Letter

I get on the Ashland bus at the Orange Line and head north. I thought about biking it, but the mental image of an electric guitar and amp bungee-corded to the bike rack for the return trip, while comical and my kind of challenge, is deterrent enough for reason to prevail for a change.

After seeing the Velvet Underground doc, I got it into my head to try playing again. It wasn’t the first time. I’ve been obsessed with guitar-based music since before I was allowed to quit playing violin at fourteen. But my experience with that instrument made me steer clear of playing. I decided to just listen. Safer that way. But it’s never stopped eating at me.

I texted Bill right after leaving the Landmark, all excited about the guitar again. I asked if he’d help me find the right one. Fifteen years ago, I traded Bill a drawing for guitar lessons. It lasted a few months, then I stopped practicing. He’s always said I still have some lessons left on the tab. Maybe now’s the time to cash in.

I get to the store early. I’m early to everything. I go to the bakery across the street to kill time. I get coffee and an eclair and sit watching an old man in an extravagantly hideous clashing-pattern shirt adjust and readjust a coffee cup, thermos, book, and notebook on his table. He’s completely oblivious to my presence. Doesn’t look up a single time in half an hour. A perfect model.

I cross the street and meet Bill by the door to the music store. We wander around a bit as I tell him what I have in mind. I basically know what I want. It has a lot to do with how the thing should look, but Bill’s here so I don’t waste my money on a beautiful lemon.

We take a couple guitars into a little room with amps and he tries each out before handing them to me. We talk about the wide range of price tags. Is it just aesthetics? Extra bells and whistles? Bill’s been at it over thirty years, so I trust him. As I hold one and pluck this string or that, I don’t remember a single lesson he taught me fifteen years back, but it feels good to make the thing make sounds.

A few days earlier I remembered that I’d bought an electric once before. It was in Boston in the mid-90s. I was driving cab and stopping at the Middle East and T.T.’s to hear bands every chance I got. I never took a lesson. It was before the internet, so I couldn’t play along with a how-to video. Perhaps I’d bought a book. I’ve managed to wipe it from the memory bank. I know that guitar didn’t make the trip back to Chicago in 1997.

So why now? Can’t be a mid-life crisis since I’m way past mid-life. I have a friend who’s been bugging me to start a band forever and ever. Maybe now’s the time. I know I’m not afraid of embarrassing myself. It’s late enough in the game that real aptitude or skill is not really in the cards. But I can just enjoy making a little noise, right?

I don’t believe in ghosts. Not the invisible ones or the bed-sheet-wearers. But I have no doubt that memories and traces of family and friends gone haunt us, whether alive, dead, or undead. I know the past has never left me alone.

Sometimes that’s a good thing. I saw Todd Haines’ amazing Velvet Underground documentary and realized that a couple of parts of “European Son” play on a loop somewhere in the background of my consciousness at all times. Also, that I want to try playing guitar again.

The horror podcast is going great guns this month because of Halloween. We’re recording every week. Makes me think about what I actually find scary. It’s definitely not horror movies. Go read up on cryptocurrency if you wanna be scared shitless. Read a news headline or three. Or watch Forrest Gump. Vampires, ghosts, zombies, and make-believe serial killers are comedy relief by comparison.

I took a walk with Wendy in Pilsen the other day and she reminded me about the time we met on Halloween at the same spot many years before. I was still driving a cab and had gotten a rubber clown mask from the Batman movie and worn it on my shift. I scared the shit out of people. Somewhere there are photobooth snaps of me and Tracy from that same night. I tried to wear the mask the following year, but it had shrunk. Probably just cheap material, but maybe the universe telling me not to do that again.

I don’t think I’ve ever been asked to draw a ghost until just recently. It was to illustrate an article about ghosting. That’s the kind of apparition I’ve become intimately familiar with. A very contemporary monster, conjured and coaxed to propagate by technology. Our communication devices give us a thousand novel ways to avoid one another. No matter how high the resolution or wide-spectrum the audio, silence is still silence; it hurts as much, maybe more. That’s what keeps haunting me. I’m probably as guilty as most. For all the time I sit and wait for someone to answer, there must be at least one or two people that sit and wait on me. The trouble is that it’s so rare that the waiters ever match. We’re always waiting for those who don’t wait for us.

Bet you have a disappearist or three in your life. What if one of them actually came back? Now that would be some scary shit!

[I read an excerpt from my book in progress for a Hello America compilation.]

Behind the door of an easy-to-miss corner storefront, at the edge of a city park, four guys gather to make music.

I’ve sat in on the recording process a few times. The amount of time it takes to set up mics in relation to instruments, the arrangement of effects pedals, the nudging and tweaking of things I don’t know the names or functions of, all feels so far out of anything I’ve ever been part of.

I can zone out just following the path of all the cords. They run alongside one another, then veer off this way and that. So many cords…

They start playing and I’m completely mesmerized. It’s like a magic trick whose secret I never want revealed. But when they take a break to listen back to what they just did, I ask the engineer why I couldn’t hear the two basses.

He points to the cords leading out into the front room and an isolation booth. They’re connected to amps that emit sound into mics behind closed doors as everyone plays. This way, in the recording, the instruments don’t bleed into each other.

Then it’s a couple hours later, though it felt like just a few minutes. They’re done with the song. They’re outside smoking, talking about some bit on SNL, where they’ll get dinner.

I say goodbye and bike it to the bar for my shift.