough-girl image I was aggressively cultivating in order to defend myself against bullies, so I went back to banging the heck out of percussion instruments.

Mostly, I didn’t want anyone telling me what to do.

Too late, I’d discovered the word
no,
and I liked the power it carried. My love for it stemmed from those nights when no wouldn’t have worked anyway. I started to say no to my mother, my teachers, and anyone who tried to make me do something I didn’t want to do. My father was out on tour a lot and was rarely confrontational anyway, so Moms bore the brunt of it.

Never being able to bring up what had happened to me when I was five only made me madder. Full of anger—conscious and subconscious—I began to test the stormy waters of rebellion.

My poor parents.

Little did they know how much of a handful I was yet to become.

7
. Tremolo

Quick repetition of the same note or a rapid alternation between two notes

I take it back—all of those crazy things that I did to you

I take it back—the way I took your heart and broke it in two

I take it back—the things I said that just cut like a knife

“I TAKE IT BACK”

THE E FAMILY

W
hat secretly set the stage for my teenage revolt was that moving away from the evil house hadn’t provided the escape I’d hoped for after all. Even though I was happier and we had music and laughter all around, my secret sexual abuse continued.

Because I’d never told my parents that my cousins had groped me as a child, they were still invited over and continued to wake me up after Moms and Pops had left for the night. Mostly I would just lie there in disbelief and let them grope me. In the dirty little world they dragged me into, the one that almost always happened in the dark, I veered from one horrible experience to the next.

With hindsight, I think I blocked out much of what happened as I was growing up. I know I shut down each time. Who was I going to tell? Everything had led me to the point where I felt that nobody would believe me, not even my parents.

I was on my own.

Having already been raped, I was petrified that one day my cousins’ sexual molestation would lead there too. There seemed to be a helpless inevitability about it, almost as if that was my chosen path.

With hindsight I can see that I was still trying to protect the five-year-old girl within me. I didn’t realize that—deep down—I was still blaming myself. I was also inadvertently protecting my abusers whenever I asked myself, “What is it about me that made them do this?” I was convinced that I had to be at least partially responsible. And so the abuse continued, and I was repeatedly warned that it would be “real bad” for me if I ever told anyone. Not knowing what else I could do, I had no choice but to comply.

I have no clear recollection of how many years the abuse went on for, or how often, but I vividly remember the night I started to put an end to it. The same cousin had woken me and was doing something that I didn’t like when I pushed him away and cried, “Stop! Please stop!”

He looked shocked. “But I thought you liked it!” he said, which shocked me.

“No, I don’t!” I cried, disgusted. “Now leave me alone.”

I ran from the room, and that particular cousin never touched me again.

Then a few months later, we were at the home of a relative when one of my cousins who had never molested me before woke me up, grabbed me, and pulled me into a room. Then he locked the door. As I watched, dumbfounded, he unzipped his pants, spat on both my hands, and made me touch him
there
.

Smiling, he instructed me to give him a blow job.

I must have been eleven or twelve years old.

I didn’t know what a blow job was, so he explained.

When I eventually took in what he was asking me to do, I recoiled in horror, snapping my hands back to my sides. A familiar feeling of fear came upon me, because I thought this was done and over with. He grabbed my hair and yanked my head down toward him.

Pushing him off me, I shouted, “No!”

I listened to the word crackle through the air like electricity, and I liked the sound of it.

“Do it, Sheila!” he repeated under his breath.

“No!” I repeated. “This isn’t right.” Then, more pleadingly, I asked, “Why are you asking me to do this?”

He told me to be quiet before grabbing me and pulling me toward him once more. My fear turned to anger, and by then I knew how to fight back. I’d been bullied for playing the violin. I’d been picked on at school for being too dark or too athletic. I shoved him harder than I’d ever shoved anyone in my life and watched as the force of it sent him crashing back against a daybed.