“And after the earthquake, a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire, a still small voice.”
— I Kings 19:12
Howie got his guitar the day the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, and he named it Elijah. It made a big impression on him: there he was in his living room tuning this new, magic thing, watching the tanks roll into Prague on television. His best friend Alf already had a guitar, a Gibson named Jezebel, and together they started a band called Rock the Tanks. Alf said if you had a guitar with a good name, you could always get laid. They talked a lot about getting laid, even though they were only in the sixth grade. In eighth grade Alf really did get laid, and it was because of the guitar, and then he got a steady girlfriend in the tenth grade and she got pregnant in the eleventh grade and the band fell apart. That was the year the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Howie stuck with Elijah and didn’t get laid until graduation night, when Evelyn Rastford pulled his pants off under the bleachers and spread out her big dark graduation gown on the ground. She smelled like a big carnation and beer. It didn’t seem to matter to her whether he had a guitar or not, or what its name was either.
