On Route 66 — The Man With The Blue Guitar

On Route 66

The Man With The Blue Guitar

[The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.]

He plays hesitantly, like he’s just discovering the next note, measuring it in his mind. It’s like watching music evolve in slow motion, an unhurried progression that confuses the synchronicity of eye to ear, sight to sound. The grey shapes of his audience tap along, but each is out of time with the others. It's as if everyone is hearing a different song.

It’s impossible to know what he’s playing or singing. Something unfamiliar but still vaguely recognizable. He’s forever switching keys and recovering from a discordant note. His voice is low and smoky. The words he sings are indistinct, moving in and out, it seems, of several languages, like some muddled recollection of Babel.

No one seems to care. Only to be here seems important. There’s something in the music that slices life into fractions of seconds, scatters the pieces of everything you remember across the table, and then pieces it all together again in a collage that you don’t recognise as having anything to do with you. But it is you. Your life. Just rearranged from an unfamiliar point of view. It’s not what you expected or even wanted. And yet, it’s there.

When the song ends, the room is quiet except for the cluttered rattle from the kitchen in a distant room and the outside roar of a lonely transport hoping to make Flagstaff before the desert moon falls out of the sky. Otherwise, the place is silent and waiting, but no one is fooled. You can feel the edge of horror cutting through the fabric of the room, and when it happens, no one is surprised or too concerned. No one misses the first note of the next song, not even when Cherise Fontaine falls in a heap from her chair to the cracked floorboards where she lies dead in an instant. It seems there will be time enough to sort out her murder after the man with the blue guitar has finished playing.

The Back Story:

This was the first story in a collection of stories that I wrote about people whom I met or imagined I met along Route 66, that famous highway that runs from Chicago to Los Angeles. These stories were what I call "practice" stories, little bits of fiction that I often use to generate larger pieces.

If this series catches your interest, I hope you'll see how writing isn't much different from fishing. You throw out a baited hook and hope you catch hold of something important or exciting or, at the very least, entertaining.

This vignette was based on a street busker, whom I met on the streets of Los Angeles, many years ago.

He did play a blue guitar, the colour probably having some significance which I've never really figured out. For the most part, his repertoire included mostly medleys of Beatles' songs, all of which I knew by heart and some of which were musically quite difficult to play. I was definitely impressed by his talent, and as I listened to him on the street, I was struck with the idea of how we expect familiar songs to begin and end in a certain way. And here was this young man breaking all the rules and taking his audience on some kind of "magical mystery tour" of various, seemingly disconnected songs, never completely allowing me to guess where the next stop would be and certainly never offering me a clue as to what the ultimate destination might be.

In the story, I moved him from the street into what I imagined was a dingy, little coffee house, somewhere out on the road. He became a representation of how music can have such an overwhelming effect on your life, something so overpowering that you lose track of what is actually taking place in the world around you. To make that notion as tangible as possible, I decided some dramatic reality of life had to happen, sort of in between the song's bridge and its final chord. So, when Cherise Fontaine dies, no one really notices, not because her death is unimportant, but because, in the trance of a singular moment, the art of the music might transcend even death.