Strings

It seems that every old guy still owns a guitar. In TV ads and influencer blog spots for everything from beard-dying to boner pills—there’s the guitar, on its stand or hanging against a wall like a piece of memorial art. I don’t know how many of those venerable axes ever get played. Very few, I suspect, going from my own experience over the decades. I was never good, had little of the music in me. But there were songs I loved, and by diligently applying a sort of mechanical devotion I could learn them. Having recently turned eighty, with fingers stiffening (anticipation of rigor mortis?), I thought I’d see if I could still play and hoped that doing so would be therapeutic. Also, I thought that if I can’t play I should sell it, I could use the money. So I hauled it out from under the never-used bed in the spare room. That had been entering a dim world of dust balls. The guitar in its case was heavier than I’d remembered, unwieldy in such a tight space. I crabbed back out dragging the case like prey and straightened up, a risen man irrationally elated! … Then at a loss for what I was about. And my hips hurt like hell.

I snapped out of it. I laid the case on the bed, sprung the rust-spotted clasps and lifted the lid. The old guitar was faithful to its model’s colouring—a sunburst. I’d expected dullness, more dust, but the case had worked like a sarcophagus, with its plush blue lining looking incredibly well-preserved. When I ran my thumb across the strings, it sounded as close to in-tune as my imperfect-pitch ears could hear. Surely that, the long-forgotten guitar’s tuned strings, was something already of a secular miracle? … Yet I still felt the old vibration of guilt the guitar had always evoked, not from its having been ignored but for how I’d acquired it.

The guitar had been stolen. I’d stolen the guitar. Some sixty years before, from a church basement where a group of madras-shirted, non-Beatle-coifed adolescents had been practicing for a “hip” Sunday service. It was a Saturday evening, I’d been drinking alone, and on the wobbly way home I’d gone in to find a bathroom. The Men’s was in a dim recessed corner at the back of the hall. I had my fingertips on the door’s push plate when I heard movement; I turned to see the kids trooping towards the rear, oblivious of me and still choiring an upbeat hymn: “Sons of God … eat His body, drink His blood … Allelu, Allelu, Allelu, Alleluia.” (Sweet Jesus! When you think about it, what a gruesome way to memorialize redemption from Original Sin, that song of supposed praise more morose even than old Cohen’s.). Leaving, I glanced back into the silent and shadowy basement hall, and there was the guitar, on its back at the edge of a low stage and glinting like an apparition—the lovely sunburst Ovation. I strode over, picked it up and walked out like I owned it.

Since that sinful act, I could never touch it without thinking how I’d acquired it. I would imagine the good boy I’d robbed, at a loss trying to explain its absence to his generous parents (Ovation guitars were new at the time, and expensive). With that confessed, recurrent guilt was nonetheless not what had ended my ungifted playing. I simply stopped in my mid-thirties. As do many men. Who then take it up again in old age, as I was considering.

It was my ex, Bernie, had gifted me the hardshell case. I never told her how I’d got the guitar, though she’d wondered why I had a guitar but no case, and why I didn’t play it more (she’d said so the rare times I got it out and mechanically picked something). She presented me the expensive case our last Christmas together. In answer to my surprise, she’d said that her new friend Shel had helped her with it. Shel, a music and art teacher at the high school where Bernie taught, had also observed that an Ovation was a very expensive guitar for an unemployed teacher (me) to own. “How’d you come by it?” Bernie asked. I was noncommittal. She said that Shel says honesty is essential to a successful relationship. I did not like that self-help bromide but curbed my tongue.

In the fall Bernie left me for Shel, who was not the man I’d assumed but a woman, and ten years her junior. I’d never suspected a thing. I encouraged rumors from the mutual friends who continued (for a while) to socialize with me alone. Over coffee, I listened hopefully for any note of disharmony in Bernie and Shel’s oh-so-honest relationship. Heard none, grew bitter. Their partnering continued successfully, and I grew increasingly blue. I never remarried. Understandably such a loss would unstring any man. Or maybe not. Maybe it shouldn’t, shouldn’t have. At eighty I look back like that on most life events: regretfully, worrying over the things I should have done and said, the words unsaid, the note unheard.

Bernie had been our partnership’s outside worker, with me house-husbanding and committed to looking after the future child of our own making we never had. We’d adopted instead, newborn Rudy, whom I’d minded for two years. This was around the time when John Lennon made the term “househusband” something of an honorific (then he’d abandoned the role and returned triumphantly to music stardom, till he was murdered by a psychotic Beatlemaniac; one’s past does come back to bite big time). I had suffered career-wise in the undertow of the second psunami of feminism. Like Bernie I was trained to be a high-school teacher (my subject History, Bernie’s Science) but could get on permanently nowhere. In that time a female teacher of chemistry and physics could pretty well write her own ticket, as high-school boards were under pressure to hire and promote women, especially in Math and Science. So Bernie and I had come to an understanding, a spoken agreement respecting our marriage roles. Which she had no expressed compunction about betraying in adultery with Shel!

But I won’t rail further against my ex, which these days is another growing hobby of reminiscing men my age, of old men that is, at least of those survivors of failed marriages. Of course I have no friends now, but when my old divorced and divorcing buddies would rant that “She’s stealing my pension!” and such, seasoned I would say, “No, she’s not. She can’t be stealing what the law says is rightfully hers.” For the most part, my dead and otherwise departed buds were dismayed—no, shocked that, having passed sixty in an intact marriage, their increasingly independent wives were leaving them, with many leaving to live with other women, whether in gay relationships or not.

It's been forty fast years since Bernie left me. When reflecting truly, I remember her resolve and strength, and miss them still. She had appeared to enjoy sex too. But my few subsequent relations with other women showed me that she was often being tolerant of my male needs than “into it.” So I should have known better, as the old Beatles song laments. But enough of the coulda/shoulda/woulda old-man lamentation. Youth may or may not be wasted on the young, but it is definitely not optimally invested. Take it from this old man of depleted stock and no other dividends paying out.

In my unused guest bedroom, still disposed in dustballs, I rested the bottom of the guitar on the closed case. I strummed an E-minor chord, always a favourite of mine. Then an A minor, a D minor, no problem. Till I fingered an F bar chord and my right hand couldn’t hold that toughest position, too many strings muted, as my brain caught up to the pain firing the index. Valiantly I tried again, and again, strumming then picking till I got the fingering precise and each string rang out. Right-hand fingertips on fire, I tried to shake the pain from my whole hand, making a comical face (why do people act like TV when no one is watching? Will I never be real again?). But okay, I could still play. I resolved to do so again. I’d need a new set of strings, though, something easier on the flaming fingertips till they toughened up. Could a steel-stringed guitar be strung with nylon? Also, the action needed to be lowered; there was too much gap between the strings and the fret board, which contributed unnecessarily to this renewer’s pain.

Despite my first impression of the strings’ fair condition, over the following days’ brief attempts I felt them to be furred with rust. Maybe I should see about selling it. … Or trading mine for a classical guitar with nylon strings. I envisioned myself playing the Beatles’ “And I Love Her,” that classic which would be best played on nylon strings. There was a time I could passably play just about any Beatles song. I remained a confirmed Beatlemaniac, had loved everything about them, if primarily their music of course; but everything, the way they talked, how they had different words for things, such as mate for friend, gear for good, bird for girl. The Beatles had changed the course of my life, always for the better. How many events can that be said for?

Once upon a time, I played and sang “And I Love Her” for Bernie. It was when we were first dating and I’d got her into my apartment. I have a fair voice, or had. I was nervous as all hell but managed well enough, even George’s sweet solo. She looked insufficiently moved, merely mimed brief tiny applause and excused herself to the bathroom. She returned with a smile: “Let’s go then, Ringo.” She took my hand and drew me into the bedroom. Those were the days. And I still don’t understand what went wrong. Or am I just being too “patriarchal”? Was it just that Bernie fell in love with another who happened to be the same sex? But that is quite the “happened”! I do believe she loved me, ‘and I loved her,’ but still don’t understand what happened between us to end us, not then or now. I’d better have sung her Lennon’s “If I fell.” More and more of the past is going that way: what truly happened? What did I do? Was I really such an oblivious shit to others and the consequences of what I did and didn’t do? … Or was it that Bernie couldn’t recover from Rudy’s death? Who could build or rebuild from such a seismic event?

I googled “guitar repair” in my neighbourhood (“Old Town,” sometimes called “Lowertown”) and found a few places, with Ponce Guitars being the most walkable (my doctor recently had my driver’s licence revoked). I liked the name, as it made me think of Ponce de León and the Fountain of Youth. I could appreciate the irony of that: misled old man trying to recover his youth in a guitar. Walking there with mine (how could it have gained weight lying under the bed all that time?), I again flashed back to my stealing the guitar and walking out of the church in a stiff gait, praying for invisibility. But now as then no one took notice. Or only one fellow old-timer did, who in slowing as we passed each other glanced with what I thought a pitying grin, a bin-there-tried-that look.

Expecting Ponce Guitars to be a store, where maybe I could see about trading for a nylon-stringed classical, I came instead to one of those plain houses that justifies the name “Lowertown”: small white weathered clapboard, wonky front porch, concrete driveway heaving as if in geologic time, with tough-looking weeds aplenty in the gaping cracks. A note below the front door’s bell said, “Ponce Guitars Use Side Entrance,” with an arrow pointing right towards the driveway. No bell at the side door, so I knocked. Waited. Nothing. I peered through the flimsy curtain: narrow stairs going up and down. I knocked forcefully. Footsteps inside, rising. The door pulled open.

He was short and thin as a child, with his wedge of a face finished in a wispy goatee like the memory of a beard, and droopy eyes like dulled marbles. Old but of indeterminate age. He wore a short green caftan, braided yellow in front, over the most faded blue jeans I’d ever seen, threadbare on the thighs. He glanced at my case, still said nothing, swept me in and continued to gesture down the wooden steps to the basement. He continued silent ushering me onward, and I wondered if he was dumb and already how I could get out of this. On the landing already the odours were assaulting: his B.O. as I’d brushed past him, dank mold as I descended, and in the low-ceilinged basement strongly what I remembered as patchouli oil (I’d used it myself for a spell some sixty years before). His workroom, obviously, which hummed with dehumidifiers. On a bench an ashtray beside a big black Levoit air purifier like a monolith. But no tincture of cigarette smoke … Ah, likely for weed. Get out while you still can, old man.

But he'd followed me down. Still without speaking, he took my guitar case and, crouching as deeply as a two-year-old, laid it on the floor and sprung the clasps. With his thumb he brushed the strings.

“Sunburst Ovation. Man, how long’s this treasure been buried?” A deeply resonant baritone, surprised to hear.

“Decades. Your web site says a hundred bucks for setup, new strings extra.”

He twisted his head up, and in the dim light his eyes now glistened. Stoned?

He straightened up. “That’s right, unless I discover other work needs doing, which I suspect will be the case for you.”

For me a hundred-plus was considerable outlay, especially on a non-necessity. But then and there I determined to do it. I’d skimp on something, say my weekly half-price Friday fish-and-chips at Piscator’s. But for bargaining purposes I pinched my mouth as if considering, looking about musingly at what appeared disorganization tempting chaos. But a plentiful disorder, therefore attesting popularity and promising good service. Every possible resting space had a guitar on it, all unstrung completely or partially, with string’s awry like sprung nerves, suggesting the atmosphere of a trauma ward or operating room. The floor was covered in closed and open black cases with plush pale-blue velvet interiors, one smaller in purple, for a ukelele perhaps, a mandolin … a violin? I had the bad impression of a funeral parlor’s coffin shop, where in the end I’d refused to select Rudy’s … well.

Rudy’d had a lethal deformation of the heart, a congenital defect detected well before birth, which was why, we were told upfront, his biological parents had put him up. So we, Bernie and I, had known what we were getting into. But we’d been waiting for years, and fighting about it because we could have conceived our own child but she deeply feared giving birth whether vaginally or by caesarian. There was a remote possibility that Rudy’s defect wouldn’t prove fatal, and together we arrogantly believed that our loving care could counter the ill effects of the defect. We believed in magic then. In the end we paid more to have him buried in a sack with a sapling planted above. We stopped having sex. We were never arrogant together again about anything, and eventually weren’t together in any way. Then Shel landed in our lives and Bernie grew confident again, away from me.

In the dank basement I made a mental note to return to that funeral home and officially have recorded my request to be cremated. And disposal of the ashes? I don’t care. There won’t be an I any more to care. But if they insist on instruction: scatter them around Rudy’s grown cedar which I, lapsed Catholic or not, visit and sit under every Ash Wednesday (then during Lent give up my weekly fish and chips). Or ferry my ashes to Liverpool and disperse them among the cinders of whatever’s left of Strawberry Fields. Yes: do put me down there.

He extended his hand: "Phil.”

I shook, though I’d sworn off such contact since the Covid pandemic: “Don.”

He smiled small: “Hey, Phil and Don, we could be the Everly Brothers!”

“A bit before my time, Phil. I’m a Beatles boy, and that’s old enough for me.”

“John and Paul learned to harmonize from the Everlys. That’s the way music works, Don. When’s the last time you listened to ‘Cathy’s Clown’?”

“Right. I was just thinking what to do with my ashes when I’m gone. Could I have them scattered down here?”

He laughed, good. “If you can find a spot.”

“How old are you, Phil?”

“Ageless! You should try it, Don.”

The workroom didn’t have much in the way of tools, just a lot of small transparent plastic boxes filled with things, and two shelves overflowing with guitar strings. Its walls were covered with posters, some very old, still showing traces of Dayglo: afroed Hendrix, chinless Clapton, hairy Rory Gallagher (a surprise), Jimmy Page (meh).

“What about Eddie Van Halen?”

“Please, Don. You are either too old or not old enough.”

I laughed, which also was good.

He smartened up and drew himself to his full short height, no more than five-two. “Two weeks, Don. Sorry but I’m very busy and the old lady is insisting on our annual holiday out west.”

“Vancouver?”

“The Island, an island off the island, Galliano.”

“Ah yes, the old hippy artist colony.”

He smirked. “Hippy? These days more like a last refuge of jaded Silicon Valley dreamers, high-tech boys and girls, already baling on AI, with nary a sound poet or tie-dye merchant to be found. Two weeks, Don.”

I saw myself up the worn concave wooden stairs and out into breathable light.

Bernie liked to travel, I didn’t. Fortunately we didn’t have enough disposable cash to indulge her restlessness extensively. But for a few years I did go along, to the Maritimes (empty, rural and rustic) and the west coast (flaky and radical), to the north coast where the weather and delays for days made travel even more unpleasant and after which I declared that that was it for me. Bernie refused to indulge what she called my “pathetic stereotypically Canadian snowbird” desire for Florida in the winter. She continued trying to argue me into more adventurous travel—Africa, South America, Antarctica!—but pressed only for a year or so after end-of-the-world Nunavut. Then ceased completely after Rudy’s death. I dropped all pretence of compromise and declared that her so-called love of travel was mere restlessness being exploited by various commercial interests, and that I for one was content to “shelter in place,” I joked unappreciated. She began travelling with a junior colleague from her school, Shel Livingston the Art teacher. I believed that Bernie’s increasing abandonment of me could be put down to Rudy’s death, we’d loved him so between us. And between us we just couldn’t heal that hole.

After two weeks I emailed Phil and he replied a few hours later that my guitar would be ready for pick up the next afternoon. “I had to do some work on the warped neck but no extra charge, the price as advertised plus the new strings. Cash, please. Delete this email!”

It was only the second visit yet strangely like meeting an old friend. My case was to the fore on the floor. Couching deeply again like a little boy, he lifted the lid and sweepingly gestured. He drew his middle finger backwards across the new strings. “Great tone, the old Ovations.” He lifted it out and handed it to me. “Test-drive.” I knew better than to try anything but a C chord. I said, “Yes.” He smirked and took it, and holding it against his body played what sounded Spanish, raking the strings with his fingers in a flamenco finish. I raised my brow in appreciation. Glancing behind he sat on a stool, steadied the guitar between his elbows and sprung the fingers of both hands. He launched into McCartney’s “Blackbird,” guitar only. I was dazzled. The second time through he sang along quietly, beautifully. I was spellbound.

I said, “I tried to learn that many times many moons ago. Do you perform, Phil?”

“Are you kidding? You don’t listen to the radio, do you, Don? Only the old Beatle himself could get away with performing ‘Blackbird’ for the rapping kiddies. But you should check out YouTube, lots of vids these days that’d teach you to play it at your own pace.”

“I got rid of my desktop.”

“Hmmm. Well, your phone would still … Tell you what, Don: come back here in a few weeks and I’ll give you a free lesson, then all you’ll have to do to get to Carnegie Hall is practice practice practice.”

“The old joke, but it doesn’t work unless you first ask the question, ‘How do you get to Carnegie Hall?’ But I’ll take you up on your generous offer, Phil, and thanks.”

“Good. I’m finished here for the day.” He popped his brow, filmy eyes mischievous. “Hey, Don, wanna burn a doobie? One for the road, for old time’s sake, that kind of thing?” He put me in mind of those kids from my youth always trying to get me in trouble.

“Sure, why not?”

“That’s the spirit!” He was turning away and reaching for one of the hard-plastic containers behind the others: “Smoke much, Don?”

“Not in decades.”

“Well, we’ll take it easy, shit’s a lot more powerful nowadays.”

“And I’ve been constipated for a long long time, spiritually speaking.”

He laughed, spluttered in a way that revealed he’d already had some (and the Levoit was quietly humming).

We smoked. We didn’t need a roach clip because he cautioned after three tokes: “That’s probably enough, Don, though this shit produces a mellow high.”

The smoke alone had challenged me not to cough, as I’d not touched a cigarette in half a century. I managed a few shallow tokes, and was instantly high. I said with my own bit of sputtered laugh, “Thank you, Phil. I’m feeling quite … mellow.”

He took the guitar and started playing Donovan’s old “Mellow Yellow,” but couldn’t get past “Ee-lec-trical ba-na-na.” We both laughed incommensurately, stoned laughter, as illogical as ever. Settling, he put the guitar in its case and clasped it, picked it up and said, “Do you know how much your Ovation is worth?”

“No, and I’d like to know.”

“Original sunburst? Fairly mint? Man, you could get thousands! Collectors contact me occasionally.”

“Wow. I could use the cash, and pick up an inexpensive classical guitar.”

“Just what I was thinking. Where’d you buy this one, when? It makes a difference in the price if I can give collectors what they call the provenance.”

I didn’t blink. “Tell them it was a gift from God, that he led me to a rock in which the Ovation was embedded, and I drew it out, which made the axe mine by divine right.”

He blinked and widened his eyes. “Okay, Don, if that’s the way you wanna play it.”

“I stole it from a group of kids at a church, Phil. Every time I’ve touched it since, it’s like the great puppet master in the sky is playing my guilty heart with hard steel strings.”

He squinted at me: “You’re serious, ain’t you, man? … From children? At a church? Sweet Jesus!”

My heart was racing—the weed, the first confession of my sin—and I knew to say no more.

He frowned smiling small. “What a tangled tale—a web of deceit that traps your own soul. You’ll have to find a way to disentangle yourself, Don.” He handed the guitar over. “As much as I enjoy your company, I’ve got a lot to do before we leave for Galiano tomorrow. I’ll text you when we’re back. To remind you of the ‘Blackbird’ lesson, free of charge, and I do usually charge, you know. In the meantime, check out the YouTube vids.”

“Maybe I’ll go to Galiano too.”

He recognized my lingering discomfort and smiled a smirk: “Man, you are stoned. But there’s no escape for you going West, young Don. Just be careful going home now.”

Climbing the basement steps I frowned over Phil’s unceremonious telling me to leave. Before I was out the door I remembered that smoking weed had always made me intensely self-conscious and sensitive of offense. Remembering so, I relaxed some. But was soon worrying his advice to “find a way.” What way? Redemption for an eighty-year-old man? I should maybe learn some hymns on the refurbished guitar and set up in a graveyard? “Sons of God, hear my holy word … dum diddy dum-dum … Eat His body, drink His blood …” I was impressed that I remembered the song that had accompanied my thievery.

Just sailing along, if listing some with the weighty case, I recognized the old mellowing buzz and stopped fretting. I was passed by joggers, young and old, men and women and boys and girls. I was fine with the kids, but with my mind excited and the buzz already beginning to curdle, I pictured the men as pursued by hooded figures with scythes, and the women with their swinging style as forever playing catch-up. My mind jigged and I reflected how well Phil had played. I could never play like that, had never and could never. He was modestly gifted, a born musician graceful with both hands; I was mechanical, a plodding hacker. I saw that I was now being passed by walkers. I remembered how weed slows the world for intense reflection, for fixation and, inevitably for me, guilt and regret.

Approaching the local homeless shelter, The Shepherds of Good Hope, for once I didn’t feel threatened by the collection of various losers crowding the sidewalk, who always caused me and others to belly widely. I stopped opposite the entrance and leaned back on a concrete pole at the curb. I smiled round at them standing and sitting in the indistinguishable mess of drying puke and what had to be recent piss, butts and roaches everywhere, bottles lying about and to their mouths, with the odour of weed strong enough to give a contact high.

I leaned the guitar case against the pole and sauntered on. Away from that messy noise, another sound attracted my attention and I fixed on the pram. I paused and gazed at the baby in it, who was not crying but babbling away. I looked about for parents and found none. The baby, a boy I imagined, was in mauve swaddling, with a pale purple hat whose draw strings looked threateningly tangled around his neck. I swayed, feared swooning … Rudy had been a dark purplish colour against the hospital’s steel postmortem table in the dank basement. He was to have been our most meaningful connection to the future, savior of our marriage. And here was a baby aban … doned … Our eyes met, though I don’t believe he was seeing me. Regardless, while looking he smiled the slightest and my heart vibrated sympathetically. I reached, pinched the pale purple strings at his throat and pulled them free.

Father and mother stepped out from behind the wall at whose corner the pram stood. They’d never been more than two feet from their child. The smell of weed was heavy on them too. The man said, “Hey there, old-timer,” with a bit of an edge.

Too stoned still myself to know if I was controlling my most supplicating smile, I hefted my palms in the halt-I’m-backing-off gesture and said, “Just looking, he’s a beauty, I wasn’t going to steal him or anything, ha-ha.”

The mother fairly pushed me away from the pram’s handle—“He’s a she”—and wheeled them away.

Next afternoon I ambled by The Shepherds of Good Hope, and the case was still leaning there against the post like failed crucifixion, or a finished one. Next morning it was gone. When I got home after a long walk going up and down the Canal, in my mailbox there was a formal memorial card from Bernie, on which she’d penned “Dear Don.” Shel had died, “after forty years of happy marriage.” Cremation had taken place, the memorial service would be in the neighbourhood. I felt a twinge, not irrational guilt but sympathetic vibration again, which strangely felt good.

Bernie looked like an old woman. At the entrance she said, “You’ve held up pretty well, Don.” I lied likewise to her, though in truth she’d shrunk in old womanhood.

A trio of women each with a guitar sang songs I didn’t recognize. Bernie came over and asked if I still played.

“No, I gave the guitar away.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Na, it was good, and I was never any good anyway.”

“I disagree.” She cupped my elbow. “I’d love to hear you sing ‘And I Love Her’ again—even here, right now, carpe diem and all that.”

“I do not think so.”

“Then at least once more before I die.”

Inappropriate as the joke was, we laughed quietly, entitled at our age. We arranged to meet for coffee.

Gerald Lynch was born on a farm at Lough Egish in Co. Monaghan Ireland and grew up in Canada. He has published 10 books, 8 of them fiction, as well as numerous short stories, essays, and reviews. His new novel, Plaguing Jake, was published in June by At Bay Press: https://atbaypress.com/books/detail/plaguing-jake