One Train Later: A Memoir (7 page)

My best friend around this time is another guitarist by the name of Dave Wilson, an intelligent dark-haired boy with looks that most women can't resist. Dave plays classical guitar and also knows some flamenco. In addition to incessantly swapping guitar licks, we read the same books in tandem, discuss them at length, and become an opinionated guitar/book club of two. After a while we develop our own view: generally a sneering attitude to anything that we consider a part of the straight world, mostly received from the nasty books we read together. We increase our knowledge of cutting-edge culture by going to see foreign films directed by Godard, Truffaut, and Antonioni. We go see Last Year at Marienbad, with its multiple editing, layering of time, flashback and flash-forward sequences, it is just confusing. But we walk out sagely nodding at each other as if in deep understanding, both afraid to admit that we don't have a clue as to what the hell it was all about. Pretending to a deep knowledge of sex and women, we speak in terms that would make Casanova pale, but the truth is that neither of us has probably got much beyond twanging a tight bra strap or an end-of-party knee trembler. Women are still a far-off mystery.

Sometimes we go to a Spanish wine bar. Although we are too young to get a drink, we can get an orangeade and listen to the resident flamenco guitarist. Eventually we work up the courage to speak to the guitarist (who is friendly), and he tells us a little bit about the compass of flamenco and the names of some of the rhythms: bulerfas, seguiriyas, and soleares. It all sounds exotic and weird to me, but I make a mental note to revisit this kind of guitar playing in the future. He plays a couple of pieces by Villa-Lobos and tells us it's classical guitar from Brazil. The angularity of the lines and the exotic harmony excite me; it isn't jazz, but it gets to me and I tuck it away for future investigation.

One summer we hitchhike down the French coast and into San Sebastian, just across the Spanish border. We sleep in fields and then grab whatever lifts we can the next morning. One of the better rides we get is with a French priest who regales us the whole way with tales of how he became a priest to avoid going into the army. We arrive in San Sebastian at around ten at night with nowhere to stay, but luckily a local police officer takes pity on us and shows us to a small pension in the middle of town. The landlady, whom we only know as the senora, has one room available with two beds, so we grab it. It also turns out that she has two beautiful daughters, and we immediately began fantasizing about them, goading each other on to new erotic delusions.

We wander around San Sebastian for a few days and sit on the beach with our books by Kierkegaard and Camus while we fry in the Spanish sun and starve because we have close to no money; existential life is alright as long as you can eat. But the senora feels sorry for us and murmurs, "Delgado, delgado," when she sees us in the house. Eventually we start to eat with the family, the senora realizing that probably the only way we are going to get food is if she invited us to sit down with them in the evening. Being Spain, dinner doesn't happen until about ten o'clock at night, by which time we are hallucinating with hunger. All Dave and I are eating at this point are oranges washed down with water.

We eat in the kitchen at a big table. The father sits at one end and apart from a Buenas noches" is silent. He works in the local fish market and has a scar over his right eyebrow and curiously red cheeks. We sit opposite Isabella and Graciella, the two daughters, which is unsettling: they are about sixteen and eighteen years of age, a couple of Spanish sex bombs. They say almost nothing because they are shy and don't speak English, but they smile a lot. Maybe it's just in my head, but there is a feeling in the sultry kitchen air of electric sexuality. The heat of the summer night seems to be in collusion with their bare brown arms and legs, their vermillion lips and pink flicking tongues, until it seems as if fire is emanating from their bodies, and this combines with the Rioja to produce a feeling of suffocation and clothes that feel too tight, and the hot little kitchen and checkered tablecloth spin before me.

At seventeen there is only one thing on our minds and it's there, inches away. I think the senora, who has a Mona Lisa smile wreathed across her craggy face, is enjoying this moment, feeding us with one hand and putting us through the most exquisite torture with the other, like a witch cooking two shrimps in her cauldron.

In the middle of the table sits a large bowl of pears, pomegranates, and grapes. Luscious and ripe, they seem to mock us with their echo of the young females. When Isabella, the younger sister, proffers the bowl and my hand touches hers, it feels as though an electric eel has just dived into my body.

The kitchen, with its strong, soulful aroma of garlic and olive oil, has the effect of igniting our salivary glands to the point of liquidity. And as the senora serves us a bowl of steaming meat and vegetables along with dark bread and Manchego cheese and olive oil, we eat like wolves. She leans over the table and pours two more glasses of Rioja and with a raised eyebrow murmurs, "~ Vino?" and although we aren't really used to it, we don't argue. Above the center of the table hangs a small lamp with a shade constructed out of an old mantilla shawl with pictures of flamenco dancers. It seems incongruous in the small, hot confines of the kitchen but gives a subdued ambient light, casting shadows on the wall that are reminiscent of a Goya. On the wall opposite, next to a small painting of the Virgin, is a San Sebastian bullfight poster from a few years earlier, and suspended from a nail next to it, an ancient-looking guitar with one string missing.

I think we both have the same thought of asking to take down the guitar to play it and impress the girls, but we are too busy stuffing our faces. At the end of dinner the senora smiles at us and says, `-Quieren helados?" and we both grin back and say, "Si, gracias," then the four of us sit at the table and slurp our way through large dollops of vanilla. Seeing Isabella and Graciella with ice cream dribbling down their chins and their tongues licking away at the diminishing whiteness is like witnessing a Balthus painting in action. For a moment the four of us grin at one another and experience a kind of sensual unity. It isn't sex, but it's within licking distance. We can't touch them, to do so would be to risk a knife in the back or death by accidental drowning in San Sebastian Bay ... but then again, maybe it would be worth it.

Replete with Spanish food to the point of pain, Dave and I limp off to our monk's cell and try to return to jean-Paul Sartre and nothingness, with the faint hope that it will take our fevered minds off the vision of two hot, naked females next door tossing and turning in the sultry Spanish night. We have strong thoughts about staying in Spain and just being itinerant, but eventually we hit the road and hitch rides back across France. Starving and hallucinating about food the whole way, we sustain each other with dreams of the future, which for me has to contain the guitar. After two weeks, I'm really missing it.

The following summer we go to Paris.

This is a different deal because we are slightly older and have suits, which we think are what you need to wear in Paris. We arrive at Orly in a small commercial plane and make our way to the city. Again we have nowhere to stay but find our way to Pigalle and eventually a small boardinghouse with a landlady who is obviously the reincarnation of Madame Defarge. This time there are no daughters, but a rather cold atmosphere where our existence is barely acknowledged. So we amuse ourselves by wandering around Paris and visiting the sites and desperately hoping to be picked up by two sexy girls. No girls come our way, but we roam around Pigalle at night and watch the prostitutes at work, many of whom are stunningly beautiful. We dare each other to go off with one of them, but neither of us has the balls for it, so to speak, although we receive many lovely smiles from the Sisters of Mercy as we cruise the boulevard. We are young meat and probably a better bet than many of the old lags whom we laugh at as they form huge lines to go into one particularly popular brothel, Vive la France.

After a few days we move to the rue de la Huchette in St. Michell, where we get a room above a jazz club called La Chat Qui Peche. As we take up residence upstairs above the jazz club, the cellar features the American jazz trumpet star Chet Baker. This is in a moment of Chet's decline; we go down to see him play, but he is playing with a French rhythm section who just clunk along behind him with no real feeling or connection. Although I can't yet articulate it, I feel something coming from Chet, who appears broken but is still playing with an undeniable and heartbreaking lyricism. He is suffering from bad drugs, bad health, and lousy accompaniment; I'm too green to comprehend the subtext, but I have an intuition that something is wrong.

Another night when left to my own devices while Dave is off with a skinny German girl by the name of Margueritte, I head across the river to the Right Bank and the Blue Note Club. I stand outside and study the poster of who is playing. It's a. trio with Kenny Clarke on drums, Jimmy Gourley on guitar, and a French organist I don't know. I desperately want to go in but it's very expensive, so it's out of the question. "Are you going in?" they ask. "No," I say wistfully, "haven't got the money." "We'll take you," they say, and in we go.

Inside it's dark and sexy with a small bar at the side of the room and a postage-stamp-size stage; the musicians aren't on yet, so my new mentor Bill orders drinks. I ask for a beer because I think it sounds cool and grown-up, but I would rather have a Coke. The trio comes on with a sort of worldweary resignation and begins the set. I'm stunned, it all flows so beautifully: Jimmy Gourley seems to melt from one pattern to another, swimming with consummate ease in the flux and whirl of drumming and chord changes. I watch his fingers and try to fathom some kind of logic-how does he know how to do that? He has a way of roaming all over the guitar neck that I just don't have yet. Of course, I have been playing only a couple of years and haven't yet grasped that there is a system of cliches, patterns, and scales you can learn and study that take you through all kinds of harmonic structure. But I can taste it, feel it. It's like an ache inside; I have to be able to do that. To improvise, to dance across the strings with eyes closed, lost in the river of time, to make music in the instant, to reflect like a mirror-this is the way to speak to the world, this is the spirit eternal. Seeing Jimmy Gourley at the Blue Note is my first exposure to a great jazz guitar improviser, and it cuts deep. After the show I wander out with my friends into the Paris night and thank them and then, scared and on fire, begin the long walk back to our room in the Latin Quarter.

On my own and with my head back over a guitar rather than homework, I begin to feel that if I am going to be a contender, I will have to get a better instrument-and that means money, and that means work, and that means a newspaper route. This tedious labor begins just as the moon fades from the icy black sky and before the rooster crows. Unfortunately, I am in the pernicious habit of crouching over my rhubarb and custard Dansette copping licks until the wee hours. This would be fine if I could sleep until three the following afternoon, but my mum now gets the up at six A.M. Like a freak of nature I crawl out of bed, put my feet on an icy patch of linoleum, and struggle into my clothes while trying to gulp down a cup of Ovaltine. At this point-being exhausted-it would be nice to get back into bed, but instead I stagger out the front door, with my mum calling out not to be late for school. I cycle through flooded streets, treacherous ice, vicious dogs, and gale-force wind. With my hands seared to the handlebars and the sleety rain howling through my woolly balaclava, the heat of the Ovaltine rapidly disappearing from my stomach, I try to think about the guitar but realize it's a waste of time because no doubt, my hands, thanks to the blackening frostbite that's now creeping over them, will have to be hacked off at the wrists. There is not one day in which the weather is not ripping me to shreds as if I were undergoing some preprogrammed extreme conditions test to ascertain whether or not I am worthy of the prize. In Down Beat magazine in America, they'd call this paying your dues.

Some mornings my mum remembers to give me "something to keep you going till breakfast," as she calls it, and on a good day will slip into my pocket a Mars bar or a Munchy Crunch Bolero. On a bad day it will be a Farley's Rusk or a few Peek Freans cheeselets, which I throw to the first Doberman that attacks. When I arrive home numb and shaking, she has breakfast ready: could be Scott's Oats porridge-always stored on the shelf next to the Omo-or Welgar shredded wheat with a slice of apple and just a hint of Windowlene. This handsome repast is usually washed down with lemon barley water, and then it's either back on the bike or the long trudge to school through the dark wood of waving willies. But the sum and reward of this mental and physical torture is the guitar that hangs like a bright flag in an impossible future.

Three

BRIDGEHAMPTON, AUGUST 18, 1983

I look down at the guitar in my hands, this battered old Fender Telecaster with most of its paint scraped off and its hybrid character (due to a Gibson humbucker replacing the original Fender neck pickup). It is with this guitar, this mangled old thing I bought in 1972 off a kid in L.A. for two hundred dollars that I have made the journey. I idly wonder if he has noticed that his old guitar has become an icon. I offered it back to him after making the purchase, saying, "Are you sure? There's something about this guitar," but he declined. I Suppose I should have a nice shiny new guitar-I get offered one about every five minutes nowbut I love it, this old relic: it has soul. Someone once said to me that like a woman, you get only one real guitar in your life. For me, it's this 1961 Tele.

By the approach of my sixteenth birthday, and after a couple of years of delivering newspapers, I have worked my way through a few guitars--a Voss, a Rogers, and a Hofner Senator-and a couple of amps: a Watkins Dominator and a Selmer True Voice (featuring the famous Selmer filtered sound). But finally after enduring the endless purgatory of newspaper rounds and other menial tasks-washing up, peeling potatoes in a hotel kitchen, dog walking, selling ice cream, working as a beachfront photographer-I have the money for a Gibson, the most iconic and desirable of all guitars. With a pocket full of pound notes and a head full of hope, I board the train to London.