Never let it be said I don’t pay my debts. Six months ago, my boon companion and vintage-clothing collector C. McL agreed to store my Boxster for the winter. Which is now over but I haven’t had time to go get the car. So it’s still in storage, taking up space in her garage, just sitting there.
Clearly I owe her. “What can I do to repay you?” I inquired, fully expecting that the answer would be
“Nothing.” But instead, she said, “Why don’t you come to a wedding in Minnesota and play guitar for me while I sing?”
Me and my big mouth.
From my front door, it’s a 627-mile drive to Winona, MN. I rented a 2013 Sentra, featuring new Child-Size Seating(tm). Then I had to pick a guitar. My first pick was my Gibson Doves in Flight but after some thought about the venue and the likelihood of being able to plug in to a DI box and the annoyances of miking an acoustic I chose my Heritage Eagle archtop. Loaded up and left the house at 2am, arrived in Minnesota at 11am.
The church was a typical Midwestern steel building thing, a warehouse for storing souls until the Reaping, a charmless, stale place. The cars in the parking lot were old and cheap. The entire wardrobe of every one of the fifty or so men in attendance could have been purchased for about the same cost as the Zegna Su Misura sportcoat I had been requested to wear by C. McL, who has an eye for detail and remembers what I’ve worn in the past.
Rehearsal was a disaster. The mix was bad and I didn’t really know the music and my companion was suffering from coughing fits. We agreed that if she lost her voice during the real thing, as she did in the rehearsal, that I would just continue without her and sing a Christian contemporary song all by my lonesome to two people I didn’t know while playing Am/C#.
I met the bride and groom briefly. They were young, cheerful, normal-looking without being attractive. They believed in the risen Christ. They’d listened carefully to the pastor’s advice about marriage. They had the smiles and words of people who never gave a fuck about font choice or food trucks or Lena Dunham or what they look like when they’re being banged from behind by somebody they just met.
Then the service started and I couldn’t help but believe in it, couldn’t help but look around at these low-income people with their low expectations and their frozen Middle West lives and stupid ridiculous belief in creationism and all that and I couldn’t help but envy them, all of them. Life makes sense to them. It’s hard, and there’s no Super 180s fabric or dinners at the Four Seasons, and nobody’s working on a book deal, but they have a purpose. Family. Support. Faith. Belief. They’re happy and the people I know living on the coasts with AMG Benzos and iPad Minis to match their maxIpads are not.
It was time to get up and play and C. McL brought it like a motherfucker and I comped lightly and sang the harmony low instead of high and afterwards everybody agreed we must have been playing together for years instead of minutes.
At dinner I watched everybody smile and laugh and love in yet another drafty steel building over a meal valued at four dollars and seventy-five cents. We posed for some photos like the one you see above. I told the bride she was beautiful and in the moment I was not lying. The husband told me he couldn’t wait to be with his bride. By which he meant bang her. Which he hadn’t done yet. And I envied that, too. Not banging her; I’ve avoided plenty of midnight phone calls from women who put his wife in the shade. But the anticipation and the meaning.
On the way home I stopped in a music store in Chicago, where I spent one thousand, nine hundred, and seventy-eight dollars on a Fano Psonicsphear guitar I didn’t know I particularly wanted until I saw it. Then for four hundred miles I thought about what I did want. It’s not necessarily to be broke and virginal and happy in frozen Minnesota. But it’s not necessarily not that, either.
