The Blue Guitar
by Peter Rustin
A. Summer/Fall, 2019
It was a lean year on the island to start, and then got so much worse. Mom’s hours at the library had been cut back, a predictable casualty of both the advent of e-books and the prevailing political riptides. Mom once wryly noted that a degree in library science was never going to lead to the gilded doors of the House of Chanel. But she and Dad had eked out a barely-middle-class existence through a savvy combination of off-brand foods (alas, nobody at school wanted to trade me, Adam, for my “Lunchios”); an apartment above a side-street hardware store (per Mom, a “maisonette”); and a pooling of Mom’s library income and Dad’s commissions from selling timeshares on those new condos on the southern tip of the island—pretentiously dubbed “The Pointe at Heron Bay.”
It all changed, though, and if there’s one thing I learned before starting Connecticut College on my Merit scholarship in 2022, it’s that the line between your life before a tragedy and your life after that tragedy is, at best, porous. Doctor Warner’s forced optimism, when he sat us down in his office on that deceptively sunny summer day, fooled no one. Dad’s leukemia silently erased him and his lopsided grin that fall, leaving Mom and me to wonder exactly what was Thanksgiving for, again?
B. Christmas, 2022
Another cliché disproved. My mom was wrong; good things don’t come in small packages. On Christmas Day 2022, I unexpectedly learned that the best things instead come in old packages, often from unlikely sources. If you’re lucky, these things have a way of rippling through your life like the sparkling concentric circles a skipped stone leaves on an otherwise dark and silent pond.
Mom had met Chris while working her second job as a receptionist at the Marina. He was a mechanic, and after a tentative courtship, Chris had become an unofficial fixture in our maisonette. Chris charmed both of us with his rough-hewed kindness, leavened with a sarcastic wit and an impressive array of international curse words acquired from his youth in the Navy. So nobody was surprised at his what-the-hell attitude when a Snap-On toolbox fell on him and broke his wrist as he was repairing a Catalina sloop’s hull. No way was Chris going to let a little thing like that ruin his Christmas.
“Jebe Ga, Adam!” Chris boomed (impressively using the Bosnian idiom for “fuck it.”) Chris’ idea of a good Christmas was to watch those crummy Hallmark Christmas movies, a Guinness in hand, and hurl obscene insults at the insipid dialogue. A broken wrist was a gateway, not an impediment, to this least strenuous of indoor sports.
Another sparse Christmas. Mom’s increasingly modest salary and Chris’ skimpy disability checks heralded one of those Dickensian Christmases, where kids got nuts and maybe an orange, or a yarn doll. Chris and I sat down to dismember an especially insipid movie (Christmas at Dollywood).
“Look over there!” barked Chris, pointing out the window. Like an idiot, I looked but saw nothing but an empty street with exhaust-blackened snowdrifts. I turned around to see Chris reaching behind our plaid chenille couch with his good right hand, and, triumphantly tugging a long oblong package, placed it on the chipped Ikea coffee table.
“Open it, dickweed!” hollered Chris.
It was a flattish case, a few feet long, covered in a grimy yellow tweed with battered leather end pieces, secured by three tarnished clasps. And even though it was obvious what it was, I wasn’t prepared for what was inside.
I popped the clasps and opened the top. If I were to say that it contained a 1955 Blue Sparkle Fender Telecaster electric guitar, that would be a ridiculously reductive, Joe Friday just-the-facts-ma’am description of the contents. No, the blue sparkle glimmered like thousands of tiny sapphire chips swept from a jeweler’s workbench. The neck was a honeyed maple, worn enough to show that it had seen hundreds of club stages, but the frets, the bridge and the knobs gleamed with a hefty steeliness that screamed 1950’s California-made. The white faceplate was pleasingly tinged with just the right amount of yellow. My English-major glibness deserted me. I was speechless.
“I mean, shit, I’m not using it,” whispered Chris, in an exaggerated stage whisper, spreading his hands. “Oh, you’ll need this too.”
From next to the couch, Chris lugged a beat-up beige box, with a filthy brown leather handle and a diamond-patterned tweed front. It was clearly heavier than its 20-inch square dimensions suggested. On top were some tarnished plugs and 8 black knobs, with molded rounded arrows offset against round plates.
“Dude, this is a fucking 1960 Vox AC15 amp. Some guy named John Lennon used it. So did Pete Buck from R.E.M. I mean, Jesus, dude, this amp was used for the freaking JAMES BOND THEME!”
The rest of this distinctly un-Dickensian Christmas is lost to memory, other than to say that Chris patiently taught me a couple of basic chords (the two-finger E-minor, friend of fledgling guitarists; the triangular D major) so that I could do more than gape at my unforeseen bounty.
C. Spring, 2022
The meager stipend from my scholarship left no room for lessons, and so I sought out the last refuge of the dilettante: the Internet. There were many free courses to be had, but one guy—Marty Schwartz—especially caught my eye. He used a song-based (as opposed to a more theoretical) approach to songs. In other words, he taught you how to play a particular song you may want to learn. I had a lifetime of pent-up songs I wanted to play, but chief among them was Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life).” I’ve always loved this song—its cynical optimism; its lovely string accompaniment; and its chiming chords. Best of all: it only required five chords: G, D, E minor, Cadd9 (with its signature plangent melancholy) and C.
So: I decided to focus on this one. The plan was to incessantly repeat it until it was a reflex, and then take the blue guitar and my reasonable singing voice to 135 Wharf Street, where Island Books had an open-mic night twice per month on Saturdays.
I signed up, and the Saturday night barreled into my life like destiny on wheels. When my turn came, I mounted the stage, plugged the blue guitar into the Vox, and squinted into the sparse audience. The only people I knew were Mom and Chris.
I leaned forward to introduce myself and was greeted by a screech of feedback. I hastily adjusted the mic, carefully formed the opening G chord, and played the song.
It felt great. I closed my eyes, secure in my muscle memory of those chords. I was on pitch; remembered the words, and hit the closing chord with an arpeggiated flourish.
We’ve all seen it in the movies. Unknown musician plays first gig. Sitting in the shadows is record-label A&R rep, in a black Italian leather jacket and boots, on vacation. Rep hears singer; sits bolt upright one verse into the song; and taps singer, basking in the knowledge of a job well done on the shoulder, with a raised-print business card in hand.
But this was most definitely not the movies. As the final G rang out, I was greeted with scattered applause, most of which came from Mom and Chris. I mumbled “Thank you,” unplugged and stepped off the stage, avoiding my Mom/Chris, and walked toward the back.
At the back of the room, I was stopped, but not by anyone from a record label. It was that lady from the coffee shop that opened last winter. Annie? Angie?
“I love that song! You really sounded great!”
She saw me doubtfully looking around the room. Everybody had already forgotten my performance, but she wisely let it go. I could barely look her in the eye and nodded a resigned thank-you before gathering my stuff and walking into the chilly April night.
D. Christmas, 2023
Stung from my failure to obtain instant stardom, I brought out the blue guitar for practice less and less. It’s not that I didn’t love it; I did, but it reminded me of disappointment and its professional-grade build seemed ever more at odds with my amateurism. Chris tactfully didn’t bug me about it, and my focus shifted towards school; the blue guitar began to fade from the day-to-day.
At Christmas, my friend Jenny and I embarked to New York for our annual holiday outing. The itinerary was satisfyingly consistent: a visit to the Museum of Modern Art, and then drinks at the King Cole Bar, at the St. Regis Hotel, where you can admire the gorgeous 25-foot Maxfield Parrish painting behind the bar and spend $120 on a cheese plate.
This year, there was an exhibition of rarely seen Picasso paintings at the MOMA. We wandered through the deconstructed women and animals. As we turned a corner into the last of the galleries, on the wall was an oil painting titled “Abstract Guitar, 1926.” It distilled lovely oval shapes suggesting a guitar, with lines as strings and washes of a beautiful dark blue. As I gazed upon it, something stirred deep in my heart (although I felt it as a leap in my stomach).
When I got home, I ran upstairs and opened the closet door.
Peter Rustin and his wife Leslie recently moved from Los Angeles to Peter’s native Connecticut, with their three rather intelligent cats. Peter is an attorney practicing remotely with his firm in Los Angeles. He plays guitar badly and drums decently. His work has been published in the Arboreal Literary Journal; Free Spirit; Assignment Literary Magazine; and the South Florida Poetry Journal.