“You’re not real!” I shouted. “You’re not real! It’s all a bunch of tricks! Damn you, Jesus! Damn you, Jesus! Damn you, damn you, damn you, Jesus!”

I ran up the stairs, crying so hard I could barely see.

 • • •

We never did get another minister, as it turned out. Some of the local padres tried to take up the slack, but attendance dropped to almost nothing, and by my senior year of high school, our church was locked and shuttered. It didn’t matter to me. My belief had ended. I have no idea what happened to Peaceable Lake and Electric Jesus. The next time I went into the downstairs MYF room in the parsonage—this was a great many years later—it was completely empty. As empty as heaven.

IV

Two Guitars. Chrome Roses. Skytop Lightning.

When we look back, we think our lives form patterns; every event starts to look logical, as if something—or Someone—has mapped out all our steps (and missteps). Take the foul-mouthed retiree who unknowingly ordained the job I worked at for twenty-five years. Do you call that fate or just happenstance? I don’t know. How can I? I wasn’t even there on the night when Hector the Barber went looking for his old Silvertone guitar. Once upon a time, I would have said we choose our paths at random: this happened, then that, hence the other. Now I know better.

There are forces.

 • • •

In 1963, before the Beatles burst on the scene, a brief but powerful infatuation with folk music gripped America. The TV show that came along at the right time to capitalize on the craze was Hootenanny, featuring such Caucasian interpreters of the black experience as the Chad Mitchell Trio and the New Christy Minstrels. (Perceived commie Caucasians like Pete Seeger and Joan Baez were not invited to perform.) My brother Conrad was best friends with Billy Paquette’s older brother, Ronnie, and they watched The Hoot, as they called it, every Saturday night at the Paquettes’ house.

At that time, Ronnie and Billy’s grandfather lived with the Paquettes. He was known as Hector the Barber because that had been his trade for almost fifty years, although it was hard to visualize him in the role; barbers, like bartenders, are supposed to be pleasantly chatty types, and Hector the Barber rarely said anything. He just sat in the living room, tipping capfuls of bourbon whiskey into his coffee and smoking Tiparillos. The smell of them permeated the whole house. When he did talk, his discourse was peppered with profanity.

He liked Hootenanny, though, and always watched it with Con and Ronnie. One night, after some white boy sang something about how his baby left him and he felt so sad, Hector the Barber snorted and said, “Shit, boys, that ain’t the blues.”

“What do you mean, Grampa?” Ronnie asked.

“Blues is mean music. That boy sounded like he just peed the bed and he’s afraid his mama might find out.”

The boys laughed at this, partly out of delight, partly in amazement that Hector was actually something of a music critic.

“You wait,” he said, and slowly mounted the stairs, yanking himself along by the banister with one gnarled hand. He was gone so long the boys had almost forgotten about him when Hector came back down carrying a beat-up Silvertone guitar by the neck. Its body was scuffed and held together with a hank of frayed hayrope. The tuning keys were crooked. He sat down with a grunt and a fart, and hauled the guitar onto his bony knees.

“Shut that shit off,” he said.

Ronnie did so—that week’s hoot was almost over, anyway. “I didn’t know you played, Grampa,” he said.

“Ain’t in years,” Hector said. “Put it away when the arthritis started to bite. I don’t know if I can even tune the bitch anymore.”

“Language, Dad,” Mrs. Paquette called from the kitchen.

Hector the Barber paid no attention to her; unless he needed her to pass the mashed potatoes, he rarely did. He tuned the guitar slowly, muttering curses under his breath, then played a chord that actually sounded a bit like music. “You could tell it was still off,” Con said when he told me the story later, “but it was pretty cool, anyway.”

“Wow!” Ronnie said. “Which chord is that, Grampa?”

“E. All this shit starts with E. But wait, you ain’t heard nothing yet. Lemme see if I can remember how this whoremaster goes.”

From the kitchen: “Language, Dad.”

He paid no more mind this time, only began to strum the old guitar, using one horny, nicotine-yellowed fingernail as a pick. He was slow at first, muttering more unapproved language under his breath, but then he picked up a steady, chugging rhythm that made the boys glance at each other in amazement. His fingers slid up and down the fretboard, clumsily at first, then—as the old memory synapses guttered back to life—a little more smoothly: B to A to G and back home to E. It’s a progression I’ve played a hundred thousand times, although in 1963 I wouldn’t have known an E chord from a spinal cord.

In a high, wailing voice utterly unlike the one he spoke in (when he did speak), Ronnie’s grandpa sang: “Why don’t you drop down, darlin, let your daddy see . . . you got somethin, darlin, keep on worryin me . . .”

Mrs. Paquette came in from the kitchen, drying her hands on a dishtowel and looking as if she’d seen some exotic bird—an ostrich or an emu, say—strutting down the middle of Route 9. Billy and little Rhonda Paquette, who could have been no more than five, came halfway down the stairs, leaning over the railing and goggling at the old man.

“That beat,” Con told me later. “It sure wasn’t like anything they play on Hootenanny.”

Hector the Barber was now thumping his foot in time and grinning. Con said he’d never seen the old man grin before, and it was a little scary, like he’d turned into some kind of singing vampire.

“My mama don’t allow me to fool around all night long . . . she afraid some woman might . . . might . . .” He drew it out. “Miiight not treat me right!”

“Go, Grampa!” Ronnie shouted, laughing and clapping his hands.

Hector launched into the second verse, the one about how the jack of diamonds told the queen of spades to go on and start her creepin ways, but then a string broke: TWANNG.

“Oh, you dirty cunt,” he said, and that was it for Hector the Barber’s impromptu concert. Mrs. Paquette snatched away his guitar (the broken string flying dangerously close to her eye) and told him to go on outside and sit on the porch if he was going to talk that way.

Hector the Barber did not go out on the porch, but he did lapse back into his accustomed silence. The boys never heard him sing and play again. He died the following summer, and Charles Jacobs—still going strong in 1964, the Year of the Beatles—officiated at his funeral.

 • • •

The day after that abbreviated version of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s “My Mama Don’t Allow Me,” Ronnie Paquette found the guitar in one of the swill barrels out back, deposited there by his outraged mom. Ronnie took it to school, where Mrs. Calhoun, the English teacher who doubled as the middle school music teacher, showed him how to put on a new string, and how to tune it by humming the first three notes of “Taps.” She also gave Ronnie a copy of Sing Out!, a folk music magazine that had both lyrics and chord changes to songs like “Barb’ry Allen.”

During the next couple of years (with a brief hiatus during the time when the Ski Pole of Destiny rendered Connie mute), the two boys learned folk song after folk song, trading the old guitar back and forth as they learned the same basic chords Leadbelly no doubt strummed during his prison years. Neither of them could play worth a tin shit, but Con had a pretty good voice—although too sweet to be convincing on the blues tunes he loved—and they performed in public a few times, as Con and Ron. (They flipped a coin to see whose name would come first.)