My Black Guitar     

      by Michael K. White

I don’t know whether or not this particular guitar was born cursed. Life’s too short to be superstitious, but the facts are the facts. Maybe it was made in the Fender factory in Mexico on the 13th hour of the 13th day of the...well there is no thirteenth month unless you count the Simpsons’ Smarch, so let’s just say that there is the possibility that this guitar is cursed. Maybe a luthier was crushed to death between the string rollers or something, like in that movie, “Christine.” Or not.

It was a beautiful black Fender Telecaster with a white pickguard and a light maple fretboard. It felt heavy and substantial, like a gun, yet it was sleek and mysterious and easy to play and it sounded like a crystalline clear chime. Its chrome hardware gleamed  substantially. Its polished elegant headstock was thrillingly emblazoned with the declaration; “FENDER ‘TeleCaster.”

Ever since I first saw it I coveted it.

The first time I saw it was in 1993, when I went to my friend Pete’s studio one day to find his hillbilly buddy Donnie Bird and a large amount of expensive music equipment filling the space. Donnie was Pete’s boyhood friend who liked to appear unannounced and remain for days at a time jamming with Pete and a couple of other musicians for epic stretches. Pete was not there, but Donnie explained to me that he had come into possession of all this equipment more or less unexpectedly and needed a place to stash it for a while. There were two guitars, the Telecaster and a beautiful Gibson black acoustic. There were three amps, including a six foot bass amp with a vintage tube head; much prized indeed by tube amp enthusiasts. There were parts of a drum kit, symbols and stands, a couple tom toms and funnily enough, the black padded stool.

When Donnie played the Telecaster that day, I was awed by its sinister beauty and sharp sound. I asked him how much he would sell it for, but he looked offended and didn’t answer. He put the guitar back in its case and went to make a phone call. In fact, Donnie Bird never spoke to me after that. I had crossed some invisible line that I was unable to fathom. Not being a real musician myself, I sometimes stumbled into territory that was familiar to me but I seemed to do all the wrong things. I was a wannabe and it showed.

In the coming months Pete had many financial crises which necessitated his selling off piece by piece the music equipment that Donnie Bird had stored with him. Pete was funny that way. Once something came into his possession he left it only if it could provide Pete with money. Legal ownership had nothing to do with it. Not that Donnie Bird owned any of this stuff. He didn’t. And that was the logic Pete used when he pawned, first the amps, then the drums and reluctantly, the acoustic guitar, for which he got almost five hundred dollars. (In the pawn shop they had it on sale for a thousand. It was a really beautiful guitar.)

The day came, of course when Donnie Bird reappeared at Pete’s studio, ready to play and sing in his high pitched twang for thirty six straight hours, only to find his shit gone and Pete telling him a lame story about being robbed and everything stolen. Donnie quite rightly pointed out that all of Pete's stuff was still there, like his cameras, etc., how come only his stolen music equipment was taken? Pete didn’t have an answer for this. Pete’s method of lying was straightforward. He stared at the ground and doggedly stuck to his story no matter what. He was a mountain and you were a single shovel.

Donnie did not stay to sing that night and in fact this ruptured his friendship with Pete. Pete knew he had gone too far, but as was his way he did nothing to rectify it. He did, however, stop playing the Telecaster. Yet he wouldn’t sell it, which was unusual for Pete. When I asked him about it, he became moody and mysterious. It sat in its coffin-like hardshell case, and once in a while I would take it out and fondle it.

Around this time, after groping the guitars in Pete’s studio for a number of months, I started to play. I learned three chords and suddenly Pete and I were writing songs. I bought a black Korean acoustic guitar. I could play four songs. They were our own songs of course, I couldn’t play anything else. My friend Jeff started playing with us. Jeff was from the Eddie Van Halen School of rock, Pete was from the Dave Gilmour School of rock and I was like an idiot savant primitive finger painter who employed arresting shapes and colors. For some reason it all worked.

We played every Friday night, blowing through our set while smoking huge amounts of pot and burning whole forests of incense. I should say that Pete and I were smoking pot. Jeff, easily the most mature and level headed of our trio, disdained it, preferring to drink Guinness from black, long necked bottles. Like all lead guitarists, Jeff could be fussy and stubborn. It was hard to get him to just cut loose. He played a Rare Bird guitar that was custom made for him by tiny Belgian luthier elves working in secret guitar workshops deep in the petrified black forests of Colorado. Jeff had an equally nice acoustic guitar which, while not made from the supernatural powers of small homunculi, still had a chiming kick ass ring to it.

Pete was savvy and equally good in a totally different way. He could play in any style but he had a tendency to vamp the same vamp over and over and if Pete did not want to play a particular song then we didn't play it. Pete always wanted to play Jeff’s guitars, and Jeff, sensing rightly that this would be a big mistake, was reluctant to let him.

Then there was me. I was like a caveman beating two rocks together. So I sang. Because after all, they were my songs. Pete and I wrote them in a pot smoking frenzy and they were instant classics. There was “Worried About Anthony Quinn,” “John Boy’s Got A Boner” (A tribute to the Waltons), “Messin’ With Magnets,” “Troy’s new car is Dirty”, “Jack Ruby’s Gun,” and “Fat Dog in America.” We burned bright. But one night it all came crashing down.

It was a rainy Friday, just on the cusp of autumn and before we started Pete asked Jeff if he could play his acoustic guitar. Jeff’s guitar was fairly high end while Pete’s was of the pawnshop variety. Pete explained that his guitar’s “intonation” was bad, a phrase Pete employed often in order to play someone else’s guitar. I had no idea what he meant by that and I suspect Jeff didn’t either, but I may be wrong, because Jeff silently handed over the guitar trying not to look too worried.

That night was by far our best performance. And we were foresighted enough to film it on a cool grainy Fisher Price video camera for kids that Pete had stolen from someone. The picture was blurry and cutting edge and avant garde. It looked so cool. We played with fire and particularly on the last song, “Troy’s new car is Dirty,” we burned through it.

About three quarters through the song Pete’s guitar playing changed. I just figured he was trying something new, but he raced to the finish and as the last notes died out, he turned his back to us. Jeff and I grinned at one another because we knew we had really played good, and we exchanged shrugs at Pete’s floor staring shuffle. I stepped from the microphone and walked out front to talk to Jeff’s wife Jenny. As I did we both watched in horror what happened next.

Jeff was putting his Rare Bird guitar back into its casket when Pete walked up to him, still clutching the acoustic guitar in playing position.

“Jeff, I gotta tell you something.”

Pete was serious and his voice carried the hint of resignation. Jeff looked up from his beauty, his mouth open. Instinctively he slammed the case for the Rare Bird shut and snapped the clasps without taking his eyes off of Pete. Pete had let go of the acoustic guitar’s neck and the headpiece dangled from steel strings like a limp penis. Pete had snapped the neck while playing “Troy’s new car is Dirty.”

“I always hated playing that fucking song anyway," Pete would say later, but now was not the time for such statements. Jeff was in shock. I was in shock. Jenny was mad.

Jeff stood slowly, deliberately, his face betraying nothing as Pete slunk out of the guitar and handed it to him.

“I’m sorry,” Pete said in a mournful voice. He then started jabbering about paying Jeff back for it, paying to have it fixed, whatever it took to make it right, etc,...But Jeff wasn’t listening. None of us were. We stood transfixed as Jeff cradled his dead guitar, staring at it in disbelief.

“It’s…okay...” he said slowly, mechanically. His face was frozen. “I...can...get...it...fixed...”

Pete suddenly thrust the black Telecaster at Jeff. “Here man,” he said, his voice trembling with guilt and shame. “Here, take this. I want you to have it. You can sell it and get a new acoustic. I’m so sorry man. I’m really sorry...”

Jeff held out his hand as if repelling an attack. “No, I don’t want your guitar,” he said, still in a robotic shocked filled monotone. He looked at the dangling headstock and shook his head sadly. “I don’t need your guitar.” He didn’t say it to be mean and it didn’t sound that way. But Pete insisted, throwing the Telecaster down.

We only played a few more times after that, but it was never the same. Eventually Pete and I had a falling out over the usual things Pete fell out over, mainly his appropriation and sale of other people’s belongings. Jeff moved to Iowa and Pete ended up in Australia. Jeff never played his acoustic guitar again, even though he spent two hundred dollars having it repaired. He said it was never the same and I believed him. He never touched or looked at the black Telecaster. This I knew was my opening. I offered to buy the Telecaster from him. He didn’t hesitate. He said if I gave him sixty bucks I could have it. And that is how I came into its possession.

I treasured my new guitar and I bought a small pawn shop amp to play it through. I would stay up late smoking pot and grinding with headphones on at full volume. I got a little better but I really didn’t improve upon my three chord repertoire. I did however milk a lot of riffs from those three chords. Eventually I fell into a band with my drummer friend Dan and his vato grindcore fanatic friend, Lee. We jammed and thrashed; we called ourselves noisecore or candy punk and we also had some killer songs. I have a video tape of us playing a long instrumental jam. This was the night that I played so hard and so free that I raked the fingernails off my hand and kept on going, staining the Telecaster’s white pickguard with my blood. Rock and Roll! After a while most of the blood flaked off, leaving only fine rusty lines in the minute scratches on the white plastic.

For some reason my toddler son was obsessed with this video, watching us play this long song over and over. When Lee happened to come over one day my son was shocked and amazed that a TV star would actually come to his house.

One beautiful fall day, I had loaded the amp and the black Telecaster into the trunk of my car to go play with Dan and Lee. I had just unloaded my son out of his car seat and handed him off to my wife and was three blocks away when an old man ran a stop sign and t-boned me. The car was destroyed, I was badly jangled but the Telecaster (uncased) appeared to be unharmed. I took it to a music store to have it checked out and explained what had happened to the mullet-headed dude behind the counter. He smiled wrongly; taking the guitar saying that it sounded like the “intonation” was fucked up and we would have to charge the insurance company a hundred bucks to fix it.

After that I stopped playing it. I hung it on the wall, like a trophy or a sculpture, its heavy black body and light neck, its shiny chrome and bloodstained white pick guard. I would often look at it, admire it, but I could never bring myself to pick it up and fondle it. It started gathering dust and I felt guilt now every time I looked at it. “It’s so handsome, so sleek,” I would think admiringly, and then I would go to touch it and pull away.

A few years later, after a devastating divorce and a subsequent move, I came home to find I had been robbed. Among other things, the black Telecaster was gone. Its distinctive shape was still outlined in dust on the wall where it had rested. I felt an odd sense of relief. It was truly Karma that this guitar should be stolen from me, that it should return to the ether of stolen guitars or the reality of someone’s bedroom, where it will either once again wreak its havoc with the lives of all who possess it or will unlock the music in someone and redeem itself.

Donnie Bird died last year under mysterious circumstances. When I talked to his sister, Stormy, she said that he died alone in a room devoid of any furniture and that all he owned in the world was “A guitar. A black guitar.”

Bio: As one half of the semi-legendary playwriting team Broken Gopher Ink, MICHAEL K. WHITE spent his youth tricking and fooling producers into investing their dirty money in his lurching, lumbering plays. Incredibly this led to forty play productions, including fifteen off-Broadway runs that cloaked the author with a bogus literary credibility he misuses to this day. His low cholesterol mega monologue play, "My Heart And the Real World" ran for almost two years in New York City, enabling the authors to eat at John's Pizzeria. In 2007 his story “13 Halloweens” was chosen as one of the ten best stories published in 2006 by the super cool folks at Story South.

A shy, humble man who lives with the cows in Colorado, White, a frequently published, deeply scarred veteran of the furious litmag scene of the 80s, is now content to live in solitude with his debts and addictions. Recently he was unpleasantly surprised to find an extended family of black and yellow snakes living inside the crack between the steps and his house. He found this out the hard way.
Contact: Broken Gopher Ink
www.brokengopher.com, brokengopher@frii.com
 

Celine

          by  Milan Smith