Three Chords

Short fiction

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I grew up in a small town that didn't have cable TV until 1983. My family couldn’t have afforded it. But Bill’s family owned a big farm so they had plenty of money.

“The cable guys come tomorrow,” Bill said. He and I had been best friends since Kindergarten.

The next day, I sat in front of Bill’s TV. Not the family’s TV. His TV. Luxury, man, luxury. The TV was off. Bill was waving his hands and arms like he was a magician. He was performing for me. Unveiling. It was goofy. It wasn’t like I was a feral human who’d been raised by wolves. It wasn’t like I’d think the images on TV were real. I wasn’t trapped on an uncharted island. Our little town was only a thirty-minute drive from Spokane.

Excited, hyperactive, Bill spun in front of the TV. We were eighteen, seniors in high school, and we were dumb, impulsive, and beautiful.

“Are you ready?” Bill asked. “Are you ready for the greatest moment of your life?”

I cussed at him. Told him to hurry up. He was always prone to exaggeration. He sometimes talked so fast that we couldn’t understand him. Sometimes, it seemed like he had too many ideas. Like he needed extra letters in the alphabet to get his meanings across.

But there were other times when he’d be so tired and gray at school that he’d sneak into the athletic supply closet and sleep on the wrestling mats. He also missed a lot of days. And was tardy on many mornings. He was smart, probably smarter than everybody in town, but his grades suffered because he was gone so much. Rumor has it that he might not even graduate.

“Here we go,” Bill said and finally switched on MTV. The first music video that we watched was U2's "New Year's Day."

It was amazing. The video starts with four horsemen riding through a winter forest. Four horsemen with musical instruments strapped on their backs. It was U2 on horseback riding to play a gig somewhere. Well, it was four stuntmen on the horses but the illusion was still beautiful. And where did U2 ride to play? At a big bonfire. But there was no audience. It was just U2 in the woods rocking in the firelight. What the hell did the video mean? I have no clue. I doubt U2 or the video’s director knew what it was about, either. But it didn’t matter. The video was a poem.

That video made me want to become a musician. And it was U2’s guitarist, The Edge, who made me want to become an axe man, a three-chord maestro.

Has there ever been a better rock star nickname than The Edge? His given name is David Howell Evans. Such an ordinary monicker. Do you think his friends and family call him David? It boggles my mind to think there might be somebody close to him who calls him Davy.

Davy!

After the video ended, Bill switched off the TV. There were tears in his eyes.

“I don’t think we need to see anything more,” he said. “I don’t think I can handle anything more.”

I understood. Bill had always felt things so deeply. He couldn’t handle playing on any of our sports teams because of the intensity. And, as a spectator, he always left our school’s basketball and football games in the fourth quarter because he got too shaky from the stress.

Bill didn’t make it to our graduation. I didn’t know it at the time but he’d been hearing voices for a year. He’d kept it hidden from me. Those voices had convinced Bill that he was the devil. At his funeral, Bill’s mother said that he’d fought hard against the voices. She said that Bill had killed himself because the voices kept telling him to hurt people.

His suicide note: "I did this to protect you from me."

I don’t know if that you was for an individual or a collective. I don’t know if Bill had written it to me.

After graduation, I left that little town for Seattle and eventually became a studio musician, a versatile six-stringer of local renown. I don't write my own songs. And I refused to join a band no matter how many times I'd been asked. Legend has it that I rebuffed Kurt Cobain. It's not true—he never asked—but I would’ve said no to him, too.

And look what happened to him. He was just like Bill. Different gun, same result. Fame and money don’t save you from anything. Don’t let anybody tell you that rich people are happier than the rest of us. Everybody has a different pain tolerance. Everybody has their limits.

I’m suspicious of material ambition and material success. I own twelve guitars but I don’t own a car.

I’ve never been in love. I’ve lived in the same studio apartment for nearly thirty years. I make enough money to live a good enough life.

Whenever I travel home to visit my parents, I fly into Spokane. And when I look down from the plane, I can see the service road where Bill had parked his red truck and shot himself.

Every time, I imagine that I see Billy’s vehicle. I imagine him sitting in there with the pistol on the seat beside him. I imagine him unloading the thing and throwing the bullets out the window. I imagine him becoming his own Catholic priest and exorcising the voices from his brain. I imagine him winning.

He, like me, would be halfway down the staircase of middle age. I don’t want to be young again but I wish that Billy had grown old. I wish his life had been the full three chords: birth, long life, peaceful death.

At Bill’s funeral, his father had wept so hard that he’d fainted at the altar.

When I delivered my eulogy, I just said that none of us would ever be the same—that part of us would always be made of cracked eggs—that part of us would never hatch.

Goddamn you, Bill, I wish you’d turned your red truck away from your self-murder and driven to me and asked for my help.

I could’ve helped. I could’ve helped. I could’ve helped.

No, my therapist says to me all the time. You were just a kid. There’s nothing any of us can do to stop somebody from suicide. Not if they’re committed to it.

But it doesn’t matter what she says. I know I could’ve saved Bill’s life.

I imagine him, balding and creaky-kneed, working on the family farm. I imagine him married with two sons and a daughter. I imagine him walking through an unharvested wheat field at sunrise.

I imagine him golden.