The camping chair was set down in the middle of the crossroads. The waiting time might be quite a spell and I didn’t aim on being dead on my feet by the time someone, or something, showed up. The guitar case stood upright against the chair. The guitar inside wasn’t tuned.
It was already a quarter to midnight and the flat land of the Delta around me was dark, quiet and hot. There was only a sickle moon illuminating countryside so diffidently it was almost no illumination at all. The heat seemed to smother me like a tsunami caused by a giant sun flare.
Rivulets of sweat ran down the side of my face and down my back. I should’ve worn a lighter suit, or perhaps not a suit at all, but this was one time one had to show respect by dressing right.
XXX
I’d stopped by a dry goods store along a desolate country road close to the bustling metropolis of Hawkins, population 235. An old codger sat snoozing on a rocker on the front porch. I stepped lightly past him. No need to wake a man so at peace with his life.
An old woman served behind the counter.
“I’m looking for a crossroads,” I said.
It must’ve been a long time since she’d heard anything to amuse her. Her eyes lit up and she shook her head with delight. She had just the right snappy comeback.
“You sure are in the right place,” she guffawed. “Plenty of crossroads around here. You just gotta move down the road a piece, Mister, not very far either.”
I realised I’d better define the search parameters more closely.
“An isolated, deserted crossroads, with no buildings around it, no people anywhere Just an empty stretch of land with a crossroads in it.”
The old women narrowed her eyes, looked past me at the front door as if she were thinking of calling the old guy, thought better of it and smiled thinly at me.
“What do you wanna go down there for, Mister? Folks say that’s where the devil waits for unwary strangers to steal their souls when they think he’s a friend in their hour of loneliness.”
The old woman must’ve heard some of the legends but I wasn’t scared of the devil stealing my soul. My intention was to do a deal for the exchange of my soul for a tangible benefit.
“Is there any place like that around here?”
The old woman shrugged her bony shoulders. No skin off her nose if some stranger wanted to go hanging out at deserted crossroads. She’d be in bed, safe from harm while this fool was jawboning with evil forces.
“Sure thing, there is. About three miles west of here, past Kenridge City on the road to Paitchville. If you want a lonely place, that’s what you’ll find down there. That’s a big stretch of loneliness, right there. If I was you, Mister, I’d be taking a silver cross and a Bible with me. Insurance you know.”
She smiled benignly. She’d warned me and she’d given me some practical advice. After that, I was on my own.
I bought a black $10 pork pie hat from a stack of hats on one of the shelves behind the counter, just so she won’t think I wasted her time by coming in to ask foolish questions.
The old guy was still gently snoring on his rocking chair. I resisted the temptation to give the rocker an almighty push. His life was probably tough enough as it was.
XXX
I found the crossroads the old woman had mentioned. It was isolated and far from any signs of life, ideal for a midnight visitation from whomever wanted to do a deal with me on the quiet, a surreptitious compact yet forever formally binding.
The deal was supposed to be done at midnight, according to reliable sources, but I didn’t count on it. If a person is about to give you a lucky break, is about to make your fondest dreams come true, change your life forever and basically just arrange it so you’ll be on top of the pecking order, no doubt and no fear, the person is not apt to be too worried being on time because they know you’ll wait and wait and wait. No chance of you getting so pissed off after fifteen minutes standing around alone at the crossroads that you’ll walk away with nothing.
XXX
My ensemble of dark suit, white shirt and black shoes made me look like an intergalactic villain hunter, but a pork pie hat made the quirky difference. The hat said goofy yet cool. The suit was damn hot though and the night was oppressively muggy. The back of my shirt was damp. The moisture did not cool me down. Somehow it seemed that my temperature was rising inexorably.
I shifted on the saggy canvass seat of the camping chair. It was not comfortable at all and I stood up, stretched my legs and arms and closed my eyes for a second.
“It’s a good night for a crossroads Kaffeeklatsch,” a thin, dry voice said.
I opened my eyes and saw nothing in front of me, turned my head to the right and still saw noting, and nothing to my left either. I closed my eyes again and reopened them. I coughed from a sudden irritation in my throat.
“I think I’m a few minutes late. Apologies for that. It’s a bad habit of mine, procrastinating when I should get on my way to be on time. But you waited and that’s a good sign.”
The figure wore a white linen planter’s suit and white Panama hat. It seemed that the light from the sickle moon was strong enough to reflect against the suite and hat, with a fuzzy, shimmering light effect playing across the face, and making it seem fluid and yet also blank. There was no way of making out the facial features, never mind identifying, person. The figure wasn’t as tall or as thin as I’d been led to believe.
I should say something.
“Pleased to meet you,” I stammered a little, pulled myself together but said nothing else for the time being. Seemed nothing sensible to say. I wanted to ask about Robert Johnson but it somehow seemed frivolous. “I’ve not been waiting long. Leastways, it’s only been a lifetime.”
My little joke fell flat. It simply wilted in the muggy heat.
“You know how this works? I tune your guitar, you sign over your soul. Simple, easy, hardly any paperwork. No fine print.”
“Yes.”
“Splendid. This is what you sign.”
The A4 sheet of paper had no logo, no letterhead, no date. It had a brief statement to be confirmed by signature.
THE DEVIL OWNS MY SOUL IN EXCHANGE FOR TUNING MY GUITAR.
“No ifs or buts. It’s that simple. You sign the paper, I tune your guitar and you go on your way. It’s up to you what you do with your guitar after that.”
“Sure.”
“You do know how to tune a guitar without a digital tuner? I tune this guitar and once tuned it will always stay in tune, but every other guitar you use must be in the same tuning and only you must tune the guitars. If you don’t tune the other guitars to the same tuning, you won’t have any success playing them.”
“I can tune my guitar. Noted about always using the same tuning.”
“One last thing. Once you sign the paper and I tune your guitar, the deal is done and your soul is irrevocably mine. No other conditions, no loopholes, no escape clause. I give only one guarantee, and that’s that you’ll be the best guitarist there is. What you do with your guitar after it’s tuned is your business. If you never play the thing again, your soul is still mine. If you play only for friends and family, if you busk for pennies on a street corner, your soul is still mine. I guarantee your ability to play extraordinarily good but financial success is up to you. If you don’t want to put in the hard work to achieve commercial success and acclaim, so be it, but your soul is mine once I tune your guitar.”
“Do I sign in my own blood?”
“Don’t be facetious. That’s unhygienic and this deal isn’t a game. A ballpoint or felt tip pen will do. I have one, if you don’t.”
“I brought one. Let me have that paper.”
I laid the guitar case over the arm rests of the chair to serve as a writing surface, took the sheet of paper and signed it and dated it for good measure.
“The date doesn’t matter but if you insist. Please let me have the guitar.”
“Do I get a copy?”
“No. You know what it says. Easy to remember. I’m a man of my word and the deal is that deal you see there. I won’t forge another agreement with different tricky terms.”
I suppose I had to accept that the devil’s word was bond.
“It used to be a handshake deal, no paperwork at all, but you’d be surprised how many folks argue at the end when I come to collect that the deal wasn’t what they agree to so many years before. That became so tedious. So difficult to convince them that my memory of the deal is always fresh and clear. The solution was to have this piece of paper. Learnt from lawyers. They want it in writing.”
I opened the lid of the guitar case and took out the acoustic guitar inside and handed it over.
He took the guitar in both hands, one under the body, the other one under the neck and twirled it around, then studied the front for a minute or two.
“Couldn’t get a cheaper guitar, could you? You’d better look after this ax. Shit quality doesn’t last.”
“I can’t afford anything better. When I’m successful I intend collecting guitars and onty the best.”
He grunted. It could’ve been a disguised sardonic chuckle.
He turned away to shield the mechanics of the tuning from my eyes. The strings were very loud in the warm midnight air. The first strummed, tuned chord sounded like that “Chinese music” the old timers talked about.
“You\re going to have to relearn how to finger your chords.”
Woodshedding again. As if I hadn’t practised enough. Obviously, just getting a new tuning wouldn’t turn me into a genius guitar player. I gotta be able to play.
I carefully put the guitar back on its velvet bed in the guitar case and shut it.
When I was done, I was alone at the crossroads. It was as if nothing had ever happened.
I folded up the camping chair and carried it with one hand and the guitar case in the other, walking slowly back to my car, about 500 metres down the road. I thought of sleeping in the car until daylight but decided against it. I had a long drive home and the sooner I could start practising with the new tuning, the quicker my career would be kickstarted. There had been enough time wasting as it was.
XXX
At the end of the lesson, once I’d packed away my guitar and Jeff and I had tidied up the practice room, Jeff turned to me with a small smile on his face.
“I want to ask you a serious question here,” he said. “Do you really want to play guitar, make something of it, or are you just messing about because it’s a vanity project?”
“What?”
“I want to be straight with you on this. It’s been a year and you’ve made progress, okay? You’ve done that. You’ve had to make progress even if it’s just because you started with nothing, but you’ve plateaued and I don’t see you going beyond that. any time soon. Do you really practice at home?”
“Maybe not as much as I should?”
“If you are practising a lot, I’ve got bad news for you. It ain’t doing much good. You’re between not being able to play at all and playing kinda badly and it doesn’t seem to me that you can progress beyond the level where you’re stuck now.”
That was not what I wanted to hear but I couldn’t argue. I knew that I sucked at playing the guitar. Obviously, I didn’t practice 8 hours a day, or whatever one was supposed to do, but I did put in regular practice hours. I guess I just didn’t have natural talent. I had the mechanics, to a degree, but I didn’t have a natural ease with the guitar.
I hadn’t played guitar until after my fortieth birthday. I woke up hungover and alone the morning after the birthday dinner with 9 of my best friends, and I took stock of my life as it was at the time. Between girlfriends, a job that paid the bills but sucked and a general lack of motivation in the life department. I was simply going through the motions on a day to day basis with little interest in what I was doing and no plan to improve the situation.
Apparently, one way of staving off Alzheimer’s was to learn to play a musical instrument. As far as I knew, there was no history of Alzheimer’s in my family but it was a hidden fear of mine that I would grow very old but spend the last years of my life in a state where I’ve lost my mind.
Playing a musical instrument is also cool. It enhances one’s social status. When one goes camping, you can entertain your fellow campers with a tune on the guitar. At house parties everyone can gather around the piano while you belt out a few sentimental favourites. If you play the saxophone you can join a local jazz combo and play at picnics, garden parties and high teas on rolling lawns. The possibilities are limitless.
I decided to learn how to play the guitar because a that seemed to be the coolest, most versatile and most mobile general instrument to master. You can play an acoustic guitar anywhere and immediately make friends and entertain strangers.
Buying a guitar and finding a music teacher were the easy parts. The difficult bit was to learn how to play the damn guitar , and to learn the ancillary tricks of tuning the instrument, understanding chord structures and reading music. Tablature was okay, the visual representation of chords was easy to grasp, but the challenge of learning chord inversions and of reading music was an obstacle I found, well, challenging and no amount of practice changed that. I guess I was just dumb.
To his credit, Jeff was patient beyond all reasonable expectations. He was much younger than me and I suppose he must often have wondered why a talentless older guy was putting himself through the torture of learning to play guitar when he clearly didn’t have the aptitude for it.
XXX
“How’s your guitar playing?” Derek asked. “Expert level yet?”
We were at his place, sipping whiskey in his lounge and eating pizza from the box around the dining room table. We were fortysomething bachelors who didn’t cook worth a damn.
“It’s been two years,” I said, “and I don’t really know why I’m sticking to it. I can play a couple of tunes but I must concentrate when I do, and it’s not much fun. I keep waiting for something to kick in, a moment of satori, when it’ll click into place and I just understand it all but it hasn’t happened. My guitar teacher is probably happy that I keep paying tuition but I don’t think he has much hope for me either. It’s like going to a shrink twice a week just to talk about shit you never manage to change for the better, and you keep doing it for years.”
“Why don’t you stop? If it isn’t working.”
“it’s my dream, man, my dream! Seriously, I’ve invested so much time and effort in this thing, I don’t want to abandon it just like that. My fear is that I will let go of it when just a few more months of work would let me crack it, and then I’ll have wasted so much time.”
Derek went to the shelves where he kept his vast record collection and pulled out a record.
“I want to play you something,” he said. “Then I’ll tell you a story that might inspire you.”
He showed me the album cover. the artist was Robert Johnson and the record was titled The King of the Delta Blues Singers, and the cover featured a man sitting on a kitchen chair, hunched over an acoustic guitar, against a plain brown background. Quite striking.
“This record was released in 1961,” Derek said, “long after Johnson died, in obscurity and legend, and it became the inspiration and influence of a generation of mostly White young blues musicians in the mid-Sixties.”
The music was sparse, just the guy singing in a kind of high pitched voice and accompanying himself on trebly guitar, with almost simultaneous rhythm and lead guitar riffs and patterns. It sounded primitive and powerful and mesmerising. This was very far from the kind of folky stuff I was learning.
“What do you think?”
“Not exactly what I’m listening to at home,” I said. “Bit rough around the edges for me.”
“Never mind, it’s the story I want to tell you. Johnson recorded only a small number of sides compared to his contemporaries but just about every one of them is a blues standard nowadays. The thing is, when Johnson started out, he was poorly regarded by his contemporaries. He tried so hard but he wasn’t up to their standard and they thought he won’t account for anything but then he went away somewhere for a few months, nobody saw him for a long while, and when he returned, he was a master of his instrument and he had these genius songs. It was like the difference between day and night.”
“He practiced a lot in his basement?” I said.
“Maybe, but the real story is that he went to a crossroad in die Mississippi Delta and sold his soul to the devil in exchange for mastery of the guitar and the ability to write songs like no-one had ever heard. That’s the story I want to share with you. Instead of scuffling forever and never progressing beyond mediocre, you should just sell your soul to the devil.”
I looked at Derek to check whether he was joking. He wasn’t smiling.
“D’you know anyone who’s done this? I mean, know personally?”
“Naah. I don’t know musicians. Perhaps it’s just a bullshit story but nobody’s ever explained how Johnson went from dreadful to genius in a couple of months. I’m leaving this with you, if your dream is so important to you. Forget about practising until your fingers bleed. Just do the deal.”
XXX
I sat with the guitar resting on my two outstretched hands, just looking at it. It didn’t feel any different in my hands and looked the same as always. I switched to playing position and strummed an open chord. It sure sounded different to what I was used to. Whatever this tuning was, I’d better get it quickly before the guitar went out of tune.
I set up a tape recorder and plucked the strings one by one, played the open chord again and tried fingering a standard chord. It was an unholy mess of a sound, pun not intended, and I knew then I would have to work hard on relearning how to play the instrument. I played back the tape to listen to the notes and the open chord. With any luck I knew enough about tuning a guitar to replicate the sound on any other instrument, or on this one when I was forced to change strings.
Jeff would earn his money for the additional lessons I’d have to take to work out how to play chords with the new tuning. I hoped he would treat my story of how I got to the tuning as a joke and just move on.
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