Guitar Shopping
with enough juice to jump-start a heart . . . back to the Bo Diddley beat . . . We don’t amp ourselves up to sing the body electric . . .
The salesman with tattooed arms
takes my history as if he’s a doctor-
Why am I here today? Why do I want
a new axe? What sound am I looking for?
His jaw drops when I tell him I play Death
Metal, but he’s cool when he sees my
clipped nails and the tough callous
on my fingertips. He swings down
an Ibanez Metal Machine, plugs in
to a Marshall stack, and while my hand
spiders up and down the fretboard,
he wants me to notice the action,
the sustain, the way the Seymour
Duncan custom pickups scream.
When I hang it up, he grabs a purple
Menace and laughs when he plays
a riff from “Purple Haze.” As I listen,
I think about my band in Medicine’s
Goth Metal Show, how we never let loose
like this with our instruments, even when
we score a Medtronic LIFEPAK
with enough juice to jump-start a heart
back to the Bo Diddley beat. We don’t
amp ourselves up to sing the body
electric, and in our fluorescent music hall
we turn it down and go monotone when
we ask, “Surgery or stents? Radiation
or chemo?” And I wonder what I can learn
from this salesman shredding a Dean
Dimebag Dime O Flame, eyes closed,
legs splayed, head tilted toward the stars,
asking me have I decided, asking me
to choose as if my life depends on it.
