Monday, April 01, 2013

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.
 




 

16 comments:

  1. It certainly captured my attention on more than one level. I would want to know what happened in the aftermath.

    Oddly enough my daughter and I had a discussion yesterday where she made the statement "you and I could drop dead and no one would notice" and I posed that question on my page last evening.

    You are quite the talented writer ...

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    1. The aftermath? Yes, mysterious, at best. Sometimes, the events of life have no logical or easy conclusion. They are just there, hanging like Christmas lights from the eaves of houses in the middle of summer.

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    2. Yes the aftermath, when people finally noticed that the lady had died....

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  2. This is really interesting post ! Hope it'll be continued !

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    1. Thanks, Doronette, and yes, the series will go for about a week ...

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  3. As much as I love the story, the back story has a way of bringing it all together. I never would have imagined the man with the blue guitar was based on a street busker in LA. I'm hooked and can't wait for the next chapter.

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  4. an enjoyable read, I especially like the second paragraph

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  5. At first hurried read (in a past post) I admittedly found this menacing and cold even though still cleverly captivating.

    I view it differently now. It's not so menacing or cruel but just as life is - with experience based interpretations. It's more about differences than sameness perhaps. Though it uses music as a focus in common, each person is removed somehow from it, even the player 'discovering notes' whilst others out of time with not only the music but each other. The lack of syncronicity, indifference, discord highlights our separateness in life and yet we come together to share this art, to understand something from it or just enjoy a rhythm we may come to recognise to make us feel some kind of connection in this life.

    I struggle to find the words so I may have written something that no one quite understands and so, that's life.

    Take what you will and if we share a smile that warms the heart - that is good.

    I like the choice of video clip also out of sync and about belonging and of course the road photo all tie in for me. Thank you - a great write.

    May I keep a copy of this piece please?

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    1. The separateness is there. That was one of the things that has always intrigued me — how people "hear" differently from one another just as they see differently, smell differently, and so on. So, bravo. You're very close to one of my fundamental beliefs about how we shape our world more than our world shapes us.

      And, of course, please keep a copy. Thank you for asking.

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  6. I think I remember reading this one. I agree with Darbie that learning the back story gives the story more meaning. The writing is very nuanced, and it's interesting to see how the details magnify the quiet tone and make the conclusion almost blase.

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    1. When I look at it through your eyes, I see several different threads moving through the story, each somehow disjointed from the rest. Most readers want something central to hang on to ... not sure that happens here.

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  7. I didn't mean to give you the impression that this piece is disjointed--only that the various details seem to set the tone or mood for how life goes on--each different, yet unique. No, I'd say that the guitar player IS the central thought, or metaphor for life, and what happens around and through him signifies how life goes on, even when something catastrophic happens, to try to stop it.

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    1. Quite right ... maybe "disjointed" is the wrong word ... maybe more like separate notes in a harmony of parts, which as you say, meet in the music or personality of the guitar player.

      I like that, and I love your preoccupation with the piece ... makes it special to me ... ;o}

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