Jesse.

I’ll name him Jesse. Black pants. Black shoes. Black shirt with the name of a band no one but he knew. Black guitar case left open on the street next to his foot tap-tap-tapping to the beat of his own creation. An Alvarez – with five strings. The E-string dangling uselessly past the head like the metal-core bands of the grungy basement scene. It was raining – he didn’t mind.

He decided he wanted the fedora he was wearing when he was sixteen years old. He was in the process of robbing a guitar store called the Blue Eagle. His E-string had broken, and he needed another. The man behind the counter caught the not-so-sneaky thief. He stared at his black shoes shuffling beneath him over the blue tile as he was dragged by his ear to the back room. He felt like a little kid again – a feeling he loathed.

His mother used to pull him by the ear, wrench it like a limb out of its socket, treating the cartilage like a removable appendage. He used to yell, to scratch her away. Then he decided to pierce his ears, because he knew then his mother would never touch them. It worked.

The man in the back of the Blue Eagle wore black pants. Black shoes. Black shirt with the name of a band he had started, a band everyone had heard of. The man wore a fedora. With a feather. He let the boy go with a nod and a wave of his cigar. He was indifferent to the boy’s minor misdemeanor. A thin stream of smoke followed the path of the man’s dismissal. The boy left and never came back. But he went home and told his mother he wanted a fedora.

His mother used to wear hats. Big ones. Elaborate ones. Purple ones for Easter. She would sit in church each Sunday on the fourth pew on the left, behind the man with the golden spectacles. She always thought he was handsome. He’d comment on her hat, on her purse, on her gloves, and she’d smile adoringly before he turned back to the front. Meanwhile her son snuck to the bathroom where he smoked cigarettes and wondered what it would be like to play in a band everybody’s heard of.

And he would come back, smelling of burnt leaves, of cheap tobacco, of a carcinogen he was not yet of age to inhale. His mother knew. She had a nose, and it functioned. She touched his long hair gently, tucked it behind his ears. She frowned when she told him he looked just like his father. And then she would adjust her hat, and turn back in the direction of the man with the golden spectacles.

The man with the golden spectacles drove a black Lincoln and arrived for church eleven minutes early. The women with the big hats always greeted him, hugged him, kissed his cheeks like the French. The man with the golden spectacles didn’t remind the mother of her son’s father. This man would never leave – she’d never see the back of his black Lincoln drive away, so that the numbers and letters of his license plate would be forever imprinted on the inside of her eyelids.
She would shut her eyes for prayer in church, see that combination bathed in blood, and open her eyes to see its descendant staring not at her, but at her hat.

He swore he’d never buy a hat – but he really liked the fedora.

His mother always left church before the man with the golden spectacles so she would never have to see him go. As she walked out of church that morning, she kissed the man goodbye on both cheeks, as the French do, and turned to see instead her son drive off, wearing the fedora he found in his father’s closet.

He rarely ventured there, but when he did, he loved the way it smelled. It smelled like old smoke. While he despised the man whose scent was infused into the very threads of the carpet, he couldn’t help but think of the time his father gave him his old Alvarez for his 14th birthday. The old man had forgotten not only his son’s birthday, but how to play the out of tune thing. The boy was to ecstatic to care.

He stole the fedora from the top shelf, where his father had left it by accident in his hasty retreat from the house that now smelled of Summer Breeze Lysol. The hat added stark angles to the silhouette the mother saw as she watched her only son drive away.

He never formed a band that everybody’s heard of. Instead he sat on the floor of his unfurnished apartment, holding his Alvarez in his arms like the child he hoped he would never have. His long hair fell over his face since his mother no longer tucked it behind is ears with the gentlest touch she knew how to give. He would fall asleep each night cradling Judas, his guitar, in his arms. He named it thus for the betrayal of his father, and the betrayal of his own.

And so he sat each day, on the corner of the street where the Blue Eagle once stood. The man with the fedora had long since died, clutching his cigars, clutching his cane. Sometimes the boy wished he could thank the old man, the one who exemplified the single act of true forgiveness he had ever witnessed. The boy would never forgive his father, and the mother would never forgive the son. Instead she would sit in church in the fourth pew each Sunday, with the drawl of the pastor in the background, and watch the man with the golden spectacles. She bought herself a nice new yellow hat – she knew he loved that color.

The boy wore nothing but black. His mother had once hated it, but now it made it easier for her to forget him and the guitar he blasphemously named Judas. When she thought of him, his morose attire allowed her to finally diminish his memory into shades of grey. She could don a purple hat on Easter Sunday and not once think of her son, the reincarnation of the man she once loved, the boy who had shared her pew for 18 years of his miserable life.

On the corner in the town far away, he found that to live without the love of a mother is to live without guilt – or at least he liked to convince himself of that. He still dressed in black, and he couldn’t help but think of how his mother had hated it. When he put on his fedora it somehow still smelled of his father, although intermingled with his own sweat, his own smoke.

He wondered if his mother would recognize him now. He thought sometimes no – his hair had grown too shaggy, his face had grown too old. But then he’d catch his reflection in a puddle in the street after a sudden rainstorm, and he’d see his father. He would wince as he once did when his mother pulled his ear. He saw in himself the man his mother fell in love with, the man she once saw standing on a street corner in Johnny Cash’s characteristic all-black, drumming along to a tune of his own creation with his feet. When she leaned in close to tell him that his playing was inspirational, she could smell the smoke in his hat.

“Where’d you get it?” asked the boy’s mother to the boy’s father, long ago.

“It was my father’s,” he replied.

I saw him on the corner, in all black. He was playing for no one but himself, but I couldn’t help but notice. It was raining, but he didn’t seem to mind. But for the broken E-string he would be alright with his fedora and his guitar.

“What’s your name?” I asked the boy with whom I would one day fall in love.

“You can call me whatever you’d like” he replied.

I’ll name him Jesse.