“I remember thinking, first instinct, This will affect piano sales,” Brian Whiton said the other day, describing the moment, this winter, when he heard about the coronavirus. Whiton, the owner of Brooklyn Fine Guitars and Big Wrench Piano Care, is a piano technician by training. He started stocking guitars in his Carroll Gardens shop only because people kept wandering in asking for them.
As the outbreak reached the city, Whiton began disinfecting his merchandise. “People seemed so relieved when I would wipe a guitar down right in front of them,” he said. Initially, he didn’t think it was necessary to restrict the number of customers inside the store, crowds being a rarity. But he eventually began having customers e-mail or text him their orders, and he carried guitars out to the sidewalk for them to try. Payment was via Venmo, or Zelle. Whiton even offered to put guitars into Ubers or Lyfts and send them off to their new owners, although no one took him up on it.
When, on Friday, March 20th, Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered all “non-essential businesses” to close by Sunday, the news prompted a run on guitars. On a normal weekend, Whiton sells between one and four of the instruments. That weekend, he sold sixteen. “Most of the people who were buying were beginners,” he said. Customers would say, “I’m looking for something entry-level to get through this.” Carmen Tellez, a twenty-seven-year-old who recently graduated from law school, was one of them. She faced the prospect of being cooped up with her boyfriend in their one-bedroom near Barclays Center. “I thought about whether I could just be content watching YouTube videos all day, which often I am,” she said. “Or what kind of crafting skills I have.” She’d played a little guitar as a teen-ager. “I was, like, Oh, maybe that’s something I could do.”
Tellez e-mailed Whiton. “I had my eye on the Yamaha JR1 3/4-size,” she wrote, and asked for curbside pickup. “I am healthy, social-distancing, and avoiding public transportation!” When she arrived, he was on the corner, handling a ukulele sale. “I Venmoed him the money, and he brought out the guitar, and he said he had sanitized it,” she recalled. Tellez consecrated her new axe by plucking out a little “Smoke on the Water.” She has been watching YouTube video tutorials, and during FaceTime calls with her mother she looks over notebooks from the lessons she took as a kid. She’s nearly finished learning the beginning of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” Next up: “Wish You Were Here,” by Pink Floyd. Tellez’s boyfriend has pronounced the new hobby “less annoying” than he expected.
Another customer was Olivia Brackins, who just turned twenty-one and worked in retail, at a zero-waste store in Williamsburg. Before the pandemic, she said, she met a guy on Hinge who sings in a rock band. “We were on, like, our fifth date, and it all got kind of messed up, because we were all social- distancing, so we just had to hang out in each other’s apartments,” she said. “But we wrote a song together, in one day. He was playing the guitar, and I was writing lyrics.” The song, called “Sanity,” opens with the lines “Chase me/I’m ready/To be your allegory.”
When the lockdown began, Brackins made her move. “I was, like, we’re going into quarantine, and I don’t have a musical instrument of my own,” she said. She e-mailed Whiton, then made her way over from Bushwick to pick up her guitar. “I’m learning it pretty fresh,” she said. “I’ve been playing it every day. My fingers are getting calluses.” Brackins loves movie scores—she’s hoping to make a career of them—and is a fan of the Irish singer-songwriter Dermot Kennedy. Also, she’s moving in with the guy from Hinge. “His roommates left their apartment in Flatbush,” she said. “So might as well.”
With his store shut down, Whiton now has more time for his own music. He’s been playing his Yamaha CG192C (rosewood back and sides, solid cedar top) for hours at a stretch. “Just standard classical stuff,” he said. Villa-Lobos. Albéniz. “Playing music is very therapeutic,” he went on. Whiton came to New York from Minneapolis two decades ago, to be a part of the “music scene,” and opened his store in 2011. With so much spare time, all of a sudden, he’s been taking FaceTime guitar lessons. “Sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of how simple it is,” he said. “It’s funny, because even though it’s just picking it up, sometimes it’s just the hardest thing to do.” ♦
A Guide to the Coronavirus
- Twenty-four hours at the epicenter of the pandemic: nearly fifty New Yorker writers and photographers fanned out to document life in New York City on April 15th.
- Seattle leaders let scientists take the lead in responding to the coronavirus. New York leaders did not.
- Can survivors help cure the disease and rescue the economy?
- What the coronavirus has revealed about American medicine.
- Can we trace the spread of COVID-19 and protect privacy at the same time?
- The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine is widely available.
- How to practice social distancing, from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food.
- The long crusade of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious-disease expert pinned between Donald Trump and the American people.
- What to read, watch, cook, and listen to under quarantine.
