The Gift of Fire (9 page)

My mother was happy that I’d found something I loved doing so much, but I know that she would have preferred I’d found a less noisy hobby … perhaps stamp collecting, or maybe mime! But my father, a dyed-in-the-wool musician, couldn’t have been more pleased by the way I threw myself into making music.

Dad didn’t hear a racket when I practiced; he heard my passion … and he heard improvement. When it became obvious to him that I wasn’t going to give up on the drums, he invited an old buddy of his to drop by the house and listen to me play. His name was Glenn Diecedue, and he became both a good friend and my first drum teacher.

G
LENN HAD BEEN A PROFESSIONAL DRUMMER
for years and had gigged with everyone in New Orleans. He’d performed at all the big jazz clubs in the French Quarter, toured with different groups, sat in on recording sessions, and even played on riverboats up and down the Mississippi. Although he originally came over to the house to help me out as a favor to my dad, I couldn’t have asked for a better first teacher.

Glenn knew how serious I was about drumming and that I dreamed of being a professional. He was straight with me right from the start. “Listen to me, Danny,” he said during our first lesson, before I’d even picked up my drumsticks. “Being a drummer is tough. There are a million guys trying to do the same thing as you, and they’ve got their hands. For someone like you, it’s going to be unbelievably hard.

“I’m telling you right now, don’t worry about what other people say. If you’re going to be a drummer, you have to focus on the music, and you have to play for yourself. You’re never going to be like any other drummer, so don’t try to copy anyone else … if you’re going to succeed, you’re going to have to find your own technique, invent your own style. That’s what I’ll try to help you do.”

That was some of the best musical advice I ever received, and I took it to heart.

Glenn was hugely encouraging. He often told me that I had genuine talent and urged me to practice as much as possible. He came by the house once a week and showed me all the basics, such as stick control and how to read music. He also set up a regimented practice routine that not only tripled the pace at which I was learning, but built up the strength in my arms and thumb as well, which allowed me to work twice as hard.

Just three months into my lessons with Glenn, I was holding the stick in my left hand for minutes at a time, rather than seconds. And the wristband that had at first seemed a bit awkward as it pressed the stick against my right arm soon felt like it was a part of my body. I was improving so rapidly that I was growing frustrated at only being able to practice on the single snare drum my father had bought me at the pawnshop.

Sensing my impatience, Glenn had a little chat with my dad. Not long afterward, my teacher showed up at our house with one of his old drum kits for me to use. “They’re yours, kid,” he said with a smile.

My creative world, which had been limited to the rhythms I could tap out on a solitary drumhead, had just exploded into a universe of possibilities. Instead of focusing all my energy on one lonely snare drum, I now had a bass drum, a floor tom, an extra snare, and tom-toms to whale on; not to mention the shiny brass crash, hi-hat, and ride cymbals that were suddenly at my command. I was euphoric that day … but my poor mother! The noise that began echoing through our house that day didn’t stop until I moved out years later to go to college.

Glenn also helped me set up a stereo system, which allowed me to practice along with the recordings of some of my favorite songs and musicians. Soon my father and older brothers were coming by for impromptu jam sessions—Dad would play trumpet or harmonica, Johnny would play second trumpet, and Scott rocked on with his trombone. My baby brother, Paul, who was just four or five years old at the time, would sit on the floor clapping his hands and humming as we jammed.

After several months of drum lessons and hundreds of hours of practice, I felt that I had a fairly solid understanding of the fundamentals of drumming. The following year, my family moved to another town where I’d begin high school. My drumming skills were so developed by then that in my freshman year, the band director gave me sheet music that only the most advanced seniors were using. Because I started my new school in September, I’d missed the summer band program. Consequently, I wasn’t allowed to be in the varsity marching band, and could only play in the school’s beginner band. But by the next year, I’d auditioned for the varsity band and was made both first chair and section leader of the band, a position I’d keep all the way through my high-school years.

I kept on practicing, both at home and at school. When I was in the concert band, I’d often play the enormous kettledrums (or timpani), which make such a deep and sonorous sound that I felt as tall and powerful as an oak tree when I struck them. And during football games, I’d parade along with the marching band under the bright floodlights illuminating the fall sky, playing four-piece quad drums (or tenor drums, as they’re sometimes called) in front of hundreds of cheering parents and students. Not bad for a kid who at the beginning of his academic career had been heckled by his kindergarten classmates and called a monster.

Meanwhile, Glenn and I continued our weekly sessions, and I kept improving. He even invited me to sit in and play with a real jazz band he belonged to during a local music festival. When he first asked, I was dubious; as the date approached, I became so nervous that I thought I’d forgotten how to breathe. So I just applied a lesson I’d already learned in the past—practice, practice, practice. Long before I took to the stage, I got ahold of the music we were to play and practiced it every morning and night until I was practically playing it in my sleep.

When the time came for the outdoor festival, I took my place on the raised platform with Glenn and the other musicians and took a deep breath. I knew I was prepared, and that made me feel confident I’d hold my own—which I did, and then some. During that short but successful public debut, I felt something like the energy that had gone through me that day in kindergarten when I felt myself open up to the universe in the school yard … and it made me hungry for more.

I’d thrown myself into my music—practiced and prepared—with the passion of a man certain that this was his destiny. The applause that washed over me when I left the stage that day is still part of who I am. From that moment forward, I knew with certainty that whatever I did in the future, my success would be determined by how seriously I approached the work.

I
’D BEEN PLAYING THE DRUMS
for a little over a year when I received a call from a segment producer on
The Montel Williams Show
in New York City. It seems that Montel was doing a program about young people who had been burned or disfigured but had come to terms with their injuries and had gone on to lead normal, productive lives.

The producer asked if I was interested in appearing on the show with other young “survivors”; if so, Montel would fly me and one of my parents to the Big Apple, put us up in a fancy hotel in Times Square, and arrange for a limo to take us to and from the studio. The show would be taped the next afternoon, which happened to be my 14th birthday.

I talked it over with my parents, and we agreed that if sharing my story on national television might help other kids struggling with the kind of difficulties I’d experienced, then I should definitely do it. So the next morning, Mom and I were in a Boeing 747 circling the Manhattan skyline as the pilot waited for the go-ahead to land at JFK International Airport. It was a bizarre and exciting journey, and our first big mother-son trip since returning from Yugoslavia seven years earlier.

That afternoon I was on the set of
Montel
sharing my story, doing my best to encourage others who were burned not to be discouraged or allow their injuries to get in the way of their dreams. To bring home the point I was trying to make, the producers rolled some home video that my mom had brought from Louisiana, which showed me playing the drums. After we finished taping, I received a nice surprise when Montel and the producers presented me with a birthday cake.

But my biggest surprise came later, when I saw how my story acted as a powerful tool in the lives of others. Since that show aired in 1993, dozens of complete strangers have stopped me on the street in cities all over the country to thank me for going on
Montel.
They’ve told me that seeing me play the drums without hands motivated them to follow their own dreams, despite whatever obstacles life had put in their way. After I’d heard a few stories like that, I realized that the
real
gift of music was its ability to inspire others.

Chapter Six

Navigating the High-School Waters

As much as I was inspired by being on
Montel
and had enjoyed my 15 minutes of fame in the national spotlight, I was also entering a phase of my life where I often wished that I could crawl under a rock and hide from the world. That phase was called
high school.

By the time I hit adolescence, I was painfully aware that I’d never be part of a popular clique. I certainly wasn’t going to be a jock—even though I could play many sports well—and I wasn’t going to be a preppy or part of the cool crowd. No, I was going to be what I’d been for most of my life: “different looking.” That knowledge didn’t do me a lot of good, though; it definitely didn’t give me any insight into how to live a normal life, deal with girls, or ignore the gawkers and morons who laughed at me when I was out in public.

Whatever hassles and heartaches I’d experienced in my young life were intensified during high school. Much later I’d come to recognize and appreciate the spiritual gifts I’d received as a result of being burned. But during the majority of my teenage years, it was very difficult for me to see beyond what I’d lost.

As
I
BEGAN MY FRESHMAN YEAR
, at least I knew with certainty that the one thing I could do was play drums. I cultivated the ever-growing sensation inside of me that one day I could and would be a fine drummer—maybe even a
great
drummer! That knowledge is what I held on to whenever I faced new challenges—such as entering high school in a new town.

Just a few months prior, my parents had decided that it was time for the family to relocate. The neighborhood my brothers and I had grown up in was changing rapidly; we’d had a population explosion in the area that had brought in a lot of petty crime, quasi-gang activity, and drug dealing to what had once been a peaceful family suburb. When I was three or four years old, I remember listening to crickets as I fell asleep … seven or eight years later, the most frequent sounds coming through my bedroom window at night were gunshots and police sirens.

So we moved about 40 miles out of town (which I considered the sticks), where we could see giant pine trees swaying in the breeze and once again hear crickets in the evening air. The town was called Mandeville, a small commuter community on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain. New Orleans proper sits on the south side of the huge lake, which is the second largest saltwater lake in America after Utah’s Great Salt Lake.

Although we weren’t that far away from New Orleans, that big body of water did a good job of cutting us off from the people we’d grown up with. This meant that when my brothers and I arrived in our new hometown, we didn’t know a single soul.

To make matters worse, I had to take the bus to get to school. From kindergarten until eighth grade, my mother had always driven me, so I never had to worry about sitting next to other kids on the bus. Now that had all changed. In many ways, I was facing the world on my own for the very first time.

Of course, it was high time for me to board a school bus just like every other kid did. By now, I was old enough and confident enough (or getting there, anyway) to handle whatever the other boys and girls might dish out. And handle it I did. A lot of times the seats around me on those first bus trips stayed vacant. But after a while—after I’d gotten to be friends with a few of the kids—those seats filled up.

I was also lucky that my big brother Scott was in his senior year when we arrived in Mandeville, and we’d often go to school together. (By this point, my eldest brother, Johnny, was off to college, so I didn’t see him too much. I didn’t see much of my little brother, Paul, either, because he was just starting elementary school.)

Once Scott and I clamored off the bus with all the other kids, however, we’d separate for the rest of the day. He’d go off to his classes, and I’d go off to mine and be on my own all day long.

I
T MAY HAVE BEEN IN THE STICKS,
but Mandeville High School was huge to me. I’d come from a private school where the student body consisted of 200 kids at the very most, and my new public school had more than 2,000! The size difference was so overwhelming for me that just being at that school was physically and emotionally exhausting. Often I’d find myself fighting upstream against a river of students flowing around me while I was heading in the opposite direction; pushing my way around or through groups of kids gathered into little hallway roadblocks, gabbing and gossiping between classes; or lugging 20 or 30 pounds of books across the enormous campus, which seemed larger than most small cities to me.