Learning to Date Guitar Players
This guitar solo is becoming a guitar duo: A Short Story
Dale never wanted to play instruments growing up. Not only was he afraid of being called ‘gay’ for joining the middle school band, he felt it would take away from athletic opportunities. You can’t practice baseball and piano at the same time. You can’t even play golf and the flute simultaneously.You could maybe play the harmonica while bowling, but sports and music don’t go together in the sense of being in unison in acting.
Now, at twenty-six years old, Dale has lost the sports that he once called his own - his prides and joys, his purposes. It’s not common for someone in their mid-twenties to be able to play baseball in any way; short of joining a league, there’s no such thing as a pickup baseball game. Even pick up basketball is difficult for an adult with the bad knees and smoking habits and blown backs. Golf is really the only game for a mid-twenties Zyn abuser, but the greens fees are so expensive and snapped clubs are too tempting for such a costly destruction. Music is what’s communally available best for someone in their mid-twenties. Bands are always being formed. The Beatles didn’t become a band until everyone was over the age of twenty-two. One Direction was full of kids who met each other on a TV talent show in their early twenties. I’m not sure about either of those statements but, if they are true, they help make my point.
Being single in the city of Boston, Dale was quite accustomed to the sight of black T’s and ripped jeans.
Like a peacock expressing her feathers (I think it’s actually the male peacocks that are colorful but hang with me here), the women of Boston all strut their bests tuff within these uniforms, attracting men wearing hats with the word ‘Boston’ written upside down in the Red Sox font, or men wearing rope hats, or men wearing their dad hats backwards.
But, what Dale was not yet accustomed to was talent. He had been on a myriad of failed dates. One was with Olivia wear she got car sick and puked in their five-minute Uber. On another date, Erin puked because she was trying to be cool and take a shot of whiskey even though she cannot stand the fatherly smell of Jim Beam. A third date took place where Gia threw up on his penis after they made out while Dale had a Zyn in and Gia was swallowing nicotine spit, trying to seem unbothered and to not offend Dale.
And then he met Colleen. Colleen was originally from Tennessee and she was the only ten Dale saw that night even though she was more of an eight - within that sweet six to eight spot where the woman was ugly enough in middle school to become funny, but blossomed into that curvature that makes cartoon characters’ eyes pop out of their skulls.
Colleen was different. She asked out Dale, which shocked him, but she was adamant that they visit a bar with live music on this night. She didn’t mean to dance, she didn’t mean to sing, she simply meant to engage in the atmosphere that puts personal problems on the back burner when music can be looked towards as a center of distraction or discussion. Essentially, if the date went poorly, at least she’d be able to hear ‘Mr. Brightside’ - a song more rare than the green Dunkin’ Donuts in Brewster; it’s a one of a kind song that gets white people up and jiving.
But the date went perfectly! They learned that Nashville and Boston were similar in having colleges nicknamed ‘The Harvard of…’ and that each city as better than New York and they learned that each of them had a crush growing up on their local news reporter(s) - specifically the ones the stations send to withstand and cover hurricanes.
The date was coming to an end, people were shuffling out of the bar between bands, and Colleen got the idea of showing Dale something back at her apartment. Dale’s heart leapt from that bar in Boston all the way to the bar in Worcester that used to have a bartender who occasionally roofied rowdy customers to urge them and their friends to go home. His palms became sweaty, his eyes darted from telephone poles to the yellow streaks in the middle of the street to sidewalk cracks that could break a mother’s back to Colleen’s boobs (which she noticed) to just about anything that he could take in in his anxiety. He nearly threw up himself but was able to keep it down the whole walk back to Colleen’s North End apartment.
The walk was a quiet one. Dale was nervous that this girl was going to be a whole gimp-y freak in the bed and Colleen was nervous about bringing a potential murderer back to her apartment; that’s partially why she shared her location with her friends and gave them a time limit of 2:00 am to call the police for an APB with a description of Dale. But, no, none of that was necessary. The quiet walk ended with Colleen holding the door open for Dale to enter the apartment building before holding the door for him again to unlock her specific unit.
The apartment was larger than Dale initially expected from both the look of its door and Colleen’s description of her place. Her roommate had cleared out for the night (hid in her own bed) to give the new attempting couple a chance to better know each other, if you know what I mean. The apartment opened up to a living room on the right, a dining table front and center, and a kitchen behind half a wall to the left. Straight past the dining room table was the minor bedroom’s bathroom (which the minor bedroom was down the right side of the hall) and to the left was the master bedroom which came with an attached bathroom. Colleen had the minor bedroom. She often had to waddle in her towels after showers because she’d forget to bring a change of clothes into the bathroom.
Yes, I mean to better know about Colleen’s musical prowess. She owned two acoustic guitars - one which was her favorite item that she owned in her life (it came with a strap that she put more flare on than Jennifer Aniston’s uniform in Office Space) and another which she would use to kill mice if given the opportunity. She gave the mouse-y Grim Reaper scythe of a guitar to Dale to let him fondle the acoustic strings.
Colleen strapped herself into her own guitar, sat down on the couch, and proceeded to ask if Dale had any song requests. ‘Good Riddance’ by Green Day (including the “fuck” Billie Joe Armstrong mutters to his mistake at the beginning of the recording) was the first song to come to Dale’s mind and Colleen knew it like the back of her hand. She didn’t sing (that was her roommate’s area of expertise for their band), but she played the song to perfection which allowed Dale’s mind to fill in the lyrics anyway, even if they weren’t in her voice.
Dale was blown away and horned up after seeing her fingers work across the fretboard. He was infatuated with both Colleen and the instrument. His attraction was that of pulling him closer to the music, wishing he could share a body with those hands that so magically brought Green Day into this North End apartment. All Dale could think of was how he was going to be able to return the favor and play a song of his own. Having not picked up an instrument since his fifth grade recorder. She just made it look so easy and natural that it gave Dale confidence he could do the same.
So, Dale tried his best at the end of the standing ovation he gave to Colleen. The horrific chalkboard scratching that necked his fretboard and the inconsistent changes in tone made for an embarrassing scene that just would never end. He had no idea what he was doing, but kept and kept and kept going on the instrument, trying to find the chords to any song while making the three minute scene nearly unbearable for the tuned ears of Colleen.
Her stifled groans and averted eyes told Dale all he needed to know - he’d fumbled the bag. The date that had been going so swimmingly well was deflated and shot down dead by the crumpled musings of Dale’s guitar. He played the guitar so horribly that Colleen said for him to immediately get out of her apartment, to even take the guitar because she didn’t want anything capable of making that noise in her life. She’d just have to use a shoe to kill mice from now on or get another shitty guitar.
Dale became determined. A strange motivation washed over his body - like a recently relapsed returner to AA. He was going to learn how to play that fucking guitar whether it left him single for thew rest of his life or not. He updated his Hinge profile - a new prompt fell under his picture of him and his dog of ‘This year, I really want to’ to which he wrote ‘learn to play guitar.’ Dale’s bleached blonde hair, anti-Conservative viewpoints, and aloofness made for a cocktail of matches, led by musicians who were flocking to his messages one by one (all the way up to four) to help this new man learn to play the guitar.
Dale had silenced his phone for the duration of his time at Polar Park - completely locked in on Tanner Houck’s rehab start, Kristian Campbell getting himself right, and Jhostynxon Garcia’s name on the board so he could say “wow, it is real” like someone looking at The Coliseum for the first time.
After the fireworks and the handy defeat of the Rochester Red Wings, Dale pulled out his phone to find this message printed into his home screen: “can you play ‘Free Bird’?”
Of course, his answer had to be an honest ‘no.’ He’d didn’t even have the proper posture down pat yet. But, he made it appear as though he was working on ‘Free Bird,’ as if he had played since being rejected by Colleen. Well, Fran didn’t know about all this and Fran bought into the idea that Dale was quietly practicing his skills. He hadn’t even learned his sound hole from his tuning pegs.
But, Dale and Fran were able to find a time to jam in the park together with the date being under the guise of Fran teaching Dale some of what she knew and he didn’t. The pretense that Dale understood the difference between the strings was a lie. Dale really only knew that he now owned a guitar and he wanted to use his right hand to strum on it.
Hunched over in his seated criss-cross, Fran first corrected Dale’s posture before learning that Dale had lied, that he hadn’t known an E string from a B string from a C string and so on. His guitar was so out of tune that Stevie Wonder would have covered his ears. In this patch of grass, Fran learned more and more about how much Dale did not know about guitar.
She was able to properly tune his messed up guitar. She handed it back to him and began, like a boyfriend to his mini-golfing girlfriend, moving his fingers for him to form the shapes of different chords; here’s A-minor and then C and then E and so on.
Fran cut the date off early - before the top of the rosé even popped off. She made an excuse that there was something wrong with her apartment after she sneakily sent a text to her roommate instructing her to call in 10 minutes while Dale looked down the neck of his guitar at the mess of wires he couldn’t understand yet. The power of yet.
The date had been going well; they found out they enjoyed all of the opposite things, yet bantered with a negging nature that made it both playful and flirty. She was a Yankees fan, he likes the Red Sox. She was allergic to peanut butter, he was a fan of fluffernutters. And she could play guitar and he couldn’t. Dale had thought the playfulness had some legs but, from the train ride home, he saw that his once-blue messages to her had become green as he tried to express how much fun he had learning from her and how excited he was to meet again for another lesson.
A more developed guitar player entered the fray. Like Colleen and unlike Fran, she was in a band. Crystal was her name. She hailed from Hurricane, UT and she wore a bandana everyday on her head. She smokes American Spirits and she has a tattoo of Fiona from Shrek on her back; it was from a dare that she won $200 and a free tattoo for completing (that is to say, her friends paid for the Fiona abomination). She has other tattoos too on her upper arms, but none of them are to write home about the same way a Fiona tattoo is.
Dale still had no idea how to tune his guitar. His tuner was still in the mail. But now! he could tell you a G-string from a G-spot or gee whillikers. He knew all of the strings and had a solid strum going for himself. Now, Dale needed to learn both how to transition his fingers quickly from one chord to another and then how to read music.
Dale offered the same place in the same park as a spot for his date with Crystal, but she promptly shut this down, calling it “pedestrian.” As a miscreant, she was constantly looking for something new and exciting to rev her engines. She brought up the idea of playing guitar by the water and the two of them decided that the local quarry was going to be a great spot to jam. The only problem is that the quarry is in the woods.
Each of them risked the other being a serial killer and met at the base of the hike, strapped with their guitar cases. On the hike, Dale was able to, as the Gen-Zers will say, rizz up Crystal and got her to crack laughing smiles the whole way up the hill. He got her with the line “the ‘a’ in ‘acorn’ stands for ‘ass’ because they taste so bad. Don’t believe me? Try one!” It’s very easy to get Crystal to laugh.
Together, the two of them jokingly decided they’d be the best musical duo since Yoko Ono ruined that John Lennon with Chuck Berry concert. It’s a fun thing to pretend you’re ready for marriage on the first date. Just ask Post Malone in ‘Too Cool to Die.’ And they finally reached the quarry after deciding, between the two of them again, that the letter ‘q’ didn’t get the respect it deserved, forcing it to be a remora for the letter ‘u.’ Let ‘q’ speak! (which is what I yell at the TV when Murr is rambling on ‘Impractical Jokers’).
Dale knew some of the chords and which strings were which, he simply had no confidence in himself in that he would be able to move from chord to chord without looking, which he would need to do to read tablature and play simultaneously. That’s what Crystal was determined to teach him. To move from chord to chord is to song.
Again, like a mini-golfing date, Crystal held Dale’s hands and showed him how to effectively slide along the fretboard to reach the music meant for the certain song(s) he wanted to play. And he was doing it! He was succeeding and holding hands with Crystal. This couldn’t be going any better.
Dale got that feeling in his gut. You know, that feeling of when a date is going well so one starts thinking about where one is going to shoot rope at the end of the night - whether it will be into a crystal or into a palm. All he had to do was not act upon the feeling too early; he must allow the same feeling to develop in Crystal before doing anything physically flirtatious.
Dale leaned in to kiss Crystal as she moved his hands from the E-string to the B-string. Crystal’s back reclined her with such force the base of it cracked and her palm connected with Dale’s oncoming mouth, pushing his face nearly to the bottom of the quarry. Without another word, Crystal packed up her things and stormed back to her apartment (which is much nicer than Dale’s).
So, there sat Dale. Defeated, lonely, and a slightly better musician. Dale looked into the dirt for a long time, contemplating his stupidity; how he could be so dumb to act upon his penis instead of his mind. This was his shortest date to date. He collected his own things and trundled his way back down the hill. He scolded and motherfucked himself the entire way down and the whole ride back to his apartment.
From then on, Dale decided he was done with guitar players. He couldn’t bear to endure the same humiliation he had with Colleen, Fran, and now Crystal. He removed the musician aspect from his Hinge profile and replaced it with his hidden talent of balancing anything his arms could hold on the tip of his nose. That’s what he should have led with from the beginning.
Sitting in front of a YouTube video on tablature, Dale slowly began to realize: he knew how to play guitar. All songs are are chords re-ordered, but they’re all made from the same initial ingredients. Now that Dale could move from one note to the other or one chord to another, he was able to play any song so long as he gave it enough practice, enough practice that he could move his fingers blindfolded.
He may not have gotten a kiss, he may have been very off-putting and weird, and he may have disagreed with one girl’s statement (I won’t say who) that Adam Sandler would have been a better actor for the Bear Jew in Inglourious Basterds, but god dammit did Dale learn the basics of how to play guitar and it all came from a simple Hinge prompt and one complete disregard for human life in his initial and feeble attempt to jam with Colleen.
If you’re more motivated to now learn guitar or another new skill via dating, feel free to purchase a coffee here.
If you’re still scared to date because you don’t like meeting new people, try your best out there.
Poor Dale 😂😂