Colorblind

by Peter Robertson

  He spoke slow and drank fast and he had all but finished his story after the first three beers, but a deal was a deal, and I paid for the fourth. By the end he was perhaps a little drunk, but I had drunk two, and I might have been in worse shape.

  He told the story well enough. Maybe I did recognize some parts. We shook hands as I got up to leave. I had already tipped the bartender, but I left some more money lying on the bar, for the storyteller, or for the green lady.

  * * *

  Outside, on the street, the bright sun laughed away all but the hardiest of superstitions.

  The bar had been chosen for a reason.

  A few doors further down, The Memphis Music Exchange stood as a shrine to the elder gods of guitardom and I entered with all due reverence.

  One store wall was made out of Telecasters: chipped varnish on aging butterscotch wood, one-pickup Esquire models from the fifties and onwards, the headstock growing smaller and larger, but the blunt economy of the bolt on guitar body staying remarkably unchanged.

  Other walls featured various Fender and Gibson models. The prices were clearly posted and, to my untrained eye, seemed steep. Perhaps the suggested price was simply a courtesy, the taunting invitation to an opening salvo of bickering—a lofty plateau from which spirited negotiations could inevitably descend some, but I couldn’t be sure.

  In the back of the shop, hermetically sealed glass doors opened into the muted sanctuary of the acoustic instrument cloisters. Inside lay a bastion of unplugged peace, far removed from legions of pimply teenagers constructing their Metallica riffs from two- and three-finger power chords. There were couches and tall stools on plush rugs, guitar picks scattered on coffee tables and almost one hundred instruments hanging from the walls in the chilled air, both vintage and new instruments, the ubiquitous Martins and Gibsons, and newer brands I knew less well: Breedlove, Taylor, and Seagull.

  A salesman walked past and saw me staring. Wordlessly he pulled down a new Gibson Hummingbird and handed it over with a knowing smile. Then he slid away, secure in the knowledge that the object of my affection had been correctly identified.

  How wonderful.

  All my adventures in shopping should progress thusly.

  I sat down on the edge of the couch, selected a pretty abalone medium pick, and gingerly strummed the dozen guitar chords I had last played in my university days. To my rusty ear, the guitar was in tune and perfect, the neck butter velvet, far smoother and easier to play than I had expected, indeed far more forgiving than I remembered the cheap yet serviceable instrument I had once owned thirty years ago. I barred a B minor and smiled to myself. It had never been that painless.

  “I’m going to hazard it’s been a while.” It wasn’t exactly a question. The wordless guitar provider was now standing directly behind me.

  “Is it that obvious?”

  He stepped in front of me, looked down, and smiled with tenderness.

  “A very long while,” I finally allowed.

  “It’s a nice instrument.” It was a statement of simple truth.

  I nodded. “It should be for three thousand dollars.” I was being crass.

  He smiled apologetically. “The price is somewhat negotiable.”

  I gently held on to the guitar. “Can you perhaps answer me a question?”

  He said nothing but waited expectantly.

  “Do you honestly think someone who plays this badly should own this?”

  His smile was still in place. “I don’t get asked that too often. Let me put it this way. Most of our customers are older guys with newfound disposable income and suspect memories of their youth.”

  “That sounds a little pathetic.”

  “I guess. Not really. Now they have the money to buy the guitar they always wanted when they were kids. It’s another form of midlife crisis. Like riding a Harley or a younger woman, but much cheaper and a lot less damaging. So. How long is very long?”

  I did some hasty math. “It must be thirty years or more.”

  “Then welcome back. You actually sound better than you think.”

  I replied. “That’s just bullshit diplomacy and the guitar talking.”

  He nodded slowly.

  “Keep on playing,” he said.

  In the background a woman was singing in a place between folk and country. There was slide guitar and a distinctive guy’s voice providing background vocals.

  “Is that Emmylou?”

  He shook his head. “Gretchen Peters.”

  “That’s Rodney Crowell singing.”

  “Yup.”

  “But it’s not Emmy?”

  “Nope.”

  The salesman took a step away.

  “We have fresh coffee,” he said. Maybe I seemed like a drunk in need of repair.

  “That would be nice.” I held the guitar carefully. “Do you have any secondhand Guilds?” I asked him.

  He looked pleasantly surprised by my question.

  He returned first with the coffee, and I placed the Hummingbird down like a sleeping baby. The coffee was delicious as I sat and sipped and waited. The woman who was not Emmylou was still singing.

  The exchange had two Guild acoustics in stock. One was a dark sunburst model, clearly close to brand new, retailing for just over a thousand. It was a nice enough guitar that sounded a lot like the Gibson but somehow thinner, while simultaneously feeling much bulkier to hold and to play. It had clearly been a novice’s blunder to play the Hummingbird first; I had now set the bar much too high. I sighed silently. Was everything less than three grand going to sound like a piece of shit in my virginal un-callused fingers?

  The second guitar was much older, well used, and Gary, for that was the salesman’s name, began to talk it up as he placed the instrument in my hands.

  “This is a D25M from the middle of the seventies with an all mahogany body. Only the fretboard here is rosewood. Someone has removed the original tuners and replaced them with Grovers. That’s a pretty common thing to do. Not a big deal. It doesn’t much affect the sound or the value of the instrument. They also put a strap pin at the top of the neck, which is also pretty standard. The rest of the guitar is original. Guild made their best guitars out of Westerly, Rhode Island, in an old furniture factory where they employed the old workers, till the company moved to California and changed owners a whole bunch of times until now. The back of the guitar is one solid piece of curved wood. Not all the D25 guitars were made that way. But this one was. There was a cutoff where the ones before a certain year were curved and the ones after weren’t and I can’t for the life of me remember when it was but this one was obviously before. The curved ones are more sought after. This is an entry-level guitar with none of the fancy binding and pearl inlays, but lots of people love them and love to play them.”

  He paused and took the instrument from me. He looked closely at the top of the guitar.

  “There’s a little finish cracking on the front.” He pointed to various places. “That’s to be expected. A little wear on the bottom of the neck, which again is normal given the age of the instrument. The frets are in good shape. Neck is straight. The guitar’s been recently set up. Some of the original papers are in the case. The owner’s manual is in there also. That’s a nice thing to have. The original tuners are there too if you wanted to put them back on, but I wouldn’t recommend doing that. We could do it for you if you really wanted. It comes with a nice Guild hard case.” Here Gary hesitated. “I need to tell you this. Some stores wouldn’t. The guitar is mid-seventies but the case definitely isn’t. It’s a decade newer, the kind Guild used in the ‘80s. You should be aware of that before you consider buying it. The two things don’t belong together so the provenance isn’t intact. The price would be a little higher if they belonged together.”

  He handed it back to me and I looked at the price tag.

  Gary spok
e again. “It’s seven hundred and fifty plus tax. I can take off the fifty. A place like eBay might have it for less but this is a good guitar at a good price. The M models are actually pretty rare. Mostly Guild made their D25s with maple tops. The rest of the body was mahogany and the neck was mahogany and they came with a rosewood fretboard just like this one. The M stands for the mahogany top and it makes the guitar sound darker than most. What do you think of it?”

  I carefully strummed G and C chords, then flatpicked the G chord slowly, adding the simplest of walking bass lines as I shifted between the two chords. The instrument was almost as easy to play as the Gibson, but the sound was a world, over two grand, and forty years apart.

  “It sounds shady.”

  “These guitars aren’t fancy. The midlifers want their mother-of-pearl inlays and onboard electronics, so they can sound slick at the open mic night.”

  “This doesn’t have a pickup?”

  Gary shook his head. “You could mic it up, which would sound fine, or else risk drilling holes in a forty-year-old piece of mahogany. If you want my opinion, clamping a Baggs active pickup across the sound hole would be the way to go here. We do sell them. So tell me, what makes you want a Guild?”

  In silence I pulled out my phone and showed him the picture of Logan Kind on the cover of Crofter. He answered my next question before I could answer it.

  “That’s a D40. It’s probably from a few years before this one. Not many. Nice.” His answer matched the Internet consensus.

  “Do you know this gentleman?” I asked Gary. He shook his head. I selected “Eddleston” and played it from the beginning. He listened. When Logan sang, I could see Gary lose some interest, but when the first instrumental break came he suddenly listened harder. He also began to look puzzled.

  “How is he tuned?”

  “The world is waiting for the answer.”

  Gary listened some more. He took the guitar from me and tinkered, unleashing a flurry of chords I’d never seen. He was clearly attempting to play along. He tried a few more chords without getting any closer. He looked slightly annoyed.

  “Is the D40 a better guitar?” I asked when the song had finished.

  He considered my question carefully. “Perhaps. It has more binding so it’s a little fancier. The neck is really solid. It’s a bigger body so it sounds loud, although all the mahogany body 25s are loud enough. The 40 had a maple top. I don’t know. I like the 25 a lot.”

  “Is the D40 more expensive?”

  “It is, but not overly so. New and used they generally go for over a grand. But old Guilds are mostly a great value, and they usually aren’t too overpriced.”

  “And are they more appropriate for someone my level?”

  He laughed. “I think maybe so.”

  I surprised neither of us with my next words. “I’ll take it.”

  * * *

  Gary wandered away with my credit card to write up the sale. I drank the last of my coffee and played my new guitar. When he returned he was carrying the black case. Gary had thrown in a dozen Fender medium pearloid picks in sea blue and a black Kyser capo. The strings, he told me, were light-gauge D’Addarios and were almost new. There was another fresh set inside the case. The case did look newer than the guitar, and the old tuners and paperwork were inside as he had promised. There was also a black leather padded strap with the Guild logo and a small Korg guitar tuner inside the compartment.

  He left me again.

  When he returned with the receipt, I handed him the guitar and he played a few simple chords gently. I said nothing but looked at him pointedly.

  “What?” He could tell what I was going to say next.

  “You can play a lot better than that,” I told him.

  So he did.

  Maybe I should have been jealous, but instead, I could only marvel at how wonderful my guitar sounded.

  Gary walked me to the front door of the store. He held a cell phone in his hand.

  “What was that guy’s name?” He typed rapidly as he spoke. I told him. He typed it in.

  “He plays very well.”

  I could only agree.

  “When was that song recorded?”

  “The early seventies.”

  “Are there any overdubs?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Wow. Was that when the picture was taken?”

  “I think so.”

  “That guitar would look a little different now.”

  “How?”

  “Maple will darken with age,” he said.

  * * *

  We shook hands on the sidewalk. The day’s heat was fading.

  “Are you staying in town?” He asked me.

  “On my way south.”

  “Does your car have a/c?” He wanted to know.

  I told him it did. I could guess why he asked.

  “Good. So where do you go next?”

  “Oxford, then New Orleans. I need to get something to eat first.”

  “Where were you planning on going?”

  “For ribs.”

  “Where?”

  “Over at Central?”

  “Well,” Gary laughed. “You don’t need my help there.”

  * * *

  At the end of that same day, with a fully loaded belly, I sat on a hard kitchen chair outside a hotel room in Batesville, Mississippi, halfway between Memphis and Oxford, and strummed along with the sound of transient traffic, as the sun dropped out of the sky.

  * * *

  The hotel had been ridiculously cheap: one of those white-knuckle deals on the Internet, accessed half an hour away from your destination, where you only see a price. You enter your credit card information, hit a button, and offer a quick prayer before you get a text confirmation and the actual location of the hotel.

  When I had arrived at the hotel the manager/owner smiled vaguely as I explained that I would prefer a room in the main complex, a pleasant and clearly empty building with an outdoor pool behind a metal fence that stood invitingly empty at the close of a hot afternoon. When I had finished talking, he nodded reassuringly before assigning me a place in the annex, some sort of quasi-military one-level barrack-style compound that stood at the other end of the communal parking lot, up against the highway, where two cars and a pickup truck stood alone and ostracized.

  He kept right on smiling as I restated my request.

  I was informed that the main section of the hotel was sadly unavailable.

  It was a curious choice of words. Not full. Unavailable.

  As I studied his guileless face I arrived at the conclusion that people who purchased their rooms cheaply were sequestered in the annex as a matter of course, whether the rest of the place was busy or otherwise.

  “Can I have a towel?”

  He looked mystified.

  “Your room has towels.”

  “I’d like to swim.”

  His smile quickly diminished.

  My request was considered carefully; he would dearly have loved to deny members of the thrifty caste use of the hotel pool, but somehow he couldn’t quite figure out how to do this. In an act of curt dismissal, he handed me a wafer-thin tea towel.

  My options for revenge were limited. I was irritated and overstuffed with beef. I instantly resolved to stay only one night. I would either find a place in Oxford tomorrow or keep on heading south at the end of the day. I realized that a crappy tip left in the room in the morning when I checked out would only impact his housekeeping staff. I could take a shit in the pool when I had finished my swim. It was certainly tempting but somewhat barbaric.

  Right now I would have to settle for a small consolation: I would leave my guitar hanging out in the hotel room with the air conditioning unit cranked good and high for just as long as it took me to swim.

  * *
*

  It’s hard to walk along the side of a highway and not feel like a vagrant or a hitchhiker. Half a block down stood Lux Liquors, where I was able to purchase the last two big, cold pint bottles of Stone IPA from a freezer filled with cans of Colt 45 and Coors Light. I considered myself more than fortunate.

  * * *

  The room came equipped with a small fridge, where one of the bottles was carefully sequestered. I found my swim shorts and carried my other beer across the almost empty parking lot. The pool was old and set in peeling sky blue paint over cracked concrete, but surprisingly large, glittery and inviting. I knelt at the edge of the pool and scooped up a handful of water to sit on. With my toes submerged, I opened my beer and drank it from the bottle.

  In the time it had taken me to shop and change my clothes, two other hotel guests were already installed poolside. The young girl swimming in the water was disconcertingly similar to the one in the previous hotel: same general age or slightly older, same baby fat-to-bones ratio, same constricting swimsuit. But this one was accompanied by her father, now languishing poolside with a cigarette in hand—a furiously inked presence, shirtless and boldly illustrated, concave-chested and dark trucker tan demarked. He was reading from a paperback. An empty plastic cup lay on the table in front of him, along with papers and pens and a large calculator.

  He pointed to my beer bottle.

  “The hell you drinkin’ there?”

  “Very good beer. Can I offer you some?”

  Silently he held out his cup, and I poured him close to half the bottle. If I was expecting him to say when, I was going to be disappointed.

  We clinked together chummily and proceeded to sip.

  “Sure as shit didn’t taste like no damn Bud.” He observed this without rancor.

  And he sure as shit had that right.