Sexual Danger


... was in the air when she talked to her musician friend at Uncle Ted's Garage. "Are you alright with these guitars?" he asked. I retreated snarling into the midnight hour with the Seagull. "Suspicious minds are talking," I said. "Trying to tear us apart. They say my love is wrong. They don't know what love is."

So I went to my therapist. "I'm enjoying the guitar, and back when I was just banging on it with this stupid, automatic rhythm ... that was a fragment but I'm upset ... I searched around to get my fingers in the right place, and well, there was just no sensitivity in my fingers."

Karlos: "I cannot help but notice a pattern in your predicates, Dan. To paraphrase what I hear you saying to me, 'I was enjoying banging the guitar with rhythm, the sensitivity in my fingers searched the right place, and well there was just no automatic around, stupid.'"

"Karlos, you are distorting what I said. The point I was trying to make is that it was really hard for me to learn to play because I started when I was already old. What Clay told me to try and give me the idea of what I was doing wrong was, 'Think of it like a beautiful woman.' So that's what I started to do."

Karlos: "This is fine as a metaphor, Daniel. And I'm sure Linda would have no problem at all with your developing a sensitivity, a simpatico, if you please, with finely made objects which have voice as well as shape and texture." I noticed that his left hand was unconsciously pointing to his head. "But you must realize that dressing the guitar in fetish clothing suggests, er, some deeper disturbance ..."


"It was tasteful," I protested. "It was just an aesthetic enhancement of the rosette."

Karlos: "You left the strings naked over the sound hole?"

"Yes," I whispered.

Karlos: "I can't help you until you're ready to admit to yourself that you have a problem. It's common for a man to project his anima into a musical instrument, because she expresses back his emotion directly." He leaned forward and his voice changed. "But before you go down that long, lonesome highway, where your loved ones are just lyrics in a lonesome ballad, take a look around you."

He dramatically threw open the drapes, so that I was looking out on the sidewalk along Folsom Street.



At three separate points on the visual field there were men with guitars. One was playing in front of a laundromat, his hat on the sidewalk. He had a week's growth of whiskers and a thin, reedy voice. Nobody seemed to pay him any attention.

Another man was walking along with a gig bag on his back, casting furtive glances all around himself. He seemed to be in some kind of altered state, and his clothing was ill fitting and dirty.

And finally there was the man on the billboard, the King himself, stopping time and climbing the charts again, singing "That's All Right."


Karlos: "Don't make a jackal of yourself. Take your sick projections off this guitar and let it express ..."

"Her."

"I beg your pardon?"

"You said 'it.' She doesn't like that."

" ... let .. her ... express herself with the innocence we as men should accord to the world of objects. Except of course for fetish objects in which case we as men can store our erotic energy in them and retrieve it whenever we damned well please.



"That's one hundred and sixty dollars, your hour is up."

"You're worth it, Karlos. You keep me sane, man."

"Don't actually touch me, please."

"Of course not, there would be no object in it ..."

Posted: Tue - July 13, 2004 at 09:32 PM