My Father’s Guitar & Other Imaginary Things: True Stories Read online

  ALSO BY JOSEPH SKIBELL

  A Blessing on the Moon

  The English Disease

  A Curable Romantic

  Six Memos from the Last Millennium: A Novelist Reads the Talmud

  My Father’s Guitar & Other Imaginary Things

  TRUE STORIES

  JOSEPH SKIBELL

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2015

  Though these stories are true—everything that happens in them happened in actual life—I’ve changed the names of a few of the people who appear in them. I’ve done this sometimes at their request and sometimes in gentlemanly deference to old lovers and friends. Also, as a work of memory, this book is subject to the distortions, incorrections, and elisions of all retrospection.

  in memory of my father,

  IRVIN ALFRED SKIBELL,

  and for

  SPIDER JOHNSON

  &

  MEREDITH MITCHELL,

  with gratitude

  for the guitar

  and the other imaginary things

  At the moment the music began

  and you heard the guitar player starting to sing

  you were filled with the beauty that ran

  through what you were imagining.

  —JACKSON BROWNE, “Linda Paloma”

  CONTENTS

  My Father’s Guitar & Other Imaginary Things

  International Type of Guy

  If You Were Smiths

  Call Morris

  The Hank Williams Songbook

  Sex Lives of Our Children

  Snip Snip Snip

  Paul McCartney’s Phone Number

  Irvin in Wonderland

  Get Your Feet Back on the Ground

  Absolute Elsewhere

  Don’t Mess with Mister In Between

  Pre-­Sweetened without Sugar

  Wooden Nickels

  Everybody’s Lot

  Ten Faces

  About the Author

  About Algonquin

  MY FATHER’S GUITAR & OTHER IMAGINARY THINGS

  It all started about five years ago when I received a call from a colleague. We’d done a bit of work together, planning a new major for the college where we teach, and we’d been compensated for this work with a small bonus to our travel-and-research funds. My colleague was calling to alert me to the fact—something he’d only then discovered—that if these funds weren’t spent by the end of that day, they’d be forfeited and returned to the college.

  I gathered up all the work-related receipts I could find, but when I totaled them up, I still had $177 dollars left, and so I did the only thing I could think to do, the only rational thing a person in my situation might do: I went down to my local Guitar Center, flagged down a salesman, told him I had $177 to spend before midnight, and asked him if he’d be willing to part with a Martin Backpacker for that precise amount.

  A Martin Backpacker, if you’ve never seen one, is a small broom-shaped guitar that’s light enough to be carried into the woods on a backpacking trip, if you were so inclined. It’s also, according to the Martin catalog, the first guitar ever sent into outer space.

  The sales guy told me he’d be delighted to sell me the guitar for that price and he went into the back to get one.

  This made me extraordinarily happy for two reasons. First, though I started playing at nine years old, I hadn’t gotten a new guitar since I was fourteen. I’d been playing less and less over the years, and I was unprepared for the sense of a renewed love affair a new instrument brings with it. Secondly, I retained in my memory a sharply etched image of my father, leaning his large body against the counter of Harrod Music Co. in Lubbock, Texas, bargaining with Clyde, the manager there, over the blue electric Fender Mustang he was buying to replace the clunky Fender acoustic he’d originally brought home for me after I’d mentioned to him that I wanted to learn how to play the guitar.

  Big and cumbersome, that acoustic Fender was too difficult for me to play. The neck was thick and beefy, and the strings were so high you could have hung laundry from them.

  As a kid, I was mortified by my father’s bargaining. Everywhere else, when you bought something, you paid what they asked for it, but Dad was a businessman, he was a merchant, he understood about markup. Still, I was afraid he might offend Clyde, that this back-and-forthing of theirs might end in a stalemate or, worse, an argument—Dad had an eruptive, unpredictable temper—and I’d lose not only the guitar but Clyde’s affection, which would mean having to go elsewhere for my lessons.

  My teacher at Harrod’s was a lanky hippie iconoclast named Spider Johnson. He was a liberating presence in my young life, and I didn’t want to lose contact with him.

  I was worried, also, that all this handln might seem too Jewish for Clyde or for Mr. Harrod, the patrician owner of the shop. The founding conductor of the Lubbock Symphony Orchestra, Mr. Harrod saw to the violins, while Clyde handled the guitars.

  But Clyde, it turned out, was happy for the sale, as was the guy at Guitar Center thirty years later, as was I in both cases. I’m sure it had more to do with my father than with the money, but the forty or so bucks the Guitar Center guy was willing to knock off the Backpacker left me feeling inordinately potent as a man.

  I brought the little Martin home, and for my birthday, my wife, Barbara, gave me a couple of songbooks containing hits from the 1920s and ’30s, and I loved nothing better than to sit at our kitchen table late into the night, playing my little broom-shaped guitar and singing songs like “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” “Bye Bye, Blackbird,” and “California, Here I Come!”

  MY FATHER WAS hospitalized a year or so after I bought the Backpacker. He was living in Oklahoma City at the time with his second wife—my mother had died years before—and my brother and sisters and I each received a call telling us we’d better get up there to see him. No one expected him to leave the hospital: his kidneys were shot and he had a host of other medical concerns.

  “His organs are just plumb wore out,” his nephrologist told me.

  As soon as we all arrived, Dad went into a coma. At one point, there was even a Code Blue. The machines in his ICU room started whirring. The staff rushed in and pulled the curtains. The hospital chaplain showed up, a fretful-looking woman in a boxy skirt set.

  “May I sit with you?” she asked each of us in turn, inflecting the verb somehow with overtones of Christian sodality.

  “No thanks,” we each said.

  I have to say, she seemed relieved. Clutching her files to her chest, she sat down, and she disappeared when no one was looking.

  As for my sisters and brother and me, we all braced ourselves and waited for our father to die.

  BUT DAD DIDN’T DIE.

  Contrary to all expectations, he came out of his coma. Eventually well enough to leave the ICU, he was furloughed to an ordinary hospital room, and though he spent nearly sixty days as an inpatient, he was ultimately released.

  During those sixty days, whenever I went to visit him, I brought the little Backpacker along. We didn’t have a lot of common interests, my father and I, our conversation was often halting and difficult, but music was something we both loved, and I’d sit by his bedside and play for him. It helped to pass the hours for both of us, and the odd-shaped guitar proved a useful conversation piece with the nurses.

  I DON’T KNOW what was going on in my father’s marriage, but when he left the hospital, he no longer seemed welcome at home. He ended up in Dallas, living in Mrs. Rudd’s condominium. Mrs. Rudd was my uncle Richard’s mother-in-law. Too frail at ninety-something to travel from her home in Wichita, she no longer used the p
lace, and Dad moved in in a quiet violation of the condo board’s rules, which forbade any and all subletting.

  I continued bringing the little Martin along whenever I visited—it was so light and easy to pack—and on one occasion, we all sat together as a family in Mrs. Rudd’s living room, my brother-in-law Alan and I taking turns on the guitar. Dad joined in, singing old cowboy and Sammy songs. He seemed to enjoy himself, and one day he told me he thought maybe he’d buy himself a guitar, take a few lessons. Why not? He was retired and living alone with a pair of alternating caregivers. He had the time, and he asked me for advice on what to buy.

  I was quite proud of him, proud that, at the age of seventy-six, he was up for something new.

  “And if, for some reason, I can’t learn it,” he said, “I’ll give it to you and you can keep it.”

  THE NEXT TIME I was in Dallas, we all sat around Mrs. Rudd’s living room again, singing and playing, and when I took a turn on Dad’s new guitar, I remember thinking, Man, this is a beautiful instrument! Curvier than most guitars, it was shaped like a figure eight, with the upper bouts (the shoulders) as wide and round as the lower bouts (the hips), and the top, back, and sides all a handsome dark nutty brown.

  “That’s a dreadnought guitar,” my friend Elbein told me when I described it to him after I’d returned home. “Big and boxy?” he said.

  I nodded. He seemed to know what he was talking about.

  “Yeah, those’re called dreadnoughts. After the battleships, because they’re so big and boxy, you have to play them standing up.”

  “Yeah, well, whatever. It’s just a beautiful instrument,” I said, “and whether my father gives it to me or it comes down to me years from now, I might just hang it on a wall as a symbol of my father’s will to keep learning and moving forward, and also because it’s just so damned beautiful. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a guitar quite like that before.”

  AS IT TURNS out, Dad’s arthritis was too bad for him to pursue the guitar in earnest, and one day, when my daughter, Samantha, and I were in Dallas, he said to me, “Joseph, take that guitar. I’m never going to learn it.”

  “Really, Dad?”

  “Take it, take it!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Sure, I’m sure,” he said.

  “Because it’s just such a beautiful guitar.”

  I was torn. On the one hand, I hated to see him giving up on it. On the other, I was thrilled to have the guitar. But either way, he was adamant, and when we said our good-byes, Samantha carried the guitar out of Mrs. Rudd’s condo, while I went to get the car. By the time I drove back to the porte-cochere, she had taken it out of its case and was standing on one foot, balancing it on her raised leg, strumming a few chords.

  Hey, that’s not my father’s guitar! I thought as I pulled up. It wasn’t the guitar I remembered at all, the one shaped like an infinity sign with the nutty brown color.

  There was nothing special about this guitar, in fact.

  It was nothing but a cheap blonde Alvarez!

  “HEY, DAD, THAT’S not the original guitar you bought, is it?”

  I was sitting next to him that evening at dinner, and I couldn’t help asking him the question, although he didn’t seem to understand it, which wasn’t surprising. The room was noisy, I was sitting on his bad side, and what I was asking him was utterly nonsensical.

  “I mean, you didn’t buy two guitars, did you?”

  “No, no.”

  “Well, but then, I mean, what happened to the first guitar?”

  “No, that is the first guitar.”

  Maybe my brother-in-law stole it was my next thought. Maybe he swapped it out for the Alvarez when he thought no one was looking.

  There were only two problems with this. First, Alan would never have done such a thing—he was too honest—and second, if he had, he’d never have gotten away with it. Eventually, I’d see the guitar in his house.

  This was all very problematic for me, mostly because my sisters have always insisted, especially when it comes to family history, that my grasp of reality is—how to put this succinctly?—less than firm, that for me memory and imagination are like two converging rivers, that I tend to misremember things or, more probably, make them up. Now, even I will admit that the two of them seemed to have grown up in an entirely different household from mine. They were born eighteen months apart and because they’re close not only in age but in temperament, their versions of our family history tend to match up. At times, we hardly seem to have come from the same family.

  For the first time, though, I began to wonder if my sisters hadn’t been right after all. I mean, if I could dream a guitar up out of thin air, what else, over the years, had I imagined?

  THE MYSTERY OF where this imaginary guitar came from persisted literally for years until, sometime after my father’s death, I was taking a walk and the realization struck me with absolute clarity: the first guitar Dad bought me, that clunky, nearly unplayable Fender—the one with the strings so high you could have hung laundry from them—had been figure eight in shape with a handsome nutty-brown color. I’d forgotten all about that guitar, but now I realized that, in a move that was laughably Freudian, filled with wish fulfillment and dreamlike distortions, I’d mentally substituted the first guitar my father had given me with the last guitar he’d ever give me, hoping in this way, I suppose, to reverse time and keep him alive.

  It didn’t work, of course.

  Though Dad survived his sixty days in the hospital, he died a few years after that. In the wake of his death, I took Sami on a road trip. We visited various guitar makers, and with a part of my inheritance, I bought a beautiful handmade archtop, which I named Fig, partly because the figures in its maple back look like the meat of a fig and also because Fig stands for Father’s Imaginary Guitar.

  And these days, it’s with Fig that I sit up late into the night at my kitchen table, often thinking about my father and singing those great old songs from the 1920s and the 1930s, songs like “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” and “Button Up Your Overcoat (You Belong to Me).”

  INTERNATIONAL TYPE OF GUY

  I don’t remember when it occurred to me to ask the telemarketers for money. Like everyone else in those days, we were inundated by their calls. Unsolicited offers for products and services, requests for donations, come-ons for weekend getaways made our phone ring at all hours of the day. These calls registered as “Out of Area” on my Southwestern Bell Freedom Phone caller ID box, and there seemed to be no way of dealing with them other than by not picking up.

  Around this same time, I’d purchased a couple of books on the North American Esperanto Association’s website, and they arrived accompanied by an enticing brochure someone at the Esperanto headquarters thought to slip into my package announcing the Eighty-Eighth annual Universala Kongreso de Esperanto. It was being held that year in Sweden.

  To the derision of almost everyone I knew—my wife and daughter, our friends, even distant relatives and casual acquaintances—I was teaching myself Esperanto, the universal language invented at the end of the nineteenth century by Dr. L. L. Zamenhof, a Warsaw oculist.

  In Esperanto, the word Esperanto literally means “one who hopes,” and it was Dr. Zamenhof’s fervent hope that a universal language might usher in an age of international brotherhood and world peace.

  Why my friends and family found universal brotherhood and world peace so damnably funny, I have no idea, and when they scoffed at me, as they invariably did, I said to them, “Ha! You see! It works! You’re laughing already!”

  Persevering like a postman through the snow and the sleet and the gloom of their derision, I diligently worked my way through Cresswell and Hartley’s Teach Yourself Esperanto, while availing myself of the ten free lessons offered on the association’s website.

  Depending on who you ask, it’s estimated that there are anywhere from a million to eight million speakers of Esperanto in the world, and becoming fluent in Dr. Zamenhof’s invented la
nguage entitles an Esperantisto to an official Esperanto passport with which he or she may travel the world, staying free in the homes of aliaj samideanoj (literally: same idea sharers). But when I asked the editor of the New York Times Sophisticated Traveler to send me to Sweden to cover the conference, though I’d written an article for the magazine on eccentric tourist traps in the American Southwest and another on a one-block-long street in Vienna where both Freud and Herzl had lived, she told me the story was too parochial for their readers.

  How can a universal language promoting international brotherhood and world peace be parochial? I wondered. And I saw her refusal to send me to Sweden as further evidence of humanity’s decline, the very sort of thing that had disillusioned Dr. Zamenhof and perhaps even led to his early death.

  With no sponsor for the trip and unable—or, in truth, unwilling—to pay for it myself, I realized in a flash of inspiration that I could solicit the dozens of telemarketers who called our house every day for the funds I needed. And if I couldn’t raise the money for the conference from them—the chances of which seemed slim, even to me—I could at least undermine their incessant monetary demands on me. After all, having refused me for my cause, how could they expect me to donate to theirs? Also, I reasoned, they were calling me. As a fund-raiser now myself, I’d simply presume that anyone who voluntarily called my number was doing so out of a desire to donate to my fund. I’d had a phone installed in my house for my convenience, after all, and not theirs.

  This changed the entire dynamic of the situation.

  I no longer dreaded the telemarketers’ calls. Instead, I found myself waiting for them with a keen sense of anticipation. Indeed, I was practically giddy the first time the phone rang and I ran into the kitchen and peered into the little caller ID box and saw the words Out of Area flashing on its tiny plasma screen.

  I answered the phone and, leaning against the counter, pressed it to my ear. I waited through the telltale silence at the other end of the line, standing by for the telemarketer’s computer to connect us so that the telemarketer could utter the incongruous Hello? that made it seem as though I had called him and not he me.