New Friends

We sat on our side of the fire, illuminated in the soft strobes of gold and yellow shooting up to the sky.  The stones containing and constraining the fire were warm on my bare feet and embers blew up and away into some great god while I listened to what turned out to be a mostly acoustic jam session.

I have been isolated now for months.  With one exception, the few friends I had left town or just moved on to something else.  I try to make new friends, but I am not good at it.  I’ve always been socially awkward and backward and any other sort of prefixed ward that could possibly mean I don’t belong.

I have a hard time meeting one or two strangers, but a ring of them is panic inducing.  But I had my guitar with me, balanced on my lap.  And so I watched the fire kick around the cooling humid air and listened to people sing songs and pick on their acoustic guitars.  I would lead in with fills and back off during the verses and build something like texture into what is normally just strumming.  I can’t even play with a pick.  I was ruining their songs. But they played it off by saying I sounded good and shot me some fake smiles.

And then we went around the male guitar players, the girls asking for a ’show-off’ song.  One guy hit up Blackbird, and a few hammer heavy ringing beauties.  Then they all looked at me.  And worse: started talking to me.  The cheap Fender that was light years behind and thousands of dollars cheaper than what anyone else brought was too small to hide me totally.  They asked for my show off song and I was lost.

That’s when I made a startling discovery:

If I played, they didn’t ask me anything and I didn’t have to look at them or put on my confident face and joke and laugh.  I could just bury myself in beer and in the fretboard and be gone forever.  And so I did.  I tuned the Strat down to Drop-D tuning, and imagined the groaning eye rolling around the circle that they kept hidden behind their friendly words and encouragement.  The kid with the cheap  electric just showed his true colors.  It was time for power chords and young kid horse shit. That’s what I imagined I heard them thinking behind that friendliness.

But I wasn’t playing anything angry.  I wrote a song one time, sitting on a forward sponson of the USS Constellation watching the sun set over the South China Sea.  I noted that if I jammed the guitar hard enough into my thigh, in the classical Andres style, I could keep my hands or knees from giving away my terror.

And so I played it.  Modulato, legato.  A few places with some minimal major/minor ambiguity.  And when I got to the end of it, I reached out in dread panic for beer.  And they asked me to play it again.  So I did.  And they asked to hear my play some more, so I played them a droning and self-absorbed arrangement of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”

And they said nice things that I ignored.  And I drank two more beers and we broke into loose jams.  I played a little more, a little louder.

Toward the end of the night, one of the guys came up and peered in the firelight at the headstock of my guitar.  I knew what he was looking for, and I was something like embarrassed when I told him, “It’s a Mexican, just a cheap one.”

I had seen his spaceship guitar packed away and his NASA pedalboard.  I just had this import guitar — no active pickups, no fancy pedals — strung into an old, dusty Fender combo amp with the reverb dimed out plugged into the outside outlet of their trailer house.

“Really. It has an amazing sound. It’s beautiful.”