18 Feb 2009 – Guitar

It was a long and complicated journey to procure the Encore guitar that now resides in the corner of my room at 10 Loch Rd. It’s been weeks of phone calls and classified ad-sifting, numerous emails returned or ignored, hunting for music shops on foot and online, and on more than one occasion, walking up to people carrying guitars on the street and inquiring about the origins of their instruments. Given the accessibility of most other items and information in Cape Town, one would expect to be able to find a cheap acoustic guitar after a month of diligent searching, but it seemed whenever I got close to purchasing a guitar – usually through gumtree.com, a South African ad site in the vein of craigslist – something prevented the transaction from taking place. First it was a miscommunication with a potential seller, then I was trumped by someone’s better offer, and most recently, it was an issue of transportation to the pick-up location that nixed the deal.

Over the past few weeks I’d cycled through periods of lost-faith in classified ads or in musical instrument retailers, but I always wound up back online sending off increasingly more desperate emails to track down a cheap guitar. So on Monday, when I found four feasible ads on a Cape Town classifieds site, I jotted down the contact information and called them all on my lunch break. Predictably, two had already been sold, and one could not be reached by phone. But the fourth guitar, as it turned out, was still for sale, though the seller wanted to assure me that the price had been misquoted on the website. Ordinarily I would have been put off by the threefold price increase, but because the total still came in under 50 USD, I knew I couldn’t pass it up. I told the man over the phone that I would contact him again on Tuesday – by which time he promised the instrument would have new strings and be fully playable – to determine a time and place to meet.

I called again during Tuesday’s lunch break, and over the din of traffic and honking horns, I managed to get the man’s address and arranged to meet him in the suburb of Parow around 6pm. Having executed the details of the transaction in the wrong order, I spent much of the afternoon (between report-writing and research at work) trying to figure out exactly how I would get to Parow that evening. Serendipitously, a pest-control sweep of the Black Sash office sent Cassidy and I home earlier than usual, and by 3:45, we were on a minibus headed for Bellville, about an hour’s ride from Cape Town. I was fairly certain that once we reached the Bellville taxi rank we’d be able to find a local minibus route that would land us in the vicinity of 28 General Henrick Schoemin Rd in Parow.

Hardly one to jump so cavalierly into an unknown or unplanned-out situation, however, I realized how much faith I was putting in the goodness and helpfulness of the people we were going to encounter at the Bellville taxi rank. When we finally got off the minibus, I clutched my rudimentary pencil-drawn map of Parow and set off for the bustling commuter hub down the road. Much like the Cape Town minibus rank, the Bellville terminal was filled with Golden Arrow buses, minibus taxis, and dozens of independent food and knick-knack vendors beneath the arched metal canopy. People walked and loitered everywhere, and as white, American young women, we were easy targets for hawkers as we wandered around asking for directions. We collected quite a following as we went from one person to the next, asking if they could point us in the right direction. Time and again I thrust the little white paper at a well-meaning man or woman, indicating the address and the general location of our destination on the barely-legible “map”, but each one ushered us in the direction of someone else. It took about half an hour before a security guard suggested we call the man with the guitar and ask him what to do, and thankfully, the man offered to meet us at the taxi rank on his way home from Durbanville.

It was the middle of rush hour, so Cassidy and I stood by the roadside looking for the “Black Audi with license plate CY 23…” for another 45 minutes before the man called back and told us he had arrived but didn’t know where we were. More time frittered away as we stumbled around the taxi rank and surrounding commuter zones - one hand pressed the cell phone to my right ear, the other plugged my left ear as I shouted descriptions of where we were over the cacophony of rush hour traffic. It was a glorious moment when we spotted the white-haired man at the corner of a parking lot, waving his arms in the air.

He greeted us apologetically – we never got his name – and pulled a half-size guitar from the back of his shiny black sedan. I inadvertently gaped for a moment, trapped between disappointment over the apparent quality (and size), and sheer excitement over finally finding the long-sought after instrument. He told us he’d just finished having it restrung and that it was just missing a lower bridge. But its fully functional, he insisted. I gave it a few strums, and when I’d determined it was playable, I handed over the 450 Rand. If I’d been a little less flustered, I might have thought to bargain him down a little, but I was just happy to have the guitar in hand as we walked back towards the minibuses a few minutes later. By then, finding the Mowbray line to take back to Red Cross Hospital was inconsequential, and feeling rather accomplished, we rode the 40 minutes back towards Rondebosch with the sun sinking low behind Table Mountain.
We had an hour-long house meeting, but the rest of the night I spent playing the “baby” guitar in the pool house, joined periodically by other people passing through or stopping by to sing along. The music lasted until sometime after 11pm, when most people headed to bed.