I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK:

[READ: December 19, 2023] “Private Hands”

This year my wife ordered me The Short Story Advent Calendar.  This is my sixth time reading the Calendar–it’s a holiday tradition!  Here’s what H&O says about the calendar this year.

The 2023 Short Story Advent Calendar is a deluxe box set of individual short stories from some of the best writers in North America and beyond.  Now in its ninth year, the SSAC is back to once again bring readers a deluxe, peppermint-fresh collection of 25 short stories from some of the best writers in North America and beyond.

The author of this story was Michael LaPointe.  Each day has an online component with the author with a brief interview.

It’s December 19. Michael LaPointe, author of The Creep, has a line on a shoe once worn by Jerry Garcia.

I’ve read a lot of short stories over the years and I keep this blog as a way to remember them.  But it’s cool when I can start a story and recognize it.  I read this story over two and a half years ago in The Walrus, but it rang familiar after the first few paragraphs.  Interesting that i didn’t remember how it ended.

Harvey has a lot of rarities that he sells.  He is trying to sell a 1963 Fender Strat that Jimi Hendrix played at the Juggy Sound Studio.  He asks $500,000 but he knows it’s too much (Harvey overpaid for it and wants to make some money back).

Harvey’s assistant suggests The Jasper, a guitar that Abel Jasper (“the folk singer, the dandelion guy”) played from ’33 to ’40, his most prolific period.  Harvey asked $100,000.  The buyer said, authenticate the guitar and he’ll buy it.

But that was the problem.  And the story is really about Harvey’s assistant, a college graduate with no real skill who is working as a minimum wage personal assistant.  He is responsible for tracking down provenance.  And it galls him that this guitar could sell for $100,000 while he is just scraping by.

But he sets out for New York to ask the owner of the shop where Harvey bought the guitar.  He can tells the story of the purchase but has no proof.  So the assistant has to head to the person who sold it.  He heads to Montreal and then to Texas, all the while listening to the songs of Jasper.  These songs were about the Depression and what it was like to have to sell your property to survive.  And here was someone trying to selling this guitar for $100,000.

As he digs deeper into the provenance, he questions whether this guitar should really be sold.

Here’s what I wrote in 2001

The narrator works as a (poorly) paid assistant to Harvey, a wealthy collector.  Harvey had made his money in pesticides and was worth about $200 million.  Harvey bought things with the intent of upselling them.  Disney merch always sold well.  But Harvey had a few things that were hard to sell, like Jimi Hendrix’ 1963 Fender Strat.

Paul was a buyer.  Harvey tried to sell him the Hendrix for $500,000 but he wasn’t biting.  Normally Harvey would haggle, but he had overpaid for this, and wouldn’t budge.

Harvey had a few other interesting items (a test pressing of Led Zeppelin III), but Paul really wanted guitars. 

The narrator mentioned the Jasper, but it seemed Harvey didn’t want to sell it.  But Paul was intrigued.  It was an acoustic guitar played by Abel Jasper (a fictitious folk singer).

Paul’s eye lit up.  He said his dad grew up in the depression and loved Jasper’s work.

Harvey said Jasper played this guitar from ’33 to ’40 and he could let it go for $100,000.  This was a huge profit for Harvey, but Paul looked smitten.

The problem came with the provenance.  Harvey didn’t formally have it, but he did have a letter testifying to its authenticity from the Museum of the Dandelion.  Paul told him if he could offer proper authentication, he would buy it.

The rest of the story is the narrator’s attempts to track down provenance.  First to New York, to the Dandelion museum, where the owner admitted he was very sad to sell that guitar which was “the soul of the museum.”  He had documentation of purchase from a woman in Texas.

But that woman was given the guitar by Christian Royce, a folk singer who now lived in Montreal.  The narrator flew to Montreal and listened to a lot of Royce’s music before talking to him.  Eventually Christian said it was his father who had been given the guitar.

When he finally gets to Texas, he has now heard so many life stories and so many stories about this guitar, that he feels he knows this guitar intimately.  He is devastated when this woman doesn’t want to share the “proof” she has about its origin.  How can he convince her?