How I lost my calluses

This is going to be a longish post. I’ve had to rewrite bits to get the details and chronology right, and I know I’ve left bits out. Hopefully it will read coherently, especially for those of you who know fragments or nothing of this.

Last night I did something I haven’t done in a long time. I got my guitar out of the wardrobe in the spare room and played it for a while before I went to bed. It felt really good, emotionally – physically, well, my fingers were a little bruised by the time I put the guitar down, but that’s because I lost my calluses a long time ago. This post is a reflection on why and how I lost my calluses, and how perhaps I might get them back again.

I may have mentioned sometime ago that when I was younger I wanted to be a singer. I don’t think I thought I was that amazing (I’m a better singer than a guitarist, but I always knew I was definitely not that great a guitarist), but I thought I had something to offer – I knew I could entertain people, make them smile and even shiver (apparently I did that to someone once; it felt good when she told me – and when I’d had a moment to process that, then I shivered).

I suppose I should begin at the beginning.

When I was 13 I took guitar lessons. Unfortunately, the teacher was really mean. She wasn’t encouraging at all. She didn’t seem to like teaching us – there were three of us in her guitar class after school. We learned the basic chords to begin with, you know, D, G, A (I purposely stopped myself spelling DAG then), C, F, Am, E, Em and so on. We had to learn the most awful songs too (well, awful to a 13-year-old, though now as a 31-year-old I’m still not too impressed by them): Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport, Amazing Grace, and yes, that old campfire favourite (but in our case, played in the cold school music room) Kumbaya. I was bored and frustrated most of the time. In class, we just played the songs without singing, which perplexed me. But I did try hard to improve my skills. I found the physical act of playing difficult to begin with – I don’t have particularly large hands or long fingers, plus I have this recalcitrant little finger – but I found that I could play most songs by ear with my meagre (then meagre, still meagre!) repetoire of chords. I didn’t need to have the chords in front of me when I played songs, I could just sense what came next, once I knew which chords were used in a song. I began to just play songs I liked, and sing by myself, in my bedroom. When we started learning plucking with some classical piece that I’ve never learned the name of, I was pretty much over having lessons, and I quit not long after. I do regret not sticking with it now – perhaps I would be a much better guitarist (I would maybe even call myself a guitarist now!), perhaps I might be able to read music by now, and perhaps I may have even learned to do barre chords properly.

I found that if I used a plectrum, inevitably I’d drop it into the soundhole (always a pain in the arse, as guitarists know!) or I’d get over vigorous when strumming and just lose it. I began using a thumbpick and found that worked very well. But then, plectrum or thumbpick, I was damaging the old classical guitar, which has no pickguard. I also didn’t like the sound of the nylon strings. I wanted a steel-string guitar, and somehow I managed to convince my dad that I should buy a guitar from some guy selling one in a newspaper ad. We rang him before we went to church and arranged to meet him after church – we met him in the church car park, where we made the deal – that’s the guitar I still have now, which I named “Susannah the semi-acoustic beauty” (yeah yeah, corny). I thought it was important to name my guitar back then, I don’t think I would now. But the name still stands.

When I was about 15 or 16 I paid $10 for a busking licence and busked in town on the Hay St and Murray St Malls. I never made much money, but occasionally nice things happened, like when a woman came out of Suzanne Grae with a handful of change and said, “We all chipped in at the shop, keep it up, we’re enjoying it!”, and the time I sang Voice in the Wilderness (a Cliff Richard song!) to this old lady and she smiled, gave me $5 and said, “Thank you!”, and there was a time when this girl elbowed her boyfriend and made him give me some money (I was singing Texas’ I Don’t Want a Lover at the time). There was one summer’s day when some of my friends from school came and sat with me while I busked, and we all got really sunburnt before we’d realised it had happened. It was an interesting time, anyway. But I didn’t stay a busker for long. It was a lot of work for very little money.

Still at 15, 16, I used to hang out with my sister CW and her friends, on weekends and school holidays, and they were very encouraging and always asked me to play for them. I played at parties at their house, which was pretty cool. My sister and a couple of her friends took me along to the Women’s Acoustic Night at the Fly By Night Club, where I played to my first audience of almost complete strangers and loved it. I went along with my friend Caroline when she bought her first guitar (a Valencia steel-string – we thought it was hilarious that the brand was Valencia, because until then, we only knew Valencia as oranges), and then over the next few weeks, I taught Caroline all the chords and songs I knew. She was really grateful and bought me a book to say thanks, one I’d shown interest in: The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris. We’ve lost touch since we finished high school. Apparently she’s now got lots of kids. I don’t know if she still plays the guitar.

As a uni student, I got opportunities to perform here and there: I played songs I’d written (which I don’t think were very good!) as well as other songs I liked, including everybody’s favourite, Sinead O’Connor’s Troy. I played at Pride Fair Day, way back when it was held at Meltham Oval (I remember, I got my then-girlfriend to hold my half-eaten hotdog while I was on stage), I played at women’s events, I played at a short set at the Court Hotel, I even got paid to play at an event at Curtin University. I suppose I secretly hoped (as one does, when she’s young and hungry for um, loooove, hell, just to know I wasn’t completely repulsive to someone would be enough!) that I could be really amazing or just cute on stage and get chicks that way – heh heh – alas, it never happened!

But then something changed when I started working in hospitality. It was a completely different, consuming, exciting, physical life that I dove right into. I loved the routine – working shifts and then going out with my workmates for food and coffee at Oriel at 2am. I’d get dropped off at my little flat just as the sun was rising, and I’d drop into bed and sleep easily, despite having had 3 or 4 short macchiatos (the funny thing is, I don’t drink coffee at all now, because it gives me a headache). I’d wake up at lunch time and ride my bicycle to KFC or cross the road and buy one of those HERO hot chicken rolls at the 24-Hr BP Station or walk down William Street to Yendo and buy hokkien mee takeaway. I’d eat, shower, and get ready to work and start my night all over again. I didn’t really play guitar or sing for any of my hospitality friends. We were just too busy having fun doing other stuff. We talked and ate and drank and drove around, but no one sang, including me.

A couple of years after graduating from uni I stopped working in hospitality and started working 9 to 5 at Telstra. I stopped going out to pubs and clubs, partly because of the job and partly because I’d found Jac and didn’t feel the need to be out there any more. And then I also got my first computer and started using the internet and teaching myself html and building websites. I suppose I got sidetracked, and also, in a way, became more and more introverted. I didn’t think about performing very much. I didn’t think people I’d sung to would remember me anyway.

Most of the friends I’ve made in recent years don’t even know I can sing in tune, let alone play the guitar. It’s like I have this secret past. Singing isn’t like talking – you have reason to talk all the time, in everyday life, but in general, there’s not much reason to sing, so I don’t sing. Even Jac’s family don’t know about my so-called secret past. I feel like for me to take out the guitar and start playing will be like showing off, or making some out of place statement. There never is an opportunity or reason to play the guitar or sing. It never is the right time. Honestly, there hasn’t been an appropriate time. I’m not about to make an announcement about it to them.

But then, to my surprise, I found out that there are people who remember the singer – in the last year I’ve met up completely unexpectedly with old friends, one who knew me when I was 16 and playing at my sister’s parties, another who met me when we were both uni students. I bumped into them on separate occasions. They both asked me, as we talked, if I still perform. When I said no, they both asked why. My immediate response was that I haven’t got time, I found computers, I lost interest. I suppose the time factor is mostly true. And I did lose interest when I found computers. But I’ve come to realise I haven’t completely lost interest.

You know what I’d love to do? If we were to forget the PhD and my aspirations to work in academia (because don’t forget, I love teaching), I’d love to be a novelist (another secret self who is currently quashed in the name of the thesis) and a wedding singer with a band on weekends (seriously!). What I’d really love is to find someone who likes similar music to me, can play guitar much, much better than me, and can harmonise. We could jam together and have lots of fun. But I suppose even if that person came along, I’d be struggling with finding the time. Maybe after the PhD is finished I will find some extra time and energy somewhere… but I was going to use that for cataloguing my books, becoming a super mahjong player and so many other things! I haven’t ever mentioned that I’d love to be a reader for audio books have I? Or that I’d love to learn how to sign for the deaf? Damn it, so many things to do.

You can thank the Dixie Chicks for inspiring me to get out the old guitar last night. As I played and sang Not Ready to Make Nice, I felt like the singer (who existed well and truly before the food pornographer) was bursting to get out of me (an X-Files-ish sort of image, really, people bursting out of people, euuuugh). It was really funny – Billy Lee hated it (the guitar? the singing? probably both!), and kept mewing at me throughout. If only she could harmonise, that would be some act! Now that my secret musical self has been resurrected I must play on despite the newly bruised fingers, and slowly slowly get those calluses back.

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