It had seemed like an eternity from that moment in your twelve-year old life when you fell in love with electric guitars until the moment one year later when you put your 23 dollars down on the counter in big bang music, rockville, maryland, and were handed the single-pickup no-name guitar which by the time you got it home and past the headshaking wonder of auntie had revealed its secret name to you call me little gold it sang and a week later you bought a guitar strap thin as an old man’s belt and a basic mel bay chord book and even now you can still remember the hunger the desolate state of your heart the near sexual need you had the hours spent staring at album covers leafing through magazines practically sniffing the cardboard and paper finding every excuse you could to loiter past the display window of g c murphy’s department store where sat the silvertone and its dainty amplifier usually being pawed over by acned boys who didn’t have a clue or if they did hadn’t been clued in the way you were and then you spotted little gold in big bang music half hidden behind a trini lopez model cherry-red gibson and a companion gretsch which looked kinda like paul kantner’s guitar single yellow racing stripe where the pickguard should be and the longhaired cooler than shit clerks ignored you for as long as they could and then directed you to the folk guitars the nylon-stringed judy collins folk guitars to add insult to injury but little gold whispered and you came and by the first evening you had learned the riff to ‘politician’ ‘sunshine of your love’ a johnny winterish skitter 6-step lead lick using 3 notes and a bend and the eerie opening to ‘eskimo blue day’ and by the end of the second day you could play ‘it ain’t me babe’ and ‘stones in my pathway’ with a sinister made-up riff part ‘spoonful’ part ‘i ain’t superstitious’ which you claimed was authentic and by the end of the first month you were in a band ‘I know she’s a girl but she’s cute and she knows how to play a d minor seventh chord’ being the keys that let you in and which became your signatures of recognition hummingbird fingers and blowjob pout and by the end of the first rehearsal in the drummer’s mom’s blacklight basement you had supplanted the other guitarist as soloist and soon had supplanted him entirely so that he fled the field of battle to never quite live down having been whipped by a chick and the band decided they needed a name so everyone wrote a dozen ideas and put the slips of paper in a hat and the drummer’s beautiful bitchy acid head girlfriend drew them out queering the proceedings by making stinky kitty faces at the ones she thought were dumb until you finally settled on the street address of the high school’s most notorious dealer 722 dunbarton and the 722s earliest repertoire consisted of ‘all along the watchtower’ ‘sympathy for the devil’ ‘wild thing’ and a strict key of e twelve-bar blues in three versions meaning very fast (‘full tilt boogie’) and medium (‘shuffle’) and very slow (‘very very slow’) and soon after the band added a minor key instrumental which featured a b minor chord and you learned to barre and spent an entire school day with your left index finger extended out as though it were broken and everyone thought the song had an ennio morricone sound and so it was named ‘hang ‘em high’ but only to one another its name on the official set list varying with each new basement party garage jam and afterschool stoning and eventually the band added ‘wild horses’ and ‘stray cat blues’ and ‘i’ve got a feeling’ and you were half-bullied and half-thrilled by the bullying into singing the john lennon parts purely for the frisson it gave the guys to hear you sing ‘everybody had a wet dream’ guys were morons but you didn’t care and sang your heart out and you showed up one rehearsal with a two verse two chorus composition of your own called ‘bloodchild’ which was greeted without enthusiasm until you flattered the singer that it would be perfect for his steve marriott inclinations and so it joined the repertoire and the next breakthrough was the addition of ‘pinball wizard’ and jesus that chick can play fast! you heard somebody say and if you’d had a dick it would have gotten hard and there was ‘summertime blues’ and the switching of the blues shuffle to the key of g and your second composition ‘bound and gagged’ was rejected as too pretty but your third and fourth ‘miles of blue’ and ‘stupidest girl’ made the cut and in time ‘wild thing’ was dropped along with the shuffle and the band added a hard rocking ‘fire and rain’ james taylor was cool everyone agreed but too sensitive for the 722s and also ‘maggie mae’ which the singer dedicated to his home room teacher and the band continued to mine the same limited vein with ‘like a rolling stone’ ‘parachute woman’ oh blow-ow-ow me out bigmouth babe and ‘from a buick 6’ relying on a 1966 brussels bootleg to justify switching dylan’s tagline from ‘and she always brings me bread’ to ‘and she always gives me head’ and you experienced guilt by association noting how the audience would shift their eyes over to you every time the line got sung even though you hadn’t not yet and the band attempted and failed to conquer ‘come together’ so you attached a standard g-d-c chorus to what they already had and wrote collective lyrics that were a private surrealist joke and the very fast blues became officially ‘i’m ready’ complete with sloppy stops and starts and the slow blues was either ‘red house’ or ‘you can’t lose (what you ain’t never had)’ depending on the singer’s mood the audience’s mood or some unexplained conjunction of stars and moon and you had an epiphany a diem mirabilis writing three songs in one two-hour sitting hunched mumbling on your bed which produced ‘assyria’ ‘the back of beyond’ and ‘show me your love’ and jimmy page presided over your selection of a new red and silver guitar strap which you cinched to its outer length so that the guitar hung down to your thighs and if you unbuttoned the bottom three buttons on your shirt your belly button showed and for all the fun and hard work rehearsals were growing growsy and divisions had begun to appear but still the rock kept rolling and the bassist brought in a song called ‘dancing on glass’ with nearly the same chord progression as ‘back of beyond’ and you so queenly and so hypocritically said you preferred his song because you wanted to be in a band like the airplane where everybody was a composer and it hadn’t occurred to you that not every band was lucky enough to have more than one or two okay songwriters and you were on a roll and pushing envy into the limelight so that the singer claimed to be polishing a couple of his own but arrived emptyhanded each time but word was getting around and the drummer’s mom’s basement was growing crowded each afternoon where in true hippie spirit the band set up in the middle of the room so that their friends could surround them on couches and on the floor and stuck in the middle you felt exposed and you liked it and the band jammed for an hour and a half on ‘down by the river’ and received high marks from the smoke-shrouded deadheads and claude jones fans on the mildewed sofa and your solos were fast and odd and you never seemed to run out of ideas sliding for a few seconds into silence before running back into the song from some different unexpected angle and by the holiday break the band dropped half the repertoire of covers substituting ‘whipping post’ although both you and the drummer had voted for ‘in memory of elizabeth reed’ and to the question from the heavy petting end of the sofa what’s this song about? you and the singer contradicted one another in the same breath but made up with a laugh him insisting it was about fucking and you insisting it was about death.
In the summer between ninth and tenth grade Mary discovered that she didn’t necessarily want death. She just heard it everywhere, found it easy to play. What she did want was to flesh out the trinity, now that she had rock and roll above her, below her, inside her. She wanted sex. And drugs. And quicker than she could say ‘who’s that knock knock knocking at my chamber door’ she got both.