Good Enough to Rock and Roll

by Danny Anderson

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Burls threw water over his face and ruffled the tight curls of his thick hair like pigeons did in the fountain in Washington Square Park. In his first week at NYU, he learned how just being in the city slickens you with a creeping layer of grime. It wasn’t always visible, but the dirt was always there, thickening as it seeped over his skin. He could feel it, spreading over him. And when he thought of how his mother was offended by the sight of sweat and dirt, he realized he was starting to like the grit that New York licked his body with.

Still, he liked to step into the streets a little fresh.

He looked at himself in the mirror, figured he could live with the minor acne on his left cheek, and nodded. Behind his reflection, he saw his acoustic guitar, a cheap Kay he picked up when he moved into the dorm two weeks earlier. His friends in Delaware would never have imagined him swinging an axe. Pudgy, rich boys didn’t play guitars, they faked their way through sax solos in the school jazz band. And they certainly didn’t go to NYU for their economics degree. But here he was doing both, defying expectations.

Everyone here called him Burls; that much he made sure of. Not like back in Delaware where his friends would draw out his full legal name, Burleson Addison Winchester, exaggerating it for cheap comic effect and dramatically tacking on “the third” at the end, as if his family legacy was something he could do anything about.

But New York was a new start and he began with his name. Here he was Burls and no one knew any different. And even if they did, it wouldn’t matter anyway as his new friends had family names that stretched out four and five generations deep.

Burls swaggered through the dorm’s halls with his Kay slung over his shoulder, seeking acknowledgement from his new social circle with a series of head nods, making mental notes of the new faces that reciprocated.

He hurled himself out into the street and breathed in deeply. September already felt cooler than August.

Burls quickly developed one habit in New York. He could not get enough of Washington Square. The chaotic bustle of liberated people fed his soul and triggered something in his imagination about what he wanted New York to be. On a sunny afternoon, there were people blazing, sunbathing, juggling, pounding calf skins in drum circles, making student films, feeding birds, and, of course, playing guitars, most even cheaper than his Kay.

Another habit was to not take West 4th into the park, even though it was the most efficient path. He liked to go up to Waverly and across. Then he would stand in front of the arch, which framed the mad spectacle of the Washington Square carnival for his Delaware eyes. He let it wash over him with the rest of the city’s exhilarating filth. Then he walked through the arch, reborn, and joined the rest of the freaks. In the Square, there wasn’t a trace of Burleson left. That chunk was annihilated and it wasn’t even midterm yet.

On the other side of George Washington’s arch, his ears picked up a sound. It was the fuzzy distortion of a small, battery-powered amp rasping out a riff desperately running behind a 12-bar blues. He followed the sound to the east side of the fountain, where he saw a thin man hunched over a Telecaster knock-off with chipping, blue paint and a dingy, white pickguard. No strap.

Burls thought that the man resembled his guitar in important ways. He guessed he was in his early thirties, but he somehow looked too beaten up to be that age. He had a long, broken nose that had been left un-straightened and his brown beard was thin and patchy, like the chipped paint on his starter guitar. As he moved in for a closer look, he saw that the man’s guitar strings were uncut, wriggling frantically above the instrument’s head. The angular chaos of his strings was mirrored by the player’s hair, which, though cut short, was still wild and untamed and it shot out from his head.

The flailing strings and wild hair darted around the player in quick, jerky movements that were a hazard to anyone sitting too close. So no one did. The cement ring around the fountain was jammed tight with New Yorkers, except for the five feet on either side of this mad axe thrower.

The city accepted and ignored his madness, as it always does.

Burls watched him flail and heard a rudimentary talent in the pentatonic scale he fired into the city’s soundscape. He was playing an extended solo for a band that wasn’t there, though he seemed completely unconcerned about their absence. Burls listened to the solo and imagined drums, bass, and rhythm guitars backing this slayer up in some invisible, dark dimension. He nodded along, grasping at admiration for the spectacle.

In mid-shred, the music stopped and the player spoke.

“You play, man?”

Right up to this instant, Burls was unaware the man even noticed him, such was the rapture of his own frenzy. “Yea, I play a little.”

“You know any blues?”

“Well…”

“Can you lay out a twelve-bar blues?”

“Yea I can do that.”

“Well sit down and let’s rock.”

Burls sat at the man’s right, away from the menacing swings of the guitar’s wild neck. The maniac wielded it like a mace on a medieval battlefield.

“We in tune?” the man asked.

Burls was in tune according to the electric tuner he bought, but it left him nowhere near the tuning of this stranger’s battered, blue electric. He tightened his strings to match the pitch of his new soloist’s instrument and cringed with every twist he wrenched into the knobs. Surely his strings would break under this pressure. Or would the Kay’s neck crack first?

“Alright, baby. That sounds good enough to rock and roll.” The player lusted for his muse and a half-turn of a D-string wasn’t going to make a difference to him.

Burls nodded and began plucking the twelve-bar in C that he’d learned the night he bought his guitar. The first notes, he hit lightly. It was the first time he’d played with another person and he had to pick through his self-awareness. The player nodded, squinted, and bit into the left side of his lower lip. In the middle of the third bar, he found his on-ramp and his fingers ran through the scales he knew. By the end of the first set of bars, he was bending the E and B strings (or whatever ethereal notes they were tuned to) and losing himself in the wilderness of his blues.

For the suburban freshman, it was a New York dream. Burls kept his rhythmic pattern steady and watched his partner’s face contort and his head bob and weave on the chord changes. He was absorbed into the player’s art and Burls had finally taken shape in the void left by Burleson.

After forty-eight bars of blues, the player had run through his repertoire and brought their coupling to its climax.

“Brother that was sweet,” the player said.

“You can really run it up. Down too,” Burls replied.

“It helps to have someone to play to man. Rock and Roll is the art of the people, brother. You gotta find people. What’s your name?” he finally asked.

“My name’s Burls.”

“What? Burls, you say? Burls?”

“Yea, Burls.”

“What is that? Short for something?”

“Ah…I don’t know. It’s just Burls.”

“Whatever brother. Burls it is. You got a cigarette?”

“No, I don’t smoke.”

“Man, we gotta do something about that. Can’t rock and roll without your smokes.”

The player circled the fountain, spotted a fellow smoker, and talked his way into a free cig. By the time he got back to Burls, he was already tapping away the first of the ash.

“My name’s Chuck, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you, Chuck. How long you been playing?”

“Ah man, me and music go way back. Way back. You from the city?”

Burls lowered, then lightly shook, his head.

“I grew up here. I grew up in clubs watching bands, man. You see the Grammys the other night?”

Burls made a non-committal gesture.

“Man the Grammys are bullshit, man. This Hanson bullshit, man. I know exactly what happened there. Some suit in an office said go find me three little blond kids and we’ll rob everyone blind, you know what I mean? That’s all bullshit. That ain’t real.”

Chuck was asking questions but Burls never felt like he was supposed to answer them. All the world was Chuck’s stage, he was learning.

“I seen the real thing, Burls, let me tell you. I saw the Beastie Boys in some little bar in the East Village back when they were a hardcore band, man. That was powerful. Everything you hear on the radio is bullshit.”

Chuck was pacing around, holding his chipping blue guitar in one hand and sucking down his purloined cigarette with the other. The cable between the axe and its amp rolled and bounced over the plaza cement as it futilely followed him, helpless.

“You’re pretty charged up about the Grammys man,” Burls said.

Chuck stopped, flicked the cigarette carcass into the fountain and pointed a long, bony finger at him.

“Listen man, there’s nothing more important than music. If you don’t push back on all the bullshit, it will drown you, Burls. Don’t ever forget that. Learn something from me, brother. You got those twelve bars down, son. Follow that to the truth. It will never let you down. It will never leave you wanting.”

It was a speech he’d either given a thousand times or had waited years to finally deliver. When he finished, he nodded and grinned, satisfied with himself.

“Woo! Baby! What a day!” he shouted to a group of tourists walking by.

Burls smiled and found himself jealous of Chuck’s reckless freedom.

“You’re in a good mood, Chuck,” he told him.

“Best day of my life, brother. Best day of my life.”

“What you meet a girl or something?”

Chuck shook his head.

“Nah, man. I quit my job today.” Chuck was looking somewhere far away, uptown, galaxies past Burls. “Gonna concentrate on music full time now. Never felt so free in my life, man.”

“Oh man, congrats,” Burls said. “What did you do?”

“I was a public school teacher, brother. Caught up in all that crap. Now I get to make music. Full time. No obstacles, no bullshit.”

Burls had had fun jamming with Chuck but was dubious about his career prospects.

“Got any gigs lined up yet?”

“Hey man I just quit my job today, remember? Give me time. It’ll happen. Plus all the clubs want you to have a whole band already formed with a dedicated fan base to boot. Like you’re supposed to do their work for ’em. You ever try and find a bass player in this town?”

“No,” Burls could say, truthfully.

“I see this dude whacking the bass one night and he was awesome. A real rock and roller. I asked him if he wanted to play a gig with me sometime. He says his minimum fee is 400 bucks. Can you believe that? I ain’t gonna make 400 on the whole gig and I’m supposed to give it all to him?”

Eventually, Burls got Chuck to jam on one more set, which sounded much like their first. He wasn’t sure if it was his limitations as a rhythm player or Chuck’s dependence on the same well-trod riffs. He figured it was both. After that, they parted ways, with the promise to meet up again and jam and Burls would look for Chuck’s posters sometime when he finally started playing gigs.

When he left, he didn’t go back through the arch. Burls cut through the trees and headed straight for West 4th.

A mere freshman again, he put his guitar in his closet that day and didn’t pull it out much after that, not for a while. He would strum that guitar for the rest of his life but never got much beyond the twelve-bar blues in C that he’d mastered that day in the park with Chuck.

He found school came easier to him the more he stayed away from Washington Square Park. One day, an Econ prof called him Burleson and he didn’t bother to correct him. His given name quickly caught on with his New York friends, but it didn’t weigh him down anymore.

One dark November day right before Thanksgiving break, Burleson had to go out in the rain to buy a bottle of Olive Oil to take home to his mother in Delaware. There was a little shop on W. 6. His mother loved cooking with artisanal ingredients and he wanted her to know that New York wasn’t ruining him after all, though for a while he tried hard to let it.

The rain was cold and thick and Burleson cut through the trees of Washington Square, seeking shelter. Under a pin oak, he shook the water from his freshly trimmed hair and wrung out his jacket sleeves. He heard the fuzzy, tuneless distortion of a familiar amp coming from the fountain.

Burleson nudged closer but stayed inside the tree line. He peeked around an old, thick tree and saw Chuck flailing his dying, blue axe around in the pouring rain. He wore a torn length of plastic over his head, cut into a makeshift rain poncho and Burleson had never seen a man so alone. Even the pigeons had abandoned him.