Heart-Shaped Uke

image stolen from Thomas Schulze


My sister is living in the dorms at the University of Oregon. My folks came up two weeks before she moved in, to move some of her stuff into my apartment beforehand, pester me and deliver our old hospital bed. Pop also wanted to go to Picc-A-Dilly, a fairly large biweekly flea market at the fairgrounds. Matie had been planning to come up as well, but They Might Be Giants cancelled their Eugene concert, as did the Red Elvises, so to hell with that.

Anyway, we piled boxes full of Matie's stuff waist-high in the corner of my apartment. I folded up the rollaway bed on which I'd been sleeping, complete with Annna-shaped dent in its 3" mattress, and had fun cranking my new hospital bed up and down. Up and down.

It has just about everything I look for in furniture: tall enough to create more storage space, wheeled, comfortable and free. Plus, it's cranky! If I ever acquire a brace of horses, goats, giant flying cats or frat boys, I'll be able to crank up the head and hitch them to the foot, then ride through the streets of Eugene, propped up by pillows and dispensing edicts and/or justice.

Since my folks were planning to stay overnight to attend Picc-A-Dilly, we had to find something interesting to do that night. I took them to the Asian restaurant two blocks from my apartment, which was pretty good, as usual. It's the Asian equivalent of a greasy storefront restaurant run by a guy named Dutch, who serves breakfast all day with eggs any way you like, as long as it's fried or scrambled. The vittles are plentiful and cheap, and even my foreign palate can tell it's comfort food.

That didn't take too much time at all, and the movie we wanted to see at the art theater wasn't starting until 9:30, so I suggested we go to Goodwills. Hooray! We went to the Goodwill on Seneca, the Saint Vincent's on Seneca, and the new Goodwill on Seneca. At Pop's urging, I got a CD-ROM of the original Oregon Trail game. In grade school I played that game for hours rather than learn anything about math, but that's a story for another time. I'll just mention that "Caulk the beetle and float it across" is one of my instinctive responses to navigational difficulty.

The Saint Vincent's is seldom memorable, even when they're giving out free popcorn, but at the new Seneca Goodwill I found something wonderful in the miscellaneous Halloween bin. A ukulele. A homemade ukulele, with a mysterious glyph on the head. A homemade ukulele, sans frets but with geared tuners, painted pink with house paint and decorated with red foil star stickers, and shaped like a heart.

And it was six dollars. YES. There were a couple of other uke-like things in the bin, without strings or tuners or ways to attach strings to them, all with the same mysterious head glyph and the same kinds of household paint jobs. It was as though some idiot savant ukulele craftsman a few Goodwills upstream of us made wonderful if twisted ukes, then released them out into the wild.

I picked up the heart-shaped uke and walked over to my father, who was, of course, in the toy department. On the way I tuned it; my ear is not the best but after much practice I can at least approximately tune things with four strings. I should mention that the neck was not at the crack or the point of the heart-shaped body, but coming out of the side of the heart, as though it were an arrow. It was still pretty comfortable to hold, though.

By the time I'd passed the shoe section, it was tuned, so when I came up to Pop I started playing the only song I know by heart, "Psycho Killer." He seemed as enchanted by it as I was. Then, disaster struck.

Someone behind me started making squeaky throat noises. I turned to find an overweight woman in her thirties, wearing short shorts and a tank top and speckled head to foot with tiny scabs the diameter of a pencil eraser. Now, in my day, when you were fat, or especially when you were covered with tiny scabs of unknown origin, you would wear some goddamned PANTS and a shirt that had at least some semblance of sleeves, but then again I was apparently raised in the Amish section of Medford.

She started to speak, sounding as if she were about to cry. She said that she'd already paid for it and that she had car trouble and that Goodwill was holding her stuff but put it all back out on the shelves.

I was a little skeptical. She seemed somewhat insane, and she didn't ever say the word "ukulele," so I didn't think that she was going to provide the best home for the heart-shaped uke. However, I didn't want to anger a crazy person over a $6 ukulele, even if it was a beautiful, unique one, so I said a few sympathetic things about the quality of Goodwill's customer service and handed the ukulele over to the scab-covered woman.

I then asked her, as if trying to cheer her up and make conversation (but secretly looking for the response "You clearly would do better things with this ukulele than I would! Please take it with my blessings!"), "Well, on the bright side, I tuned it for you! It's in D; do you generally use D tuning or C?"

She talked about car trouble and Goodwill and stuff some more, and thanked me for giving it back. I said, "Oh, that's too bad. [beat] I have two other ukuleles; is this your first one? Are you thinking of putting in frets or leaving it fretless? I bet slide ukulele would sound pretty cool." She showed no sign of comprehension and talked about cars and Goodwill some more, so I said my goodbyes and left, making slow and nonthreatening movements.

In the décor section of Goodwill, there were more ukes by the same artisan, as evidenced by his sigil on their heads. However, these were wall shelves with fake flowers glued to them, with fake tuners made out of plastic beads and no boxes behind the soundboard.

I was kicking myself all through the book section and the appliances. Dammit, she probably didn't play ukulele. I bet she wasn't going to fix the G string's backward tuner, put on real strings and mark frets on the neck, then use the ukulele to delight small children and as many as eight loyal listeners on an Internet Web site. I bet she was going to put it on her wall.

When we went out into the parking lot, we saw the woman and a mustached man packing their purchases into a small pickup. It looked like they'd suddenly found out that they had 7-year-old children; there were toys, a plastic playhouse, clothing and stuffed animals, as well as my ukulele and, most damning, one of the other crazy ukes that didn't even have tuners or pegs.

I almost went over there. She was going to give that ukulele to children. Not that all children around the world shouldn't have ukuleles, but making a snap judgement from her car, her husband and her demeanor, she was probably not going to teach her children how to play, or even give them any guidance in the ukulele. It was going to be used for hitting their sisters over the head and/or pretending it was a guitar.

I almost went over there, to offer to buy it, to replace it with a student guitar, to challenge her to a ukulele contest, to plead my case for ownership of the most interesting ukulele I'd seen in a while. But I didn't. Maybe I was remembering Solomon's custody judgment, maybe I was just a colossal pansy and didn't want to anger the presumably infectious. Probably the latter. I got into the van with my parents and we went to see Brother.

As the days passed, I grew more and more annoyed that I'd let that slip from my fingers. I thought about putting an ad in the "I Saw You" section of the free personals:


Scab-Covered Woman at Seneca Goodwill
You took my heart-shaped ukulele!
Do you even play? I do; I will buy it back!
The art of kanly is still practiced!


Then Matie advised me that the first line sounded like it should be followed by "Do you like women?" I decided I'd best let the matter drop.

I went back to the new Seneca Goodwill a few days later and saw more half-finished ukuleles by the same maker, but none so charming or so easily made playable. Heartened, I kept going back, and eventually found a strange ukulele for me. It was in a pile of stuff behind a counter, and I finally mustered up the courage to ask the clerk if the things back there were being reserved. When she answered in the negative, I asked for it, and ended up paying $3 for my own twisted ukulele.

It's black and red, the size of a soprano (standard) uke, fretless, with wooden peg tuners. One tuner is missing, but I think I can replace them all with regular friction tuners. It resembles nothing more than the sawed-off guitar from Devo's "Satisfaction." The body is only two inches wider than the neck, and as square as though it'd been sawn off. It has a great sound, but doesn't project too much. In short, this is an ideal candidate for Operation: Electric Uke, especially since a well-wisher has been nice enough to send me a spare set of soprano ukulele strings, to replace what looks and sounds like fishing line. Soon I too will be crushing people with amplified ukulele power.

Starting with Crazy Scab Lady. If you see an underdressed fat chick in the Eugene-Springfield area, covered with scabs or scars, please ask her what she did with the heart-shaped ukulele and tell her that Annna challenges her to a ukulele deathmatch.

And tell her she'd better start working on the chords to "Psycho Killer."