Pacifica

Ididn’t expect this trip to involve a guitar. But on a beautiful Pacifica afternoon, over lunch with a woman I had never met, I was handed something sacred.

Pete Doolittle was one of my oldest friends. We met in the mid-1990s in Fayetteville, playing in a band we named The Fairmonts, after his unreliable car that somehow always got us where we needed to go. Which was usually trouble.

In 1996, Pete left Brooks, Georgia, for San Francisco. We reconnected years later over Facebook, still bonding over our love for Jerry Lee Lewis and Devo, while trading photos of ugly cars and weird guitars.

In San Francisco, Pete became a fixture of the underground art scene, a self-taught painter best known for his vibrant, cartoonish work rendered almost exclusively on discarded window panes.

His art wa