Casual
Caldwell, Christopher
Casual STRUNG ALONG I went to a rock club the other night. When we arrived, a 5-foot-3 college-age guy with an acoustic guitar was onstage. He didn't look like a rock star. He looked like the kids...
...We didn't do much guitar-playing...
...My heart went out to him as he pawed grimly through the simplest chord changes...
...He looked like the kids I once sat next to in AP Calculus, earnest and self-effacing— ingratiating, even...
...For the first few lessons we listened to Julian Bream and Andres Segovia records...
...I always felt like I owed Bridget something, anyway, for my coming in out of the slushy weather to interrupt her reveries of sunlit Granada as it was in 1952, even if whatever unhappiness she was dragging around with her had nothing to do with America and nothing to do with Spain...
...Why, given that my ambitions were limited to learning the solo on "Bod-hisattva," did I study classical guitar...
...How I would come to rue that throwaway phrase "fundamentals of music...
...Jamon serrano was excellent, but what passed for ham in our supermarkets . . . well, a Spaniard would be insulted if you served it to him...
...One suspected, too, that they had colorful nicknames for women like Bridget...
...One gathered they had their strong points, even if they were finicky about their ham...
...Her run-down rented house was a shrine to Spain...
...I was informed that Salamanca was a beautiful city, and Toledo...
...Ay, caramba...
...CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL...
...When I nonetheless asked if I could learn to play something, she would form an "E," instructing me to do the same...
...A guitar was always resting on her thigh, but it made noise only when her rings and bangles dinged against it in the middle of some gesticulation...
...It was filled with knick-knacks, most of them ashtrays and most of those full...
...No—a classical guitar sat on the lap, like a bag of groceries...
...It makes me sad to think about Bridget now...
...He played only the blues, the slower the better, and by "blues" I mean dumpty-doody, dumpty-doody, where Dumpty = E, and Doody = E7...
...He could mimic this rock'n'roll abandon only for two or three bars at a time, because he was at the outermost limits of his virtuosity, and was petrified of breaking his concentration...
...Also beautiful...
...The thing didn't even rest heavily on my hip like an automatic weapon, the way the guitar of my fantasies did...
...Occasionally Bridget would sigh up at the wineskins and the watercolors showing the Puerta del Sol as it had looked when she was 20, and talk about the "pride" of these Spanish men...
...Then she would strum it and sing, "Eeee...
...It may produce lousier guitarists, but it probably supports a more interesting society than today's results-based commerce...
...In like fashion, over the years I learned A ("Ayyy . . . "), A7, E7, Em, F, and G. Yet I began to fear that the girls I was trying to impress would have grandchildren before I learned that solo on "Bodhisattva...
...Bridget" was a 50-year-old spinster whose main qualification for teaching guitar was that she had visited Spain in her youth...
...Not at all because I feel ripped off...
...It would only trammel your artistic spirit, she warned...
...I couldn't very well procure the necessary Strato-caster by saying, "For an absolute bare minimum of effort, I'd like to have women throw themselves at me and men hail me as 'The Bard of Our Generation.'" So I said, "Learning the guitar would acquaint me with the fundamentals of music...
...Because, as it happens, E and E7 make up 29 percent of the seven chords I managed to learn in two years of studying classical guitar as a teenage rock-demiurge-in-training...
...Because my ability to present worthless projects to my parents as constructive ones—so useful in other contexts—got the better of me...
...It led my parents to get me a guitar that would have been just the item if I had felt like playing chamber quintets, but was of little use otherwise...
...He wore a torn-up army jacket and a $300 haircut that brought him up to about 5-foot-6...
...Whenever my demands for instruction grew too importunate, Bridget would play the first 25 notes of the bourree from the Bach lute suite in E minor, pressing it out with her thumb at one note per second, staring at her left hand with cross-eyed concentration, as if she were stringing beads—the same look I saw on poor Dukakis in the club the other night...
...His signature stage move—putting on a nyanh-nyanh face while miming banging his head against the wall—served only to accentuate his resemblance to Michael Dukakis...
...It was several weeks before we were able to locate someone in our part of Massachusetts who could teach it...
...This was a look he gave every evidence of wishing to transcend...
...No slushy winters there...
...Handing over money to people for their enthusiasms rather than their skills was a more common practice 25 years ago, at least in small towns...
...Granada...
...She insisted, with an imperiousness I took to be Iberian, that she would not teach me to read music...
Vol. 9 • January 2004 • No. 17
