He was known as the best guitar player in the United States.
Maybe the world.
I didn’t know; I’d never met him.
Luke.
I had friends who knew him, had seen him play in the French Quarter, or they themselves had jammed with him in one of those hill houses in San Francisco when he was part-timing as a tour guide in Ghirardelli Square.
They attested to his skill.
His virtuosity.
The word “singularity” was used.
“Heaven sent,” got thrown around.
I was told outside a restaurant that there was a girl in Morocco who was “nearly his equal.”
Close in skill.
But not better.
“It was like watching a new element be created,” said my friend whose band had once opened for Luke at a club in DC, in some little dark bar down a long bright alley in Dupont Circle, where my friend said you could be almost-homeless and eat falafel and mujaddara indefinitely, sleep legally in the park with a blanket and pillow, and somehow see the Washington Monument over the tops of the Magnolia trees, all without the cops hassling you.
“Isn’t that America?” my friend said.
I pretended to scroll on my phone when he told me these things, and, honestly, stopped inviting that friend over for garden beers because he threw his bottlecaps in the peat soil, which upset the other occupants of my tri-plex—all of whom worked in the garden in the hot part of June and all of whom felt that my friend didn’t respect the effort that went into their dirt work.
What surprised me.
What really hurt.
Was on a less hot day that same June, the new and wonderful girl I’d started dating said she knew Luke. She said they used to hang a bit.
A little bit.
For a time.
She confirmed his irradiant brilliance and said his name only once during our conversation. Just one time. But it was enough to make my eyes tighten, my hands go cold, and my heart––hidden beneath a lidocaine patch because I’d pulled something in my chest while attempting to turn ground in the carrot bed––race with a sense of approaching, or possibly arrived danger.
“He played a twelve-string Stratocaster made of driftwood and stolen car parts,” she said one night while we lay close but untouching. “It sounded like God getting over something.”
Later, she said she could never really pin him down, that he was charming but chaotic. And that she now valued stability and emotional awareness in a partner over all things. Excitement. Spontaneity. Carnal attraction.
She told me the end wasn’t bad with Luke.
No.
He just ran off somewhere absurd like Finland or West Oakland.
It was fine.
Probably for the best.
And she said all this like it would comfort me.
Which.
It didn’t, of course.
No.
And neither did her story about the last time she saw him, barefoot in a parking lot, playing “Blackbird” in reverse, which caused the nearby starlings and roof pigeons to fly in strange new ways, which then caused more than a few midair collisions.
“He could twist time a little,” she said. “Even the birds got lost.”
I laughed because it felt like The Move.
But she didn’t laugh back.
No.
She just looked out the window like the air might still have something he made in it.
Time passed from there.
Big fat time.
In which: I ricocheted off something on my way to work, broke my bike, rebuilt it, planted squash too early, spinach too late, tried a joke I brought with me from California, watched the joke die in a meeting, had another meeting, wherein I pitched Activision a game where all the crops had died and we need to sell-off the farm equipment, the harvester, balers and dozers, the silos and snow movers, the endless braid of irrigation sprinklers that roll over the cornstalk, had everyone in the boardroom staring until I said I had other ideas too, had no other ideas, none, but to make it all better my caring girlfriend had made me my favorite dinner using a newer and healthier and much-raved about recipe on a night when I needed her the most, and needed everything to be old in a non-new way, but she insisted on change.
Small change. But still, change.
And I wanted to tell her.
I wanted to say.
That I shoved someone into a wall once.
When I was seventeen.
My girlfriend.
Who’d made me so angry.
And I was sorry, but it didn’t matter.
And that this wasn’t like that.
No.
But it wasn’t not like that entirely either.
No.
She kept Luke’s pick in a velvet pouch in her purse.
I found it when she asked me to grab her lipstick.
It had teeth marks on the edge like something half-animal had gotten to it.
It was a ravaged thing.
“Did you love him?” I asked one morning, finally brave.
She blinked slow, like it was a question she hadn’t heard in a while.
Then she shut her eyes and prayed for a car accident.
A bang.
Something loud, possibly outside or down the street––something to break up the moment.
It didn’t come, so we stayed quiet at the table.
After.
I learned the bass just to keep up.
Joined a band that practiced on Tuesdays and sometimes Sunday but never performed.
I wrote her a song.
She said it was sweet but asked if it could be more truthful or more honest.
Or more of both those things.
Then.
One night.
Months after we stopped talking.
I heard this strange music outside my window. Something like thunder politely arguing with itself. Or airplanes kissing. Or mad earth.
I went out in my boxers.
I went into the garden.
And there he was: a shape against the streetlight.
Playing something that made me listen.
He didn’t look up. No.
Just played.
And played.
Until my body became like a water balloon that he was in charge of.
Then.
He ended his song.
And removed his capo from the 4th fret and dropped it into his proud bindle.
He dipped his head to the late night applause: the clapping of the maple leaves and the yard dogs barking rowdily with delight. His long, untamed hair––which held more gray than I’d imagined for a man who I understood to be three years younger than myself––dangled calmly in the dark. He looked like one of the men who fished for trout off the top of the overpass.
Or.
Like one of those simple types who worked the factories off Hasting Street, stamping out hubcaps and tailgates, hood ornaments and passenger-side doors.
He shrugged his shoulders and cracked his neck.
With his guitar slung over his back he suddenly looked very obvious.
Very normal.
Like a normal person.
The kind you stand behind in line when waiting to order something.
His t-shirt holey and threadbare. Like a rag you’d use to plug a wound or wipe your dog’s paws with.
He didn’t look at me.
Not really.
I was hiding in the garden between the hollyhocks I’d planted and let die.
But I could see him.
Luke.
His eyes: blue, white, housed and brilliant in the almost midnight of my late street.
He stood for another moment.
Then another moment.
And then.
Then.
He wiped his nose against the collar of his shirt.
And he was gone.
***
I called her the next morning and said, “I think I saw him.”
And she didn’t ask who.
And she didn’t ask how.
No.
She just whispered, “Yeah.”
And then.
“He does that.”