When you are fifteen, you’re that kid in your group of friends who wants to learn to play guitar. Your interest comes up in the cafeteria one day, and Jason, your neighbor and resident guitar expert, says he can teach you. It has never occurred to you that someone your age can teach you a new skill. People usually take lessons from older brothers or earthy middle-aged men who work at the guitar shop downtown.
You, however, don’t like thinking of yourself in any way that can be termed typical. It is that point in your life when conformity is a dirty word, and while you can endure slings and arrows like “freak,” “fag,” or “FroshKosh B’gosh,” nothing gets under your skin like being called “poser.” The Individuals are the ones who can walk the halls standing tall, who the teachers smile at when they raise their hands and give presentations, who can do anything and make it look cool without having to practice first. They are main character material. It’s like they’re the heroes from the books you read made flesh, except instead of riding a dragon that dude has a mountain bike, or rather than a mastery of arcane magic that girl is in the upper-level math class. They’re going somewhere, and you want to go with them, but you aren’t properly equipped yet.
So you say, “Really? That would be awesome, when can we start?” Apparently you don’t come off sounding too eager because Jason says you can come over after dinner and he’ll show you some of the basics. He tells you not to worry, that he has an extra guitar for you. You struggle to focus in the rest of your classes.
That night at dinner, you tell your parents where you are going once you have finished your first serving of chicken pot pie. Your mother reacts predictably.
“He’s going to teach me how to play guitar,” you say again.
“Ok, but why? Why Jason? I mean, really? Jason? Really?” She says really and Jason several more times. It’s her favorite rhetorical strategy, repeating one or two words over and over with a slight variation in inflection each time. You always know exactly what she means by the time she lets you speak again.
“Because he offered, and I said yes.”
“Why guitar though? Why not… why not…” Her fingers grasp for something in the air that isn’t there while she tries to think of an instrument that is more grounded, more academic, more appropriate for her little boy. She claps her hands together once she finds it. “Why not piano? Oh, yes, that would be great, and we could see if Mrs. Patterson would teach you. That would just be perfect.”
Mrs. Patterson is the widow who lives up the street. You get dragged over to her house every year for her neighborhood Christmas party, even though yours is one of the only families polite enough to show up anymore because everyone else is tired of her cranberry tort, and her virgin’s eggnog, and her stories about her schnauzer. She has an upright piano situated in her bay window, an antique Baldwin, with faded floral fabric on the bench, and it hasn’t been tuned in God knows how long. You can hear her from the sidewalk, hammering out hymns and singing along. Christmas carols are her favorites, the unpopular ones, the ones people don’t even sing when they actually go caroling, and she plays them year round as though she’s rehearsing for her party.
Pianos lack the power you need. You think of yourself as a warrior. The static seat in the corner of the stage would be unbecoming of someone of your stature – the one you aspire to, anyway. No, you need a weapon that you can hold in your hands and feel the raw power coursing through it, an instrument that will part the crowds so that you might pass, not one that pins you to a stagnant congregation. You need a battle axe.
“I want to play guitar,” you say.
Your mother sighs. “But why Jason?” She starts to say that they can hire a professional teacher for you, but your father, who has said nothing the whole time, clears his throat and stabs a piece of chicken with enough force that his fork clinks against the plate underneath. You have eaten enough meals with your family to know that this is your dad’s way of saying that’s not in the budget.
Your mom recognizes it too, but she still gives him the Dear-I’m-trying-to-make-a-point-to-our-son look, which earns her the Honey-let-it-go shake of the head. She crosses her legs and folds her arms and reminds you of your bedtime, adding that you better not think of going over there until your homework is done.
You stand at the end of your driveway, hands in your pockets with thumbs sticking out, staring across the cul-de-sac, beyond the asphalt expanse to Jason’s house. Fireflies are out, flickering in the dusk. This strikes you as the kind of pose a hero takes while reflecting upon everything that has brought him to this point, to the moment before the start of something really excellent.
Guitar lessons aren’t your first attempt to set off down the path to Individuality. You ran for student council, thinking that you had the savvy to work your way to the top of the bureaucracy one day, but your re-imagining of Aragorn’s speech before the Black Gates didn’t net you as many votes as you had been hoping for. Last fall you joined the football team, but your as-of-yet undeveloped coordination earned you a spot on the depth chart so low that you qualified as equipment, a tackle-dummy, everyone’s favorite one-man sled – the one that didn’t put up a fight. It occurred to you after the season that team sports would never allow you to stand out anyway.
That’s the beauty of the guitar, though. Once you’ve mastered it, your days of playing other people’s games will be over. You’ll be free.
With that in mind, you cross over and enter Jason’s home.
He’s sitting on the edge of his bed when you walk in, thumbing the strings of the acoustic guitar in his lap, adjusting the machine heads every so often. He’s wearing a Beastie Boys t-shirt, 501s, and Vans. “’Sup?” he says. “Grab a drink if you want one.”
You look around the room. His walls are covered with posters of guitarists. David Gilmour. Kirk Hammett. John Petrucci. Mikael Åkerfeldt. Omar Rodríguez-López. You don’t know any of these names, but you’ll learn them in time. There’s a stack of guitar magazines on his dresser, and another pile on top of the mini-fridge in the corner. You open the fridge and pull out a Mountain Dew. You stare at the cool, green can.
Your parents don’t even keep soda in the house. They tell you that Mountain Dew will dissolve your teeth. You crack open the can and take a sip, then walk over to the bed.
Jason makes room for you and continues tuning the guitar. He says something about not having used this one in a while, not since he got his new one.
The sleek black guitar resting in its rack across the room has already drawn your gaze. “What kind is it?” you ask.
While you wait, you ask him how long he’s played guitar, if he ever had lessons. You’re curious if he has the qualifications to back up this room or that guitar on the opposite wall or the stacks of magazines that stick out like musical diplomas.
“Yeah, my parents got me started off with a few lessons back in sixth grade, just learning my way around this one,” – He taps the acoustic – “but once I had a handle on it, I figured out I could pick out a lot of stuff by ear, so then I just taught myself the rest.” He plucks each string in turn and then all of them at once, listening to the tones fill the room. Satisfied, he hands you the guitar.
It feels a lot bigger resting on your knee than it looked on his. Jason is a bit of an early bloomer. Not that you’re a late bloomer by any means. You’re just taking your time with the whole getting big and strong thing.
Jason jumps right into it, showing you how to arrange the fingers of your left hand across the strings, telling you to strum with your right, letting you hear the sound of each chord before telling you its name. The strings hurt your fingertips, and your hand gets tired quickly, but you dare not show signs of weakness. A warrior grits his teeth and presses on. You pay close attention to the guitar in your hands, bearing its weight on your lap and feeling the vibrations creep through your fingertips, resonating in the wooden cavity. Resonating within you.
After he shows you several chords and has you play them back to him, he walks over and takes the black axe from its mount on the wall, slinging the strap over his shoulder and turning on the amp. Rounding on you, he says, “Let’s start with something really simple.” Then he gets you to repeat after him, slowly playing through “Smoke on the Water.”
You slide your fingers up and down the fret board, mirroring his motions, following him as he ups the tempo on each succession. When you finally play at full speed, you mutter the lyrics – the ones you know – and then at the chorus, croon the title drop.
Jason says that was pretty good, but that you’ll have to find someone else to teach you how to sing. He tells you to keep practicing while he goes to the bathroom.
You wait until you hear the door close at the end of the hall and then set the acoustic down on the bed, getting up and approaching the ESP. That other guitar is finely crafted, but it is the equivalent of training with a wooden sword. This is the goal: The matte black guitar you now hold in your hands. You look at the door and listen to make sure Jason isn’t returning yet and then slip the strap over your neck. It’s much too long for you, the guitar hanging awkwardly low. You’re undeterred, though. There’s no harm in trying it on, getting a sense of what it will be like once you can harness this power for yourself.
Closing your eyes, you imagine yourself on stage, a crush of people out in the crowd, roaring their adoration. You spread your feet, taking up the power stance and bringing your arm around like a windmill, pretending to wail on the strings, exercising your control over the roiling masses before the stage. Going in for the kill, you lean back and raise the guitar’s head toward the sky, preparing to offer up a wicked testament to the Lord of the Chord.
The strap pops free from its fastening at the base of the neck. Caught off guard, you bobble the guitar momentarily before it hits the hardwood floor with a crash of feedback, dischord reverberating through the house like a steel tsunami. You cover your ears with your hands to try and block out the sound, but the truth of what you’ve done slips through your fingers.
Jason appears in the doorway. He walks over and cradles the guitar. He can’t look at you.
You stand there watching as he examines his instrument, plucking at the strings and turning the knobs. There’s a crack zigzagging up its back, starting at the point of impact. The neck cranes out at a wrong angle, and one of the tuning keys breaks off when he tries to adjust it. Your ears won’t stop ringing.
“Jason, I’m really sorry,” you say. More than once.
You’re not sure if he hears you, and he still hasn’t looked up, but after a moment, he calms the guitar with one hand and says, “Get out. Lesson’s over.”
Out in the cul-de-sac, your mind races. You think back to the stories, remember the heroes. They aren’t perfect. Gandalf confided in Saruman. Will broke the Subtle Knife. Hercules killed his family. If they could make mistakes, surely you can, too. Right?
You stop in the center of the street and look up at the sky. You’ve read books about stars, too. There are more of them in the Milky Way than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of the Earth, more stars than words spoken by everyone who has ever lived. Each one burns bright enough and long enough to appear as a pinprick in the sky, individual beacons clustering every night.
Yet darkness stares down at you now, the stars blotted out by the streetlamps. You stare back and try to pierce the veil. Looking for the lights. Looking for the answer. When your eyes get tired and your neck starts to ache, you bow your head under some invisible weight and walk back to your house beneath the constellations you cannot see. It’s quiet when you walk in, to your great relief.
