\u201cLook, you not gonna get it to sound like that. It only sounds like that on the record cause it was his guitar he keep in his closet every day gettin’ soggy and melding with the temperature of the room. He beat that thing into the way it sounds. It used to sound jes’ like yours: clean and new and straight. Until later and carrying it all over the hills and leavin\u2019 it uncased when he be drunk. You cain’t build a guitar to sound like that. You gotta tear one down.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what the old man was telling this poor kid on the street, plucking away at old Robert Johnson tunes waiting for some dollar bills to fall down over the quarters he himself had placed in his open guitar case. Sitting on a stoop, unlicensed but proud. It looked like he\u2019d always figured a cop would be the one pushing him along, uprooting him from his fantasy. But this was some old black bastard tearing him down, stained white t-shirt like a drape cloth barely covering his antique belly, face like wet tree bark, yellow eyes full of educational menace. I couldn\u2019t decide which one to root for. The runaway with straggly sideburns busking, trying to live on that thin edge of flaky authenticity, or the old man with no say so in the world except what used to be.<\/p>\n
The kid looked hurt. \u201cWell, shit if I ain\u2019t trying!\u201d<\/p>\n
You can\u2019t always take something away from things you overhear.<\/p>\n
\u201cClose the door, honey,\u201d says the jazz station DJ to some unseen accomplice in the studio. \u201cYou\u2019re letting the flies in.\u201d Perched on the second floor of an old building downtown. The studio has doors that open onto a balcony overlooking Decatur Street. That\u2019s how I imagine it anyway. And damned if a fly doesn\u2019t land right on a live mic, catching a breeze from the DJ\u2019s plosive syllables. I can hear the wings rattling over the airwaves, a creature-made sound separate from the mechanical buzzing of broadcast apparatuses. \u201cIt\u2019s so hot my eyes are sweating,\u201d the DJ says. Then he must wave the fly off because the sound pulls away, and he laughs and cues a song. Again, I\u2019m torn. I kind of want to hear that annoying little whirr from the bug continue and know that it\u2019s being amplified through a thousand other radios across town, all of us listening in on the biological percussion, but life and its routines can\u2019t be suspended for each and every rarity.<\/p>\n
Like the man making up one one-hundredth of a crowd walking against itself down Canal Street. He moves at a slower pace than people with a destination in mind, praying to some unknown god about his troubles, carrying a white plastic bag with a snap handle marked \u201cPatient Belongings.\u201d His face is almost featureless, eroded by the over pouring of a worried mind. He\u2019s another stumbling soul released on his own recognizance, disturbing parents but amusing the children. I\u2019m stuck behind him, in his wake, bobbing. I think don\u2019t have time for this, but maybe I do.<\/p>\n
We can\u2019t all have the time for this, to look out, to oversee, to give every person the attention they\u2019re asking for. All the street performers\u2014solo trombonists, tarot card readers, human statues\u2014needing recognition along with their lunch money from their attendant amateur comprehenders of art. The free range unemployables spend their time to and fro with no compunction to keep their limbs or their mumbled memoirs to themselves. Even the regular citizens need their stimulus, too, and crave encounters with subculture and alternative meaning, if only to further define themselves as sane, pleasant, and not adverse to observation.<\/p>\n
I guess that\u2019s why they build cities, residential mazes. Let the natives and the newcomers turn corners, bump into each other. A sizeable enough population should suffice to have something for everyone. Advice and admonishment, unsolicited or not, finds its way to us daily. The critics say the city isolates, that the easily obtained anonymity subsumes, like a drug, the motivation to interact. I call bullshit on that. You stand in one spot long enough, someone\u2019s going to notice and step up. They might want to tell you what to think. They might offer you a woman. They might ask you for directions. And if you can\u2019t stand to answer them, to let a little part of you rub off and be taken away back home with someone else, if you can\u2019t be a tore down, nature-warped instrument that\u2019s fit to play on, well, then, you don\u2019t really belong anywhere but in a case, sealed and protected from all our elements.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cLook, you not gonna get it to sound like that. It only sounds like that on the record cause it was his guitar he keep in his closet every day gettin’ soggy and melding with the temperature of the room. …<\/p>\n