I set down the guitar cases.
"She paid cash so I don’t know who she was," he said.
I asked him what she looked like.
"I wouldn’t kick her out of bed for eating crackers," he said.
I kept looking at him. I couldn’t believe he had said that. Then he gave a police blotter description of the girl—young, long brown hair, skinny, pale, wearing jeans and a green jacket, said he wouldn’t call her pretty exactly. I asked him, if she came back in, to give her my name and the place where I roomed and to tell her I’d pay to get the Gibson back. I said I’d pay him, too, for doing that.
"Once I tell her, you got no reason to pay me," he said.
"That’s true," I said.
"A twenty ought to take care of it," he said.
I felt so beat I didn’t argue. I squatted down and lifted my pants leg to get at my sock. The bell rang and a guy in a dirty overcoat and came in and set down a kit bag and started pulling out barber tools. I stood up and the owner took my twenty. I picked up my guitar cases and left.
Walking down the street, freezing, I realized I could take the money I had and buy a coat and a bus ticket and be back in Dallas by midnight or I could stay in Cincinnati and buy a coat and try to find the Gibson. I thought about it three seconds and decided to stay.
I can play guitar pretty well. And I’ve spent twenty years worth of afternoons in libraries killing time before gigs so I know the difference between Augustine of Hippo and all the other Augustines and I know that even if we do come up with a unified field theory it isn’t going to change a damn thing. But other than that, I wouldn’t take my own advice about anything.