APPRECIATION
“WHEN DID YOU FIRST KNOW you could guitar like you do?”
He’s on the couch now, lying across it with his doctored coffee in hand. He’s put the copy of the album that he gave me on his ancient turntable so I could hear what it sounds like with the clicks and pops of vinyl – the evidence of life, as he calls it, the hand of God in the music. I’m sitting in a chair at the table with his guitar, twiddling away little tunes over his songs coming through the speakers as it plays. Merging my melodies with his. “I was seven or so,” I tell him. “Only started lessons a few years back, though.”
“Amazing.” He raises his mug to me. I feel like I’m still that kid, showing my parents what I can do and hoping they’ll be impressed with me. My mother was every time. She celebrated me, exalted me. Tom…not so much. He’d smile, say, “Pretty good, Ty,” or “Keep it up,” and leave the room.
I wonder if I’ve ever been able to impress that man with anything I do.
“And your plans for it?” he asks. “Because, obviously, if you have talent like this you’re not going to squander it working behind a desk for a corporation that doesn’t value any kind of artistry whatsoever.” He says all the right things, and I wonder if this is sincerity or just some of his pop star smoothness showing through.
I don’t really care either way.
“Not sure at the moment. I have a few more months of school to figure it out. Maybe I’ll do studio stuff...or write.” I’m afraid to say something that sounds stupid, like my band is just now getting paying gigs, only we haven’t really been paid for them yet.
“You have far greater skill here than popular music calls for.” He’s sipping from the mug, which I realize now is not just a morning beverage holder. It’s what he uses to haul around his continuous supply of alcohol. He’s still a little more rock star than he wants to let on, I think. “Why would you ever lower yourself to that?”
He has such a negative view of his own art form. “Why would you?” I don’t mean to deflect it back on him, but I’ve gotten nowhere yet with the Nothings. I’m want to be, and he’s was once and now isn’t. His story is bound to be much more interesting than mine.
He tips his glass to me. “Well-played.” He takes a deep drink. “It wasn’t always that way for me. I thought I had a higher calling at one point.”
He’s forgetful, maybe. We already covered his spirituality. “Yeah. Thousand Heavens and everything.”
He shakes his head in a charming, half-drunk way. “No…before that. Before music entirely. I was in seminary school. I was, for all intents and purposes, a priest of the Catholic church.”
“Holy shit.” This is a revelation. He hadn’t even hinted at something like this when we were talking yesterday.
“Oh, yes…a total shit. Holy? Not nearly enough.”
I laugh. “So what happened?”
“What is it that usually happens to draw a young man away from devotion of his life to the church?”
I’m not religious; I don’t really know how these things go. “For me, it’d be…sex, I think.” Oh yeah. It’s kind of obvious now.
“Yessir. That’s what it was. A lovely young lady from my high school days who worked her wiles on me.” He closes his eyes as he recalls it. “It didn’t take much. I think I realized I’d made a poor career choice squarely between orgasm number one...and orgasm number two.”
I can’t imagine a more inappropriate career choice for someone who ended up as rock and roll as he did. “Why would you choose to do something like that in the first place?”
“Well, it certainly wasn’t because I received the calling – that was never in question.” His eyes stay closed, but his expression changes. “I did it for my parents. Never for myself; it was always for them.”
I guess I should be happy Tom only wants me to go to college.
He’s listening intently to his own songs now, and the subject changes to that. It’s a tune called Holy Father, Holy Sun. Entirely appropriate for the conversation. I can see so many things crossing his face as it plays, like he’s trying to remember where it came from, where it’s going musically, maybe if he’d remember how to play it if he had the guitar right now instead of me. He picks up a line that says, Listening for the sound of beauty, and finding it in everything I see… I pick up the melody and start covering the guitar part with no effort whatsoever. It’s simple, almost like a nursery rhyme or a hymn. Then his voice gets stronger, though it’s not anything like it is on the record, and he starts harmonizing with himself as I play over top of both the recording and his live vocal. I can’t tell if this moment is real. It has that blurry-edged quality that makes it difficult to know for sure. Then the song fades, and we both come back to now. “I wrote that while at a Na’hali shrine in Varansi. The structures, the water, the sky. It was all just there, such beauty like I’d never seen where I’m from. Once I was away from the church, everything just came out of me like that, in words and music…and women.”
I run a little bump-and-grind tune on his guitar.
He laughs loud and surprised. “Safe to say I made up for any time I’d lost in the brotherhood once I was on the other side. Even at the Heavens.”
Now I want road stories. I want to hear from an insider what the life I’ve been dreaming about is really like. “Trevor Graves had a shitload of groupies, didn’t he?”
He only looks half-embarrassed to admit it to me, a total stranger. “By the busload, kid. They would just show up after a concert, some of them crying over the performance. So wrapped up in the music, and the musician. They essentially gave themselves over to us.”
Another cliché.
“And you just…took them?” I make it sound seedy on purpose.
“I would have been a fool not to.” He’s bobbing his foot in time with the music, and smiling, his eyelids drooping. I’m guessing he’s reliving some of his numerous encounters when it hits me: my mom is among them.
My mom is one of his groupie road stories.
Suddenly this isn’t okay. “You got to know them though, right? You didn’t just blow through them and kick them off the bus?” I’m holding back a little, not wanting to scare him away from my questions by sounding too superior, too defensive.
I can’t believe how manipulative I’m being.
He’s loose-tongued now, thanks to his drink. “I was on the road forty weeks a year. That’s a lot of getting to know. Sometimes they hung around a bit afterward, maybe rode with us to the next few shows. There was nothing permanent, though. Nothing long-term. It’s just not the nature of the beast.”
It’s difficult to figure out what his nature is all about now that I know how many people he treated like this.
They were all something like my mom.
We listen to a few tracks without speaking, just letting the music be the only sound. Then, Lady Made of Sky starts playing.
The one about her.
I’m more comfortable testing the waters now, feeling like maybe I can steer the conversation toward more personal topics. “And what inspired this one?” I ask him.
He closes his eyes and smiles. “Beauty…again.”
Now that I know how he played, it’s a little creepier than I thought it would be.
I let the song play for a bit, fiddling with some quiet arpeggios over the sound since I’ve come to know the song so well. We both just listen to the lyrics, taking it all in as if it’s the first time we’ve both heard this. Halfway through, I work up the nerve to ask him something pointed, something I already know the answer to. But it’s the best way I can think of to start the conversation. “Was there really a Sweet Miranda?” I keep guitaring, not wanting to seem too eager. I realize that at any moment he might decide that this is as much as he wants to share.
“Oh yeah…there was. For sure.” He leans back awkwardly on the couch, digs into his pocket and comes back with a skinny little joint and a cheap lighter. I’m not even thrown by the expectedness of it, seeing as much of him as I’ve seen by now. I watch as he lights it up, sucks deeper and deeper on it before pulling it away and holding in the smoke. “As far as I’m concerned, she was absolutely made of sky. The stars and the moon and all that.” He finally lets out a little smoke. It turns my stomach as soon as it hits my lungs. Then he holds it out to me. “Lunch?” he says.
All the fortitude that has kept me from doing shit like that up to this point kicks in, and I stop playing with the guitar. I realize I’m on the voyage now, the journey to myself. All kinds of stupid thoughts like that pop into my head, amounting to me convincing myself that whatever this ends up being I should probably just go with it for the moment. I reach out, take the joint from his hand and take a long drag from it, trying to look like I know what I’m doing so I don’t come off as the limp-dick idiot he thought I was back at the bar. I suck in again, hold it, trying not to cough or choke or dry-heave. I have nothing in my stomach, haven’t eaten anything since the granola bars ran out. It doesn’t take much for the mellow to set in. I hand it back to him, not knowing what it is I’ve just put into my bloodstream or what the ultimate effect will be.
A thought occurs to me: It’s three in the afternoon, and I’m sitting here playing the guitar and getting stoned with my dad while we listen to a song he wrote about my mom.
I can’t make sense of it, really.
So I stop trying.
“So Miranda was beautiful, huh?” I ask him.
He nods. “Within…without.”
I’m playing with the guitar again, trying to be as casual as possible. “And what was her story? Another bus rider?” I can’t believe I’m referring to her like that. It’s all part of the lie, so I discount it like it’s not really anything.
He shakes his head emphatically while trying not to choke on his next inhale. “She was no groupie.” I’m glad to hear that. “She was someone I met while in Spain writing songs for this album…another of my spiritual retreats.”
He says it sarcastically. Or, at least, that’s how I take it. “It wasn’t really spiritual?”
“No, it was…it was brilliant, actually. Even more so after I met her.” He takes another toke. “At a place called Playa de las Catedrales, the Beach of the Cathedrals. She was painting the rock formations, and I was hovering…lingering with my guitar in hand. Watching the ocean, reimagining my sound and my life. Expecting music to just come rolling in on the tide if I looked at it hard enough.”
I stop playing. “Did it?”
“Nope. Only boats and tourists in terrible bathing suits, wandering the shore in search of some sort of inspiration. Just like me.” He gets up and puts the needle back to that song. “But when she walked by trying to get a better view of the stones, I found all the inspiration I needed. There was a connection from the first. Cellular; cosmic.”
Now he sounds totally stoned, but I can’t tell if it’s from the pot or the memory. “What was she like?”
He looks at me like he’s been waiting forever to tell someone about this. He takes another puff, hands it back to me and says, “I’ll put it this way: I used to call myself an artist before I met Miranda…and afterward, I knew I was nothing more than a git with a guitar.” He holds the smoke in this time. “She was an artist, and she was art, in the truest sense. Everything she touched was created anew.”
Maybe it’s the pot messing with my head now, but that’s exactly how I would have described her if anyone had asked me.