I bought my first guitar in Los Angeles. It was 3/4 size, perfect for me because I am small and not ready to lose in a wrestling match with a musical instrument. I paid $200 for it from a young man with a young wife and a baby who lived in a top-floor loft in Santa Monica with pastel walls and a feigned calm, as if their life and their faces were all preordained for a hipster paradise young parents postcard. The guitar was light birch color and smelled of fresh wood, new like the child that was never taken out.
I took a community college class for 3 months to learn that guitar, with an enthusiastic teacher named Cheeseman. Cheeseman was so nice he’d probably lay prostrate in the middle of the street and sacrifice his body if that was going to help one of his students have a more dexterous hand. We learned Blackbird by the Beatles for fingerpicking. Two years later, I can feel my thumb and pointer finger pinch for the first chord/note-thing. The kind of muscle memory that belongs to old pros. Except I don’t remember the rest of the song.
There’s a beauty in traveling with as little items as possible, only your beating heart (and the beating heart of your dog), the clothes on your back. It could be argued that the guitar has its own beating heart, but the airlines and their carry-on luggage shape and size requirements don’t see it that way. I told the guitar I’d come back and see it again, the same way I’ve left boyfriends. No exact return date, I might replace him easily, I might torture myself later… thinking of him as the best I ever had, wondering what kind of rockstars we could’ve been together.
A blind Portuguese friend told me that I could find a guitar here in Lisbon for less than 100 euros easy. As I set up an apartment with as little furniture as possible, my list of necessities dwindled. I don’t need it, but the idea of acquiring a guitar came to mind as I looked at the empty corners and imagined the sinuous form.
Lisbon has been empty with the pandemic. Emptiness in the city invokes the human to become like a bird, chirping instead of speaking. The thoughts in your head become songs that fill the shade, the valleys between buildings, the unending open vista along the river. The lyrics of old tunes are plenty of company.
I ran to the edge of a trucking lot. That was the closest I could get to the river, all the other river edges have been blocked by fences and construction. I looked out onto the river, splashes pitching little tents up and down, and I sang, sending my voice across the space. Singing is usually private. It’s like underwear. Everyone does it, from a young age, but not in public. And what is singing, anyway? The voice, pushed. Words strewn together like string lights. We make demigods out of people that are pretty enough and willing to do it in public. They go do it on a stage, amplify their voices for radio, records, reputation.
Why cover your ears with a recorded sound? One reason. When you’re in the mood. Unfettered life has nowhere to go in your body, so you walk down the street, and with the right recording you smother the spontaneous ambience with your beat.
It seems futile to replace that guitar. It’s highly doubtful at this point that I’ll master the matrix of that metal with these hands, to find a way and a place to sing that won’t just make me feel like a wannabe.
Still, for under 100 euros, it couldn’t hurt.
I went on OLX, the app for used stuff. I found one nearby for 88 euros sold by Hugo, except a friend noticed that it was missing a string. And when I brought up the missing string to Hugo, he said, “Yes that’s your problem.” I asked if he could meet me at a guitar shop so they could fix it at the same time as the transaction. He wrote, “I don’t need to go to the shop, the string is your problem.” Was he selling a problem or a guitar?
Next I found Joao GM selling a guitar. This one was listed for 159, and further away. I wrote Joao GM, first asking how he’s doing, after all there should be a person on the other end of that anonymity, and second asking if he ever comes to the city center. He wrote, “Hello. Yes, I do come to the city center quite often.” He said he comes on Tuesdays, and so the decision as deferred for Tuesdays. I mentioned that I was looking for a guitar for less than 100 euros, and he said the lowest he’d go was 140. I sent him Hugo’s ad and asked Joao GM the difference; he said Hugo’s had vinyl strings, and his is limited edition. California, limited edition.
We exchanged phone numbers. I looked at his profile connected to his phone number on WhatsApp. It’s a guy cross-seated on top of the hood of a bright red old BMW model, the bumper hanging by one bolt diagonally. He’s a casual diamond with his elbows to his wrists, punctuated by the three Adidas lines along his jacket sleeves, and his skinny legs are crossed at the ankle punctuated by the bright white shoelaces of his converse. The photo is grainy with a purplish hue, like it was taken with a polaroid in the 1970s.
On Monday he said that next was Tuesday, and he was coming to the city. He sent me a short video “demo” of himself playing Blackbird. His fingers like firecrackers. I couldn’t see his face- only the bottom corner of his chin, and could make out salt and pepper stubble. He wrote “she’s a beauty :)”
On Tuesday he fulfilled his promise to the stranger that was me, that he was coming. I said I’d meet him.
As soon as I agreed to meet him, it became one of those “Oh shit decisions are indecisive torture.” If I had slept better the night before, would it be easier to buy it? Maybe. If it were less than 100 euros, would it be a no-brainer? Yes. If I’d been raised speaking Finnish, Japanese, and French, playing guitar, ukulele, accordion, and saxophone, would I have been more equipped for adulthood, and thus not want this guitar? Probably.
I bailed. I told him I hadn’t slept well. Anxiety. Human.
He wrote he was “so sorry to hear that” and that “I’ve also had anxiety in the past, I know the feeling.”
The ping-pong indecisive regret about the guitar turned into a chat, as I got out and walked in the night. He asked what I thought about Portuguese people, I told him about the stereotype of mama’s boys and Portuguese people not being finicky. He responded quickly, like we were friends.
The next day he invited me to meet the guitar. When I still hesitated, he invited me to meet him. Same thing, but that was an easier decision somehow.
As he approached, I tried to hide the disappointment, even from myself. Was I really so mercenary, that I’d only wanted to meet him if he was good-looking? Yes, I was, and shit, I stopped caring what I looked like. Politeness overtook where curiosity had been. I’d have to find a way out. He was small and older than I’d imagined. A small Paul McCartney, with a small head. Sure, he had a full head of hair and a beard, but the mat of it was tufted like it had all been glued on in one piece.
“She’s so cute,” I said, to his dog. It sounded like I just came to meet the dog.
We stopped at the cafe in front of us where the sun blazed the outdoor tables. He asked the blonde waitress for permission to enter the (empty) cafe and sit in the (empty) terrace in the rear. She said we would have to wear masks and we weren’t allowed in the rear with the dog. We looked at the closed umbrella in front of us, and asked if she could open that. She said it was broken. He asked if she would go ask her manager if they want to lose two clients, she left and came back and said she was sorry but they didn’t care.
“What the fuck just happened?” he said.
I shrugged, sharing his exasperation but it not lasting long enough to join in. Since it wasn’t my dog I hadn’t taken it as personally. We kept walking, stretching out my polite time with him, and passed a fancy-looking Italian restaurant. I wasn’t sure if his invitation had meant he was paying, and we had the 140 euros ticking above us between the possibility of the guitar or friendship. We settled on a cafe with outdoor tables in the shade that didn’t look expensive. I sat askew on the grew plastic, drank my orange juice and ate my quiche in 2 minutes. He gave his card to the cafe, in case they need help writing the menu. He’s a copywriter. I asked him about himself. He was staying at his brother’s nearby, he lives further out.
“My brother is 49. 12 years older than me,” he offered. That was a funny way to tell me his age. I did the math. I had bike chain grease like black charcoal all over my calves, even on my socks and my new shoes. I propped my legs up in full view, I didn’t care. He said that baby wipes would take care of it. “How do you say baby wipes in Portuguese?” “Toalhitas,” he said. “That’s funny like tiny towels… or towels specifically for tiny humans.” I thought about the hassle of going to buy baby wipes, creating more trash in the world, and calculated this whole predicament of bike grease on me against the value of the guitar.
The cafe didn’t take my card, they only took cash. I was the only one with cash. I paid. I wasn’t sure if he’d pay me back. He didn’t mention paying me back, and as we stood up from the tables, I was mad I’d lost 16 euros on lunch and was still hungry.
He asked me if I want to see the guitar. He had the guitar in his car, and it was right here. He opened the trunk and pulled out the guitar. It was in mint condition. He invited me up. I don’t know why I agreed. Perhaps because I’d come all this way already, or maybe because buildings secrets and when you’re invited inside, unless you’re afraid for your life, you always go just to see the inside of the shell.
“This is a beautiful building,” I pointed to the 1920s building with tall windows and decorative arches, tiled with white. His building was not that one. The next one, ugly. A concrete structure from the drab 70s. I followed him up the stairs, and it had a fresh athletic smell. He opened the door of the apartment, it had high ceilings, wood floors like the 1920s had a kid named Junior and this apartment was him. Photos of his niece and nephew, books about art, paintings by his brother.
The dog settled on the carpet.
I went to the bathroom, where I also found baby wipes, and rubbed them vigorously on my calf, on my socks, on my shoes, wondering if me taking extra amount of time and the noise of shuffling around in the bathroom would make him suspicious. Maybe he’d think I was stealing or doing drugs in his bathroom. I rubbed and rubbed the baby wipes. As I expected, they didn’t magically erase the grease on my socks and shoes, nor my disappointment. He wasn’t good looking and he didn’t have good life advice either.
When I came out of the bathroom, I found Joao GM in the corner of the living room, protected by his laptop and the wall, and starting to play guitar.
I sat on the couch, holding my elbow, looking at the dog.
He asked if I sing. I started to sing. My voice came out without cracking, it was like listening to a recorded artist that I’d forgotten about long ago. I kept singing, with curiosity. He told me to sing louder. I sang from my throat, I sang from my stomach. Then we did the same songs many times. The Beatles, Aimee Mann, Comodores, Oasis, Sublime.
There was one Aimee Mann song he said he’d seen in a commercial that was too sad, he couldn’t stand it. He showed me an Oasis cover with the scrawl, “Definitely Maybe.” He said he was planning to get this tattooed on him soon, because he was so bad at making decisions.
I stopped being angry about paying for lunch. I stopped feeling annoyed at the disappointment. We’d arrived at a moment without money, without time. There was always more songs.
“How did you decide to sell the guitar?” I asked.
He shrugged, as if he didn’t even consider that to be a decision.
We ate yogurt with granola while standing in the kitchen.
“Here are baby wipes,” he offered. I was surprised he hadn’t suspected me of being a baby wipe smuggler already in the bathroom. “I already tried them but they didn’t work,” I said, still pleased at his follow-through.
He told me he’d been with a girlfriend for 10 years until recently, and is now exploring being alone, and while he told me that he changed hue, from shrunken copywriter grasping at a non-job to write a menu, from some girl’s heartbreak, to the mellow brother willing to spend the day with the dog.
I got up to leave. “Do you want to buy the guitar?” He said softly. I swerved and wriggled. “Does anyone else want it?” I deflected. “Yeah, a guy from Italy,” he said. He searched the guitar on eBay in front of me, as if he were researching it himself, showing me that the price was reasonable. “I’ll think about it,” I said. “And I’ll pay you back for lunch,” he said. “Either a bank transfer or when you buy the guitar we deduct it.” “Don’t worry,” I swerved, but I was really relieved. The involuntary patronizing had been weighing on me.
When I left, I said, “Don’t disappear,” and hopped on my bike. I don’t know why I said that. Maybe I was saying that for him, because I felt like I might easily disappear on him. As I biked away, my hands were empty. I imagined the guitar heavy, slung over my shoulders, pressing upon me to learn it. Maybe I’ll buy it sometime, I thought. Maybe I’ll find one under 100 euros. Not definitely. Just maybe.