Life [21]
Gus was leading me subtly into getting interested in playing, rather than shoving something into my hand and saying, “It goes like this.” The guitar was totally out of reach. It was something you looked at, thought about, but never got your hands on. I’ll never forget the guitar on top of his upright piano every time I’d go and visit, starting maybe from the age of five. I thought that was where the thing lived. I thought it was always there. And I just kept looking at it, and he didn’t say anything, and a few years later I was still looking at it. “Hey, when you get tall enough, you can have a go at it,” he said. I didn’t find out until after he was dead that he only brought that out and put it up there when he knew I was coming to visit. So I was being teased in a way. I think he studied me because he heard me singing. When songs came on the radio, we’d all start harmonizing; that’s just what we did. A load of singers.
I can’t remember when it was that he took the guitar down and said, “Here you go.” Maybe I was nine or ten, so I started pretty late. A gut-string classical Spanish guitar, a sweet, lovely little lady. Although I didn’t know what the hell to do with it. The smell of it. Even now, to open a guitar case, when it’s an old wooden guitar, I could crawl in and close the lid. Gus wasn’t much of a guitar player himself, but he knew the basics. He showed me the first licks and chords, the major chord shapes, D and G and E. He said, “Play ‘Malagueña,’ you can play anything.” By the time he said, “I think you’re getting the hang of it,” I was pretty happy.
My six aunts, in no special order: Marje, Beatrice, Joanna, Elsie, Connie, Patty. Amazingly, at the time of writing, five of them are still alive. My favorite aunt was Joanna, who died in the 1980s of multiple sclerosis. She was my mate. She was an actress. A rush of glamour came into the room when Joanna arrived, black hair, wearing bangles and smelling of perfume. Especially when everything else was so drab in the early ’50s, Joanna would come in and it was as if the Ronettes had arrived. She used to do Chekhov and stuff like that at Highbury Theatre. She was also the only one that never married. She always had boyfriends. And she too, like all of us, was into music. We would harmonize together. Any song that came on the radio, we’d say, “Let’s try that.” I remember singing “When Will I Be Loved,” the Everly Brothers song, with her.
The move to Spielman Road on Temple Hill, across the tracks and into the wasteland, was a catastrophe for me for at least one whole year of living dangerously and fearfully, when I was nine or ten. I was a very small guy in those days—I grew into my rightful size not until I was fifteen or so. If you’re a squirt like I was you’re always on the defensive. Also I was a year younger than everybody else in my class, because of my birthday, December 18. I was unfortunate in that respect. And a year at that age is enormous. I loved to play football, actually; I was a good left winger. I was swift and I tried to shoot my passes. But I’m the smallest fucker,