Phil and His Guitar

My friend died in his van of a heroin overdose thirty years ago. 

He was found in the morning in the driver's seat, the vehicle out of gas.  He just did a little more than he could handle.  He'd been off the stuff for a while, then gone back on.  He might have forgotten how much was just enough and how much was too much.  Gotten overconfident about his capacity.  Does one ever know exactly where that line is, with respect to anything?  With respect to this thing, you frequently get no free mistakes.

He wrote me some tearfully funny cards from San Francisco when he was living in a flophouse out there, trying to play music.  The cards were sometimes about topics that were not funny. Drugs and street crime and living in this hard world and the sadness and suffering it entails. 

When I heard he was dead—it was his dear mother who told me—I wondered how it could be so.  I did not doubt that it was possible.  He was after all living in a van in a strange city, and in a dangerous relationship with a dangerous substance, with no family or friends within hundreds of miles of him.  But it was still too much to believe it had really happened. 

I knew death.  People I love had gone away from me already.  When I heard about Phil, I sat at the table and looked at nothing and unsuccessfully tried to gather it in. To come to grips with the fact that here it was, cold, brute, unyielding, and ever and always unchangeable. 

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Phil played guitar. 

That’s not quite right.  He did not do anything so mundane.  Anyone who knows a G-major chord can play a guitar, technically speaking.  You can learn that in five minutes. What he did was to make the guitar produce music, somehow, unfathomably, mysteriously, supernaturally.  He inhabited it in some way so as to make it part of him, him part of it, and it and he made sound in that hybrid state. 

I have never heard anyone else get a guitar to do what Phil got a guitar to do.  And I have heard all the great guitar players, all the ones you might name for me, I am fairly sure I know them.  I have heard them, on their records, and some in person.  I have known a few people with superb training on guitar, who could do many wonderful and astounding things with the instrument.  So far as I know, Phil had little or no formal training.  He had only him, the force that was him, and he brought that to bear on the task. 

To think of him is to think of that noise that he managed to make emerge from that guitar and that amplifier. 

We made music together for a time.  I struck and tapped and attacked various objects percussively.  He picked up his guitar and plugged it in and got it to do extraordinary things.  We did this at the same time, in the same place, together.

Those moments, just he and I in a room alone, two souls separated from the human sea, without preconceived plans, just sitting down with our tools and fixing our minds on the common good, on the beautiful, terrifying, pristine, sacrosanct place toward which we were attempting to set sail, collectively, I and he, the two of us, engaged, heightened, attuned, paying attention, attention, attention, listening, he to me, I to him, each to the other. 

Making music together. 

Communicating with sounds that are not words, that exceed language, that transcend the prosaic humdrum of that quotidian interactional game and enter another, more rarefied space. 

Have I ever been more alive than in those moments I shared with him?

We sometimes thought it was rubbish, what we had done on a particular day, then we listened to the recording, and we’d sit silent, hushed, worshipful, ashamed by our lack of faith.  Other times we thought we had done well, and then listened again, and looked immediately at one another, my eyes into his, his into mine, and it was understood, we had been misled this time, and we would have to try again. 

But back to it we would go.  Eager, full of anticipation, if also with trepidation, for we were invoking gods and powers beyond us, we would go down to the basement and turn on all the switches and knobs, and say our inward prayers, and strive to get outside ego and let music speak through us. 

Our audience was the two of us, him, me, no one else.  We cared not a whit for the opinions of anyone else, even if what we were doing was preparation for the presentation of our collective enterprise to others at a later time.  This cannot be stressed enough.  The matter of what others might think about what we had made never even occurred to us.  We assumed as given, a certainty that once we were happy with our ability to produce interesting things on more or less any given occasion that we sat down together to do it, there would be others who would be interested in what we considered interesting. We never played the recordings for anyone else.  Obviously, we reasoned, no one who was not present could have a meaningful perspective on the thing we had done, and we two were always, always the only ones. 

We only talked about music if it couldn’t be avoided and for as little time as absolutely necessary to communicate whatever practical thing needed communicating. 

Just play.  Let the music be. 

How I loved him.  How much I loved him.  My dear, dear brother. 

He was so difficult.  Impossible, even.  Often unlovable.  But nevertheless, no matter, despite it all, because of what we shared, how I loved him.

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What I felt on hearing of his death was that I no longer had the right to sit on my ass and try to have a normal life.  That’s what I felt, immediately, like a wound, like a gunshot, like a punch to the face. 

Wake up.  Now. 

Phil had gently and not so gently prodded me about this for years.  Do something, get something accomplished, something that makes the suffering bearable.  When we were not in the same place, he would write me those postcards, with hilarious scribbled drawings on one side and on the other some economically expressed version of “You Have Something to Say.  Say It Before It Is Too Late.” 

I listened sometimes, for a little while, and went to work, trying to figure out how to let the spirit flow out, how to shamanically go alone to that place he and I had often frequented together and to open up enough of a door between there and here to let that energy flow into this world in some way. 

But then the whirlwind of everyday life and concerns and stresses and responsibilities and all of that tediousness drowned out his voice in my brain. 

Now I would have to listen to him because he was no longer and to ignore him now was an affront even I, in my carelessness, in my laziness, could not countenance. 

And yet the time passed, and his death receded toward some horizon, and there were other things that had to be done, and I didn’t listen to what he told me in his absence, and so it was and so it is and so it will be.

Would he be surprised by that failure?  Saddened?  Understanding?  Would he know that what we did, the places we went, would he understand that they required us both, and that they are now lost, and that they will never ever return, and that this is the everything of their sacred power? 

Yes.  He would know.