What The Heart is to the Soul

     I was finishing off my first beer by the time Jesse showed up. The last time I’d seen him was on the tube as a contestant on Play On! Made it all the way to the finals too. Jesse had been playing the bars for close to thirty years. Cut a couple of records that didn’t sell much. Had one of his songs covered by some Nashville upstart, but it was only an album cut and the album made a brief surge before disappearing off the map. Still, it helped him accumulate a small but loyal following around Canada and in a few pockets in the U.S. Appearing on Play On! was his latest bid for that long-awaited big break. Even if he didn’t win, it would be the most exposure he ever got. Millions of people viewing him on a network TV show. Playing his songs in living rooms across the States and Canada.

  We did the one-armed hug with obligatory pats on the back, then sat down again. The waitress came by and I ordered us a round and a plate of nachos. The first thing I noticed was he didn’t have his guitar case with him. Not that he carried it everywhere, but he was usually enroute to a live gig or a studio for some recording work or just sitting in at a jam session in some after-hours club, so the guitar case became a familiar fixture to those who knew him.

  “Don’t tell me you have a night off,” I said.

  His brow briefly furrowed in confusion before he took my meaning and nodded. “The guitar, you mean.” 

  “Yeah,” I said as our drinks arrived. “The guitar, I mean.”

  “Yeah,” he said and glanced at his beer. “Got rid of it.”

  I studied the thoughtful straight line of his mouth, expecting him to break character any minute and start laughing. He finally lifted the glass to his lips and tilted his head for a long swallow.

  “Got your eye on a new one?”

  “Nope.”

  It wasn’t out of character for Jesse to arrange a trade-in at Tandy’s Music or any number of pawn shops on the road if he saw another guitar that caught his eye, or maybe do a straight swap with another musician. It wasn’t so much about getting a better-quality instrument as it was about starting anew somehow. He sometimes saw a guitar and convinced himself that this was the axe that was going to change his fortunes or steer him toward success. And then he did whatever he could to acquire the instrument. It could be any little thing that caught his fancy — a certain nick in the finish, the odd curve of an f-hole, the worn groove in a neck or unusual tuning pegs — some idiosyncrasy that spoke to him at any given moment. He was a more than passable player (reliable enough for producers to keep in mind for last-minute studio sessions) and his bluesy rasp carried enough gravitas to make up for his limited vocal range. His real talent was the uncompromising delivery of his deceptively simple melodies and his sometimes quirky yet often haunting lyrics in any hole-in-the wall that would have him.

  Our nachos came. I dug in, but Jesse just sat and watched me eat.

  “So, what’s going on?” I asked. “Is this about the TV show? Being a finalist must count for something. Get you a few gigs anyway.”

  “Funny you should say that,” he said. “Changing your tune. The way I remember it, you didn’t think it was such a good idea, me doing that show.”

  As critical as this sounded on the surface, there was no rancor in his voice. 

  “Is that how it came across?” I asked, as much to myself as to Jesse. “I guess what I meant was… I don’t know. It’s just the way things get distorted on those shows.”

  I didn’t even own a TV set, preferring to veg out with sporadic YouTube jags on my laptop, believing it was somehow better than channel surfing on the sofa because I was watching 5 to 10-minute clips rather than full shows. Most likely I was doing even more damage to my already-short attention span. That was where I came across Jesse’s performance in the Play On! finals. I avoided watching it for the longest time, although the clip kept popping up on my feed whenever I least expected it. Almost goading me to click the link. It was never that I wasn’t interested in seeing him perform. I dutifully showed up at gigs any time he was playing in the city. I knew his repertoire well and had my own favourites of his songs. The idea of seeing him perform on TV stirred in me a nervous thrill, morphing somehow into a protective instinct that could not help but fear the worst.

  “I don’t know what I was expecting,” said Jesse. “I didn’t go in thinking it’d be some kind of Cinderella story. I didn’t think it was going to make me or break me.”

  “Break you? Is that what happened?” I asked. “Is that why you got rid of the guitar? You’ll get another. You always do.”

  “Even when they called me to say they liked my audition tape. When the plane was landing at LAX. When I passed the live audition. The whole time I kept thinking I wouldn’t go through with it. That I’d turn around and get on the next plane home. The whole time I kept hearing what you said to me. ‘You’re going there to show them who you are,’ you said. ‘And they’re going to show you who you’re not. But only one of you can be right.’ Do you remember saying that?”

  That he could quote the words exactly made me hear them as if for the first time. As if he was telling me something that someone else had said to him. 

  “I’m not sure what that even means now,” I said.

  Ultimately, Jesse lost to a twenty-something divorced single mother who had married as a teenager and endured years of domestic abuse before finally leaving with her three kids. She took the top prize with an acapella rendition of I Will Survive that started off almost as a plaintive prayer but slowly built to a full-throated anthem of personal empowerment that got the studio audience clapping along in rhythm as her sole accompaniment. I had watched her winning performance and the interviews where she told her story (an integral part of the show), before I watched the clip of Jesse. 

  “You go through a lot of interviews,” Jesse explained. “They really lull you in, get you to open up. They’re looking for material to pick and choose. They’re trying to craft a narrative they think the audience will respond to. They say it’s to help you be relatable to the audience so they’ll like you. You become a story for them to tell.”

  When I finally did watch the ten-minute clip of Jesse’s segment in the finals, seeing how uncomfortable he was during the interviews evoked a certain amount of sympathy. The narrative the producers had carved out for him involved his early marriage and divorce, due to his many infidelities on the road, which he spoke about at length. Surprisingly, in the final interview he also talked about the daughter he had not seen since his divorce. He rarely spoke about her in all the time I’d known him, although I suspected a couple of his songs were about her. 

  I couldn’t imagine how the producers managed to get this very private part of his story out of him, as painful as it obviously was. After the divorce became final, his ex soon remarried and so she never went after him for child support. His daughter, Heather, was only two when the split happened. As far as Jesse knew, she had taken her step-father’s last name. During one interview Jesse even confessed that he often had dreams about her. When he mentioned that she would be in her late teens now, the unseen interviewer could be heard asking if there was anything he wanted to say to her, in case she might be watching. At the interviewer’s coaxing, Jesse looked straight into the camera. Seeing the fear in his eyes made my stomach turn sour. He was clearly struggling not to lose it, trying to gather his thoughts, but in the end the best he could do was clench his jaw and twist his mouth into something between a grin and a grimace.

  The clip segued into Jesse’s final performance. He did a song I’d never heard before, about a conversation between the heart and the soul. How the heart wanted to trade places with the soul, so the soul could feel desire and the heart could understand life’s meaning. The soul then countered with why switching places was impossible and how they had to follow their own destinies, even though they were in the same human body. The verses played out like a philosophical debate and I wondered (a touch arrogantly, I admit) if the song might come off as a bit too cerebral for this particular studio audience. All the same, they began to clap along to the refrain’s melodic hook.

“What the heart is to the soul,

the treasure is to the chart

and what the diamond is to coal,

the soul is to the heart.”

  At the end, the applause was politely enthusiastic, but nothing compared to the thunderous standing ovation that the divorced single mom got with her rendition of I Will Survive.

  “I remember they suggested that instead of doing one of my own songs, it might help me score points with the audience if I did a cover, something the audience would be more familiar with. When I told them outright that I wasn’t comfortable with the idea, the whole point being to be able to do my own songs, they got all huffy and said I could at least have the courtesy to listen to their suggestions.” Jesse laughed. “Suddenly all these producers were thinking of songs and someone was writing them down. I think Time in a Bottle, the Jim Croce song, was one suggestion they really liked. In My Life by The Beatles was another. They wanted something poignant, something that would make up for the way I froze in that last interview.”

  I watched him inwardly relive that moment and got up enough nerve to ask him whether, if he could do the interview again, he would say something to his daughter. He looked annoyed and I was about to apologize, when he confided that she had somehow found his phone number and left him a couple of messages.

  “She made it clear that she was doing this on her own without her parents’ knowledge. This was before I did the show. She left me her cell number and gave me specific times to call her because she didn’t want her parents to know. I never called her back.”

  “Why not?”

  He merely shrugged and said something about not wanting to disrupt anyone’s life and leaving well enough alone. I knew better than to press him on it. 

  “Anyway, they gave me the list of songs and asked me to go back to my hotel and pick one. Instead, I ended up writing this new one. They said it wasn’t wise to try out new material so late in the competition, but I stood my ground. It was pure rebellion. I felt I’d capitulated to them enough. Besides, I sensed it was already decided that I was going to be a runner-up. Just little things they said. Like how I could parlay being in the finals to my advantage. One of them even said it would look good on a resumé, I’m not shitting you. Talking to me like a high school guidance counsellor. Anyway, I figured if the brass ring was out of my reach, I’d go down on my own terms.”

  I couldn’t fault him there but had to agree that a philosophical argument between the heart and the soul was definitely not the feel-good catharsis the Play On! audience was looking for. I asked him what really happened to his guitar. He told me that after leaving the studio, on his last day in L.A., he gave it away to a busker he saw at the corner of Cahuenga and Sunset. The perplexed street musician thanked him when he saw the blond Guild he was getting for nothing, which was in far better condition than the beat-up Yamaha, with its missing E-string, that he was playing. 

  By this time, I’d eaten most of the nachos and was starting to wonder if maybe Jesse had done the right thing, bowing out after reaching as far to the top as he was ever going to get. I asked him what he was going to do now. 

  “No idea,” he said.

  “Maybe you could teach,” I said and suggested we pick up a six-pack and go to my place. I mentioned that I hadn’t touched my guitar in almost a year and maybe he could give me a lesson to get me back into it. 

  “What, the Gibson you spent almost two grand on and tried to learn to play for a couple of months before giving up on it?”

  Jesse started to laugh but stopped when he saw I wasn’t joining in. 

  “Anyway,” he added to cover up the awkwardness of the moment. “I thought you found a buyer for it.”

  “I did, but decided not to sell at the last minute,” I said. “I thought if I just had it sitting there, where I could see it every day, I’d get interested in playing it again. I thought a quick lesson might give me a little nudge.”

  “I’m going to take a pass,” Jesse said. “For tonight anyway. Maybe another time, okay?”

  I paid the check and we went our separate ways. Back at home the guitar was sitting on its stand in a corner of my bedroom. I started to get ready for bed and thought about how the guitar would be the first thing I would see when I woke up the next morning and however many mornings after that. The idea of ever picking up the instrument again and trying to play it seemed impossible to me. But not more impossible than imagining Jesse waking up tomorrow (and however many mornings after) and not seeing a guitar first thing.