there was more football on two channels, and golf on the third—even worse. Claire’s old bedroom was now Connie’s, but some of her paperbacks were still stacked in the closet, and I thought I might try one of the Agatha Christies. Claire said they were easy to read, and it was fun to detect along with Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot. I walked in and saw Con’s Gibson in the corner, surrounded by an untidy heap of old Sing Out! magazines. I looked at it, leaning there and long forgotten, and thought, I wonder if I could play “Cherry, Cherry” on that.
I remember that moment as clearly as my first kiss, because the thought was an exotic stranger, utterly unconnected to anything that had been on my mind when I walked into Con’s room. I’d swear to it on a stack of Bibles. It wasn’t even like a thought. It was like a voice.
I took the guitar and sat down on Con’s bed. I didn’t touch the strings at first, just thought about that song some more. I knew it would sound good on Connie’s acoustic because “Cherry, Cherry” is built around an acoustic riff (not that I knew the word then). I listened to it in my head and was astounded to realize I could see the chord changes as well as hear them. I knew everything about them except where they were hiding on the fretboard.
I grabbed an issue of Sing Out! at random and looked for a blues, any blues. I found one called “Turn Your Money Green,” saw how to make an E (All this shit starts with E, Hector the Barber had told Con and Ronnie), and played it on the guitar. The sound was muffled but true. The Gibson was a fine instrument that had stayed in tune even though it had been neglected. I pushed down harder with the first three fingers of my left hand. It hurt, but I didn’t care. Because E was right. E was divine. It matched the sound in my head perfectly.
It took Con six months to learn “The House of the Rising Sun,” and he was never able to go from the D to the F without a hesitation as he arranged his fingers. I learned the three-chord “Cherry, Cherry” riff—E to A to D and back to A—in ten minutes, then realized I could use the same three chords to play “Gloria,” by Shadows of Knight, and “Louie, Louie,” by the Kingsmen. I played until my fingertips were howling with pain and I could hardly unbend my left hand. When I finally stopped, it wasn’t because I wanted to but because I had to. And I couldn’t wait to start again. I didn’t care about the New Christy Minstrels, or Ian and Sylvia, or any of those folk-singing assholes, but I could have played “Cherry, Cherry” all day: it had the way to move me.
If I could learn to play well enough, I thought, Astrid Soderberg might look at me as something other than just a homework source. Yet even that was a secondary consideration, because playing filled that hole in me. It was its own thing, an emotional truth. Playing made me feel like a real person again.
• • •
Three weeks later, on another Saturday afternoon, Con came home early after the football game instead of staying for the traditional post-game cookout put on by the boosters. I was sitting on the landing at the top of the stairs, scratching out “Wild Thing.” I thought he’d go nuts and grab his guitar away from me, maybe accuse me of sacrilege for playing three-chord idiocy by the Troggs on an instrument meant for such sensitive songs of protest as “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
But Con had scored three TDs that day, he’d set a school record for yards gained rushing, and the Gators were headed for the Class C playoffs. All he said was, “That’s just about the stupidest song to ever get on the radio.”
“No,” I said. “I think the prize goes to ‘Surfin’ Bird.’ I can play that one, too, if you want to hear it.”
“Jesus, no.” He could curse because Mom was out in the garden, Dad and Terry were in the garage, working on Road Rocket III, and our religion-minded older brother no longer lived at home. Like Claire, Andy was now attending the University of Maine (which, he claimed, was full of “useless hippies”).
“But you don’t mind if I play it, Con?”
“Knock