SPOTLIGHT ON: PEE WEE BANJO
That's from the picture, isn't it? I mean the picture, right? The one that they put in all the newspapers after?
Wow. I haven't seen it in, what, 40 years? Decades anyway. God, was I ever really that thin? That young? That happy?
I was pretty good at that banjo too. I just took to it naturally. I never had one lesson. Not one. I just picked the thing up and sort of figured it out over a couple weeks. Man, I loved playing that thing.
What? No. No, I don't play anymore.
Anyway, I'd played for about two years before I finally had the courage to approach the guys in Team USA Banjo. I was so intimidated that my hands shook a little and I played pretty bad, really, but they took me all the same. They renamed me Pee Wee Banjo and I thought that was just swell.
She had such control over us. Such control over all of us, and we didn't even realize.
Yeah, I did have pretty nice hair back then, didn't I? I was bald before I was twenty.
Man, that picture. That's the most genuine smile I've ever seen in a photograph of myself. You know, I'm not even really looking at the camera there, I don't think. Sort of just off to the side of it, like I'm looking off toward the horizon, like I'm expecting some grand banjo future to come striding toward us all.
It didn't happen that way.
Look, do me a favor, would you? Burn that photo.