Passing Time

I first picked up a guitar in the junior high band. My music teacher, who had a large face which turned shiny and did impersonations of Spanish onions swelling with liquid when he blew on his trumpet, told me that I was useless at keyboard, clarinet and even cymbals, so he put a cheap classical Yamaha in my hands, missing two strings and sadly, oh so sadly, out of tune, and suggested that I buy a book and a pick and get to work.

I was kicked out of the band later that week when the music teacher told everyone that Miles was infinitely better than Coltrane, which is simply not true. I got into a screaming match with him and ended up flinging the guitar to the ground, making an impressive dint and snapping another string, and storming out to join some friends on the football team.

The second time I picked up a guitar was years and years after I had taken up piano, it was after I had passed through med school and it was after I had met Wilson. We were drinking, there was a band, I got into a fight, and the guitar, which was of that peculiar Flying V breed, seemed like an apt weapon, and it was also superior in terms of proximity, so I smashed it hard into the offending sternum.

I picked up the guitar in the sense that I actually started playing it about a year after the infarc. Bizarre purchases at yard sales had never been my strength in the past. I thought Stacey had trained me out of the habit of cluttering the apartment with useless novelty items like cracked shot glasses and squash racquets after I got her to quit labelling absolutely every food product and utensil in the kitchen. But when she left I felt any obligations or accessions I had made to her no longer counted, so I picked up a steel string acoustic which was hanging in the window of the second hand store down the road purely because I had always associated guitars with anger and smashing things, and I was in the mood for a kind of nostalgic venting. So I laid down thirty on the counter and ended up sticking with it long after its purchase value wore thin.

I was staying at home drifting in and out of a self-pitying stupor, assisted by drugs and alcohol and midday movies when appropriate. The piano didn't mean the same thing to me anymore, it meant no more concerts and no more drunken ditties surrounded by drunken strippers (though maybe those experiences passed when I hit 40 rather when the infarc hit me). Now the piano was just a presence and an occasional pastime, and it was ridiculous and large and overbearing in all its weighty expectation. Because playing piano was normal and returning to normalcy isn't high on the priority list when you're drifting in and out of a drunken stupor assisted by drugs and alcohol and midday movies. But the guitar was new and it was challenging and it meant having a purpose for going to work - spending the whole day waiting to return home so I could get my hands on the fretboard again was a twisted motive which worked well enough.

I became a Stevie Ray Vaughn fan, but despite my newfound love for guitar-based blues and self-indulgent soloing, I stuck with a plain acoustic.

I don't tell people that I play.

I don't tell people anything anymore because anything that means anything to me never lasts. So maybe, if I try hard this time and keep my mouth shut and my heart open, tuned to the music (three fingers picking over six strings, a homemade glass bottleneck sliding three frets up into a sweet, tremulous C), well, maybe I might just avoid falling.