April 17, 2005

Strumming Toward Self-Awareness

N a sense, Dan Smith had been promising to teach me guitar for years. His fliers, adorned with the photo of a skinny, serious-looking young man holding an electric guitar, said it in bold capital letters: "DAN SMITH WILL TEACH YOU GUITAR."

I noticed a flier taped to the wall of the bodega near my first Manhattan apartment, on the Upper West Side. Over the next few years, I found them everywhere - on community bulletin boards, in restaurant entryways, on the sides of phone booths. A friend told me she once saw a whole wall of them, next to a shoe repair store.

I always had vague dreams of playing the guitar (who hasn't?), strumming away in my room and belting out throaty old heartbreaker ballads. Guitar fit very well with a certain romanticized vision of myself: lonely but appealingly sad, artsy and deep.

I didn't really have the voice to become a traveling folk singer, though. More to the point, I didn't have a guitar. So when I passed Dan Smith on the way to buy milk or cigarettes, I'd wonder briefly about him, idly imagine taking lessons someday, and move on.

Then my best friend moved to Los Angeles and, having long listened to my abstract longings for a guitar, left me hers. That changed everything. When someone gives you a guitar, you must learn to play it.

I had never bothered to take down Dan Smith's number, but once I made up my mind to call him, I saw a flier a few days later, in an Upper East Side doorway. "If you want to move ahead with your music," it said, "Dan would like to hear from you."

Taking guitar lessons from Dan Smith is like getting skin treatment from Dr. Zizmor; both are legendary self-promoters. So I set up an introductory lesson, even though Dan Smith, who speaks in a friendly but formal way that exactly matches what you'd expect from his picture, tells me he charges $100 an hour, almost what I earn in a day.

One chilly January evening I make my way to his apartment on the Upper West Side. In the lobby, a doorman directs me to an elevator at the end of the hall, past curving marble staircases. On the sixth floor I step out and am glancing around when I hear someone behind me. "Laura?" It's Dan Smith, leaning out of his doorway, an oddly familiar face. We shake hands.

In his living room, he tells me to take a seat and starts asking me questions.

What do I do? What are my plans for myself? When I tell him I'm a fact-checker (adding, quickly, that I'm also a writer) he asks where I want to go with that. I mumble something about wanting to be an editor, which doesn't make much sense. I find myself telling him that I am about to move in with my boyfriend, and then I wonder why I am telling him this. Dan Smith takes it all in with nods and reassuring repetitions of, "Sure, sure."

He asks me why I called him, and when I tell him I've been seeing his fliers for years, he straightens up. "Where?" he asks.

"All over," I say.

He grins. "That's the idea."

He had told me not to bring a guitar - I could play his - but asks about mine. Is it nylon or steel strings? I have no idea. I can't even remember the brand. "It's from the Matt Umanov Guitar Store," I offer, silently berating myself for arriving at my $100 lesson so woefully unprepared.

He hands me a Yamaha, and takes a Fender Stratocaster for himself. We go over tuning. "Don't worry if you don't remember everything," he says. "You'll kind of get it by osmosis."

In our phone conversation he had asked me what kind of music I liked, and I had mentioned Bob Dylan. So our first song will be "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," which has only three chords: G, D, and A minor.

Piece of cake. He tells me where to put my fingers for a G chord. But somehow, my fingers do not seem to stretch the way his do. It also quickly becomes apparent that my fingernails are getting in the way.

"It's completely up to you," he says, "but I do have nail clippers."

He washes a pair of clippers and brings them over with a small waste basket. As I trim my nails, he plays the song, strumming the chords on his Stratocaster and singing. After his rendition, we listen to Bob Dylan's rendition. Then I try again.

He tells me to relax my pinky, which is sticking into the air, twisted and tense. I try to relax it, while keeping my other fingers on the appropriate strings. It does not relax. With each chord, I send my fingers conscious commands. It's like having to tell your legs to walk.

Miraculously, in a matter of 10 minutes, I improve markedly. Occasionally real, right notes come out of the guitar. I decide that Dan Smith is an excellent teacher. I should take one more lesson. Maybe two. Then he lays out the rules.

YOU must pay your $100 in cash, at the beginning of each lesson, and take a lesson of an hour or more every week. If you cancel, you must still pay for that time, unless you can successfully reschedule. He concludes by saying, in his quiet, gentle voice: "I think we can work together. What do you think?"

I explain, awkwardly, what I've already explained on the phone, that I can only afford a couple of lessons just now. "I'd like to take at least another lesson or two," I say. "But I'm going to San Francisco next week."

"Why?"

"Well I have friends there, and there was a cheap airfare."

Dan Smith nods, and I immediately regret my revelation. I know what he's thinking. I can afford to fly to California on an apparent whim, but I can't afford guitar lessons?

"You have to think about how guitar fits into your life," he says. "Some people have a lot going on, and there's just no room for it.

"I'm not saying you're one of those people," he adds quickly.

No. I do not want to be "one of those people." Those sad dilettantes.

We try to schedule something for the following week, but it's hard. I try to explain how I have no control over my own schedule, which is true, but I feel as if I'm lying, and that he knows I am lying, to disguise my lack of commitment to the guitar.

"Why don't you just call me?" he says finally. I realize suddenly he has been standing for a few minutes. "I do have another student waiting."

In the hallway, a young woman with a hipster haircut is lounging against the wall. I hurry out.

Over the next week, I find myself actually considering the possibility of spending $400 a month on guitar lessons. Then I go to San Francisco, and suddenly two weeks have gone by and I have not picked up the guitar. My fingernails are growing back.

Instead of buying a guitar book, I start writing about my lesson, and when I call Dan Smith to ask him some questions, he says he doesn't have time for them. Reluctantly, he provides a few nuggets of biography - he is 34 years old, grew up in Newton, Mass., and has been teaching in New York for about 12 years - but he can't sit down for a formal interview. "Teaching is really taking up all of my time right now," he explains. It is, after all, what he does. Dan Smith teaches people guitar.

And I still don't sing.