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a leaf from her hair and murmurs as if in assent. On an impulse I put my arm around her and pull her toward me with closed eyes. "No," she says, and lets out a loud laugh and takes off across the park. I put the guitar down and take off after her into the streets that lead to her house. She runs like a deer, and in the twilight I lose her. I run back to the park to get my guitar and go home. But when I reach the bench, there is nothing there except a few more leaves. She's gone. My ES 175-disappeared. In hallucination I run my hands over the wood of the bench. I feel sick, the guitar of my dreams lost forever. I walk home numb and shocked and go through a tearful and wrenching scene as I explain to my parents what happened. My dad immediately calls the local police station, and they agree to go out and look for it.
    Days pass and nothing turns up. I become very quiet, stay in my room, and experience a black depression. I stare into space and strum listlessly on the Uncle Jim Spanish, but it brings me down even more. I lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling. Maybe it's a first lesson: a rite of passage, a convergence of guitars and desire-the fatal mix of frets and femme fatale-a marker of the future. Or maybe I should just pay more attention.
    Meanwhile, the local constabulary-good lads-scour field and hedgerow for the stealer of my dreams and come up with nothing except a blank expression. But the universe turns and one day, as if a double six has fallen on the roulette wheel, I hear my dad in the hallway talking into the huge black rotary thing that he calls a telephone. "Yes, I see ... oh, well, hmm ... yes, of course, I'll tell him." It doesn't sound too good. There's a knock on my bedroom door as I morosely play. My dad frowns and does his best Captain Bligh imitation, but he can't keep it up-he starts grinning and says, "The bastards are going to cough up." I let out a moan and roll off the bed in a mock epileptic fit. He smiles and quietly closes the door; whether it's relief or madness, I don't know, but I stand in front of my small pile of LPs, touch them, and then begin laughing as tears roll down my cheeks.
    With the insurance company money safely deposited, I return to London and get my second Gibson. This time, now under the influence of ultrahip New York guitarist Grant Green, I buy an ES 335. The 335 is an innovative guitar that Gibson designed in 1958 and is slowly being accepted as a pretty cool instrument. They have come up with the concept of a semi-solid: a slimmed down version of an archtop jazz, maybe in answer to Fender's highly successful line of solid-body guitars. Not much more than two inches deep, it features a double cutaway that allows the player access to the highest frets and is a slick, fast guitar with two double humbuckers. In fact, the 335 turns out to be one of the best guitar designs ever, and from its humble beginnings in Michigan it begins its inexorable diaspora. How was I to know in this breathless moment as the first 335 passes into my hands that in the distant and magical future, Gibson will one day manufacture one of them as the Andy Summers Signature model? If the spirit had whispered into the sixteen-year-old's ear at that point, it would have been a cosmic joke.

Four
    Right after I get my 335, Thelonius Monk arrives in England to play a concert at Fairfield Hall in Croydon, and I travel up to London by train to see him. After fifteen or sixteen hours of marvelous food and luxury travel with British Rail and several tricky station changes, I finally make it to the concert hall. On the bill are not only Monk but Dizzy Gillespie and Roy Eldridge. I am thrilled by all of it and love the jubilant sound of Dizzy and Roy playing "Groovin' High." But when Monk comes on and plays a solo rendition of "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You," it's as if the sun rises in my head. Monk plays from another place, pulling the order of notes and the sequence of chords from some private cookbook. With