Soon enough, as I’d predicted, Little Big Tom ambled up. He saw me sitting there, mimed as though the surprise of seeing me in such a position was going to knock him over backwards, and said:
“You mind very much if they smoke! Oh, brutal.”
The first sentence was in reference to my little battery-powered practice amp that was made out of a cigarette box; the second was directed at Pride and Prejudice and was accompanied by a hand drawn melodramatically across his brow, expressing sympathy for my having to read it. I suppose he must have thought I was being forced to read it for school rather than just reading it for “fun” because of a reckless vow.
I put down the book and asked Little Big Tom if he, by any possible chance, knew how to fingerpick like all the other hippies in the sixties did, and if so, could he show me how.
I wish 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary had powerful enough words to describe the alarming yet touching smile that blossomed, in slow motion, under Little Big Tom’s mustache as it gradually dawned on him that I had come of my own free will to ask him for a bit of fake fatherly instruction. For a moment there I thought he might actually start to cry. It’s good he didn’t, because if he had, I would have had to do something far more wounding than necessary, just to escape. But in the end, Little Big Tom regained his composure enough to pat me on the shoulder and reach for the guitar.
“I’m a little rusty,” he said, testing the strings and frowning at the brittle, distorted sound coming out of the cigarette-pack amp. “But I think I may know a thing or two.”
A horrifying thought struck me. Please, I prayed, don’t play “Stairway to Heaven,” please don’t play “Stairway to Heaven,” please don’t play—
Would you be at all surprised if I were to tell you that it was at that point that Little Big Tom started to play “Stairway to Heaven”? I didn’t think so.
I made the buzz-alarm sound, signaling that he could stop that right away. My face said: “What else ya got?”
Little Big Tom frowned. It seemed beyond his comprehension that anyone would veto “Stairway to Heaven,” his unofficial anthem. But he regrouped and tried something else. It was hard to make out what it was through the fuzz, but it was clear that whatever it was, he kind of knew what he was doing. Finally, he identified the song as “Dear Prudence.” Okay, that was better, and I’d like to learn how to do that too, but it wasn’t quite what I’d had in mind. I explained about the cool black guys with the derby hats and the arm scrunchies and the skinny girls and their underwear. Little Big Tom got a strange, distant look in his eye.
“Well,” he said. “There is something, maybe, that I was taught by a great man long ago. I’m not sure you’ll like it. I don’t know if I can even remember it, but it’s the only other one I really know.…”
Then Little Big Tom started to play, and sing, what was perhaps the stupidest song I had ever heard. He had a surprisingly good voice, and even though he kept forgetting the words and stumbling over the chords, and despite the terrible fake Irish accent he was trying to sing in, I got the gist of it. It was about this Irish guy named Pat O’Brien who goes to Hawaii to try to seduce a hula girl, but because he can’t speak her language he just shouts gibberish at her, things like “begorrah hickey doola” and other nonsense, hoping she’ll understand him and let him ramone her. But of course the poor girl can’t understand a word, though he keeps trying and trying, like a big idiot. In other words, this guy is kind of like Sam Hellerman with Jeans Skirt Girl, or face it, kind of like just about every guy with just about any girl. A tale as old as time, I think it’s called.
“That song is almost a hundred years old,” said Little Big Tom when he had finished, obviously proud that he had been able to remember something so old. And I agree, it was impressive. The oldest song I knew how to play was only from 1955.
Anyway, I hated it, mostly. It wasn’t a song I could imagine the hair scrunchie guys with the underwear girls doing, not at all. It was as uncool as it’s possible for a thing to be. But I found myself inexplicably drawn to it at the same time. It was kind of catchy. And without understanding why, I knew that I wanted to be able to play it. Maybe I could pull a kind of Shinefieldian switcheroo on it, changing the chords around and rewriting the lyrics so they’d be about Sam Hellerman and Jeans Skirt Girl instead of the Irish dude and his Honolulu Lou. It seemed like a pretty good plan to me.
Unfortunately, while Little Big Tom wasn’t all that bad at playing it, he was terrible at teaching it. He would play a bit and then say “You just—” and instead of saying what it was that you do, he would mime it and then do it again. Still, I figured if Little Big Tom could do it, I probably could manage it eventually. I made him do it very slowly and took down the lyrics in my notebook. I’d have those skinny dancing girls showing their underwear if my life depended on it.