[from an email i wrote tonight]

… the audience was half the show, honestly.  I literally saw some insane concertgoer who lost his seat after abandoning it in the middle of the _____ first yell at the person who took it, then give him the finger while sitting cross-legged on the floor directly before the stage, and then finally PUNCHING the seated man in the shoulder before bolting up the aisle.  This was all happening mid-performance, mind you.  In other news, the conductor’s podium was missing a leg, setup after the _____ took 30+ minutes (not exaggerating), and in front of me were at least 5 mentally handicapped individuals with caretakers.  After the _____ ended, one of them (he’d been turned around, staring at me and sticking his tongue out for the entire duration of the piece) spun around to his nurse and promptly shouted: “FUCK!”  

It’s 9 a.m. on the Upper East Side, and I’m hovering over a digital piano explaining “Middle C” to a pop singer as her miniature Pomeranian humps my leg.  She apologizes, but I really want her to get this, so I focus her back to the page, feeling the tiny dog’s clutch tighten.  Two minutes later, he urinates on a lamp.  The lesson is suspended.

It’s time like these when I start to analyze how exactly I became a piano teacher in New York City.  Three years ago, I came here a classical musical refugee floundering after a fifty-state tour and a two-year tenure as Texas new music presenter, which is to say, I came to New York broke and unemployed.  I lived out of a duffel bag for eight months and slept on couches and floors.  I made $130 a week from the couple students I found on Craigslist, lied to a Texas unemployment office to get about $130 more, and went out every night in the East Village with a friend who no longer speaks to me.  We’d return to his apartment on St. Mark’s Place at 3 a.m. and I’d roll out my air mattress across his cigarette ash caked floor, and many times I’d wake up and teach only a matter of hours later.  

I had no way to practice, but I was here.  I had a relationship I couldn’t maintain, but I was here.  I had a book no one would publish, but I was here.  I had no connections, but I was here.

Some, but certainly not all of my circumstances have improved, and I’ve managed to survive in New York living on music alone, which is a huge accomplishment even if it still barely feels like I have a real job.  My plan, after all, had been to come to New York with my big fat resume and work in the arts nonprofit sector while working up new recital programs.  Didn’t happen.  Now, over two years later, I still run a stunningly inefficient teaching studio, dashing around the city every day of the week, dropping myself into the lives of others for varying rates and no cancellation fee. 

And these students aren’t just kids, but many times adults, even senior citizens — writers, artists, psychologists, accountants, news anchors, retirees, with our lessons often bordering on therapy.  The piano is there, of course, but often it serves as a platform for other methods of catharsis.  Our lessons are a safe place, and my students feel comfortable telling me their problems, their joys, their secrets.  Maybe it’s a ploy — I’ve had personal trainers tell me stories about clients who stall by talking —  and maybe I’m just not much of a taskmaster, but I’m happy to let our lessons wander where they will.  I like to listen.  A gay student recently played an original composition that she hadn’t touched since the 70s, experiencing a flashback to her first marriage so intense that she wept on the piano bench.  I pat her on the back and told her she was doing great.  Is this not still a piano lesson?  Then, a half hour later, I showed an eight-year-old how to play “Yankee Doodle” as he begged to show me his rock collection.

Virtually none of my students practice, but neither did I when I first started.  In fact, it took a decade before classical music snagged me into its unending cycle of hunger and upkeep — some call it passion — where I’ve flopped, finagled, and flagellated since high school.  But yes, I was once a kid who counted the minutes until his lesson ended, not to mention the years until my ultimate emancipation.  My mother bribed me through the toughest periods with after-lesson trips to Burger King.  I owe my life in music to a double cheeseburger.  

But with the exception of a psychologist who used to smash her hands into the keyboard whenever she made a mistake (“You hate when I do that,” she once said.  ”I don’t mind,” I answered, “but your dog sure does,” and I pointed to the ancient golden retriever who’d lept to his feet in terror), almost none of my students quit.  They stick around.  The ten-year-old who still can’t figure out the bass clef, the eighty-year-old nibbling through a Bach Partitia (“…nobody knows I’m eighty,” she confesses one day, along with the revelation that she’s having an affair with a married man twelve years younger) — they’re in it for the long haul.  For fun, I guess.  Somehow, even as a pianist I often can’t wrap my head around it.  Where does this all lead, I wonder?  Where does it end?  It’s almost as if I’ve become so goal oriented in my vocation as a pianist, which so resembles a recreational activity, that I have trouble understanding the idea hapless joy of embracing an activity as an amateur.  Or maybe not.  I do, after all, I flop all over a yoga mat once a week.  For fun, I gue— 

“We should get married,” F says out of nowhere, and I think he’s serious.  “Isn’t this okay?” I answer, gesturing about the room, a charades movement for ‘our life now.’  I’m shocked in this moment to find that I’m thinking mostly about my piano students again.  Suddenly the question that I secretly confront them with hits closer to home: Why stick with something — an instrument, a relationship — if it has no discernible goal, no real endpoint?  A career, a marriage? 

But I don’t go too deep into this question.  It’s stupid, I decide.  Any professional in any field can tell you that their ‘goal’ has only evolved as they themselves matured.  Goals function the same way mirages do.  I don’t think you’re supposed to reach them.  Has anyone who’s ever called themselves an artist ever felt done with their life’s work? 

Truth is, I barely see any difference between my students and myself.  We’re in different places, sure, but I see in both our processes the same kind of triumphs and frustrations.  I’m simply at an advantage because I’ve done it longer — some call it passion — and I teach.  I might not have a ton of time to practice, but every day I’m forced to articulate my personal credo of pianism for several different people, and this inevitably forces me to clarify for myself exactly what I believe in, over and over.  It helps.  I’ve never played better in my life.  And who’s to say where this process will lead, how it will evolve, say, ten years from now when one of my students might be walking onto a concert stage, when I might be walking down the aisle?

“there is always something interesting to learn from every person, no matter how retarded he is.” - my 10:30 a.m student, 22

[composed entirely on the Notes application of my iPhone between Rockefeller Center and 2nd Avenue on the F subway line, and also in bed between 4-6 a.m. this morning, because I couldn’t sleep.  Presented unedited.]

I’ve never thought that being a whore would bother me. I mean, like, an actual whore. Somehow I think I could separate love and sex (God knows I’ve done it before) and not take the whole compensation element personally. And as I’ve said before, many of my friends in the arts actually make their rent by prostituting themselves. Again, I’m not being symbolic. They’re actual whores.  These people have occasionally argued the lifestyle’s merits to me, and I’ve shrugged. The issue isn’t a moral one for me, but rather about ability and pickiness. I’d be too selective a whore, I’m afraid, and not at all a good one if put in a position that seems especially awkward, or paired with someone especially horrid.

Anyway, I digress, because the real matter at hand is that I’m on a subway platform with sore hands and dress pants on, thinking to myself: So this is what a whore feels like, that oft-mentioned whore feeling! I get it!

I just spent nearly two hours playing the piano for money at a gig that came to me through a series of recommendations and odd coincidences, none of them important. But from the start I smelled trouble.

It was to take place at an exclusive New York City department store, at a private party for sales associates who have sold a million dollars or more in merchandise. At first I was elated. “Wow, I’m getting referred,” I thought. “And I don’t even DO lounge music. This is cool. I’m really making it.” Etc. Etc.

Then the red flags began. The guys in charge wanted to meet me. Then HEAR me. A couple decades’ worth of audition traumas came flooding back. I agreed to have them meet me at Soho House where, twice a week, I play two-hour marathons of ambient treatments of pop music.

They’ll love it, I thought.

So picture it. I’m deeply involved in a 10+ minute rendition of “Like a Virgin” when these two men in suits appear. Now I really start to play out. These are the guys, I figure. I start playing inside the piano, delving deep into the psycho-sexual-subterranean universe of “Like a Virgin.”. Eventually I feel a tap on my shoulder. They introduce themselves.

Did they did the place all right? I ask. “No…not really.”

So, anyway….

And as we go on introducing ourselves for a bit, they hint ever more emphatically that whatever I was just doing, was definitely NOT what they had in mind for the party. “We want, you know, show tunes, standards… for people to sing along.”

I gulped.

“Do you take requests?”

No. “Sure!”

“Good, because really we just want the party to be Fun,” one of them said. It’s a word that would haunt me for the next couple weeks and all the way to tonight. “Fun. We want Fun.”

Fun?  I wasn’t really sure I really did Fun. It was clear these two men were worried for the same.

I don’t know why I didn’t say No right then and there, why I didn’t say, “Thanks anyway but this isn’t really a match,” and send these gentlemen on their merry way to The Monster where half the guys in the room have libraries of Fun material in their heads and hands. Those were the guys for the job.  Why was I going along with this?

Money. I wanted $250 for two hours of playing. Simple.

“Can you send us a set list?”

What?  “Sure!” I chirped.

I accepted the gig, and the three weeks since have been hell. I’ve been wracking my brain over Fun, and it hasn’t helped that every couple days I’ve received some kind of reminder email from those same two guys with less-than-discreet emphasis on how Fun the event would be, or rather, was supposed to be…

Fun.

I can’t do this, I thought, going to Vermont and delving through all the cheesy sheet music I could find, borrowing show tune books from friends here in New York.

Or maybe it’ll be amazing.  This also crossed my mind.  I’ve been known to blow things like this up in my mind — you should’ve seen me getting ready for a caroling party this winter, holy shit —  and then finding out at the event that there was never anything to worry about.

Everything’s fine. Yes… it’ll all be okay.

It was mere minutes after I arrived tonight when I realized it wouldn’t.  Not by a long shot.  

“Do you have a set list?” pointedly asked one of the planners the second I sat at the piano, examining my books and a rough list of pop songs that couldn’t have been satisfying to him or anyone. Throughout the night, people would pick it up, puzzleover it, and then squawk openly about not recognizing the songs.  ”What are these — tunes or makeup colors,” one girl would shriek.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  ”I have an idea of what I’m going to do,” I lied, hoping the planners would leave.

They didn’t, and the night became less about Fun and more about Suzanne.  Yes, Suzanne, someone whose role and identity remained a mystery, but who apparently I was supposed to fear because everyone else did.  “When Suzanne comes in, really let ‘er rip.” “Suzanne will want to sing.” “Suzanne will dig through your music.” And so on.

“We want you to start with something peppy and Fun,” said the other planner, suddenly leafing through my books. “Can you do…uh, ‘The Very Thought of You,’ only more upbeat?  Peppy?  Fun?”

“Sure!” Already this was a nightmare. The piano was rented, just barely tuned, and in the middle of the room. A centerpiece. I was noodling around the keyboard when the same guy who had just prepared my opening number for me shouted across the room: “HERE THEY COME!”  Meaning, the sales associates, the partygoers.  And so, panicked — I don’t know why his cause for alarm — I started, and so the energy was set for the next two hours.

Minutes later, Suzanne arrived to much aplomb.  One of the planners whizzed by.  ”This is the moment!  Suzanne’s here!  Give it all you got!” he instructed in fearful tones. I just banged out “The Very Thought of You” again, only louder.

For the rest of the evening, any moment of the slightest comfort was quickly shattered by some administrator whispering a demand in my ear, or rather, a vague suggestion. I can’t tell you how many times this happened, nor could I necessary tell you why. The guests all seemed to be having Fun.  It was just these administrators who were losing their minds.  It had to be Suzanne.

“Can you do doo wop?” one minion asked.  I looked at her blankfaced.  ”Like, what?  A barbershop quartet on the piano?” I asked.  At another point, this same person came over while I played and shivered, as if afraid, “Okay so we need to spruce it up! Is this ’Celebration’ song you have on your list song like—” and then she began singing, “…‘celebrate good times, come on!!” I don’t have the heart to tell her no (in fact, it’s a Madonna song) and so I began to play the disco song she hoped for.  

This was when I really started to feel disgusting.

Then Suzanne appears. A hulking, bird like figure, she’s holding a mic. “I’m about to speak,” she says to me. “Can you play ‘New York, New York’?” I try, and get through no more than ten notes before she cuts me off. “That’s good.”  She addresses the crowd of million dollar money makers, though I’m not sure she thanks a single one of them for anything, and passes the mic to yet another man who tells these people why they’ve proved the recession wrong.  No sooner does this pomp come to end than Suzanne is at my side demanding to sing, but she’s not sure what song. All my suggestions are flops.  “TOO SLOW,” she announces.  Then she decides, for some reason, on “Making’ Whoopee” and sings, mic and everything, swaying back and forth behind me (a menacing presence) as everyone in the room watches, smiles frozen to their faces. Then she sings “Misty.” A circle forms. People are cheering (for her). The whole thing is sort of like watching the North Korean mourners for Kim Jong Il, weeping theatrically in the town squares for all the cameras to see.

Then Suzanne disappears, but not before urging everyone who catches her eye to come ask me to play a song. “He’ll play anything you want,” she says — “No I won’t,” I actually manage to reply — and my only interactions with her from that point on come via shrouded complaints from her associates about what I’m doing. And make no mistake, these come every couple minutes.

Imagine if you threw a party and every someone came up to you and said they didn’t like the lighting — no other information, but perhaps the lighting could be more… Fun — and then they vanish, only to reappear thirty seconds later to say the same thing. Then imagine this going on for two hours. That’s sort of what this was like for me.  Except lights are lights. And music is —

“How about ‘Hey Big Spender’? Can you play that?”

“Huh?”

Yes, now others are following Suzanne’s suggestion, girls in cocktail dresses requesting mostly Frank Sinatra songs — go figure — which I either don’t have or, in many cases, have never heard of. A dehumanizing exchange ensues before they slink away moaning.

Meanwhile, I’m still pounding away, trying to be Fun, head delved into the keyboard like a mechanic under the hood. No one says a word of encouragement.  No one offers a drink.  All I’m getting are rapid-fire suggestions, demands, complaints, and then — like a tornado passing, everyone more-or-less gives up.  They leave.

All is quiet, and the last remaining party stragglers — Suzanne left without saying goodbye — sit in small huddled groups about the room.  Then, even they disappear.  A new event manager, a kind of dapper bear in a pink plaid shirt, appears and signals for me to stop with that kind of self-throat-slitting gesture — I’m mid-song, after all — because he wants to move the piano and clean up the room. The original planners come forward with the contracts and I sign some dotted lines.  It’s over.

“I think it went well,” one of them says.

“You do?” I ask.  

“I think everyone had a great time.”

“Really?”

Well, I’m not one to argue.  I nearly ran out of the room.

Which brings me to this subway platform, feeling like a whore. My entire facility is spent, but I don’t feel an ounce of fulfillment.  I’m only upset with myself.  I’ve exploited my craft. There was nothing, I repeat, nothing validating about the last two hours of my life; I was a trick pony, everyone hopping on.  $250?  It’s a small price for this weird sense of shame I feel, my dignity shredded.  And it’s a feeling that perhaps the million dollar earners who I just played for wouldn’t understand, or Suzanne, their queen.  They might look at it with the same baffled glare with which they stared at my set list.  And perhaps it’s something I never fully understood until tonight either.  I, who always thought I could be a whore, no problem, but who just moments ago scrambled about the piano for my copy of “Chattanooga Choo-Choo.”

“That’s good,” whispered one of the planners in my right ear, gazing all the while at Suzanne as I oom-chump-chumped away.  ”Yes, ‘Chattanooga Choo-Choo.’”  I sank inside, felt sick, and my eyes darted about the room.  Who’s next, and what will they ask me to do?  “That’s what we want,” he cooed.  ”Just something fun.”