Debra Anne Davis-Guitars

Published in The Massachusetts Review, Summer 2001

Copyright Debra Anne Davis 2004

Guitars

So pour me a drink from a broken bottle
And fill my glass with the dirty water
What I’ve lost is gone
What I’ve gained has no name
And I’ll take my leave once more

Alejandro Escovedo
from the album Gravity

I have this T-shirt with a silk screened, hand-painted photo of an arm holding up a guitar on the front. The arm and guitar are mostly black with some white for contrast; the colored part is a wavy teal sky in the background. It’s an electric guitar and the arm is holding it straight up, over the unseen head, the neck of the guitar held firmly in a fist. Across the bottom of the shirt is typed “AUSTIN TEXAS.”

I bought the shirt from a stall in the little outdoor Renaissance Market which is across Guadalupe Street from the University of Texas. It was probably a Friday afternoon when I bought the shirt—I’d have just finished teaching my psychology and yearbook editing classes at a small private high school around the corner and down the street. I bought the shirt because it seemed to sum up, for better and worse, what Austin was—or at least what Austin had been for me: music, attitude, anger, an unreal sky.

I bought the shirt when I lived in Texas, but I didn’t think about it much until one day a few years later. I was combing out my wet hair in the apartment I lived in with my husband Bobby in Coralville, Iowa. I was wearing the shirt and looking in the mirror, trying to get my part straight, and suddenly the photo on the shirt looked different to me: sinister, or maybe taunting. Perhaps it was because I was now away from Texas, or because I was looking at a reverse of the image I was used to, that the picture seemed to shift. It was the guitar that seemed different: It looked familiar.

* * *

When I lived in Austin, guitars were everywhere. There was always an electric guitar—black, or shiny lacquered red, or powder blue—propped up against the black futon chair in our living room. Or an acoustic—soft brown, curvy—leaning against the wall. Bobby would casually pick one up and play absent-mindedly for a few minutes. Or he’d walk into the room, go straight for one of them, swing it onto his thigh, and play, hard, for hours.

He called them his girlfriends, partially as a joke and partially to make me jealous, which I was already; he named them each Darla.

There were picks all over the place: fluorescent green or pink, tortoise shell—rounded triangles. They were on the night stand, the kitchen table, my bookshelves.

There were always guitar “strings,” metal wires really, on the carpet. Bobby would sit in the living room and clip the old strings with wire cutters and then twist on new ones. He’d try to pick up all the old pieces, but he’d always miss one or two. They’d poke my bare feet, or I’d just see them making lines on the carpet, stiff silver snakes.

* * *
Far away from the bombast and excess of arena rock, the cold perfection of the click track and synthesizer, the aural overload of a stack of Marshall amps, and the deceptiveness of the electronic sample, there is a groovy little music town called Austin, Texas, full of honky-tonks, juke joints, funky little nightclubs, and hundreds of real, live bands playing real instruments for the pleasure of real people. It is one of the few places left on earth where groups knock out four sets a night just because they love the music. But for all the music and all those musicians, only one band, our beloved LeRoi Brothers, sums up what the Austin experience is all about.

The mojo hand belongs to the LeRoi Brothers and no one else for several reasons: guitars that twang and thunder the way guitars were intended—no frentafrentafrenta or hiddley-hiddley heehee here; a blue-collar, white-trash perspective that rings true because these guys actually work day jobs; authentic jungle rhythms that have a strange me[s]morizing effect over otherwise upstanding senior citizens and idealistic youth alike; and an accompaniment of harmonicas, accordions, saxophones, pianos and other cool non-digital instruments tacked onto their Wall of Jangle.

Wrap it around sordid tales of testosterone lust, heavy petting, rumbles in the parking lot, too much booze, tobacco addiction, and episodes of living behind bars and in them, and you’ve got an album for the ages.

from the liner notes to the LeRoi Brothers’
album Crown Royale

* * *
I moved to Austin, Texas, from Santa Cruz, California. The culture shock was severe. I had left a socially and politically very liberal (“radical” many of the locals would prefer) town, a town that Ms. magazine had called “a female Camelot,” a town where the mayor identified himself as a “socialist-feminist”—a town where I felt comfortable and at home. But now I’d followed my boyfriend to the town he had chosen to move to nine months earlier, so he could play guitar—to a town where the women’s basketball team was referred to as the “Lady Longhorns,” to a town where I had no other friends, to the South.

I arrived in June and couldn’t believe the heat. Couldn’t believe it was real.

It was ridiculously hot. Hot hot hot. How could people live here? I tried to take walks, as I’d done all my life, but after a block I felt uncomfortable. Sweat. On some days it was a health hazard to walk a half mile at noon, the heat, the humidity. Never before had the weather been my enemy.

We’d go down to Sixth Street, several long blocks crammed with bars of all types, people of every sort. At midnight in July it was 90 degrees out. I couldn’t wear anything but shorts. Long, baggy shorts and loose T-shirts. Of course I didn’t fit in.

No one would talk to me in the bars. I felt snubbed. I felt superior. People in my home state didn’t act that way. Californians were open and friendly. “Drive Friendly, the Texas Way,” the electric signs over the highway (not freeway) announced, both ungrammatically and deceitfully. I’d never seen such horrible drivers. “Texas Friendly” other signs announced. It was all bullshit. Southern hospitality. BS. They weren’t friendly or hospitable.

They. They.

I’d never lived outside my home state before. Never lived in a town where I didn’t know anyone. Never been an appendage. We’d walk into bars and Bobby would start shaking hands. Musician networking. I’d stare and be stared at. Stared up and down. Stared even, it felt like, inside. Was I cool, they wondered? “Would she sleep with me?” I felt guys ask themselves silently. “Will she sleep with my boyfriend?” Women glared.

I couldn’t stand it. The heat in the bar. If you can’t stand the heat… I got out of the bar. I went outside and sat on the curb and watched the old and new cars drive by too fast on the street lined with pedestrians. (They don’t pay any attention to cross walks here.)

I’m sitting, alone, finally.

Two guys walk up. College students, from UT, out to drink. “Hey,” one says and sits too close to me. The other sits too close on the other side. “What are you doing out here all alone?” the first one asks. He leans over too far; I can smell the Pabst Blue Ribbon cloud from behind his straight white teeth.

“I’m sitting,” I say. Go away go away, I think.

He keeps leaning over too far, keeps talking. I realize: He thinks it is his right to talk to me. I tell him to go away. He’s angry. He thinks I’m rude.

I went back in the bar. I found the darkest corner of the dark bar, The Black Cat. I sat in my shorts and shirt and watched in a daze. Women in short vintage dresses, leather cowboy boots, stockings—even make-up. Make-up! The idea itself made me sweat harder. How did they keep it from streaking down their faces two minutes after they gooped it all on? Men in boots and jeans and tight tank tops. I waited ‘til it was time to leave and promised myself I’d never come back.

              * * *

   “They should not give crazy people guitars”

               Scrawled on the wall at the
               Black Cat Lounge, Austin, Texas

              * * *

In Iowa, combing out my hair, I once again looked at the T-shirt I’d bought from the street vendor in Austin. This time when I saw the wavy photo on the shirt, in the backwards mirror reflection, my mind had this thought: That could be the arm of the man who raped me.

On his way out of our apartment, the rapist had taken Bobby’s electric guitar, though I didn’t know that, nor would I have cared, at the time. We didn’t realize the guitar was missing until Bobby came back the next day, cutting short the Thanksgiving trip he’d taken to his parents’ house.

Before Bobby arrived, I’d gone through the apartment with a Sex Crimes Detective from the Austin Police Department. I’d reenacted the crime for the detective, showed him where we’d been standing when the rapist had shoved my face to the wall, where we’d been standing when he’d shoved me to the floor, where he’d been standing and I’d been lying when he tied my hands behind my back. But I didn’t notice then, in the apartment with the police detective, that the guitar was missing.

When Bobby and I did go back to our apartment together, he noticed immediately the empty space by the bookcase; “Where’s my guitar?” he asked, and then we knew. It was minor, the theft of a three hundred dollar instrument, compared to the other crime. But it was somehow disturbing on its own.

(Two and a half years later, I sat in the Assistant District Attorney’s office, answering questions about the rape. At one point I said, “And he stole a guitar on his way out.” The two lawyers seemed intrigued by that piece of information. “You saw him walk out with it?” one of them asked me. “No,” I said. They were then disappointed. I tried to convince them: “We know he took it. It was there before, and after he left, it wasn’t there.” But that wasn’t evidence enough for them. So, though he was convicted of the rape, he was never charged with the robbery.)

With the theft of his guitar, Bobby was now a victim of the same man. Bobby had been robbed. He’d liked that guitar, more than most he’d owned. He felt he was fair game now, too.   Bobby carried a butcher knife in his coat pocket for a week after I was attacked, to protect me or to protect himself, whichever of us might need it.

              * * *
There was so much music in Austin. Every bar on the five or six long blocks of Sixth Street had a live band, or two or three, almost every night. Eleven p. m. on a Saturday night you could walk down that street (pushing through the wall of people) and hear country music; then two steps later, punk; another step, rock and roll; then country again, folk, jazz, rock, back to country. Many of the bands were terrible; even I could tell. Many were actually very good.   And some were great. But a great band could have a bad night (maybe the lead guitar player was too drunk, or not drunk enough). So, when you left the house, you never knew what kind of a show you were going to see that night. (Musicians talk about “seeing” shows when really they mean “hearing.”)

So, many times you were disappointed. And that hangover you had the next morning wasn’t even worth it. But then some shows were transcendent, like going to heaven. Two Hoots and a Holler one night at the Black Cat. The LeRoi Brothers that time at the Hole. Alejandro Escovedo. Kelly Willis who sounded just like Patsy Cline. Willie Nelson. Even, I have to admit, Jerry Jeff Walker one night at Aquafest on the banks of Town Lake, as he sang “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mothers.”

Something happens to me, physically, mentally, emotionally, during one of these shows—I dance, I think, I cry sometimes. It is so big. It is outside of me and inside at the same time.

The sound overloads one sense, hearing, and so the other senses, touch, sight, are either deadened or heightened, too. So you either dance and sing along, throwing your body around just so your touch can keep up with your hearing; you yell; you glance around at everything very quickly or you stare intently at one thing, a beer bottle, a guitar neck, a button on someone’s leather jacket—or you sit catatonically and let your ears do all your living for you, for those moments, for as long as the music keeps on.

After I was raped, I couldn’t even think about going to Sixth Street for several months. I didn’t want to be in the crowded dark. I didn’t want people to look at me the way people look at each other in bars. I didn’t want strangers to touch me. And I didn’t want to be seduced by the music, to lose control of my mind or body, even a bit, even for a moment. I didn’t want to see a great show. I didn’t want to feel that feeling.

              * * *

I changed the lock on my front door so you can’t see me any more and
You can’t come inside my house and
You can’t lie down on my couch
I changed the lock on my front door

               “Changed the Locks”
               Lucinda Williams

              * * *

We never found Bobby’s guitar. I had assumed the rapist had stolen it to pawn it for money, but it never showed up at a pawn shop. The police detective told me, “Maybe he jest wanted a guitar. Sometimes these guys they jest see something they want, and they take it: That’s jest how they think.” He shook his head. He spent his life trying to find those guys, but he couldn’t understand them.

              * * *

“Come here, little dolphin, come here!” I’m standing in the pool and holding a small rubber ball just an inch above the water. Cecilia paddles over and bumps at the ball with her nose. She makes dolphin noises, “Eee ee eek!”

“Good little dolphin!” I tell her and pat her wet hair.

“Eee ee eek!” She nods her head, asking me to throw the ball. I toss it two feet in front of me; she’s only five and I don’t know how well she can swim. Her piggy tails fan in and out behind her head as she paddles out into the pool, her body moving more up and down than away. She gets to the ball, circles it, and then bumps it back, following it, bumping it more.

She swims straight into me and locks her arms around my neck. I feel her tiny body, her legs, her belly, her shoulders, press against mine. She’s a perfect being, a perfect feeling, her hot pink bathing suit, her rounded miniature limbs and abdomen. “Toss the ball! Toss the ball! Eee ee eeeeeek!” She nudges me with her tiny dolphin nose.

I want to hold her again. I toss the ball. “Come here, little dolphin, come here!” I tell her. And she swims to me again. It’s almost pain to look at her face.

I spend all that day in the pool with other people’s kids. Well, because, of course, it’s hot out. And: I want to avoid the adults’ lounge chair conversation about Louisiana shrimp and their bosses at work and music music music. But, yes, mainly I stay in the pool because I’ve begun to love these girls. I want to throw the ball for them, dive for the plastic toys they let fall to the floor of the shallow end, hold them. I want to watch their jerky, elegant little little girl movements.

Cecilia’s older sister Nadine is walking around us. She’s trying to get the blue and white plastic jump rope to stretch across the pool, but once she gets it up on one side, it falls into the water on the other. But she doesn’t give up. She keeps moving the plastic rope up and down the hot concrete, experimenting, until she finds a place that’s narrow enough to allow the entire rope to stretch across.

Right before I leave Austin for Iowa, I give a bunch of stuff to Nadine and Cecilia, including the Barbie and Ken dolls we used as bride and groom figures on our wedding cake. I also gave them a bunch of foreign coins I’d collected. Then Nadine and I sat on my living room floor and looked at the high school geography textbook I used at school; we found the countries that the coins came from. She deciphered the colored blocks on the map quickly, much more quickly and with more enthusiasm than many of my high school students would have.

Eduardo and Ellie, Nadine and Cecilia’s parents, had a potluck at their home in South Austin. Chips and salsa, salads, hamburgers, guitars. I’d gotten used to the unendingness of summer by then. We all sat on the concrete patio under an awning, 85 or 90 humid degrees out, nothing to comment about. Talking. I went inside for a while. The kids, mostly girls, were watching a video of “Robin Hood.” A sword fight for the fair maiden—though in this version the maiden can fight also. I’d read a review that called her a “feminist Maid Marion.” But, still, in this version her back is pushed against the wall, a knife held at her neck (above her heaving breast); still she was rescued by Robin Hood, not by her own skill. I wonder: What will the future be like for the girls in this room?

Outside. Getting to be dusk. Instruments appear from nowhere and a band has formed. Eduardo sits at his drum kit; six people on guitars, three singers. Men play the instruments and sing. One woman also sings. I listen to the music, bored this time. I don’t like jam sessions. But this is what is. I can stay at home, or I can go to a barbecue at our friends’ house, and listen to the inevitable music.

Nadine plays tambourine. Eduardo tells the rest of us that she’s very good, quite talented. He says this not the way a doting father talks about his precocious kid, but the way one musician talks about another musician. But I wonder, when she’s older, will she still play music? Will there be a band for her to play in? Will she want to dress up and put on make-up and stand on a stage on Sixth Street and tantalize the crowd with her looks before her skill?

And she’s smart. I see Nadine with a Ph.D. in something, a doctor, a scientist, the president. Maybe she’ll still jam with her dad and his friends when she’s home for vacations; maybe she’ll always love music, be a musician. But I think: It will be easier for her to become a brain surgeon than a successful, respected musician in this town.

After dusk Nadine takes a jar and runs around in the front yard, looking for fireflies. She’s intent on her task—it’s not a game for her, to catch the bugs; it’s more like a job. Watching her chase across the grass I think: This is what is meant by a “bright” child.

“I keep missing them!” she yells across the grass to the patio. She walks back over to the cluster of adults on lawn chairs. “If one of you could watch and tell me when you see one, then I could run to it. If you could point it out to me.”

Eduardo, now playing guitar while someone else sits behind his drum kit, tells her, “Honey, we’re busy right now. Maybe someone can help you later.” He leans down to tune the guitar strings.

I want to help her. I like her. But I feel too comfortable sitting in the finally cool of the evening. I don’t feel like getting up. I don’t feel like watching for the maddening flicks of light.

I don’t help her find fireflies. Instead, I sit and watch her miss them.

Nadine runs across the grass, jar in one hand, lid in the other. “Can someone help me? Can someone help me, please?” she calls. No one helps her.

              * * *

     “We can’t go through Texas.”
                      Thelma and Louise

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