6:53 a.m. - 2023-11-16
desiccant
It happened six years ago now, maybe? On an otherwise unremarkable night spent doing what I tend to do out here when the weather is mild; sitting on the tailgate of my truck beneath a thicket of stars, trying to nail something new down on guitar and drinking heavily. So heavily, in fact, that at some point I stumbled back to my room and passed out on my tiny bed* fully clothed.
~ ~ ~
Was it minutes or hours that I'd been asleep, when the thunderclap jolted me awake? Seconds before another one, near-simultaneous with the flash-bulb burst of a lightning strike, rattled my cabin and a hailstorm commenced? Rudely rousted, I assessed the chaos through the gaping frame of my front door (something I'm wont to leave open en-route to passing out), and mumbled a groggy curse before dashing out to check the truck windows. They were down of course, and after rolling 'em up I bolted back indoors and returned to sleep relieved...dreaming peacefully 'neath the rhythmic report of spring weather on my tin roof.That relief vanished quickly come morning...when I stepped out under the painful blue skies of a fresh hangover and noted, along w/the felled limbs and other storm debris, that I'd left the tailgate of my pickup down. And that I'd left my guitar laid out upon it, sound-hole up, so it could fill with rainwater.
“Fuck” I thought.
Not that it's a valuable instrument dollar-wise (the case I transport it in cost four times what I could sell the guitar for), but its sentimental history is priceless. It was bequeathed to me by someone I love, and was a childhood gift to her from her father, another one of my favorite people. He didn't know much about guitars though...at least for beginners. It's a classical nylon-string acoustic with a neck as wide as a baseball bat and painfully high action; perfect for my big, clumsy bass-player's fingers, but would have proved difficult for a child's hands to navigate. It might not have mattered anyway...her youthful passion was for ballet, and she was more into Anna Pavlova than Joan Baez at that age. But her father's thoughtfulness was appreciated, and the guitar had moved w/her from apartment to apartment, eventually landing in the one we shared. So I've an emotional attachment to the thing, and if I destroyed it (too) in an act of drunken neglect, the symbolism would be too poignant to bear.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck” I thought.
I switched into panicky action mode; cutting the strings with a pair of shears, dumping out the water and wiping down what little part of the interior my hand could reach. Then I sped into town to buy rice, 10 lbs. of the stuff. All of which was poured into the sound-hole before laying the instrument out on a shop-bench to dry...hopefully. Because their bodies are made of Luan, these cheap guitars--a wood notorious for de-laminating. And even if the body didn't peel and warp beyond the pale of utility, surely the neck would bow or twist?
Three days later the guitar was bone-dry. Alarmingly dry, really. So with the rice dumped back in the sack (why waste rice?) I tentatively began to restring the thing, fearing the worst... Twenty minutes later I was racing through cover-songs and grinning in disbelief. That chunky, “unplayable” neck had served the guitar well through elemental adversity, and the intonation was unchanged. The only evidence of the incident was on the face which, when held now to the light, reveals a hammered smattering of hail-dings across the finish. This gives it “character”, I like to think; a trait the weathered face in my mirror regards w/a certain affinity...
Anyway, this morning I was reminded of the whole incident when, sitting down to record, I heard a familiar rattle in the ol' acoustic. Raising the guitar over my head, I tried to shake/steer the little stowaway towards the exit. It took a few minutes but eventually my suspicions were confirmed when, six years after the fact, an errant white grain tumbled to the floor.
~ ~ ~
*A tiny bed that is, through the vagaries of fate, the same one I slept in as a child. An accommodation that represented, at the time, a serious upgrade from sleeping three-a-bed with my grandmother and little sister. That would have been after the divorce, when my mom was living in her parents' garage and pursuing her nursing degree. This bed represented too, amidst the traumatic realignment and uncertainty of moving into my stepfather's house, a sign that our lives might change for the better.How many times has this humble mattress-frame been moved? Between the manifold military bases where I grew up, and my step-dad's subsequent career in the civilian sector, I can count a dozen off the top of my head. So like every other artifact of my youth, it's papered with moving company stickers...
Behind the headboard lies a different cache of adhesive evidence; petrified wads of chewing gum, some in flavors no-doubt discontinued... (Although, to be fair to my younger self, some of these deposits are suspiciously soft; souvenirs left, I suspect, by more recent sleepover guests. 'Cause yeah, as modest as that little bed may seem, it's been privileged to witness, over the last ten years, things I couldn't have imagined at the age of eight. Things that, by the time I was thirteen, I couldn't seem to stop imagining...)
