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“You’re not real!” I shouted. “You’re not real! It’s all a bunch of tricks! Damn you, Jesus! Damn you, Jesus! Damn you, damn you, damn you, Jesus!”
I ran up the stairs, crying so hard I could barely see.
• • •
We never did get another minister, as it turned out. Some of the local padres tried to take up the slack, but attendance dropped to almost nothing, and by my senior year of high school, our church was locked and shuttered. It didn’t matter to me. My belief had ended. I have no idea what happened to Peaceable Lake and Electric Jesus. The next time I went into the downstairs MYF room in the parsonage—this was a great many years later—it was completely empty. As empty as heaven.
IV
Two Guitars. Chrome Roses. Skytop Lightning.
When we look back, we think our lives form patterns; every event starts to look logical, as if something—or Someone—has mapped out all our steps (and missteps). Take the foul-mouthed retiree who unknowingly ordained the job I worked at for twenty-five years. Do you call that fate or just happenstance? I don’t know. How can I? I wasn’t even there on the night when Hector the Barber went looking for his old Silvertone guitar. Once upon a time, I would have said we choose our paths at random: this happened, then that, hence the other. Now I know better.
There are forces.
• • •
In 1963, before the Beatles burst on the scene, a brief but powerful infatuation with folk music gripped America. The TV show that came along at the right time to capitalize on the craze was Hootena
At that time, Ro
He liked Hootena
“What do you mean, Grampa?” Ro
“Blues is mean music. That boy sounded like he just peed the bed and he’s afraid his mama might find out.”
The boys laughed at this, partly out of delight, partly in amazement that Hector was actually something of a music critic.
“You wait,” he said, and slowly mounted the stairs, yanking himself along by the banister with one gnarled hand. He was gone so long the boys had almost forgotten about him when Hector came back down carrying a beat-up Silvertone guitar by the neck. Its body was scuffed and held together with a hank of frayed hayrope. The tuning keys were crooked. He sat down with a grunt and a fart, and hauled the guitar onto his bony knees.
“Shut that shit off,” he said.
Ro
“Ain’t in years,” Hector said. “Put it away when the arthritis started to bite. I don’t know if I can even tune the bitch anymore.”
“Language, Dad,” Mrs. Paquette called from the kitchen.
Hector the Barber paid no attention to her; unless he needed her to pass the mashed potatoes, he rarely did. He tuned the guitar slowly, muttering curses under his breath, then played a chord that actually sounded a bit like music. “You could tell it was still off,” Con said when he told me the story later, “but it was pretty cool, anyway.”
“Wow!” Ro
“E. All this shit starts with E. But wait, you ain’t heard nothing yet. Lemme see if I can remember how this whoremaster goes.”
From the kitchen: “Language, Dad.”
He paid no more mind this time, only began to strum the old guitar, using one horny, nicotine-yellowed fingernail as a pick. He was slow at first, muttering more unapproved language under his breath, but then he picked up a steady, chugging rhythm that made the boys glance at each other in amazement. His fingers slid up and down the fretboard, clumsily at first, then—as the old memory synapses guttered back to life—a little more smoothly: B to A to G and back home to E. It’s a progression I’ve played a hundred thousand times, although in 1963 I wouldn’t have known an E chord from a spinal cord.
In a high, wailing voice utterly unlike the one he spoke in (when he did speak), Ro
Mrs. Paquette came in from the kitchen, drying her hands on a dishtowel and looking as if she’d seen some exotic bird—an ostrich or an emu, say—strutting down the middle of Route 9. Billy and little Rhonda Paquette, who could have been no more than five, came halfway down the stairs, leaning over the railing and goggling at the old man.
“That beat,” Con told me later. “It sure wasn’t like anything they play on Hootena
Hector the Barber was now thumping his foot in time and gri
“My mama don’t allow me to fool around all night long . . . she afraid some woman might . . . might . . .” He drew it out. “Miiight not treat me right!”
“Go, Grampa!” Ro
Hector launched into the second verse, the one about how the jack of diamonds told the queen of spades to go on and start her creepin ways, but then a string broke: TWANNG.
“Oh, you dirty cunt,” he said, and that was it for Hector the Barber’s impromptu concert. Mrs. Paquette snatched away his guitar (the broken string flying dangerously close to her eye) and told him to go on outside and sit on the porch if he was going to talk that way.
Hector the Barber did not go out on the porch, but he did lapse back into his accustomed silence. The boys never heard him sing and play again. He died the following summer, and Charles Jacobs—still going strong in 1964, the Year of the Beatles—officiated at his funeral.
• • •
The day after that abbreviated version of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s “My Mama Don’t Allow Me,” Ro
During the next couple of years (with a brief hiatus during the time when the Ski Pole of Destiny rendered Co