My Hairy Past

WHEN THE BEATLES APPEARED on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time, in 1964, I was about to turn nine and knew nothing about them, although my parents and my six-year-old sister, Anne, somehow did. So did my best friend, John Ruth, who explained that the round things on their guitars—which I had guessed were decorative moons—were control knobs. My ignorance wasn’t permanent. When A Hard Day’s Night came to Kansas City, where we lived, John Ruth and I went to see it more than once, and we watched it the way we watched Dr. No and Goldfinger, by going to the theater without checking the starting times, and staying in our seats until the movie had come back around to where it had been when we sat down. Then, if we had nothing else to do, we let it go around again.

We studied the (tiny) selection of electric guitars in the Sears mail-order catalog and debated about which of them each of us would play in the “singing group” that would make us famous, too. The only friend of ours who ever actually got an electric guitar was Ralph Lewis, whose house was catty-corner to John Ruth’s. One afternoon, Ralph, John, another friend, and I loaded Ralph’s guitar and amplifier into my old Radio Flyer red wagon, rolled everything down the street to my house, and plugged the amplifier into an outlet to the left of our front door. I was wearing jeans and a shiny dark-blue windbreaker, which to me looked like a leather jacket, even though it had a hood. I made my hair seem as long as I could by using my palm to smooth it onto my forehead, then rang the bell, and when my mother opened the door, I gazed (through sunglasses) into her astonished eyes while loudly, tunelessly strumming. This was how we had planned to persuade her that I, too, should have an electric guitar, but the tactic didn’t work.

When I was in kindergarten, my friend Freddy Bartlett