The bell over the door rings with your cautious, sniveling entry. . . . . like Brother Cadfile grasping the hand of the Pope himself.

The white-haired sage of the strings-- in a checkered shirt and glasses-- grimaces over an acoustic instrument like a seated Medieval artisan, adjusting a tuning peg with the tips of his calloused fingers ever-so-slightly in the postage-stamp sized store that smells of must, dust, and fine instruments. You stand around with your hands in your pockets with feigned casualness-- trying not to look too conspicuous, now-- affecting the pose of an uncertain lad on the eve of "a grand adventure", passing your eyes over the pocket shelves of dime-thin instructional books in the corner that bode the way to the cryptic formula like occult literature into secrets of legend.

Yet "the hobby from hell" is fraught with danger-- oh, inexperienced one-- like a grimacing Satan on his heavy metal throne bending down to swipe with a clawed hand at all those who merely "dabble" like chickadees wandering outside the Pentagram of chalk lines.

Squint and observe: volume one of the "Beginner's Guitar" series reads, in an explosive ragged oval, "over 3 million sold!". Volume two lists "over 1 million sold!". Volume three, and all other successive stages leading the way into that mired, sinking "Vietnam" of personal investment makes no mention of how many units sold. . . . . . of how much "manpower" you have to throw into it, good after bad, to call your hobby a success-- like sending troops into the trenches of Verdun for a few meters of "No Man's Land".

Circling on the edge of your personal La Brea tar pit, run your hands over the guitar display, instruments hung up by their head-stocks, and twang an open string. Stare at it with loving reverence and abashed homage like the most humble of grovelers. Not looking up, smiling to himself, the sage knows your type. . . . . those who marvel too much! That is, a long-haired teenager attired in a outrageous heavy metal t-shirt who goes out of his way to act overly conscientious around the whirlpool of serious commitment. Long on youthful, upright-seeming rectitude, but short on a couple hundred dollars that would actually pay this hole-in-the-wall's rent, if not lacking the actual discipline that would make holding a guitar something less of a nonchalant event.

Carnival barkers have a name for gawkers who watch the rides but don't spend any money-- "LOT LICE". Calloused old bluesmen have one thing to say to soft, sheltered "wannabes" who don't practice-- "GET OUT OF HEAH, BOY!", kicking them in the behind as they run away from the guitar stool with a flurry of straw from his black-spat boot.

********************

Yes, as that biblical-sized mandate on that 1977 AC/DC record commanded: "Let There Be Rock!"

I suppose that back then I was liberal and breathlesss, if not euphoric and broad-minded, and saw it all as a delightful whim or something. . . . . like a Parisian in a top hat about to take a ride on a hot-air balloon with the 19th century notion of brisk, airy "PROGRESS" in the city. It also just so happened that a client of my liberal therapist mother had a banjo he wasn't playing anymore. An unholy alliance if any-- my flaky, naive 1960's Jewish "New Age" mother and this bluegrass-playing "son of the soil" shrugging at my abashment. There he would be, like a literal-minded Amish craftsman bent over an anvil with a hammer and a long crusty beard, unaware of the more decadent predilections of peach-fuzzed suburban youth.

There the question hung like a fat zeppelin. . . . . banjo or guitar. Dad, ever the seasoned skinflint, had a rather predictable answer. He had a strange way of smiling and furrowing his brow to capture a sure sense of absurdity. . . . . a sort of grimace when I uttered a far-fetched notion that was beyond an answer, so far as it came to actually parting with hard-earned money that could otherwise be spent on old junk like a weary rag picker pushing along a cart in the cobblestone streets of Westphalia. This is the man who would have made me wear ugly hand-me-down clothes from yard-sales and big, thick, ugly plastic glasses like a poor, geekish reject instead of looking comfortably spoiled and middle-class like a boy of majestic leisure floating along on the ferment of his own rotting self-indulgence. He would have nipped my PASSION in heavy metal and Stephen King and "the dark arts" in the bud "for my own good" like a castrating gardener of responsible, conservative parenting.

GAAHHHHH!

We drove out to "Music Folk" in pastoral Webster Groves, a shop of acoustic instruments and aesthetic reservedness that would sooner cater to heavy metal as Peter, Paul, & Mary would put out a "thrash" record. I could not help but think of a frog-on-a-log playing a guitar and protesting cuts in the state education budget with an earnest, frowning voice, even as a tractor came along and crushed him into green mush.

My teacher was Wendell. . . . . a sallow, humorless man with a brown, "soup-strainer" mustache and a receding hairline who seemed like a real "Judas Priest" fan if there ever was one. Each Thursday, an appointment at 7 o' clock for an half-hour lesson in a windowless plaster room that held the gnarled psychic energy of a thousand conservative folk player aspirants in flairless, button-down outfits. No Sammy Hagar shirts for you-- hollering with jubilation under the stars in some kind of heavy metal parking lot moment with your adolescent sweat-brothers.

That first day, Wendell asked me why I wanted to play the banjo. At 14 years old, I shrugged-- mortified at being under the "cooking light" of such a "down-to-business" question, like I was being interrogated by a detective mashing his hat backward while under a spotlight. I felt tiny and insignificant at the "sizing up" of a virtuoso who seemed to have a lot more figured out about this life than I ever would in his very seriousness, and wondered-- with this crossing of the breach-- if my life would somehow be changed forever more, made more significant, somehow like a swimmer standing at the beaches of the depthless ocean.

If I felt "formless" and "unhewn", I wanted to be shaped and fixed in one place like the mammoth stage at Castle Donnington in England, the site of "The Monsters of Rock" festival. . . . . a decorative, symmetrical balcony placed on either side where a guitarist could stand like a red-lit icon and solo like the dickens before the roars of a drunken, reveling crowd hosting brews and cackling with Gaelic celebration. Me, guitar god. Stuff of "Beavis n' Butthead" fantasy.

There I sat before this humorless lump of a banjo instructor-- a tittering teenager in a black AC/DC shirt no less, a frenzied Angus Young "ripping" out of my chest in a clever-but-stupid optical illusion, using the head-stock to charge at the viewer bayonet-style. That wily little Australian running around shirtless at Castle Donnington, "rocking" from one foot to the other, eyes closed, "biting down" on each glorious note with a rising and falling chin. Then doing his patented "duck-walk" sideways across the stage, legs clopping together, somehow managing to play guitar at the same time. As the song ends, he flexes his jaws open and shut as if he was having an epileptic fit, and takes a running jump-- landing on the stage with the final crashing cymbal.

Wendell stared at me hard, looked at Angus Young baring his teeth like a wicked witch charging out of a thatched cottage like pure low-down rock theater, and then looked away.

My untried, untested assertion was that I could do anything if only I put my mind to it. It was the kind of simple, sagely thing grandmothers said with sagacity and secret smiles, hands folded in their aprons. Not as if they ever took a crack at though, scrubbing toilets on their hands & knees and reminiscing about some kind of church rummage sale three weeks ago like an aged Lutheran slug.

Well, there are worse things to believe in, probably, but it would seem that there was something "so much more to it", a saying so uncanny and disarmingly simple.

My problem was being too engrossed in bottomless speculation with how little work I could "get away with" while still having time to slack like a "gorping" gastropod leaving a slimy trail (-- some notion of "PROGRESS!"). I call it "the remote control syndrome", being too lazy to walk across the room to take a shit because you're comfortable enough right where you are. The nagging details would only "complicate" things. If the 19th century was about "PROGRESS", then the turn of the 21st century was about "ENTROPY" as the culture disintegrated away into cynicism and nothingness and quick-fix "Home Simpson" answers.

Yet Wendell went to Juiliard in the flower of his youth, a state of budding luster I couldn't readily imagine, because he was so drab-looking. And how many hours did he practice a DAY? He played THREE instruments-- guitar, banjo, and mandolin-- clocking in AT LEAST ten hours, seven days a week. It was like his JOB, the one thing he did. And "well", I might add.

How much did he want me to practice in a daily 24-hour period, a inveterately ungifted amateur starting out late in life when his developing brain had long since hardened and fused itself shut from readily acquiring new skills? FORTY-FIVE MINUTES! But I couldn't even work up the resolve to do THAT, frustrated because it wasn't convenient and easy.

And when it came down to the cringing amounts of minuscule progress, he could smell the sudden, rank sweat of wide-eyed fibs when I protested that I REALLY HAD practiced after-all. Yet I seemed to have much more fun marveling at the guitar poster instead. "Wow, man!". But my parents kept paying for the lessons, twenty dollars a misspent session, and Wendell certainly wasn't going to end this travesty of childishness-- his source of pay-the-freelance-piper income-- though his impatience and disgust were glaring on across his crinkled brow like a flashlight trained through sewage.

More than once I took to underhanded sabotage-- whipping out a pair of pliers and cutting a string or two so I would have a fail-safe excuse of why no practice was done. Not lost upon Wendell was the fact that my Dad could have DROVE me over to get the string FIXED, but I took it as a rather grand excuse why "the war effort" was stunted that week as a seedy man loafed in a pile of tin cans and cigarette butts like the villain in a World War II propaganda poster.

It was my ulcer, my cancer, my shame, and it only poignantly demonstrated that in this life, everyone had to pull their own weight. . . . . and no one could do it for you! If you didn't, it showed up mighty quick: like a toddler wandering along the side of the road in a shitty loin-cloth.

I was too ashamed to quit, and felt keenly sheepish when my grizzled Dad and hopping-about, tragically-unaware kid brother-- waiting in the shop upstairs-- bought me a little pocket book of chords, as if I was comfortably progressing down some winding hillside of storybook proportions, Mr. Sun smiling down at the "earnestness" of his children.

After the atrocity of a flubbed practice session, my biggest thrill was asking for assistance from a sales clerk-- a group of them huddled off to the side, a "secretive" guild of esoteric knowledge, their sleek ponytails adding to the impression of indelible sophistication-- and requesting to try out a guitar. I held it in my hands, like a page in a fantasy novel clenching "Excalibur", and pondered on the intangibles that separated me from self-assured talent.

I wondered aloud if I could perhaps plug it into a speaker, which the sales clerk did with agile non-aplomb, exuding the breath of Yanni records and sparkling champagne and beautiful Greek brunette women in purple dresses marveling at their feet as they played something artful and sensitive.

The tone was "clean", almost like an acoustic guitar, and not quite what I had in mind. It didn't sound like HEAVY METAL, and I wanted distortion, as if it would never occur to these folk music aficionados that I wanted to sound like "Megadeth".

Ultimately, I weighed the pros and cons of continuing on with this unhappy bluegrass/country sham and righteously concluded that I would be better off "giving up the ghost", like Jesus nailed up on the cross of useless suffering. As they say, "putting myself out of my own misery". All and all, this humiliating failure could have been been described as a mixture of blame & excuse which inevitably thinks itself some kind of wisdom, as I shuffled off with a crimson face-- looking behind my shoulder at those "sour grapes".

Take up an instrument at your own peril, kids. Buy a cheap one! And learn power chords! It suited me just fine as I jam along as your half-Jewish bullshit artist. . . . .

********************

Hey, kids--

    Wanna learn?

*******************

"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

(Rheeee of Crickets)

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

("I heard that, Missy!")