There was a man in Manhattan,
who took the whole city for a drum kit. Newspaper racks, rubbish bins, vending machines, kerbs — all of it just waiting for someone to make it ring. Gene Palma made it ring. Five days a week, for decades, with two sticks and hair that smelled of shoe polish.
By day, in the early seventies,
he carried statistics through the city's advertising agencies. A messenger. Anyone who shared a lift with him met a man who said not a word, looked no one in the eye and seemed entirely unaware of the effect he had. What nobody knew: inside his head, a solo was running without pause. Krupa, Buddy Rich, Chick Webb — he knew all the riffs by heart. Four years later, a former colleague sat in a cinema, watched Taxi Driver — and there stood the silent messenger from the lift, in the middle of Scorsese's film, drumming.
His hair stuck like fresh road tar;
pressed out, the oil could have greased a turbine. He styled it with shoe polish, because Rudolph Valentino had supposedly done the same. It proved his undoing. On a delivery he once brushed against a client in a white raincoat; the polish ruined the fabric, and Palma lost the job. The lift lost its quiet virtuoso. In return, the street got him whole.
It had all begun with a film.
In 1937, aged thirteen, he saw Hollywood Hotel — and in it, Gene Krupa at the drums. He leapt out of his seat. That was what he wanted to be. A drummer. Later he won a Krupa drumming contest at a picture house on 86th Street. The prize: a hundred-dollar snare drum — and four hours in the house of his idol. One drum, one mission, one hero. It was enough for a whole life.
For his appearance in Taxi Driver he was paid $172.50.
Afterwards, passers-by recognised him and tossed him coins. In the nineties he disappeared from the street. He died in 2005, aged eighty-one, in a nursing home, far from the city he had once ruled beat by beat.
