I remember a time when I made friends just standing in line waiting to go into the cafeteria for lunch at my small Christian university. Granted we were kind’a trapped on campus with only one other spot to catch lunch, so the chances of running into the same people day-after-day for the 14-week semesters was pretty high. This was also an era decades before the advent of social media and hand-held devices, so you were more or less “forced” to talk to the people around you. Obviously, things have changed substantially since then. 

But as a lifelong techy, who has tended to adopt whatever was happening in the tech world, I would hardly blame social media or tech for this loneliness epidemic. If anything it’s just made the cycles of connection and silence much more obvious. I mean, in college relationships, marriages and families seemed to emerge just from standing in those damn lines for the cafeteria or bookstore (especially at the beginning of any semester). But then toward the end of college, folks paired off or moved back home or just moved away and those bonds slipped away. It’s just a cycle and whomever you are going to spend time with or make connections with is going to be dependent on where you go after college.

I put off having to deal with any of this by pursuing several college degrees in a row. But eventually I had to grow up, get a job, figure out where I was going to live and wonder where everyone went on those lonely weekend evenings when I wasn’t overwhelmed with work. It was surprising how quickly the college buddies I’d made attending four different universities seemed to disappear. I had managed to reconnect with a few high school friends, thanks to a 10-year reunion, but none of us lived in the same city and this was still in an era when phone calls beyond one’s city were charged by the minute. So, we were left with having to maintain connections via letters sent by the US postal service. Crazy. Fortunately, I had made casual friends at work and at the gym, but by definition they were extremely transitory, which made me all the more dependent on the little slips of paper that would arrive in my mailbox every few weeks or so. Cycles of connection and silence, not exactly a healthy situation but I was normally so busy that I didn’t really notice. I didn’t notice, but the thing is that all of this can all change in an instant.

It was right in the middle of one of those lulls, in the late 1990s, when I was staying busy with work and had resolved myself that the three or four friends whom I was corresponding with would contact me when their own busy lives would permit and this wasn’t a bad thing. It was actually a pretty good day and I was working at my PC at home. I’d gotten back into my aerobics classes and they usually left me pretty charged up emotionally, idea-wise, and physically when I got home. So I was plowing through the current pile of papers on my desk. And when I work I usually have the stereo blasting and whenever I’m so moved by the music, I usually push away from the table and take my guitar, which is a foot or two way, and play along with the music. So it was this kind of evening. I was in pretty good spirits, making progress with the papers, enjoying the evening, such as it was. I’d just finished plucking along with the music. I leaned my guitar up against the edge of my couch and got up to use the restroom. It was that proverbial moment when I thought, “hmmm, maybe I shouldn’t leave the guitar propped up this way and should put in on its stand.” I took no more than three steps when I heard this “whoosh, CRACK!” And turned to see the guitar lying on its face in the center of the room. The crack was a foreboding sound.

When I reached down to look, my friend and constant companion for the past 25-years, had a huge gash just at the top of the neck near the tuning keys and the pull of the strings was threatening to pull the head right off. Damn. I felt stupid and mad all in the same moment. A minutes carelessness, and this tranquil evening was split open just like my nearly decapitated friend. Damn, I couldn’t afford to replace the thing. What the hell?! Before computers, longer and more consistent than any relationship, my sounding board, my companion and social shield through many dark nights at and after college, from Washington State performing an impromptu concert for half dozen to Costa Mesa performing before several thousand… and more importantly, having retired from that public commotion, in these lonely quiet times that no one else ever hears or sees, it’s given me solace and built a bridge to happier more contented times. A year before, after some time in storage, I’d pulled it out of it’s case to discover a similar injury. It spent over a month in the guitar shop and I was left to wonder if it couldn’t be healed a second time from this same injury.

The mind reels. In the 1970s mom got angry with me when I came home from Laguna Beach with this guitar. A bit later, when I complained about not having a car she chided me saying, why don’t I just get on the guitar and ride away. But then she couldn’t know how much that expensive piece of wood meant to me. It put up with my youthful angst and muddled attempts at marriage and early adulthood. It was there when lovers drove away in the middle of the night and I couldn’t quite understand what went wrong. It was there in Ventura when my first live-in girlfriend and I watched the sun set over the beach on our first vacation together. It was there in those brief moments when I played in a short-lived band, before everyone got too busy with their lives. 

It all ended in a split second. I was forced to loosen and then remove all its strings so that the head wouldn’t snap off. For days, maybe weeks, it sat in the corner, mute, helpless and useless to me. I’d still play the stereo but I felt like I didn’t have arms anymore. I’d hear something and then look at my fallen friend, unable to help, unable to bridge the gap.

I’ve never been one to give pet names to inanimate objects (computers, guitars, favorite body parts…). But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t real to me. The loss is there. I hesitated just moving on (even if it weren’t a financial thing). I couldn’t toss the thing in the dumpster. But I was not sure what to do. In the bigger world of things this event, this passing, did not register. But it did for me. JBB

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Tags: friendships, Joe Bustillos short stories, short stories, The life of things, writing projects

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