One day I brought my ratty Stella down, and as I played him the four chords of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” he threw a fit, telling me I didn’t know a damned thing about the guitar (“You play like you’re wearing mittens,” he said), and commenced, on that afternoon, to teach me — or at least try to — my first bar chords, and jazzy ones that made my fingers ache for days. Nevertheless, I’d go back there, wanting to learn more, and, in time, I could play the square (to me) turnarounds of pieces like “Someone to Watch Over Me.” Afterward, I’d sit in Bobby’s room and feel relieved to hear, off his record player, the zippier 45s of the day. But I’d pick up stuff all over the place. Once Marcial García and his family had moved in upstairs and I’d sometimes end up there with my mother, I learned that he too played the guitar, but in the classical style, with sheet music for studies by Tárrega, Fernando Sor, and others lying in stacks on a table by a stand in his living room. He had a beautiful Spanish guitar from Valencia, full toned and plump in sound, that, made by an angel, did all the work for you — that is, if you knew how to play. He taught me some études, which I never quite got right, and because of the craziness in my head and despite all the lessons he gave me about reading music, during which he would fill up blank staffs with the notes written out in pencil, I simply tuned out, in the same way I did when it came to Spanish — some busy emotions in my head preventing, as it were, my momentary concentration.
Still, I loved those lessons, and they brought me comfort, and especially so in that year when the explosions were going off, though I could hardly ever really feel good about what I was doing. If you own a guitar, however, as I learned, no matter how badly you play, you begin to acquire a self-nurturing attachment to it. Often when sitting with my father on those nights when he would go on and on about the perils of his mortality, I’d drift off, thinking about the chords of a song, and in my mind, no matter what the song happened to be, I’d run through its entirety, even some bullshit piece like “Hanky Panky,” and coming back, I’d catch him staring at me quizzically, as if I hadn’t been listening to him at all.
But I had other teachers as well. Remember Teddy Morganbesser, over on 119th Street, at whose apartment my father had tried to give me my first drink of wine? His squeeze, Belen, had two kids, the first being the fabulously beautiful and muy sexy Tanya, who would marry that gallant from my street, Napoleon, and a son, Philip, about one of the sharpest-dressed and most astute, forward-moving Latinos around. (I remember seeing him sitting on the stoop next to mine, studiously reading textbooks from his school.) He was outrageously handsome, with classic heartthrob looks — think of Ricardo Montalbán or, for more current generations, Julio Iglesias Jr., with a beautiful yet manly and effortlessly chiseled face. He was a scholarship student at Fordham and doing well, the kind of slick guy who’s conquering the world and I couldn’t help but admire. At an early point, he had taken up playing the guitar, and since he, so impeccable in his dress and manner, had set a high bar for his pursuits, his instrument turned out to be one of the most elegant and, I think, pricey guitars around, a curvaceous brass-knobbed Gretsch Anniversary guitar of a shining green luster with a tremolo bar and intricate inlay along the fret board. (Like the perfect woman — in fact, I think, the vast appeal of guitars has much to do with their female shape.)
It was Philip (may God bless his soul, for he, like so many people from my neighborhood, would end in ruin because of drugs) who first taught me how to play that Beatles riff for the song “I Feel Fine.” We’d spent a couple of weeks working on it — why he did so, I don’t know to this day, except to say he was a generous soul. He had a tender demeanor about him, nodding when you got something right, shaking his head wildly when you didn’t. In the half-light of his living room, while he, thin yet muscular, seemed to glow, I tried my best. The rock and roll fingerings were different from the classical, but in the end, I could play that riff, and once I started listening to other Beatles tunes, I figured them out as well, though what would some dumb fuck kid do with useless knowledge like that?
I went to Rolling Stones concerts on Fourteenth Street, at the old Academy of Music, when first-balcony tickets cost two dollars and fifty cents, and, with an empty guitar case in hand, I’d go running from one end of the line of miniskirted ticket holders to the other, hoping to meet some wildly screaming girl. (It sometimes worked, though I was too knuckle-brained to figure out what to do from there.) Over on La Salle Street, some ten blocks away from 118th, I’d hang outside the apartment building where Kenny Burrell, the jazz guitarist, lived, listening to him practicing his scales and tunes. On the same street, in a first-floor apartment, its windows facing the sidewalk, a Puerto Rican conjunto, the lead singer in coal-black sunglasses, rehearsed — their repertoire consisted of a few Latin tunes, but mainly they practiced Top Forty songs, a look of resignation and professional “let’s get this over with” on the lead’s face as he plucked away on his Telecaster. I remember thinking, I’d like to do this. And I’d go down to the Apollo when they had afternoon matinees featuring acts like James Brown and Wilson Pickett and the Cadillacs — and along the way, with my eyes always watching the guitar player in the band, I got some wild idea that I could become a musician.
At sixteen, I’d played guitar behind a neighborhood doo-wop group that auditioned before a hashish-stoned audience on an openmike afternoon, singing vamped-up, multi-harmonized versions of popular folk tunes like “When I Die” at the Café Wha? in Greenwich Village. (We cleared out the place.) I’d played in a little band in Brownsville, Brooklyn, with my friend Jerry, who had long since moved away, performing simple rock tunes by groups like the Kinks and Them, as well as some of our own, in more than a few deadend bars and social clubs in the midafternoon. (I never liked to hang around there at night, for it was a neighborhood where you heard guns popping off in the distance.) And, often enough, while crossing the campus, I’d hear some guy fingerpicking a tune and sit down, just watching his every move. If he sang, that was fine, but mostly I watched the way he played.