Chapter 3

He awoke the next morning with a start, the dream of his mother melting away, and his backside inflamed and throbbing. Exhausted, he remained in bed for some time in a silence which soon made him uncomfortable. The stereo stood at the foot of his bed. He reached for it and played the same tunes to which he fell asleep. The pain was so bad that he could hardly move, and he remained in one position for several hours falling in and out of a restless slumber.

His father had left for work without the slightest instruction. He came and went as he pleased, and Noble had little idea who he saw, where he went, or when he would return. He was grateful enough to have the house to himself, to enjoy a full recovery, and again he saw a large stage in the middle of an open field, the band playing, the young women swaying, the sun hot and heavy in a sky of azure, not a single cloud, only a deep endless blue, and the women in their shorts and tight tee shirts dancing with a brilliant clarity. Noble made a dangerous leap in vision from this point.

For the past several years this particular fantasy always placed him in the audience, and he was satisfied with his position as a consumer of the all-mighty guitar and the virtuosos who played it. But in this particular and pioneering vision he saw himself on the stage.

He fought this self-indulgence. He had always been a very modest and humble young man, whether in principle or in the avoidance of confrontation, he wasn’t sure, but in this picture he held the delicate, weighty instrument and cradled it like a newborn. And the guitar sang in waves, screaming and moaning through the branches which shook and blossomed in the summer air into the ears of the women who hungered for another lick, any chord to transport them far away from bitter, harsh realities. And these women somehow heard his voice through the electric medium. The voice called for them, yearned for any woman to find him attractive, and the man without a woman transmogrifies, slowly but surely, into a beast fit for the climates of hell, the beast which attacks sheep in the dark and devours horse-flesh with blood-curdling exactitude, leaving not a single string of meat on the carcass.

The changing of man into beast doesn’t come quickly or even gradually, rather it takes on a creeping, insidious character, the transformation beginning on the inside, an implosion of the immune system, a disease eating first the liver, the lungs, and then the heart, until it finally feeds on the skin, scathing it with a corrosion and disfigurement like an acid. And without a woman Noble had little idea how he would regain his sanity which oozed from him like a thick, gluey puss. Although he played a fast and precise guitar in this grandiose vision, he saw an acid burning through his skin, his hair aflame, his legs gangrenous, legions and cysts about his face, until there was nothing left but a skeleton with a fixed grin, covered by maggots burrowing through its marrow. He knew misery well! A man without a woman, he called it, and instead of being pinned to a vision which haunted him, he intimated having a woman, and the once-egregious scene shifted to a countryside of green hills and a brook which trickled by a fertile cherry tree, the melody soothing and everlasting, and a nude woman lying beside him, her blonde hair luxurious and her skin as smooth as Chinese silk. He fetches some water to quench their thirst, and he submerges the ceramic pitcher into the mellow stream. They share the pitcher, the woman sipping it slowly with a slight affectation, and Noble looking into her eyes and finding a meaning he couldn’t define, only these shards of half-blues and greens like a deep painting. And he wants to know her, he wants to feel what she feels, he wants to become a part of her, to assess her needs while touring her clandestine vaults where she has stored the little girl collecting lilies taller than her crown, and he opens these vaults, these secrets which collect like old newspapers, and in them he finds the same eyes looking back at him, the eyes of a young maiden swinging below the cherry tree, her heart racing with delight, her white-laced dress lifting in a warm breeze, and himself below, ready to catch her should she fall.

Within a woman there is always the little girl, he thought, a girl who remains young and free like her hair which brushes against his lips, his chin finding a resting place between neck and shoulder. She’s ticklish there, and he kisses her, penetrating years of hypersensitive armor, and she lets him in, a gate stretching over the moat, the bridge laden with mines, and he enters her carefully as she resists and whispers his name, but he enters without sword or shield. He is not there to conquer or steal, but to understand the girl to which the woman so stubbornly clings, to know her ultimate purpose, her phantasmal beauty.

He hears nursery rhymes and faint voices emanating through her walls. He sees paintings along this fleshy cavern, these stages of womanhood slowly deconstructing and devolving, and when he can go no further, when these child-like rhymes dulcify to simplest terms, he finds the young girl singing on the grass, her secrets released like a set of apparitions floating in mid-air. He reaches for her impetuously, but she vanishes. He is instantly returned to the wine and those perplexing eyes in which he first drowned. He then notices the tranquil scene from on high, the illusion fading. The skeleton plays the guitar. The puss oozes back into his boils. The boils fade. The burning acid smoothes his skin. The women dance and sway before him while he’s on the stage. Finally, he finds himself in his bedroom again, the door shut tight, the tunes on the stereo, his rear-end throbbing.

He returned to consciousness as quickly as his fantasy began, and he thought more realistically about his woebegone woman situation. He recalled the summers in Waspachick. He entered headlong into that lonely area where he couldn’t get women at all, as all of the Waspachick women had steady boyfriends with expensive cars. They had all the money, and Noble hardly a cent to his name, only an allowance saved up in a piggy-bank, and he used those funds to buy herb. He didn’t feel sorry for himself, but rather found his situation impossible.

A lack of money was not the only reason for his inability to get women. With Shylock he talked like a true bachelor, eyeing women who strolled the strip and making some joke about them, but he would only talk of women when he was with Shylock. Alone, however, he would never even consider approaching a woman, and some of them did look at him with seductive eyes, but he would turn away in shyness. More than any one element, he feared most the rejection, the embarrassment and humiliation of being turned down and perhaps scoffed at by a woman he thought attractive. He also believed he had nothing in common with the opposite sex. He knew only that they had a zest for life, that they wanted amusement constantly, that they needed a strong, virile man saturated in his own testosterone, a man who brawled when another man looked at his woman the wrong way, the man who was controlling and obsessive like the father who surrounds her in a wall of stone, getting jealous, getting angry, ready to defeat anyone’s ego more inflated than his own. He admitted that this was only one type of woman and one type of man, but these pairs would roam the strip of Waspachick in droves, particularly on the weekends when the housewives and their strollers finished their weekly shopping.

And what hurt most is that these women knew of their attractiveness. They all seemed to know that beauty, as defined by Noble’s magazines, was the only foundation to their self-esteem. They actually enjoyed being the prize of the man’s struggle. They liked being enclosed like a doll in a case of glass, a glass never broken, only a doll within it smiling, modeling, moving about with wily, cat-like manners.

It’s not to say that these women of Waspachick hadn’t their wits about them. Actually the opposite was true. When compared to these competitive, pugnacious males they possessed a wit and wisdom infinitely higher. They used the simple rationale of letting the man prove worthy of them. The men sought gifts on display at the corner jewelry store, or drove down the center of Waspachick with their radios booming, sending shock-waves through the coffee houses, the restaurants, and the new art gallery. Unfortunately, Noble admired the prize, never the woman standing right in front of him, only the woman he hadn’t a chance in hell of getting. He knew that about himself. He didn’t kid himself either. He liked the ones out of his league, and he hated himself for it. He hated having attended the local high school, watching young, pubescent teens driving expensive automobiles. He hated how ‘like’ people stuck with ‘like’ people, little cliquish groups already formed, cliques he couldn’t enter on account of his wallet, on account of his total uninterest in school work. He didn’t fit in anywhere, only roamed the outskirts, as he did to this day. He was unsure whether his marginalization was his own fault or everyone else’s. And he wanted the woman who every single male would do anything for: the Waspachick woman, one type of woman for one peculiar village.

But why not at least try? He did the night before with the fair Alexandra, a woman he most likely would never see again. Why not abandon his childishness and take the leap of faith required of every man? After all, doesn’t every man have to put on airs to attract women, even the men least desirable? And with rejection, with each leap that precedes a fumble into a dark abyss, doesn’t each rejection thereafter become easier, until one is totally numb from these rejections that they come naturally, like a whip cracking over someone’s back over and over again, or repeated lunges at the heart when only the first stab takes his life?

But approaching a woman took a confidence Noble lacked, a confidence which would lead to a fight with other males jockeying for the same position. And how would he look walking down Waspachick, he in his threadbare clothes, and the prize of a woman in an elegant evening dress- a mismatched mutt-like couple, a pair which lacked a convenient symmetry, and what pressure the woman of Waspachick would be under: her stalwart father who wants her to marry a man in a suit, the paranoia of constantly being judged by the entire town, curious eyes peeping through cracks in the walls, the eyes which follow them down the strip and glare at Noble the misfit and this woman who could have done better. The sensitive Noble would be subject to snide remarks by men who thought they could achieve that calculated symmetry, that stroll about town with a trophy in their arms.

And from this contemplation and criticism of these haughty mating practices, he escaped once again to the stage where he picked and poked at the strings, sending notes into the huge crowd which gathered before him. He was the expert, playing the instrument nonchalantly, a quiet poise, and once in a while smiling to the bassist next to him. He played such mean chords that he made it look easy, and his body while on the stage didn’t move or run around to elicit any excitement. He stood there quietly, concentrating totally on the instrument, and letting it sing voices he couldn’t articulate for himself.

The crowd on its feet, the women in the front row crying and screaming, and still he remains quiet, the front rows having little idea why he refused ostentation. They not only loved what he played, but also respected him. He became to them an icon, a representation of what it meant to play guitar, a representative of a generation from some extinguished era reincarnated upon the stage clouded in a venerable and austere light.

While in this reverie, he accepted the prestige but none of the money. He made playing the guitar an art form, and the heaving crowd knew this, but he did not. His world was confined to strings, bobbin, neck, and pick-up. He made sounds no one ever heard but somehow knew, for these sounds were not his own but everyone else’s, moving like memories through their hearts. And this guitarist (which is Noble) had a back-story, something tragic and surreal which codifies his true artistry and his fans’ undying loyality. Perhaps he lost a woman in his early days at the height of his popularity, and then went underground, hiding from the flashes and microphones stuffed in his face. A frenetic media followed him, but he chose to hide from his adoring public due to his bereavement, and through the years of his solitude and grief, his fans’ adoration never waned but grew exponentially, to such a degree that he was forced to appear on the stage for this rare performance, and within an instant he rose through the echelons of popularity only to arrive at this tremendous stadium, the faces becoming faceless as each one liquefies into one corporal element. But he rarely looks up from his guitar, like a New Englander’s focus on his shoes, his solos lasting for hours, a long, trippy synthesis of mood distortion, an inability to follow one established path, but many of them at once, form and structure thrown to the dogs, the freedom which only comes from being heard and respected no matter what he played, because he had earned that right, surpassing the ordinary and latching onto the divine, controlled by the voice of some mysterious power flowing through him, a voice which kept him as humble as the Waspachick town bum, but adored by its women, his stardom working on another level, as though time and space were endless enough to discredit exploration and find within that crying fan in the first row a world all her own, and the guitar feeding her world, nurturing it, transforming her own values and beliefs, breaking them down into a simple box of happiness, the ecstasy which comes from guitar appreciation...

Noble dreamed in this way for several hours as he understood that a man without dreams makes his days intolerable, and he tolerated this dream of becoming a great guitarist, although he felt somewhat guilty in elevating his jobless, penniless status into something sublime and therefore unreachable. But he knew that this daydream was put before him for a purpose. It was a new fantasy, not new to others, but new for him. He had made that transition from consumer to producer, a stance in which he must actually do something, must actually work to achieve that which fulfilled this dream. Could this be his calling? To become a guitarist? To pick up a guitar and expose himself to the world?

Well, he needed a guitar first, a slight consideration he initially missed, but a guitar would certainly aid in his plans. He asked: ‘why hadn’t I thought of it sooner? Most of the great guitarists started early, in their early teens. Am I too old?’ ‘It’s never too late,’ he heard himself mumbling, but do people say that to defy old age? To give them an excuse, almost a permission to begin anew? He wasn’t sure, but he knew this had to be his calling, and the excitement of this new purpose made him pace the room like a strategizing dictator fueled by this unknown element known as success and respect, perhaps fame.

And this fame would bring him what he desired most: a beautiful woman, not just one but tons of them. He would amble down the tired strip of Waspachick, and they would turn their heads: ‘why isn’t that Noble McCloud, the guitarist extraordinaire?’ He would no longer be the man the saleswomen laughed out of their stores, he would no longer be associated with the riff-raff on disability, hanging out at the town park late at night, gulping Thunderbird, complaining about their monthly checks, nor would he ever be smiled at by the town bum with his red, bulbous nose and his red cheeks, as though he just arrived through a time portal. And finally, with the women and his guitar, he would leave Waspachick never to return, and follow that elusive path to the West, that shrine of heightened consciousness.

He couldn’t play part-time. He couldn’t do it only when he felt like playing. He had to do it all the time, working his days and nights on the guitar itself. Half-measures would be like flushing this dream into the sewer. No artist ever did it halfway, he thought. They played despite the pressures of money and the rats who scurried for it. For rich and for poor he must marry the instrument, the blessed union giving way to a new lifestyle: that of the infamous genius who, when his eyes wandered across the street, could always find someone who knew him well, even the most distant stranger. He could enter the bar and order a drink on the house, a picture of him and his guitar hanging by the whiskey bottles. After all, it didn’t take much to make it in music these days. All you needed was a hackneyed beat, a bass for rhythm, lyrics which made little sense to anyone but the musician, and boom! Presto! You had a song. Yet Noble refused the easy route. He would avoid the most common pitfalls of penning these one-hit wonders. He would write operas and symphonies with his guitar, those thirty-minute songs which the record industry likened to death, but the kind people listened to. He wouldn’t have a particular group of fans either. His guitar playing would be universal, effecting the town bum as well as the chairman who returned by train from a feud with his board of directors.

This could work. It will work. No longer would he sit in his room and dream of a distant happiness, the same distance between him and the unattainable woman. He had definition now, a clear purpose.

‘Don’t rush it,’ he thought. He understood he had plenty to learn, yet instinctively he wanted it immediately. He even thought of music school, but knew that no great guitarist ever emerged from their ranks. He would stick to reality and swear off this surreal grandiosity, the unattainable pinnacle which ironically thrust him forward.

Good. He had a vision and suddenly a purpose, and his days beforehand had been spent listening to the great ones. All he needed now was the guitar. Electric or acoustic? He meditated on this for some time. An electric guitar offered greater sound versatility, but an acoustic seemed more venerable, almost monkish, as though an acoustic were an essential rite de passage for any budding guitarist. But he didn’t want to become a folk-singer, or end up a camp counselor singing Bingo the Dog to a group of snot-nosed youngsters. Yes, playing guitar has its underbelly just like anything else: the night club with a handful of drunkards, the city block where hurried pedestrians dropped coins in his case, or a status so poor that he would have to hock the guitar for stale bread. He vaguely pondered these scenarios, but they were infinitely better than living at home with his father. In fact, anything was better, aside from having a job, of course. He would sleep with his guitar if he had to, he would sell his soul to demons, he would beat his own head against the wall until a new riff escaped from the strings, he would play until his mind bled through his ears, until his melodies seemed freakish and dark, until his fingertips blistered and callused. The women would love him for it, the whole world resting below his feet and at his command. He had it all planned out, not a stone unturned, except for the perplexing question: how to get a guitar without any money? But he fought against dipping into financial waters and instead envisioned the dark arena flickering with a thousand lighters during a slow song about life on the road, suped-up buses equipped with televisions and amplifiers, and the gang of groupies, women no doubt, engaged in a never-ending striptease. And if God filled him with this ultimate purpose, then undoubtedly he will aid in this pioneering voyage away from Waspachick, a guitar in hand, recording tracks at a luxurious studio in Monserrat.

He knew little about buying a guitar. There were no musical shops in Waspachick, maybe a piano shop, but nothing dealing with things guitar. His finances were already pressed. He had little for his next meal which he preferred to eat at the all-night convenience store where Waspachick ended and the ghetto began. He would have to cut these sandwiches from his budget. But then what about herb, yes, that precious brown Mexicali substance which he needed after a good spanking? Well, he would have to cut this as well; deep cuts all around. He would have to live off his father to a greater degree, but this was the plan, the vision. He would never go down like the soldier unknown, the hero unsung. And he hadn’t a dime, nor did he have credit. ‘Get a job,’ he heard his father mumbling in the back of his mind, but a job would take the focus from his art, and what’s the use of being oppressed and enslaved by the mighty greenback? The vision, the hero, the great guitarist in front of thousands, and a job would crush this. So he returned to deep cuts which would largely confine him to home, and his days would be free to strum the guitar.

In one of the rundown roadhouses where he stood upon the stage, a record producer in a metallic suit would spot him and sign him to a mega-million dollar deal. If there were any logic to the artist’s rationale, the next step had to be a record deal, the big break which comes after years of playing clubs, drinking watered-down whiskey, and taking tokes from someone else’s joint. Yes, the big-break. All he needed was this one chance, and ding-ding, he would win the prize from which would follow platinum records and interviews with the music mags, but no, he would throw it all back to them, because he wouldn’t sell-out his fans, those true believers who followed him, the dirty gals who hung around after the show.

It was now a duty. He would play for better or for worse, a marriage with his instrument. Another step in the logical procession: first the marriage ceremony, or the purchase of the divine guitar. Then, of course, the big break. He saw it unfolding, but first, deep cuts, and he found himself lost in thought, almost a confusion, no longer at bliss from receiving the vision but a need to scrape every penny, to bleed it from his father who already provided a monthly allowance. Homo economus. And then the piggy-bank, not a pig actually but a container stashed underneath the fetid dampness. He opened the lid and found maybe seven dollars in bills and the rest pennies and lint. Seven dollars wouldn’t get him to Manhattan and back. Shit. What to do?He would save this money, put it in the bank and earn a penny every month, or maybe he could buy a penny stock, one share, in a fledgling company that would sky rocket and give him a return of two hundred percent, or approximately twenty-one dollars. Then we factor in the commission charges, the Exchange commission fee, capital gains taxes, and bam!, we are back down to the same seven dollars. Democracy and Capitalism at their finest. He actually contemplated this, but the vision, the calling, the sold-out arena. Fine, the stock market wasn’t the best route. He needed more liquidity anyway.

He stood motionless in his room, the volume at a simmer, his rear-end no longer shooting through his back. He squeezed the bills in his hand, the rustling of faded green, the presidents wrinkled and dry and burnt like a suburban lawn in the summer. And the guitarist on the stereo filtered through the speakers. He heard the voices transferred from the guitar into his own head, such that the walls oozed with this guitarist and his talk, as though a tacit, unspeakable, unutterable communication took place, a spirit which came through the walls:

“Are you sure about this, Noble,” came the sound, and he looked beside him, and there stood an hallucination? Could it be that this guitarist was the same man who was pictured on the CD jacket? Noble couldn’t believe that a man could just emerge through the walls. He blamed his overactive imagination at first, but this spirit, the quasi-hallucination talked to him in mellowing tones, the same spirit he considered his idol, the greatest guitarist ever to grace the plucky instrument with mean tone and unquenchable rhythm. Yes, the spirit of the great one sitting on his own bed, understanding his predicament, as though Noble had crossed a river and this guitarist at the foot of his bed demanded payment in terms of psychic disturbance.

‘Now I’ve been a guitarist a long, long time, and well, let’s just say that you may never make it.”

Noble played along with this conversation, real and unreal, something he couldn’t prove or disprove, only this hero, this idol with burning eyes and his infamous, custom guitar.

‘Are you real?’ asked the unsure Noble.

‘Are you real?’ replied the guitarist/apparition.

‘I dunno,’ replied Noble, the conversation taking place in his own mind, his entire body immobilized, the apparition strumming the chord to his own tune. Maybe the weed was laced with lysergic acid.

‘No, Noble, the weed wasn’t laced,’ he said, (or it said, Noble wasn’t sure). He was dumbfounded, unable to differentiate his own subjectivity from this objective apparition in full concert gear. The apparition wasn’t part of objective reality, he couldn’t be, and yet he tried to disprove it with a simple declarative sentence:

‘You are unreal... ‘ and then to himself, “and I must be tired, very tired, and I must save some dough for a guitar just like his.”

“Ah, yes,” replied the apparition, “Dreams and visions of grandeur, ah, I remember I was like you...”

“I said you’re not real, hear me, not real!”

“Then why are you talking to me?”

“Why aren’t I talking to some out of work junkie, then, down South Waspachick way? Why does it have to be someone famous, why does it have to be you, a virtual legend, why can’t it be Joe Shmoe from the gas station?”

Out of the blank wall came Joe Shmoe from the gas station, a tall, thin, middle-aged African-American in a mechanic’s suit stained with grease. He must have held the carburetor for effect.

“Is this what you wanted,” asked the African-American, sitting side-by-side with the infamous guitarist.

Noble thought this some unruly misperception, something baffling, as though his mind were slowly slipping into an ether-like tank drenched with a strong, inexorable hallucinogen, that or maybe a party-goer dropped a sugar cube into his drink, but how? These two figures before him smiled conspiratorially. Then he tried hard to disprove it. He looked at them once, twice, thrice. His imagination had always gotten him into trouble, and he had no one to blame but himself. He stood frozen. He didn’t move, and his calf muscles cramped. He could not shake them.

Perhaps he was lonely, and loneliness had divided his mind into the imagination and objective reality, a chasm so extreme that all of his might could not bridge the gulf. The imagination acted on its own without precept. The tubular mass of gray matter between his ears led to his grandeur, and his imagination became this limitless entity, its baffling propensity blurring those boundaries between objective reality and subjective projection. Should he believe in these apparitions? Or should he discard them into the land of his wandering, nomadic, grandiose visions to which he had been so accustomed?

But they just sat there, and if he reached for them they may vanish and return to that dense gray matter, and all would be lost, the vision, the guitar, his intense desire to jam in the eyes of millions with this idol and the auto mechanic. He shut his eyes and shook his head. They sat there. He rushed to the bathroom and flushed his face, then returned. They sat there. He turned the volume up. He threw his canister filled with spoiling copper pennies into the adjacent wall. He did push-ups and sit-ups. He ran about in circles like a chicken after its feed. They sat there and smiled knowingly. And Noble: why had he been selected? He was a nothing, a nobody who was too absorbed in himself.

Delusions are cruelest to those who approach them with skepticism and an indefatigable will to disprove their existence. He tried to discredit the two men with all the reasoning he could muster, but he grew tired, and after a couple of hours he accepted them as fixtures which wouldn’t go away.

“Are you done fighting it, Noble?” asked his guitar idol with a smile.

“Y’know it would make it a lot easier on yourself if you stopped fighting us,” chimed the mechanic.

“I’m not fighting you personally, okay, it’s just that, well, this is so very strange and new.”

“Of course it is,” said the idol. “You want to play the guitar, and we are here to help.”

“You’ll teach me how to play?”

“No, you have to do that on your own.”

“Then why the hell are you here? Just to bother the shit outta me?”

“We’re here to support you- a little moral support.”

“This can’t be happening,” said Noble. “Now I know that I sometimes get carried away, but I never thought it would come to this. I must be going mad, and maybe I need some help.”

“You can’t afford help,” said the mechanic.

“And besides, you could use our help.”

“Well, I can’t make you go away, so I guess I’ll have to put up with you.”

“Only ... don’t push us too far,” said the guitarist with a solemnity which scared him for a moment.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Let’s just say, that you have quite an imagination,” said the mechanic, “and you shouldn’t try to disprove us. We are a part of you. Just go with the flow.”