Music Lessons
Memories, friendship, and pieces left behind
My first memory of Josh is watching him punch a kid in the face in Sunday School. Losing patience at being harassed over rights to his favorite toy, he landed a right hook worthy of a highlight reel. As his antagonist wailed in pain, a teacher rushed over prepared to enforce justice.
“Josh Bates! What did you do!?”
He titled his preschool head back, brow raised to the sky, and replied calmly, with perfect eye contact and a mildly unsettling grin, “I punched him,” as if the thought of lying to get out of trouble never occurred to him at all.
“Well… don’t do that again,” his would-be disciplinarian replied, too caught off guard at his earnestness to follow through with consequences.
Radical honesty in the face of danger would become a defining feature of his life.
That was more than 30 years ago. A clear image on an island surrounded by a fog of dissipated memories. Toys were gold and teachers were gods. The moment my toddler friend stared down judge, jury, and executioner in defense of his territory survived a period otherwise blurred by time. Why?
The fog clears again years later. This time I’m standing outside my middle school locker as he approaches.
“Hey Andrew, let’s start a band,” he proposed. “I’m going to learn to play guitar. Why don’t you learn drums.” Annoyed at what I considered fanciful posturing, I dismissed him out of hand.
“Josh,” I said turning to face him, “I’m not going to learn to play drums. And you’re not going to learn to play guitar.” I was half right.
Within a few months he could play along with most of the radio. Shortly after that, he’d pieced together a band with a much less cynical drummer. Later still, he was touring local venues. At his peak, he rationed his time to competing music projects like they were beggars at a soup kitchen.
In our late teenage years we found ourselves vacationing in the Florida panhandle. As the sun set on our first night, he walked to the shore and started playing. Within a few minutes a passerby stopped to listen. Then another one stopped, then a few more. A crowd formed and bystanders began to shout requests. Josh took each one in stride.
As the last few notes of the previous song were played, he’d seamlessly flow into the next-requested without so much as a glance in the direction of who it had come from. Eyebrows rose as he struck the notes of every song thrown at him in effortless succession. Enchanted beachgoers transformed the coast into a seaside concert. Volume moved inversely with the sun until the last ray of light was cut off by the horizon. Inhibitions fell. Voices rang out and rolled forward with the waves as stragglers on the periphery continued to be drawn into the scene like moths to a flame.
At the show’s peak, a pair of cops rushed in ready to break up the madness only to be seduced by an irresistible chord progression that broke their aggression and forced them to hum along. Toxic couples joined hands. Tattoo-covered outcasts eagerly integrated with the impromptu tribe. Some poor bastard in the back briefly forgot he’d been born with the worst combination of genes possible and sang in off-key harmony with a mass of strangers briefly united by a vision of life they suddenly remembered. This went on for hours.
Throughout it all, he remained oblivious to the line of admirers forming at the front of the crowd. Pretty girls forced their way past blockades, hoping to win the favor of the night’s star while he stared straight ahead at the ground just in front of him, plucking requests out of the air and immediately translating them to crowd-pleasing notes as the performance raged on. I’m not sure he ever saw the size of the crowds he drew each night that week. I’m not sure he saw anything at all.
I admitted the error of my ways and came back to him ready to learn.
“Hey Josh, you think you could give me a few lessons?” I asked after finally swallowing a sufficient amount of pride.
“Sure man,” he offered with the same grin that had shown itself in the aftermath of preschool battle long before. We went over the basics of chords needed to get me off the ground.
“Yeah, that’s a C,” he acknowledged as I tried to prove I’d done a minimum of self-study, “but here’s a better C” — he moved my index and middle fingers a quarter-inch higher. “Listen to the difference. You hear how that’s a smoother transition?”
He eventually decided I was ready to graduate from novice. “Try this one: C-sharp minor.” He barred the 4th fret and positioned his fingers to let the requisite notes ring out in crystal-clear perfection. I tried to mimic him only to produce an awkward clash of half-pressed strings and unintended harmonics, like a haunted piano in a forgotten mansion. I grimaced at my blunder.
“Don’t worry man,” he said, noticing my visible frustration and placing a hand on my shoulder, “you’ll get it.”
The more intimately he came to know music, the less relatable the rest of the world became. Our conversations became shorter and more abstract. In groups of friends, he’d play background music from the sideline while the rest of the room yapped endlessly about the nonsense flavor of the week. His room began to resemble a music sanctuary as he collected guitars fit for every style: Gibson, Les Paul, Taylor, Gretsch. The honorable defender of toys became a vessel of acoustic truth.
One night at dinner I asked, “If you had to get a job outside of music, what would it be?” He smiled the same detached smile that had become his hallmark. “Who cares, I’m never going to have a job outside of music.”
He never did have a job outside of music. As my life zig-zagged in directions geographic and metaphoric, his remained steadily grounded in the musicians and instruments he inevitably drew into his orbit. Time marched on. Distance challenged the foundation of a friendship born beyond the horizon of consciousness. Memories began to fade. A few survived.
After years apart, I got a long-awaited text:
“I’m coming to visit you in New York. What should we do?”
We did a lot. Days in Brooklyn, nights in Manhattan, idle moments passed exploring the space between. One night we found one of his long-admired jazz clubs and sank into its rhythm.
“Jazz doesn’t resolve,” he explained as we stepped into a hole-in-the-wall bar afterward. Most music sticks to basic patterns, but jazz — you can’t figure it out. That’s why it gets stuck in your head. Your mind is always racing to find the next note, but its unpredictability sucks you in and violates your expectations. That’s why people love it.”
I ordered a beer and stared at him condescendingly.
“So you dating anyone?” he asked, sensing my annoyance and trying to enliven the conversation.
“Nah, not really.”
“Wanna know what your problem is?”
“What’s that?”
“You don’t know how to slay dragons,” he insisted with deathly seriousness. “If you want to be with a girl, you’ve gotta know how to slay her dragons.”
“Josh, what the fuck are you talking about?”
“Don’t worry man,” he smirked again. “You’ll get it.”
When I venture down my trail of memories, I’m often struck by the breadcrumbs left behind. Decades of friendship encapsulated in a few flashes. Hints of wisdom buried in the remains. A succession of clues pointing to discoveries just beyond the periphery of understanding. Fragments of life that lodged themselves in your mind so you could hear their messages once you’d lived long enough to grasp them. You sensed their significance but your conscious mind wasn’t ready to decipher them so the scenes grabbed you and found a way to survive the assault of time until they were ready to be heard.
Like genes striving to replicate themselves into the next generation, memories laden with meaning record themselves for safekeeping, waiting for the right time to resurface so they might be reborn into the world and live on unencumbered, encoding their lessons onto new hosts to carry them forward.
Josh’s own dragons were slain one early spring morning shortly after our final weekend faded to black. Lingering afflictions were finally defeated by a bullet from his own hand. In its wake: apologies, funds for bills to be paid, a love letter to his sister, a collection of songs left behind.
My phone rang off the hook that morning. Texts burned a hole in my pocket and sent dread down my spine until I finally pulled myself away from a meeting to face terrible news I felt was imminent. “Josh is dead,” rang out as soon as my return call was answered. “The funeral is next week. Come home.”
Days later, I careened between the sites of a preschool rebellion and a lockerside declaration long-passed to take in the closing notes of a lifelong performance. A preacher spoke, a band played. Long-estranged friends reconnected with anecdotes about music and brazen honesty.
Shortly after the ceremony ended, we stood in the museum he called a bedroom and each claimed tools of his life’s work to be scattered in various directions. Among the artifacts, I spotted the centerpiece of a bygone seaside concert and carried it away with hands far less skilled than it was accustomed to but a reverence fully attuned to the potential of its magic.
In the years that followed I played it over skylines in New York and Paris and brought it on journeys throughout the continents that claim them. It helped to broker new relationships with familiar tunes that lowered defenses and worked its magic to resolve romantic tension with soothing notes that made indignant girlfriends forget why they were mad. At weekend parties it bridged the gap from senseless debauchery to intimate conversation and gave friends a convenient excuse to prolong the night. And then it lay dormant, neglected for life routines that inevitably demanded attention as time further separated me from carefree adolescence.
The memory trail ends as my final recollections merge into the present. I stand back and take them in together, and the lessons take hold.
Last night I came home in a daze. Beaten and battered by a day filled with unforgiving minutes. Head filled with too many thoughts to leave room for memories and eager for nothing but rest. I unlocked my door, emptied my pockets, and headed for bed.
As I passed through my hallway, I caught a glimpse of his old guitar staring at me from the corner. I picked it up and hit a perfect C-sharp minor.
