David's Stories

Two hours David was with me. When we first struck the deal two years ago, I was getting paid thirty dollars for an hour. In an unspoken fashion, David's parents and I allowed the lessons to augment to one and a half hours. That's totally ok with me. First of all, they have to drive from the border of Draper and Murray all the way to my house in Sugarhouse. Second, I'm only teaching one lesson a week. Third, I have a pretty sweet gig. I don't have to pay any taxes, show up anywhere, be in a uniform, take orders from anyone, or wake up before eleven on a Saturday morning. It almost doesn't seem fair that I get paid to play guitar with a nice, funny twelve-year-old that admires me because, oh my gosh, I'm so good at guitar. That's not mentioning that David has ADD, so about 20% of each lesson is used up on him telling stories from the past week-another reason I'm very willing to let lessons go longer than they're supposed to.

I get it. My Mom paid the same amount for half an hour with a man named Kim Driggs. To be honest, Kim did little more than listen to me and occasionally offer his standard two-cents: "It was good. I liked it." The longer I took lessons from him, the less we did anything that resembled a typical guitar lesson. He introduced me to sight-reading, basic music theory, and advanced technique early on, but his attempts to get me to actually practice these elements were fruitless. I never practiced, but I was always playing. I was grotesquely lazy with schoolwork and anything, everything that required discipline, except for songwriting. With respect to my single hobby, my lone method of mental stimulation and character-building, Kim Driggs was my role model. David is not as extreme of a case as I was, but how strange it is that I, the former archetype of the over-privileged unmotivated media-sedated American pre-teen, have become a the role model that Kim Driggs was to me. The role model that my Mom and David's parents pay for.

David's stories that he shares with me are darling. I don't want to make him sound younger than he is, but they're of a childhood that I fear is getting more and more rare in America today. He's at the ripest point, too-right when you start feeling comfortable dropping a swear word once in a while, and when you really can't help but incessantly flirt with attractive girls-especially the one's that are just your friends. He romps around with his friends around their neighborhood, and they film themselves doing stupid stuff that only they think is funny, and they don't feel bad about being politically incorrect yet. I never got in any physical altercations with anyone, and I barely ever got any exercise. I missed boyhood. But hearing his stories doesn't make me feel jealous or boring. I think my story of going from a bratty hermit to role model is just as action-packed as his stories.