[FWEEEEEEEET!]
And then the world ended, and I could not move.
I have to make you understand the noise, because everything else happens inside it, and if you do not have the noise you do not have the night.
It did not come through my ears. It came up through the floor.
Up through the studs and into the bones of my legs and it did not stop, it went up through my chest and it sat in my back teeth and it stayed, and when I opened my mouth I was shouting and could not hear myself do it.
There was a drummer 20 yards behind our dugout. A big man, bare to the waist, the drum roped across his chest, and he had beaten it all night. When the whistle went his arms stopped dead in the air for half a second, both sticks up, like a man who has been switched off.
Then he hit it so hard the skin split, [BOOM], and he was gone, screaming, the broken drum swinging off him. Somebody right behind me had an air horn on the whole time. [PAAAAARP.] One long note that did not stop for breath.
