ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN
FROM WHISPERS TO ROARS - SPRING 2020
WINNER OF THE NONFICTION ESSAY CONTEST FOR THE 2020 CLIMAX ISSUE (VOLUME 2)
REPRINTED IN RED FEZ - AUGUST 2021
A hundred or more guitars hung high on the wall like a choir holding a silent note in unison, mouths forming perfect O’s as if waiting for a nameless conductor to snuff the note with a tight fist. Of all the guitars displayed, I really only saw one: a Washburn acoustic, stained a dark greenish-blue, nearly aquamarine; colors I would one day recognize in the deepest shores of Puerto Rico at high noon. The guitar was oceanic in its own way, emitting a rich, lingering tone from within, like the low, throaty moans of deep-sea geologic forces.
On the cold afternoon that I jingled the glass doors of Dunkley Music on Capitol Boulevard in Boise, I craved the ocean with an almost ravenous ache. I missed the gentle tug and playful bucking beneath a surfboard, the sweep of sand beneath my toes as the tide rushed out, and the wide iridescent bluescape stretching into the Monterey Bay mist — by then the only bowl of ocean I had ever known.
Wind howled and rattled outside the music store, blowing so hard it jarred the senses, and it seemed to interrupt the sunlight in the cloudless sky like billowing shadows cast by malevolent phantoms. I knew phantoms by then. I knew they could disguise themselves in Abercrombie and Fitch, shimmer behind the vapors of vodka, and lead me by the hand down dark alleyways.
Was it just me, or had it been a particularly long winter? Did I imagine there were more gray days than the year before, more ice and more bare trees? I remembered the previous Boise winter in full resplendent color. Had those colors drained all at once, tickling the bottoms of my feet while receding from view? Or had they simply blinked out one by one, swallowed by a cold, dense mist that hovered low?
The sounds from the Washburn’s belly awoke my own hunger, that gnawing insatiable beast that eroded my college-girl curves down to the bedrock of my form, keeping me just-enough alive to watch it devour me. I needed to redirect that hunger, to create a diversion, to offer a sacrifice. Right away, I saw that the belly of the Washburn was something I could feed now, but feast upon later.
I paid for the blue Washburn and carried it home to the small apartment off Broadway that I shared with two roommates, where I mastered only a “Stand By Me” lead and the opening licks to Eve’s “Let Me Blow Ya Mind”, featuring Gwen Stefani.
Every night until exactly midnight, I knelt on my beige bedroom carpet and pulled the guitar onto my lap. I ran my hand along the cool, smooth curve of its body, a thing to caress. The only caress I allowed myself then. This was a season I let whole days pass without speaking a word to anyone. Weeks went by without human touch of any kind. Months devoid of laughter.
What secrets it contains, now that I’ve whispered into its dark cave. I hoped the guitar could somehow translate my emotion into sonorous harmonics and twangy vibrations. I believed it could help me amplify the muffled howl lodged near the base of my skull that seemed to stretch down around my jutting ribcage and squeeze. I believed guitars could do that because I’ve heard it done before.
Only a few months earlier, I stood near the stage at Lucky Peak Reservoir with Aunt Carole, soaking in the redolent notes stretching like saltwater taffy towards me from Ben Harper’s slide guitar. And on a warm Sunday afternoon I sat on the bare ground in front of the bandstand in Julia Davis Park to watch Built to Spill run marathon scales up and down the necks of their electric guitars. And later, sitting in the farthest seat from the stage in the Pavilion, I watched B.B. King gently rock his beloved Lucille on his knee. His guitar seemed to wail inconsolably at first, before it finally sighed and sang its troubles beneath King’s broad smile.
Like all beginners, I had a tendency to rush the tempo when I knew the sequence well enough. I played like a person anxiously crossing an icy rushing river by leaping from one slick boulder to another; quickly, and then tentatively. As though I might avoid certain peril by playing through an entire song as fast as possible just to get to the end. This is no way to enjoy an instrument.
I have schlepped the Washburn with me from Idaho to Santa Cruz and back to Idaho, where I tried to leave it with my dad, certain it would be played in his house, along with his banjo or his Martin guitar. But Dad packed my guitar in his own sturdy coffin-like case and brought it to me in Colorado, where it now rests, entombed, at the foot of the guest bed. Unused but available. Is it just me, or does it seem heavier than it used to be, grief-logged and anchored by rusty whispers stored in its core?
Is this why I hold on to it still? As a keeper of my secrets it can never spill until I say when? A sunken safe collecting sediment, waiting for the only key - my ability to play? Is it now only a life-size, woman-shaped reminder that some things only appear to be hollow, but are in fact brimming and nearly swelling with our own expectations and desires and worries and grief?
I don’t remember a single note from “Stand By Me”. The Dunkley Music store moved out of town and the building was razed for a boutique hotel. My old apartment building has been torn down and rebuilt. I don’t miss the ocean with a cellular thirst anymore, now that I’m satisfied by the high Colorado sunshine. Nothing from that lonely gray season of my life remains but this old blue guitar that I just can’t bear to part with.