(Previous: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Chapter 10, Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 13, Chapter 14)
Memoirs Of A Busker: Epilogue
For several years after we emigrated, my South African buddy Trevor and I would pick a random part of the United States every year – somewhere neither of us had been before, and drive around for a few days with no planned route or plan, looking at this part of our adopted country with new eyes, and reminding ourselves just why we’d taken that big step across the ocean to start our lives all over again.
On one occasion, we found ourselves in Maine, traveling up and down the coast. On our last night we ended up at some hotel on the coast, with an outside bar.
Turns out there was a family reunion or maybe a class reunion of some sort, and their party was loud and raucous, as these things are, the participants were all about my age — mid-thirties — and letting loose without the kids to hold them back. At one point, a couple of guitars were brought out and they started singing songs.
The problem was that the two guys playing the guitars knew hardly any songs: in fact, I think they ran dry after only three or four.
When they started repeating songs, Trevor nudged me and said, “Why don’t you go and play some?” I started to protest, but the skunk went over to one of the guitarists and said, “Hey, my buddy can play guitar and he knows a whole bunch of songs. D’you mind if he plays a bit?”
Well, the guitar was handed to me and thus, after not having touched a guitar of any sort, nor having sung a note outside the shower pretty much since I’d left South Africa, I started playing.
I have no idea how it happened, but somehow the old songs all started coming back to me: the ones I’d learned from Ricky Hammond-Tooke’s songbook back at the College, a whole bunch of the old rock ‘n roll songs from American Graffiti, and more than a few of the songs out of 101 Hits For Buskers that I’d played in the cocktail bar at the Hunter’s Rest Hotel. They all flowed out of me as though I’d only just played them the day before: I remembered the music, the lyrics, the little touches I’d devised to make them sound different: it turned into a real show, and I ended up playing nonstop for two whole hours.
(note the groupies)
And so, after nearly a decade of silence, I played my last gig pretty much as I’d played my first: busking away like I knew what I was doing, on an instrument I could barely play — but this time (thanks to many years’ experience) I did manage to fool pretty much everyone.
The End
