We Have Banjos

Since I kind of talked myself out via email earlier tonight, I am not going to write my 1667 words on the new novel, so I thought I'd say a little something here before I go to bed.

Like I said in a comment a couple of posts ago, I recently got tricked by the weather into buying a tenor banjo.

I have wanted a tenor banjo for a long time--even before I learned that Jack Vance himself plays the tenor banjo! (which he tunes like a ukulele)--and I finally came across the right tenor banjo for me.

Last Saturday was an absurdly beautiful autumn day, and even though I irresponisbly got up at two P.M. I decided that it was about time for me to re-string my guitar. The last time I'd done it, I lived with Sam on State Street. That's over a year and a half ago, and now that I occasionally have people over to my house, I don't want my guitar to sound like (this is not my analogy--it came from a Jandek review) an out-of-tune tennis racket.

If the weather weren't so loverly, and the air so exceedingly mild, I woudn't have even left the house. I rode my bike down Lawrence's marvellous alleys and ended up at a guitar-shop. I locked the bike to a power-line pole across the alley and went in. I was going to buy strings, but I also had a check-book with me, just in case.

Most weekends, since I do not know how to drive, what I do--wherever I live--is entirely dependent on where I can get to on foot, or how much I can carry lashed to the back of my bicycle. If I need an answering-machine, and don't live within walking- or driving- (by proxy) distance to something like a Walgreen's, it's most likely that I won't buy an answering-machine. I don't have one now, so I have no idea how many hundreds of calls I've missed from hott girls. I also don't really care; with an answering-machine comes bill-collectors.

So I went into the music store, and there it was: a lovely little tenor banjo from the 1920s, old enough that the skin on the head was translucent in parts and dark in other places so it looked like the moon. I pulled it down off the wall. It sounded like shit. Beautiful.

I bought some guitar strings, and a harmonica for a friend, and asked if the tenor banjo came with a case. It did not. There was no way I could get it home on my bike.

I started riding back home and realized that I had a backpack that might fit the little banjo. I stopped by an ATM and made sure that I could afford the $150.00, and went home to pick up the backpack.

I rode home later with a wooden antenna on my back.

I haven't been able to find any information about the make of the banjo--it's a "Stella", and they also made mandolins for awhile--but I did spend a wonderful night tuning it. I used a monkeywrench to tighten the seventeen screws on the drum because some of the frets were buzzing, and moved the bridge around. Tonight, I tuned it to "Irish Tenor" tuning, which is one octave below the tuning of a mandolin, but I'm going to tune it back up to C tomorrow because what's now the "G" string is too slack.

It's the banjo I've always wanted. I take it out on the porch every once in awhile and play at the night. I know I'm a pretentious asshole for doing it, but I don't care.