Hendrixian

Jimi Hendrix put me in a closet. A real closet. Not a metaphor for homosexuality and not a punishment, though by the time I left guitar lessons behind, I came to see the closet as a punishment. It was the strip-mall guitar shop’s closet, and I was there because the closet happened to be the only space my strip-mall guitar shop had to spare for lessons. 

Jimi Hendrix put me in that closet and I know I’m not the only child who went to a closet because of Mr. Hendrix.

Unfortunately, Jimi Hendrix was dead and gone by the time he inspired me to pick up a guitar. Not to say that, were he still with us, he would’ve been my teacher, but as a child signing up for guitar lessons, I sincerely hoped for and imagined a man who looked like Jimi Hendrix teaching me how to move my fingers in the arcane manners required to make music like Mr. Hendrix. Music that seemed to crackle up from Mother Earth herself through the soles of Jimi Hendrix’s feet and through his fingers to hum some deep primordial part of my soul. His was such a singular sound to me that I felt I had to get as close to Jimi Hendrix as I could in order to learn his music.

So, naturally if somewhat idiotically, I imagined my guitar teacher would be a black man. More specifically, I often imagined sitting next to a vibrant, young, beautiful, headbanded black man, as he gently showed me the ways of Hendrix. It was a child’s stupidity and some early racist thinking at work I imagine, but it seemed to me that black men were the only names worth remembering in the guitar world, otherwise I would’ve known more white names. At that time, the only name that registered for me as a guitarist’s name was Jimi Hendrix. And though I’d grown up on Eric Clapton, Willie Nelson, and Johnny Cash, and though I’d come to learn who those men were, I didn’t associate them with being guitarists. I associated them with singing songs. I imagined and hoped for a black guitar teacher because, somehow, I felt that black people were simply better at guitar than white people because again, at the time, I only knew who Jimi Hendrix was. Also, I had about six NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL MUSIC discs at home and I frequently skipped the white artists on those discs to get to what I felt was better music. Ludacris and Usher and Nelly and 50 cent. Those men. You know.

To elaborate further on my flawed kid-logic: I worried I’d never be black like Jimi Hendrix, though at the time the possibility wasn’t completely out of the question, still I worried I’d never be black like Jimi Hendrix and I wanted desperately to be like Jimi Hendrix, and so the next best thing to somehow becoming black was wishing for a teacher who looked like Jimi Hendrix. And wish I did.

Unfortunately for my wish (and fortunately in many other respects), I grew up in the idyllic suburbs of Mechanicsville, Virginia in a luxurious neighborhood called King’s Charter where I personally knew exactly one black boy who was not allowed to leave his house unless his parents knew exactly whom he was with, what he was doing, why he was doing it, where he was doing it, and when he was to be expected home--a protocol that I didn’t fully understand at the time--suffice to say, I grew up in a predominantly white area, and so I got a white guitar teacher who would prove to be nothing like the Hendrixian teacher I wished for.

My guitar teacher was a bald, tattooed, white man in his thirties whose name I’ve since forgotten because he was, by far and away, the worst teacher I’ve yet to have in my life. At least, he was the worst teacher who claimed the title of “teacher.” I’ve had plenty worse teachers, though they never claimed to be teachers. I’ll share the most glaring proof of my guitar teacher’s failure, though there were many proofs in our short-lived relationship:

I was young when I started guitar lessons. Pre-teenage type young, so I was still wrapping my mind around the Standard American English Alphabet and Grammar and so was actively enrolled in classes like “English” and “Spelling” and “Grammar”. Basic stuff but it was still stuff I needed to learn and had yet to fully grasp.

On top of learning my native language, learning the guitar meant learning a whole new alphabet and grammar: the alphabet of musical notation and the grammar of composition. Anyone who’s tried to do this can tell you it’s not exactly intuitive to a young mind and it can be difficult to grasp without certain mnemonic tricks. It’s especially counterintuitive if all you’ve ever known is ABCDEFGHIJK...and so on. 

This new alphabet I endeavored to learn in that little closet with that little man was, and still is, “EADGBE” in descending order from the top string to the bottom string if you’re holding a guitar right-side-up in your lap. And those are just the untouched, or what we call “open” strings. By placing my fingers at certain intervals on certain strings, I could learn to express the entirety of the musical alphabet and start to create musical grammar, though at the time I struggled mightily with learning the simple alphabet of the open strings.

My inability to wrap my mind around this completely new alphabet upset my teacher. One particular lesson, we sat reviewing this new alphabet over and over again, with him first plucking a string and me then incorrectly guessing “F” or “J” which weren’t even options but in my nervousness seemed like perfectly reasonable guesses. After a few such plucks and a few more under-his-breath “fucks” we tried a different method. 

My guitar teacher produced a piece of paper from beneath his folding chair and scrawled “E A D G B E” in large frustrated capitals across the top of the page. He then had me rewrite “E A D G B E” twenty times while he tapped his foot and huffed at my slow handwriting. Then, he took the paper from me and plucked his string again in a “hurry up and get it” type of way.

“H” I said, because writing six letters twenty times over while a grown man huffs and puffs next to me was, somehow, astoundingly, an ineffective learning methodology for me.

He plucked another string like he was poking The Devil in the eye. “A” I said.

“Jesus Christ,” he blurted, “Are you fucking retarded or something?”

My stomach sank. I didn’t know if I was “fucking retarded or something.” I was a child who was still learning English. I had a few differently-abled friends whose houses I went to and whose birthdays I celebrated who I imagined didn’t think of themselves as “retarded” though that’s the name the world would have them use. I loved my “retarded” friends and I already knew I didn’t like that term because of the way it was used by my adolescent peers to poke holes in my confidence. However, if “retarded” was the way the world named my friends, then maybe that’s what I was too. I wasn’t too sure at the moment and I wasn’t prepared to confront my mental abilities when I went into the closet that day. Hot tears pooled in my eyes. In the quiet that fell after my guitar teacher snapped at me, I was frustrated, uncertain, and realizing I was probably “fucking retarded or something.”

My guitar teacher felt the tearful silence and, to his credit, decided to ditch the alphabet for the day and instead teach me the tablature for “Purple Haze.” He didn’t apologize. He didn’t soften. He just decided to try something else. And in case you’re wondering, “tablature” is a musical alphabet that lets someone who may or may not be “fucking retarded or something” learn to play music without learning the exact pitch of a song. To be clear, tablature was an option all along. We could’ve simply played Hendrix tabs and had a good time. Instead, this little man decided to belittle me, a child, into learning a new alpahbet.

I lost interest in learning the guitar shortly after this lesson. Maybe if I was made of sterner stuff, I would’ve continued lessons just to spite this bald white tattooed man who was so far from my loving Hendrixian ideal. However, I find it difficult to motivate myself with hate. I think that’s probably true for most people. I think it’s rare to be truly hateful. Fearful, yes. Ignorant, absolutely. Loving, sure why not? Maybe he snapped at me because he was afraid he wasn’t a good teacher. Maybe he snapped at me because he loved the guitar so much that he just wanted to get on with teaching me the fun stuff. Maybe he snapped at me because he had a show to go to that night and was ready for our lesson to wrap. I don’t know what motivated him, but I know he didn’t hate me. He just didn’t know how to love me like I imagined my Hendrixian guitar teacher might. He didn’t love me the way I loved the beautiful, black, Hendrixian guitar teacher of my dreams.