The Guitar Lesson

Petaluma, California 

     I worked for a young woman who owned a sizeable chunk of Marin County, tending her herd of Hanoverian jumping horses, thirty shaggy pampered sheep, one too-friendly diary heifer (Marilyn Moo), four free-range hogs, twenty feral chickens, random ducks and three gangly, loud-mouthed peacocks. She paid me a thousand dollars a month, I shared a one-room bunkhouse with a blue-eyed cowdog. The boss and my pre-teen daughter slept in a large brown farmhouse with nine neutered, spayed, and spoiled-rotten house cats.

      One morning, shortly after I swatted Myra the feline matron from her rummage through a plate of bacon, the boss announced that she was going to view art in France. She would place a few thousand bucks in my bank account for wages and ranch expenses and she would return in a month or two. The place was mine to run as I saw fit. Delta and I were to help ourselves to the stash in the freezer. She’d be leaving the next day.

     The farm pretty much ran itself. The previous year was spent building fences, corrals and stock water systems. The lambing was over. Other than moving sheep from one pasture to the next, feeding the stock, scraping the barn once a week with an old Ford tractor and broadcasting grain to the rest of the menagerie each morning, I had plenty of spare time to ponder while my kid attended the one-room school down the road.

     My first act as a land baron was to drive into town and purchase a three-hundred-dollar Yamaha acoustic guitar, an assortment of picks, and a Mel Bay Method for Guitar book. Previous experience as a musician was as elementary school trumpet player, self-taught Autoharp strummer, and harmonica squawker. 

     The dog and I hunkered with Mel Bay in the bunkhouse for a week of evenings until my fingers were blistered and I had almost learned where to place them to play three chords in the key of D. At that point I made the mistake of thinking that I needed a better instrument to assist me in becoming the guitar player I had always dreamed of being. 

     Taking advantage of the generosity of the money lenders who finance newlyweds’ furniture, I drove back to the ranch one Tuesday afternoon with a brand new 1979 Martin D-25K, a mid-sized Dreadnaught with spruce top and koa wood everywhere else. The contract was for twelve months of hundred-dollar payments at twenty percent per annum.   

    (Aside: At the conclusion of a particularly sterling performance of a very difficult violin concerto, an audience member congratulated Heifitz on how good his Stradivarius sounded. Heifitz handed the violin to the man and said, “Here, you are welcome to play the concerto.”) The Yamaha would’ve been plenty enough axe for my God-given talents. 

     A month later, with a new set of calluses on my left fingertips, I was a one-song wonder, able plunk along on my Cadillac guitar in the key of D as I crooned “I Ride an Old Paint.” to an audience of sheep. In a moment of humility prompted by boredom in the eyes of an old ewe, I decided I needed help with my career and went to the Yellow Pages in search of a guitar instructor.

    When Tina drove up to the ranch in her folks’ new blue Oldsmobile, I knew I might be in over my head. She wore the archetypal concert musician’s garb, full length black dress, hair in bun, cat-eye glasses, dark stockings. She tiptoed through the peacock shit carefully to the trunk of the car and extracted a hand-crafted guitar case, then carried it up the stairs into the cat-perfumed parlor of the main house.

     I paid in advance for the lesson, twenty buck for an hour. Tina opened her case, propped the lid against the once-Victorian-now-Goodwill lounging divan, and gently lifted her Italian classical guitar onto her lap, where she began wiping down the strings with a dark rose cloth. I propped the lid of my Martin case against the same couch and readied my git-fiddle for the slaughter.

    The first half of the lesson was devoted to the manner in which one properly holds a guitar. The thumb of the fretting hand is to be positioned just so against the center of the neck, the wrist arched just so, the fingers poised just so, each assigned a particular string and fret. The plucking fingers, too, each had a discrete task. Visions of Chuck Berry scotch-hopping across the stage and Johnny Cash whanging away at shoulder level came to mind, but I held my tongue.

    Then she asked me to demonstrate what I knew about playing the guitar. I launched into “I Ride an Old Paint,” glancing up from staring at my left hand while the fellow cowpokes were taking my pony from his stall and tying my bones to the saddle, to catch the same hint of horror in Tina’s eyes that I’d once seen on my mother’s when she discovered that the neatly wrapped package we found next to the road contained chicken guts.

    Murray the Dolt saved me and Tina from the embarrassment of a professional critique. Murray was a special needs housecat, rendered into a permanent state of stupor by imbibing bong water as a kitten. Just as Tina was relaxing her tight smile, ready to mash my dreams into a gooey pulp, Murray sauntered into the parlor, spun a couple of quick brodies, put it in reverse, parked in front of the guitar cases and sprayed a full load of cat piss all over the velvet interiors.

    Tina managed an E above high C when she screamed “Ohhhh, Noooo.” Murray shook his tail a few times, winked at her, dodged my boot, and scampered away toward the kitchen. Tina was in total fussy shock as I tried to soak up Murray’s indiscretion from her guitar case with my snot rag.  

    She carried the guitar and case separately and very delicately back to the Olds. I wrote a check on the ranch portion of my fortune for $350 to cover the cost of a new case, and we agreed that she was not the suitable person to teach me how to play the guitar. It took decades for Murray’s scent to evaporate from the Martin case. I can now play “I Ride an Old Paint” in a couple of keys.