Nicki

For the last year or so I have dedicated many hours to learning how to play a couple of guitars: an electric Fender Stratocaster, and an acoustic Martin D-15. Each is a very nice instrument, though neither was expensive. And neither, when all is said and done, sounds especially good when I try to play.

In a college course on playwriting, we often discussed what makes a play "good." The answer is certainly subjective. One day we also discussed the question of what happens when writers finally realize that they are not especially good at their craft? At what point, exactly, should they give up and find a corporate job?

It happens. Or, maybe it should happen. I don't know.

In a more recent college course at a local junior college, a course in which we got to play our guitars and even learn some things, I met a woman who caught the short end of many sticks physically. Her teeth were bad, almost deformed somehow; she was large without trying to be. She had assorted ailments that required medication, and she once told me she suffered from some kind of learning difficulties that qualified her for disability. In the time I knew her, she broke one ankle and wrenched a knee. On several nights after class I helped her carry her assorted bags--she always had at least one bag plus a backpack--and guitars across campus as she limped to the light-rail station. She didn't have a car. She told me many things: problems with people she lived with, problems with her family, how she had to use a credit card to pay for her mother's funeral because nobody else would pay and was still trying to pay things off.  I often wonder why people--often people I barely know--share such things with me.

This woman...wait: her name is Nicki. Let's call her that. Nicki was majoring in music, and she knew the chords and the theory and the techniques quite well. She would try to help me figure things out, if I asked, which I thought was nice. She had plans of getting her B.A. in music, and then teaching. She loved jazz, and she knew the jazz chords. To get into the music program at the university she wanted to attend, she had to audition. The week before her audition, I wished her luck. Our class was at night, and her audition was during the same day. As we sat in the hallway before class started, waiting for the instructor to unlock the door, Nicki was on the phone. She didn't seem happy. When she hung up, I asked her how her days had gone. And, because I'd asked, she told me that she'd blown the audition, that she'd been told, basically, that maybe she could try again in a year or so. She was 35 at the time.

What do you say to someone whose singular dream is liquified in the span of a 20-minute audition? Nicki had worked and worked to get to that spot, and I didn't have anything especially wise to tell her. I considered her large body, the poor teeth, the unseen other ailments, and everything that must have burdened her as much as the bags and guitars she schlepped on buses and light-rail trains as she worked her way from her apartment and to 2 junior colleges. I wanted to tell her that things would work out, but that kind of advice has no value so close to a time when things did not work out.

Tonight, trying to work the Martin through what I'm sure is an easy 36-bar song, I thought of Nicki, wondered what she's up to. And I wonder if writers who never sell anything and musicians who never pass auditions every really give up. I know that when I write--when I really sit down and write something born from imagination and not something corporate--I am quite happy.  The characters' voices are always there, and we can have grand conversations. And, to a lesser extent, when I sit down with the Fender or the Martin, the IV chord is always there, just where it is supposed to be no matter the baggage I've carried throughout the day.