THREE

I ran long streaks of paint across the boards with a full brush then jammed it into the alligatored surface.  Painters long before me had done the same, and a thirsty old house is the best place to prop up a ladder and have a self chat.  This old house should have never been solid white.  The trim, the siding, the rails, boxes, and the columns, all the same white.  Every detail was washed away until it was another big old house on Scott Street.

I climbed back down the ladder, thinking about walking to KenJo on the corner.  Paint work goes better with a buzz on peanut butter crackers and Coke Zero.  I backed up to the street and looked at the house.  My baggy green hiking pants were covered in years of paint.  I’d claimed Ashley’s old Kentucky hoodie and wore my most destroyed tennis shoes.  My stringy hair was chewed up and I had a patchy beard that looked very crappy.  When we’d bought the place down the street I’d been a clean cut banker.  Cars drizzled past every now and again, never recognizing a neighbor on another’s ladder.

I walked away from the house, satisfied.  The colors were good.  Painting is a job that lets you know where you stand.  The pay is better than any honest day’s songwriting.  It’s simple work and easy to explain.  I’ve never heard of a painter memorizing an elevator speech.  “I give dignity and redemption to the people I serve so that their goals of colorful home ownership may become a reality.”

No way.  A paint job describes itself.  Good finish or not.  And a due paint job doesn’t require much of a sell.  Somebody needs a paint job like they need to heal a blister.  People need songwriters like they need fresh presidential candidates.

I walked away, quipping to an imaginary person.  “I paint houses.  And write a few songs.”

The Kenjo was just about a block.

“Say, were you one of the ten folks at the open mic in Happy Holler last Tuesday night?  It was a little dark in there and I get blinded by stage lights.  It causes me trouble, locking the muscles above and below the shoulders and mostly at the throat.  Anyways, I paint houses.  And I have CDs for sale, but I’ll give you two.”

A string of Christmas bells smacked the glass behind me and I stepped out onto the pavement. I squinted up at the sun and held the Coke Zero to my chin.  I gave it a cush, followed by a long pull.  There was an idling Nissan pickup in front of me.  A homeless guy was speaking through the window.  The corner is shared with a foam and fabric outlet and a chain linked vacant lot.  A few tall churches and warehouses stood between the Kenjo’s view of downtown.  I-40 ran clogged and heavy the way a cigarette feels too soon after one just before.  Like a garage full of boxes, Knoxville is a city that holds its secrets from the road.

The other day I was pressing a C chord on a pawnshop guitar.  It smelled like nickels and dust.  I held the neck loosely and felt the balance on my knee.  I listened, my ear tuned more for songs than tone.  The guitar had only four strings laying slack on the fretboard, the wood grungy and metal frets turning green.  I wiped the dust and ran my hand along the curves.  I gave it a little tap on the laminate top which wasn’t even wood.  There was no reason to want this guitar.  The tuning pegs were stiff, plastic, and yellowed.

I traded a piano tuner and a microphone to get the guitar.  It was rickety, yes desperately rickety.  But it resonated something actual.  In that hopeless condition, unnoticeably common, inferior even upon creation, the busted old thing sang the most familiar C chord I’d ever heard.  It was a small cry, lost in the shelves of a pawnshop among the used up stories of fortitude and trial and cutting losses and submission.  No one finds themselves in a pawnshop in control of a situation.  I found a way and a reason to get that guitar.  I could redeem what someone could not, or had thrown away, had maybe lost or probably sacrificed.  Not just redeem it, but want it that way.

Then soon enough you have to stand behind that busted guitar, having given yourself a shine, slipping on your best boots, and hearing that the camera is cutting to you in “Five…four…three…“

He points at you.  Then quiet.

You come in strumming on a live local program, the morning’s brushes still wet in their cut buckets, the lids slid over just to the handle.  And you sing:

“I don’t write good pop songs.  They don’t come to my mind.  Got married too young for break up tunes and I worked at a bank for a time.”