A Piece Of History by Ben Fitts

A Piece Of History

By Ben Fitts

David spotted the guitar in the back of the shop, buried behind rows of shiny new Stratocasters and Les Pauls and sleek black guitars marketed towards bedroom shredders.

The guitar looked ancient. Its once white finish had turned a sickly pale yellow with age and strips of it were missing, revealing the bare swamp ash underneath. At some point someone must have spilled nail polish or something on it, because flecks of dark red stained the guitar around its humbucker pickups.  

But best of all, it had no brand logo or other identifier on its headstock, meaning it was probably built in some average joe’s workshop. It was probably one of a kind.

“Hey,” David called to the clerk behind the counter, “could I please try that one over there in the back?”

The clerk ceased fiddling with the massive blue gauge in her left ear. A crusty ring surrounded the piercing and it looked freshly infected.

“Sure,” she said, fishing a key out from a drawer.

“You know,” she said as she strolled over to the rack, “I’ve worked here for a few years now, and that guitar had been here the whole time but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone else ask to play it before.”

“Really?” asked David, genuinely surprised.

The only reason he sought out small, local instrument shops like this place was to get his hands on the weirdest, oldest things he could find. New guitars could play or sound nice, but ultimately always he found them boring.

They didn’t have any history.  

“Yeah,” she said, unlocking the protective latch around the guitar’s neck and removing it from the rack. “I’m not surprised either. It looks like it’s practically falling apart. It doesn’t seem like whomever owned it before took very could care of it.”

“That’s actually what I like about it,” he admitted.

“To each their own, I guess,” she said, handing him the instrument. “To be honest, something about that guitar has always given me the creeps.”

David took the guitar into the semi-soundproofed room in the back and plugged it into the biggest Fender tube amp he could find. He strummed a big open G chord, just to hear the notes ring out.

The tone was amazing, thick and meaty from the humbuckers but also bright and jangly like a good strat.

He noodled on the guitar a bit, cycling through his favorite Black Sabbath and Hendrix riffs and all his go-to licks for soloing. Before long, he was in love with the instrument.

Yes the guitar was literally electric, but when playing it David felt a different sort of electricity in his fingers as they worked their way over the worn rosewood fretboard.

It was as if he could feel all the many people who’d played this guitar before him, like their spirits were somehow captured in the guitar itself.

It was this exact feeling that had always drawn David to old things. Warped vinyl records from old crates, vintage psychedelic posters, antique cameras and yellowed paperbacks. He loved the feeling of something that had a past, that had passed through many other hands before arriving to him. But he had never before had had that feeling as strongly as he did while playing this old, unnamed guitar.

David was only a part-time employed college student without much of an disposable income to toss around, but he knew that he was going to leave the shop with this guitar.

There was no price tag on the instrument and without a brand or model number emblazoned on the headstock its value was impossible to look up, but after examining the guitar’s peeling paint and timeworn wood, the clerk let him buy it  for only a hundred dollars. The hundred bucks was enough to be a sizable financial hit for David, but deep down he knew he would have emptied every penny from his savings account if that’s what had cost that take the guitar home with him that day.

“I’m pretty sure my boss would be cool with it,” she said as she handed his debit card back to him. “And to be honest, I’m kinda glad to see that thing finally out of here.”

The guitar didn’t have a case so David rode the bus back home cradling it against his chest, terrified he might bang it on his seat and shatter the ancient the wood.

It was dark by the time he arrived home, but the guitar was still intact.

Living off campus was expensive for a college student, so David rented a crowded little walkup with four other students. He was lucky enough have one of the rooms on the second floor, which meant that he could take the fire escape straight up to his door without having to pass through any of the common areas if he wasn’t in the mood to say hi to anyone.

Generally he liked his roommates even if they sometimes could get on his nerves, but right then he wanted nothing more than head straight to his room, plug the guitar and play until his fingers fell off.

David jogged up the fire escape, taking the stairs two at a time. He snuck into his room without running into anyone, shut the door behind him and flicked on the lamp on his nightstand. The lamp bathed his cramped room in pale yellow, illuminating vintage rock posters in frames, milk crates stuffed with old records and all of his other overabundant possessions.

He collapsed onto his bed and plugged the guitar into the amp he kept nearby.

When David played the guitar again, the same feeling he had had while playing it in the shop rushed through his fingertips and into his heart. It was like playing a piece of history.

He kept playing and playing, forgetting about the cultural anthropology course he had in the morning, and eventually dozed off with the guitar in his lap.

Later, David awoke to the sound of someone playing an electric guitar.

His room was dark, the lamp inexplicably turned off. The guitar was missing from David’s lap and in the darkness he could see the smudgy silhouette of someone sitting in his desk chair, the outline of the very same guitar in their hands.

“Jeff is that you?” he asked.

Jeff’s room was downstairs. He was the only one of David’s four roommates who also played guitar, so David figured it must be him playing now. The two of them had tried on several occasions to start a band, but nothing had ever materialized past of couple of informal jams. Jeff had always been too busy.  

The silhouette in David’s chair did not answer. It just kept on playing and David found himself listening to the music despite his initial irritation at his roommate’s uncharacteristic rudeness.  

The music was a dark, minor-key blues with just a little bit of southern flair to it. It was hauntingly gorgeous.

Jeff was a decent player, but David had never heard him play anything nearly as stunning as this.

“Oh shit, dude,” David mumbled in the dark. “You’ve gotten good. Have you been practicing?”

The guitarist answered with a slow, soulful lick followed by a flashy arpeggio.

David reached from his bed and flicked his lamp back on and the yellow light washed over his room again.

The man shitting in his chair wasn’t his roommate Jeff but some scraggly old hippy, his face obscured by a long-brimmed hat and a scruffy black beard as it craned downwards towards David’s new guitar. The hippy wore a turquoise bolo tie and frayed old bell-bottom jeans with a pair of muddy alligator boots poking out from underneath.

David bolted off his bed, putting his arms up defensively.

“Whoa, man. I don’t know who you are…”

He trailed off as the hippy looked up and into his eyes. David tried to scream, but no sound came from his throat.

Underneath the wide-brimmed hat and unkept beard, the hippy’s face was nothing but rotting grey flesh and strips of naked white bone.

It stared at David with bloated yellow eyes as it rose and strode across his room, hefting guitar by the neck with its right hand.

It reached towards David with its other hand, its slimy, decayed fingers wrapping around his face.

After a few days of neither seeing nor even hearing from David, his four roommates gathered around the closed door to his room. Tentatively, one of them knocked on the door.

They waited, but heard no response.

“Should we just go in?” asked another of the roommates. The one who knocked nodded.

“Yeah,” she said. “Just to check on him.”

She turned the knob and the group squeezed into David’s cluttered room.

There was no one in the room, and it didn’t seem as if anyone had been there for days. An opened bag of potato chips grew stale on his desk by his computer and the bulb in his lamp flickered as if it were about to burn out.

Strangest of all was an old relic of a beat up guitar, lying haphazardly on the floor beside his bed. David was a tad unorganized, but he loved old guitars like nothing else. It wasn’t like him just to leave one just lying on the ground where something could happen to it.

It wasn’t like him at all.




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