Mr. Good

I could’ve kicked myself for chasing a woman bass player all the way to Cincinnati: a month after I got there, I left her for a twenty-three-year-old grocery clerk. A few weeks later that was over, too, and I didn’t even have money for a bus ticket back to Dallas.buy inflatable christmas I hadn’t been able to find a gig since I’d moved. I tried finding work in a music store, and then started applying anywhere and everywhere—fast food, motels, convenience stores—and finally to stay out of a homeless shelter I had to pawn the only one of my guitars worth much, a 1965 Gibson Hummingbird. I stayed drunk for two days. Then I started working day labor so I could get it back. I was mixing mortar and carrying bricks, which I hated because it messed with my hands. The second week I smashed a thumbnail.
Everyday I went to the pawnshop to make sure the guitar was still there. The owner looked like a vaguely degenerate antique dealer in a movie. He wore a vest.
Every morning I got up at five and made the half-hour walk to the temp service, a trailer set up in a gravel lot. The place looked like a used car dealership without any cars and the owner was a big thick guy named Purcell who was quick to let you know he was retired Navy. The whole set up was pretty shady. Pay was always in cash and you had to get there before dawn to get a job. Except for me the crowd was all Mexican, illegals I’m pretty sure. They stayed to themselves, so I’d stand alone while we waited for Purcell to show up and smoke and drink coffee and think about how I was going to smash the guitar over a low brick wall once I got it back. My father gave it to me when I was eighteen. One afternoon, 1979, when my high school let out he was in the parking lot sitting on the hood of an old Lincoln he’d parked sideways across five spaces. You couldn’t miss him any way you looked. He was dressed in the same outfit Hank Williams was buried in. I hadn’t heard from him for seven years.
I told my friends I was supposed to meet with a teacher and went back inside and hid in the bathroom—I figured if I waited long enough he’d leave. The janitor ran me out of there so I wouldn’t interfere with his drinking. I killed some time walking the halls, then fooling at my locker. Finally the assistant principal who was locking up made me leave.
He was still outside. It was deserted now. He smiled and waved.
"Thought that was you I saw," he said. "Figured I’d wait."
I nodded. I didn’t know what to say.
"I hear you’re getting ready to be a high school graduate," he said.
I nodded again.
"That’s real good." He cocked his head, looking at me and smiling. "Your grandma don’t mind your hair being that long?"
"She hasn’t said anything."
"First time I came in with a duck tail she chased me with the scissors." He took a pack of cigarettes from his inside coat pocket and rapped it on his knee and a single cigarette jumped halfway out, and if he hadn’t been my father that would’ve been cool as hell.
He wanted to go get a hamburger. The inside of the Lincoln smelled like a strip club at six AM. The radio was missing. I reminded him how to get to McKenna’s, a place that had curb service. After we got our drinks he poured part of his Coke out the window and filled it back up from a pint of bourbon he pulled from under the seat. He offered me the bottle but I shook my head.
"Don’t drink?" he asked.
I shrugged.
He nodded. "Don’t seem to talk, either."
After seven years that crawled all over me. I turned away and stared out my window.
"Ah son," he said, "I know, I know. I . . . well," and then I heard his cup slosh. I was looking out at a station wagon where a woman was handing around soft serve cones to her kids. A little boy in the backseat was looking back at me.
"Your grandma tells me you’re playing now," he said.
"Yeah." I still didn’t look at him.
"What’re you doing?"
I was in a bad cover band that played sock hops and dances at country clubs. I’d been listening to Earl Klugh and Wes Montgomery, too, trying some of that out.
"Not much," I said.
The boy pulled his nose up with his thumb and grinned. He had braces. His mother had on a green scarf.
"I guess you don’t go in for Bob Wills and such," he said.
"No," I said.
"Not many do anymore," he said. "That’s why this car’s such a piece of shit."
Then neither of us said anything. A long minute passed, then another. The little boy kept making faces between licks of his cone. Then the mother caught him. After a glance at me, she jerked him around by the collar.
I heard him splash bourbon into his cup again.
Then the car hop brought the tray with the food and hung it on his window and I felt like I could finally turn around.
"Anything else?" she asked. She was bleach blond and pudgy—I recognized her from school a couple years back but didn’t know her. She had on white jeans and a pink shirt with the tails tied into a knot below her breasts. When you looked at her all you saw was stomach.
"You all got any ice cream left in there?" he said.
"Sure," she said.
"Then get you one and charge it on my ticket. Girl who looks sweet as cake needs some ice cream to go with her."
She giggled.
"Or maybe you want a drink of this special Co’-Cola instead?" he asked.
She leered, looked left and then right. "Sure," she said. He handed her the cup and she ducked her head and took a drink.
"When they let you off here?" he said.

"Not soon enough," she said. "The horse’s ass that runs the place keeps us here half the night."

"Well, we’re big boys," he said. "We get to stay up late."

I opened my door and got out. He looked around. "Hey, where you going?"
I shut the door. My eyes met the girl’s over the roof of the car, then I ducked my head in the window. "I’ve got to go," I said. "I’ll see you," and I started away from the car.
"Hey!" he yelled.
But I didn’t turn around. He yelled a couple more times but I kept going. When I was far enough away I looked back. The girl was still standing at the Lincoln.
I was hoping he’d be waiting outside the house when I got home. He wasn’t.
A week later a notice came from Martin’s Drugs saying I had a Trailways package. It was a cardboard box wrapped in brown butcher’s paper and tied with string, light to carry but about the size of Shakespeare’s coffin. When I got it home and opened it I found a new calfskin guitar case packed in newspaper and inside that was the Hummingbird. The guitar was in good shape, but the words Mr Good were scratched in tall letters on the back of the body. In the bottom of the case was a note:
Son
I wont you to have this a fine instrumint i bought it new in 1965. Maybe somday we can play together i can teech you some Bob wills. The only thing about it is i got no idee how the writing got on the back i woke up in a motel in oddessa tex 8 yeer ago and it was almost nite and their it was this is stil a good guitar.
Dad
I hadn’t heard from him since. If he was alive he’d be sixty-three, and the older I got the more I wished I could see him. We’d have something to talk about now that I’d made every mistake he had.
Once I was living with a psychologist and she started ribbing me after she saw how I took such good care of the Gibson. Better take Mr. Good to soccer practice, she’d say, or Mr. Good says he wants to order Chinese. If she hadn’t been so good-looking I wouldn’t have put up with her—she’d come home after counseling all day and make astrology charts on her clients and smoke pot. She finally drank enough coffee one morning to think to ask how I got the guitar. I told her the story about my dad.
"That’s cute," she said.
I just stared at her.
"What is it?" she said.
I shook my head.
"No, what is it?" she asked, almost hysterical.
Nothing," I said. "Just looking at your hair."
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