Daron's Guitar Chronicles Volume 12

923 TOO MUCH JOY

TOO MUCH JOY

We didn't leave Jordan's until brunch time the next day, when Sarah insisted on showing Magenta the best breakfast spot in the city, which was a diner in Hell's Kitchen. It didn't strike me as all that different from a hundred other diners in Manhattan but Sarah had settled on this one as her favorite so we were happy to go along with that. From there we kidnapped Magenta to Sarah's apartment in a cab.

"Isn't it a work day for you lot?" Magenta said from the front seat, meaning you Americans. "It's a Friday."

"It's the day after Thanksgiving," Ziggy said in return, from the middle of the back seat. "The whole point of putting it on a Thursday is you get a four-day weekend."

"Unless yer a waitress or a cabbie." Madge gave us a wry smile. The cab driver didn't seem to notice he'd been mentioned.

I looked out the window at where we were and remembered Sarah had moved from the place she'd been in when she first came to the city. That had been a sublet, but I still remembered the place fondly, with its old piano and Einstein shower curtain. I knew she'd moved to a place of her own, but right then I couldn't remember anything about it.

As soon as we walked in the door, though, I remembered it was the place where she'd had that Christmas party where Remo found out Melissa was pregnant. I was finding it hard to remember whether that had been while Ziggy and I were together or apart.

Priss had been there, though. I remembered as soon as I saw Sarah's practice piano, and a stab of guilt got me right in the heart over the fact that I hadn't done my exercises–any of them–in over 24 hours. More like 48, actually, given the time of day. ("Brunch" had happened in the early afternoon.)

Sarah had amassed a giant closet full of interesting thrift store finds. She could have outfitted an entire cast of a film that was a cross between Fame and Mad Max. I fell asleep on the bed while watching her, Ziggy, and Magenta try things on. You'd think a person wouldn't be able to sleep through all the giggling and exclamations of wonder but I did.

When I woke up, all three of them were crashed out. Sarah was actually next to me with her head on a pillow; Ziggy was stretched out across the foot of the bed like a cat, and Madge was curled up in a pile of crinolines. I crept into the bathroom and took a shower. After I got out I put my jeans back on without underwear and then went into the kitchen to look for a rubber band. I eventually found a bunch of them around a doorknob. I started some coffee brewing in the coffee maker and then sat down in a stool at the kitchen counter to do my finger exercises.

This rubber band was thicker than the one I'd been using, and I told myself that was why my muscles got fatigued faster than usual, not that I'd skipped for a day or two (or was it three...?). The steam heat in the building was hissing and the apartment was warm enough I didn't feel the need to put on a shirt right away. The only other sound was distant traffic noise–we were on a side street fairly high up–and a rhythmic sound from the apartment right above me that had to be a dishwasher running.

I really couldn't do my vocal exercises without waking everyone up. I went barefoot over to the piano anyway. The notebook of staff paper sitting there seemed to stare at me, which is impressive since it didn't have eyes.

Yeah, write a song, uh huh, that's what I should do right now. That was the thought that went through my head, but that was all. No actual song ideas came up. What's different now? I thought. Why can't I write anything?

When I was a kid I had once seen Marvin Hamlisch do a presentation–he apparently did it at schools all over–where he'd have the audience give him song titles or ideas and he'd write them live on stage, more or less instantaneously. I was young enough at the time that I had been impressed by it before I had really understood what he was doing. You know, one kid wrote down "I love chocolate chip cookies," and Hamlisch whipped out a kind of 1950's style doo-wop. He had mastery of so many different cliches and forms and genres of music that it seemed impressive. Well, like any magic trick done on stage, the actual trick is not magic but skill. As I got older I was no longer in awe of what seemed like spontaneous genius and in better understanding of what skills he applied to create that effect.