Ghost Song

Burnt-out punk singer in a mixed-sex band, that’s how Cara Friday imagined herself a few years down the road. She modeled her career on Erik Devon’s meteoric rise and vertiginous crash. From the age of sixteen, she had bought every CD, begged her parents to allow her brother to take her with him to any concert within a five hundred mile radius, scanned and purchased and clipped articles and photos from serious magazines like Rolling Stones, Q, Billboard, Spin, and Alternative Press to all the teen magazines she could get her hands on—Seventeen and Teen Voices—whether or not she could stomach their sappy stories or tasteless pandering to consumerism. She spent hours trolling the internet, sniffing out even tangential commentary on Devon or his music, downloaded so many images and YouTube videos that her parents swore to take her computer away from her if it crashed one more time.

She owed it all to Devon. Although Cara had always had a lovely voice and had been in choir every year since fifth grade, she had never expressed interest in taking up a musical instrument until she saw Devon play a two-minute riff on a special edition DVD included in his third album, Extreme. She was at an overnight party at a friend’s house, sitting alongside nine other fifteen- and sixteen-year-old girls, all of them glossy-eyed and rapt, the music cranked up so loud that they could not hear themselves breathe. Later in interviews, she would swear that she picked up the guitar only to touch an instrument she could pretend had touched him. For her sixteenth birthday, her parents gave her a starter guitar from Schmitt Music and arranged for weekly lessons with a young man who played for their church. But it was watching and imitating Devon in her upstairs room each day after soccer that taught her to play the instrument as if it were another limb.

Low-hung, the guitar bisected his pelvis at an angle and shielded his groin, the neck jutting out in an obviously sexual way. In his videos and concerts, Erik Devon used the instrument as if it were an extension of his own body. When his left hand glided up and down, fingers dancing over the strings, no one in the audience missed the allusion. And if his performance on the guitar weren’t blatant enough, legs akimbo, guitar neck surging forward alive in his grasp, face contorted in a private grimace of excitation always bordering on completion, his voice was a phantom caress as if he had reached out with his very hands and slid them under the elastic band of the pink Friday bikini briefs Cara wore under her jeans.