“Put it back,” Carl says. “We’ve talked about this. You’re not buying today. You need to leave the instruments for customers who are.” Daniel looks at Carl. He looks at the guitar. He puts it back on the wall hook. He does it carefully, the way he always does. The guitar in its exact position, the cable coiled neatly, everything as he found it. He walks toward the door.
What no one in the store knows yet is that the man in the next aisle has been listening for two of those 3 minutes, and that he is not going to let the door close. Eddie Van Halen had come to Foothill Music that Saturday morning for one thing, a set of strings. He had a session at a friend’s studio that afternoon, and had run out of his preferred gauge the previous evening.
Foothill Music was three blocks off his route. He had parked, gone in, found the string rack in the second aisle, and been comparing two options when the sound reached him from around the corner. He had been comparing strings for 4 minutes before Daniel started playing. He stopped after 20 seconds of listening.
He had been in enough stores and heard enough players to know within 20 seconds the difference between someone playing a guitar and someone who has something to say through a guitar. The distinction was not about technique. Technique was a later question. It was about whether the phrases went somewhere, whether there was a decision being made behind the notes, whether the person holding the instrument had an internal logic they were trying to express, rather than a series of positions they were trying to reproduce.
Most people who picked up a guitar in a music store on a Saturday morning were reproducing positions. The boy around the corner was not. The tone was imprecise. A mid-range import through a small practice amplifier cannot do what the sound in the boy’s head probably required, but the structure underneath was audible.
The phrases went somewhere. They resolved. There was a melodic idea being developed, returned to, altered. Composition in other words, however informal, however unconscious, the composer might have been of the fact that what he was doing had a name. He was still holding the string packet when he heard Carl’s voice.
Put it back. He set the string packet on the shelf. He came around the corner in time to see Daniel return the guitar to the wall hook with the careful precision of someone who has learned that the right to be here depends on leaving everything exactly as found, and turned toward the door.
What no one in the store knows yet, not Carl, not the father and son at the acoustic wall, not the woman at the keyboards, is that what Eddie heard in the second aisle in the past 2 minutes has already changed what is about to happen. The door is not going to close. “Hey,” Eddie said. Daniel stopped. He turned around. He looked at the man in the gray jacket who had just come from the string aisle.
“How long have you been playing?” Eddie said. Daniel looked at him. “2 years,” he said, “more or less.” 2 years. No teacher, no instrument of his own, 20 minutes a week in a store on Foothill Boulevard. Eddie did the arithmetic of what he had just heard against those 2 years and what it meant. “You have your own guitar?” Eddie said.
Daniel shook his head. Eddie looked at Carl Briggs, who was behind the counter and had recognized in the past 30 seconds who had just come from the string aisle and was now standing in the middle of his store talking to a 12-year-old he had just asked to leave. He looked at the guitar Daniel had put back on the wall, the Stratocaster copy, $240.
He looked at Daniel. “Pick it back up,” he said. Daniel looked at the guitar. He looked at Eddie. He looked at Carl. Carl’s expression had shifted into the expression of a man who is recalibrating the last 5 minutes. “Pick it up,” Eddie said again. Daniel took the guitar down from the wall. “Play me what you were playing,” Eddie said.
Daniel played. He played the thing he had been working on that morning, a passage he had been developing for 3 weeks in the 20 minutes every Saturday, built from something he had heard on the radio and taken apart and put back together differently. He played it for 2 minutes without stopping. His hands did not shake.
He had just been told to leave and he had come back, and there was a man in a gray jacket standing 6 feet away watching him play, and his hands did not shake. When he finished, the store was quiet. The father and son at the acoustic wall had stopped talking. The woman at the keyboards had turned around.
Carl’s assistant had put down the amplifier brochure. Carl Briggs was behind the counter. Eddie looked at Carl. He walked to the counter. He put the string packet down. He put his credit card down beside it. He said, quietly enough that Daniel could not hear from across the store, “Ring up the strings and the Stratocaster and a small amplifier, whatever’s the best one he can actually carry home.
” Carl looked at the card. He looked at Eddie. He rang it up without saying anything. The total was $387. Eddie signed the receipt. He picked up the strings. He walked back across the store to where Daniel was standing with the guitar. He said, “That’s yours now. The amp’s coming, too. Carl will carry it out.
” Daniel looked at the guitar in his hands. He looked at Eddie. His mouth opened and nothing came out for a moment. “You play every Saturday?” Eddie said. Daniel nodded. “Then keep playing every Saturday,” Eddie said. “Find a teacher when you can. Don’t let them tell you the way you hold it is wrong if it’s making the sound you want.
” “And,” he paused, “don’t let anyone tell you to put it back.” He walked to the door. He stopped once with his hand on the frame and looked back at Carl Briggs. “He had good ears,” Eddie said. “For next time.” He walked out. Drop your city or state in the comments. I want to see how far this reaches.
Daniel Flores carried the Stratocaster copy and the small amplifier home to the apartment on Live Oak Avenue. He carried the amplifier in both arms and the guitar over his shoulder in the gig bag Carl had included without being asked. He walked four blocks. He set the amplifier up in the corner of the bedroom he shared with his two sisters who were at their aunt’s until 2:00.
He sat on his bed and played for an hour and 40 minutes without stopping. The first time in his life he had played for more than 30 minutes. The first time he had ever played on his own instrument. The first time the sound that came out of the guitar was the sound he had been hearing in his head for 2 years.
His sisters came home at 2:15. The younger one, Rosa, who was nine, stood in the doorway and listened for a while. She did not say anything. Later she told him it was the best thing she had ever heard. Daniel did not believe her because she was nine and she would have said that about anything he did.
