The Dissonant States - Adam Tendler

LOUNGE PIANO GANGBANG

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 09:21:00 -0500

[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.”

ASK AND IT IS GIVEN

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 13:03:08 -0500

Just before I get off the 1 train, a woman looks up from her book and says to me, “Celebrate your freedom.”

Photo

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 10:03:11 -0500

Conversation With a Nine Year Old Student That I've Also Had With My Boyfriend

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:19:00 -0500

Him: “What?” Me: “Nothing I’m just sighing.”

dispatch from the titanic

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 09:53:00 -0500

…turning 30 in five days, i remember half-a-decade ago, standing before this fountain with my closest friends, saturated with three days’ worth of $2 margaritas and Pepto Bismol (hit communally from the bottle between cocktails), watching this show with this song by accident as we walked to our airport shuttle about to be swept to our different parts of the country; mine was texas. what began as silly, ironic laughter — “why the fuck are they playing celine dion!?” — turned for me into a shaking voice, watery eyes, and then, yes, hysterical tears. there i stood weeping openly, bellowing with sobs, and laughing, trying to find some meaning in the meltdown as my friends watched with frozen grins and incredulous eyes.

maybe my body was short-circuiting on cheap alcohol and lack of sleep. maybe i was just sad that we were all about to say goodbye. or maybe — and this is probably the answer closest to the truth — it’s just a really great song.

New York Compliment

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 22:27:57 -0500

“Of course I talk to my therapist about you!”

Chicken or the Egg

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 19:42:56 -0500

I have no inspiration to teach people who have no inspiration to learn.

Conflict / Resolution

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 21:00:15 -0500

I think every musician is in some way addicted to conflict. Why else would we practice? “The search for perfection,” answers the wide-eyed conservatory student. Well, I won’t argue, but I also won’t say there’s any difference. Forget music, ask anyone who’s ever looked for perfection in anything — in a spouse, for instance. Do these searches ever end well? Or rather, do they ever end?

Probably not, but then, there are some of us who just like to fight.

PUSHED INTO THE CLOSET

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:22:00 -0500

Come on guys. Haven’t you ever come out before? We, of all people, should know that the Tim Tebow blogcircus will do nothing to bring him, or anyone else for that matter, out of the closet; that is, if they in fact live closeted lives in the first place.

Exhibit A: The first 25 years of my life. I talked a certain way, liked certain things, did certain activities, and even as everyone around me whispered, pulled, taunted, and aggressed me to come out, I only denied the fact more fervently, especially to myself, and recoiled deep, deep, deeper into the closet. Celibate for years.

It’s not an unusual story. I had a college friend whose lover, in some flash of anger, out-ed him to his parents. I just watched from the sidelines wishing it had been me. What an easy “out;” he didn’t even have to do anything. Just say Yes. We all waited.

He said No, and we all went back to whispering. It was nearly a decade before he came out, and I’m sure the fever pitch of confirmed and un-confirmed rumors did nothing to help. But he did it when he was ready.

Coming out, for those of us who have gone through it, can represent one of the most important, difficult, liberating, and above all, personal acts of our lives. It’s also a process. Have we forgotten? Pressuring someone, whether it’s over coffee, clenched fist, or national campaign, is not only useless, but also rather tacky. We don’t know him, and this kind of thing makes us look like we don’t really know ourselves.

FAITH AND DELUSION

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 23:52:27 -0500

I’ve been disappointed by rejection but never once discouraged. Having faced rejection, say, about three to five times a week for the past thirteen years, the common onlooker might suggest I examine the fine line between persistence and insanity, faith and delusion, but I also might suggest that this onlooker simply doesn’t get it. Wait for positive feedback? Who has the time? Plus, with that advice I’d have given up — well — thirteen years ago, the day I received my first conservatory rejection letter. ”Given up on what?” the imaginary onlooker asks. Someone listening. Someone saying Yes.

Free Downloadable Album: ADAM TENDLER: LIVE IN MAUI, John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 15:47:00 -0500

Free Download

ADAM TENDLER: LIVE IN MAUI — JOHN CAGE’S SONATAS AND INTERLUDES FOR PREPARED PIANO

or go to bit.ly/sonatasandinterludes

a memory before bed - "you're not special"

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 10:06:00 -0500

I played the saxophone for a year when I was ten. I might have been good at it, too, but I already played the piano, and I knew I was better that. As a keyboard player, the issue of “what should I do with the school band?” would haunt me for awhile. In the elementary marching band, my role was that of banner holder, in high school, I played xylophone — piano, xylophone, same thing, right? — and in the state youth orchestra, where another pianist somehow got all of the orchestral piano parts, I stood in the back playing the bass drum.

Anyway, I was ten, and convinced my band teacher to let me incorporate the school’s synthesizer into our band music, mostly doubling the bass parts. So there I was, standing on the sideline with a giant keyboard, a huge amp — drunk with power. It was a terrible scenario for my teacher, actually, because those days my top priority was to entertain, and if not that, to wreak havoc. Just a little. I would play improvisatory outros to all of the band’s mishaps, or create a laughtrack to someone’s joke. As for my teacher, I would accompany his reprimands with a walking bass, or often as he addressed the room with an instruction, I would turn the volume on very low and press the helicopter sound and watch as people’s eyes went to the window in confusion.

Reduced to madness, my poor teacher would scream from the podium, and I’d come away from band rehearsal sort of judging my performance, scanning through it all. Did I play the seagull sound, or was it machine gun fire? Was the disruption was justified, or mean-spirited? And so on. What’s amazing, looking back, is that I remember feeling guilty almost every day about my behavior. I’d promise myself that next time I wouldn’t get so carried away, that I would work with my teacher and avoid trying to make everyone laugh, to make everyone like me. And then of course, the next day would come and I’d crumble under the temptation. Atomic bomb sound, comin’ right up!

My teacher actually married the band assistant, who was this awful woman who looked like caricature of a librarian — wire-rimmed glasses and gray hair pulled back into a sad ponytail — and she had a couple sons in the band from a previous marriage. She really hated me, but I figured it was because every time we went on a field trip I’d inadvertently tell my mom the wrong pick-up time and this woman would have to wait with me at the school for an extra hour — what a mess — but one day I learned that there was something else. She really wanted to teach me a lesson, and one day, her wish came true.

It’s all kind of foggy, but I think everyone had been told not to make any noise, and of course I made a sound with the keyboard. Looking more determined than in the past, she barreled over. ”Who do you think you are?” she shrieked as my band teacher watched, defenseless. ”Do you think you’re special? Well, you’re not.” I was stunned. ”YOU’RE NOT SPECIAL. YOU’RE NOT SPECIAL!” Over and over she repeated these words. ”Now you say it!” she demanded. ”I want you to say it! Say ‘I’m not special.’” No one was laughing, and when I looked over her shoulder, I could see one of her sons squirming in his seat. ”Say it! Say that you’re not special!”

And so I did. ”I’m not special,” I said. And I don’t remember much else after that.

VERMONT FRAGMENT

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 09:23:00 -0500

(MAY/JUNE, 2006)

When I returned to Vermont, the first thing I did was have surgery on a hernia I gave myself a two Februarys prior after my hospital dispatch and an irresponsible weight lifting regime. Lately it had been more visible than ever on my lower-right pelvis, and if I coughed or laughed, it would pop out like a tumor. Since my health insurance was running out [soon], this was my last chance to get it taken care of, and though it had been described to me as a harmless, virtually pain-free surgery, I came out of the procedure with a long, bloody, pus-oozing gash across my groin, and in excruciating pain. But pain or not, I had a lot of promoting to do. My fiftieth and final concert was less than a month away.

——-

My audience, my family, and most of the Goddard staff, were all gone or on their way to an afterparty at my house when I realized someone had taken my car keys, along with the rest of my books and equipment, back to my house without me. I stood frozen. I was stranded at the venue while my party was going on without me. [My concert manager] was still around, thank God, and I called my house from his cell phone. He left minutes later and I was alone in the parking lot, surrounded by the darkness of the Vermont woods, the moans of swaying trees and the songs of owls and insects. A custodian came outside and joined me. He was tall and grizzled, looking at me through his thick, sideways glasses. “Tonight was a bigger audience than I seen in a long time,” he said.

“Really?”

“Yeah. People who play way out here don’t get nearly half the crowd you got tonight. Why — you thought it shoulda been bigger?” He started laughing.

“Kind of,” I shrugged. “Or maybe the music…”

“I liked the music.”

We stood there, hanging in that moment.

“So when did you start playing the piano?” he asked.

“Six or seven.”

"WOAH YOU'RE HERE!" - TEXAS FRAGMENTS

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 11:56:57 -0500

(TEXAS, 4/22/06)

The next morning, instead of taking I-10 west across Texas, I took the less-direct but more scenic Highway 90, stretching from Houston through the southern Texas desert. The terrain was desolate and rocky, sometimes flat, sometimes immense and mountainous, giant hedges of earth colored like brown sugar. Birds that looked like vultures coasted in large, calm circles against a sky darkening with black, churning thunderclouds. Had anyone ever climbed these mountains, I wondered? And who laid those abandoned railroad tracks running alongside the highway, piece by piece? How heroic an act, I thought, and for what?

Every so often I’d pass through a tiny town where people painted their rooftops like the Texas flag and men said “Howdy” when entering a general store. Women had beehive haircuts and painted their faces with bright makeup. Others towns, however, were nothing more than shells, remnants of what seemed like a disturbingly recent past, with hollow modern-looking gas stations that still had their prices posted, closed diners that looked like they could have been open just days before. The houses weren’t crumbling. Just empty. It all eerily betrayed evidence of a recent desertion, as if everyone all left at once.

——-

I stopped in Del Rio , found a cheap motel, and bought a large, five-dollar pizza at Little Caesar’s to consume in my room for dinner. I could hear music coming from a nightclub next door. Having already visited, out of some odd sense of obligation, the rustic but deserted downtown of Del Rio at twilight, halfheartedly studying its derelict and eerie points of interest…

… I wanted now more than ever to join the happy commotion next door and see what else I could make of this border town. I’d been too afraid in the past to leave my room. Now, at the end of the tour, it was finally time. I walked over and stood on the wooden planked porch outside the door, still deciding whether or not to enter. Then I saw a bulky figure running toward me through the dusty parking lot. It was a man with long blonde hair, sweating through his tank top and wearing purple shorts that looked like swimming trunks. He wasn’t slowing down. Then he leapt onto the porch and sat on a bench next to the door with a thud, looking up at me grinning, his hair matted and strewn across his face. “Did I miss anything?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said. ”I haven’t been inside yet.”

“I see,” he nodded, gazing ahead now, catching his breath. “I’m Randy.”

He guided me inside and, after a couple pitchers of beer, we became fast friends. He did most of the talking, though, and I mainly watched the couples line dancing to country music. “I used to play pro golf,” Randy confessed. “But now I’ve stopped all that to drink.” He laughed and then paused, studying me. “You look like the kind of guy who likes to smoke a lot of weed. You have any weed?”

“Huh? No.”

“I don’t believe you. You don’t smoke weed?”

“I don’t have weed.”

He leaned forward and started to whisper. “I can show you a place where the trees are so high, man… they’re to the fucking ceiling.” He raised both arms.

“I can’t,” I said. “Besides, my motel is right across the way.” I nodded my head toward the wall.

“You’re really not carrying? Ecstasy? Coke?” I shook my head, but Randy seemed lost in reverie. ”…trees to the fucking ceiling, man,” he repeated. ”Why else would I give up golf?”

“Drinking, I thought.”

He smirked. “You’re in Del Rio, man. It’s basically Mexico. Del Rio is a gray area. People can get away with shit here because there’s no law. It ain’t really the States. It ain’t really Mexico. There are no real rules.” Then he excused himself to the restroom for the second time in fifteen minutes, and as the door closed behind him a young man with slick black hair left his two friends at a nearby table and approached me.

“You better watch your friend,” he said.

“Why?” I tried to sound affable and nonchalant, but was beginning to feel hot.

“You just better watch him is all I’m saying.”

“I’m not from here. I don’t even know hi—”

“I don’t care if you’re not from here esé. Your friend keeps looking over this direction.”

Oh my god, I thought. He just said ‘esé.’ This is really bad. Where the fuck am I? (You’re in Del Rio, man…) Get me out of here. “He’s looking at you?” I asked, trembling.

“No, man. At my wife, man. At my girl.” He was getting more agitated now.

“I’m sorry. Okay, I’ll tell him,” I said, hoping that Randy wasn’t about to come back from the bathroom to interrupt our little pow wow.

“No, no… don’t tell him anything. You guys are gonna’ go, ‘cause I don’t want nothing bad to happen, you feel me?” His eyes were fixed on me as he backed away to his table.

Randy was still in the bathroom. I got up and ran out the door, across the parking lot, and didn’t stop until I was back in my motel room. I left him there. Such was my state of courage at the end of a fifty-state tour.

VERMONT ARTICLES

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 09:23:32 -0500

ONLY HUMAN - EASTER IN NEW ORLEANS

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:27:00 -0500

(NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA, Easter Sunday 2006)

My Hyundai snaked through the narrow streets and cobble-stoned corridors of New Orleans, Matilda serving as tour guide from the tiny tomb of the backseat, legs folded in against her body, and Ernesto sitting disinterestedly in the passenger seat. I couldn’t use my rearview mirror because someone had smashed it the night before; I wasn’t sure how. “It looks like a broken heart,” said Matilda when she saw it.

We arrived at a jazz club, Snug Harbor, where a gospel choir was finishing their ecstatic set in the back room. Ernesto pulled up to the bar alone, speaking to no one and immediately nursing a glass of Chartreuse. I ran into the bathroom and let a surge of bloody, fibrous diarrhea blast across what had been snow white porcelain. There were pieces of lentils from that afternoon’s lunch with Matilda, each lentil now encased in what could looked like guts and little pieces of flesh, what very well could have been the lining of my colon. This was my fourteenth trip to the bathroom that day. I came out, out-of-breath and weak, but still determined to make the best of the night, the achievement of having actually driven through New Orleans to find this jazz club in the French Quarter, even finding a great parking spot right outside. Matilda appeared with a glass of whiskey. “Here. Drink this slowly. It will help your stomach. And in a few minutes you can go up and play. Ernesto talked to the owner.”

“What?”

“You’ll go up and play,” Ernesto answered for her, turning from the bar and motioning to the stage in the back room.

“Play? Play here?”

“Yeah. Play whatever. I don’t know…” He looked at me, suddenly puzzled. “You don’t want to? This is Snug Harbor, man! The people who have played here…”

“Okay,” I sighed, feeling faint.

“They just finished, actually,” said the owner from behind the bar, pointing to the back room. He looked big and intimidating, but also warm, with a white beard like Santa Claus. “Go on up.”

Not unlike one of the girls in the piano lab back in Augusta, Georgia, I followed his command automatically, nudging through the dispersing crowd and climbing onto the stage, sitting before a shiny but smudged Yamaha grand. I emptied my pockets and adjusted the bench, and had only played the first note of the first movement of Copland’s Four Piano Blues when an arm shot across my line of sight, startling me and sending my hands off the keyboard like it was a hot stove. “Sorry,” said the pianist from the last act, a cigarette hanging from his mouth. “Just let me clear up my shit.” He grabbed his music — I hadn’t even noticed it — and jumped offstage.

Of all of the pianos I had played in America 88x50, this piano in Snug Harbor, with just a slightly lighter action and just a slightly brighter sound, worked more perfectly for my music than any other instrument yet. The accents I played sounded just bright enough, the runs unhurried, the phrases perfectly shaped. I was immersed totally in this piano. First Copland, then some Griffes, then Ginastera, then Adams, then the Barber Nocturne I’d recently committed to memory, and then I made it up as I went along, improvising, and after about an hour I stepped down. No one clapped, but there were people scattered throughout the room who had been listening.

“Sounded wonderful!” said Matilda.

The owner handed me a stack of CDs — “on the house” — and we started talking like old friends. Suddenly his face distorted into something a bit horrified, a bit disappointed. I wound around to find Ernesto on all fours behind me, his back arched like a cat, heaving milky white vomit laced with brown strands of food onto the floor that poured from his mouth like a faucet and splattered in all directions. He was gasping for air, but when he tried to exhale only more vomit came out.

“All right. It’s okay,” said the owner calmly. “It’s my fault. I fucked him up.”

I was on my feet, backing away, nodding numbly at what the owner said as a man knocked against me from behind, rushing to Ernesto and handing Matilda a plastic water cup. “Go to the bathroom and finish up,” the man said, kneeling. Matilda handed the cup to Ernesto. He promptly spat in it before throwing up again. ”Go to the bathroom and finish up,” repeated the man.

“I can’t fucking move, man!” he howled.

Here was one of New Orleans’s most respected classical musicians at his worst, and there I was, like a child, almost completely unable to process the sight. He had been so intense behind the organ at that morning’s Easter service, so bewildering, and now he seemed — well — only human. “I’m fucking puking on the fucking floor, man,” he cried. “Leave me the fuck alone!” A bartender tossed a paper bag from behind the bar in Ernesto’s direction and it landed just in front of his face on top of the steaming puddle of vomit.

Matilda and I propped him on his feet and dragged him across the floor toward the door. “Great meeting you!” I called to the owner. ”Thank you! It was amazing!” We hoisted Ernesto into the car, Matilda squeezed again into the backseat, and I tore away from Snug Harbor, begging for the fastest directions back to their apartment. I had to go to the bathroom again.

The streets were barely wide enough for my car and was traffic ahead. ”Oh, they’re shooting a movie!” said Matilda from the backseat. I felt a spasm in my bowels, my stomach gurgling, pushing downward. I was sweating. This could get much, much worse. Then it did.

“I’m gonna’ puke again,” moaned Ernesto, leaning against his door.

“NO!” On impulse, I reached across his body and swung the door open and he went tumbling sideways before I caught him.

“Nevermind. I’m okay,” he said breathlessly. My heart was convulsing. I could not let this man throw up in my car, which already smelled like gasoline, medicine, and beer [a six pack of bottles had exploded in the heat]. The pressure building in my colon, it felt like I might let it go right here in the traffic. I bit the insides of my cheeks, closing Ernesto’s door as traffic began moving again. Oblivious, Matilda admired the movie shoot and continued explaining points of interest. “Oh God!” Ernesto interrupted again.

“It’s happening now?!” I shouted in a panic.

“Yes!

I screeched the car again on the cobblestones and once more flung the door open, reaching across his body. Cars skidded and squealed behind us, nearly piling up against my back bumper, and horns began honking as I hurled his body outward and suspended it over the pavement, holding him up by the back of his suit jacket. But again, nothing happened. “I’m okay, I’m okay,” he repeated. I could have killed him. “There’s not much left to come up now, anyway.”

Back to careening through the city, I thought maybe I could distract everyone, including myself, with some small talk. “Did the French Quarter see much damage from Katrina?” We bounced recklessly through a bustling Bourbon Street crosswalk.

“No, of course not,” drawled Ernesto, his head steaming up the passenger window he was leaning on. “This all stayed safe. They flooded out the people they wanted to, flooded them right out of the city. Turned off the levee pumps at the places they wanted…” he slurred. “Everyone knows it, just no one says it.”

I pulled in front of their apartment and began our goodbyes. Just then, two boys appeared — we all saw them — looking sort of like fraternity brothers, piling into the cab of a black truck across the street. Both of them were laughing, drunk, and pushing each other, and then one of their pants fell down to his legs, exposing a tiny penis in the middle of a brown bush of pubic hair, and then they disappeared into the truck, punching and grabbing each other playfully as they went.

The scene was anything but romantic, and yet still Ernesto was incensed enough by it to be threatening once more to throw up again. “Fuck, man! Jesus fuck! See what I’m talking about? The city’s going to fucking shit! Why the fuck did I have to see that fucking sh—”

I opened the door and pushed him out of the car, for real this time.

LOUISIANA FRAGMENT

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 12:03:00 -0500

(ST. BERNARD PARISH, LOUISIANA, 4-12?-06)

It was the only sign of life for miles. THREE FREE HOT MEALS A DAY! EMERGENCY COMMUNITIES. MADE WITH LOVE CAFÉ AND GRILL.

I parked the car and walked toward two enormous domed tents.

They guarded a small city of camping tents, Army tents, porta-potties, and even a few teepees.

Tractor-trailers had been converted into giant refrigerators, powered by generators that shook the ground. There was a “Free Store” where people could bring or take clothes and food. A mother emerged with her son, holding an armful of food, including an old, spotted a jar of spaghetti sauce. Stray dogs were everywhere.

Inside the largest were rows of picnic tables, each with a vase of flowers and salt and pepper shakers. High on the wall were four wide windows shaped like water droplets, which at first glance I thought were teardrops.

Lining the perimeter was a “Rehydration Station” for water, a condiment area for mealtimes, a library, and a small upright piano.

I caught my reflection in a dusty mirror. I had a thick black beard, hardly distinguishable from my leathery skin. My arms, chest, and shoulders were bigger. I looked dirty. I was dirty.

But it wouldn’t matter here in Emergency Communities, where people seemed to treat their bodies like blank canvases. Men and women alike wore long, flowery skirts and weathered sandals. Many of the men donned beards, and several had mohawks. The women seemed gentle, often in t-shirts and tank tops, hair in their armpits. But the more I tried to find a pattern, the more I found it was impossible to do. Everyone here was truly their own creation, or rather, they seemed to create and erase and re-form their identities on the spot, if only to prove the futility of identity in the first place. Anyone could be anything, anytime, as long as they helped the camp. Just outside the dome, several men had begun to grill the pork for that night’s supper. One of them was, probably in his seventies, had a cigarette hanging from his mouth, and wore a long black dress, pearls around his neck, and sunglasses.

——

The line of residents who came to the Made with Love Café and Grill for dinner extended out of the tent, far into the parking lot, and onto the abandoned street. These people, most of whom had once lived financially comfortable lives, weren’t coming here because it was free food. They were coming here because it was the only food. I dumped a serving of carrot soufflé onto each plate. I helped make it.

——

“We’re going to start tonight’s circle with a group Om!” shouts a voice. We’re all — hundreds of us — in a circle, but I can’t see the speaker. There’s silence, and then a low, long drone of voices that fills the room, all of us joining in a deafening but unifying Om like monks. When it subsides, the voice rings out again. “Now we will go around the circle and introduce ourselves, bringing up any concerns we have about our community.”

For over an hour, each person stands, stating their name and then saying something about the camp, praising it, or occasionally giving a suggestions of how to improve it. Almost every testimony ends with “I love you,” and a few voices call back, “I love you!” It’s my first day, but even when I introduce myself and thank the community for welcoming me, several people shout out that they love me. “I love you, too,” I answer.

TALES OF BILOXI

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 10:55:00 -0500

(BILOXI, MISSISSIPPI, early-April 2006)

While working in the houses of the dead and displaced, we met those neighbors who survived, and furthermore, who chose to stay, living in campers and FEMA trailers, and often they would come out and tell us their stories — stories about bodies in the streets and people drowned in attics. One day they decided prepare us a crawfish boil as a gesture of gratitude. So with Massenet’s opera Manon playing on the public radio station, crackling from a small portable radio, we volunteers took a break from mold removal and ate crawfish in our bodysuits, listening less to the Massenet and more to the family.

They didn’t call Katrina a storm, by the way. They called it a flood, explaining that a giant wave swept north from the Gulf over the little finger of land on which Biloxi sits, demolishing nearly everything and everyone in its path, and emptying into the bay directly north of that little finger of land. But like any wave, big or small, it had to return to sea. “So we got it twice,” finished our cook, stirring the crawfish pot, his face dripping with sweat as he smiled and shook his head in disbelief.

“I tell you,” added his wife. ”I can still see the places that aren’t here anymore. I pass by the spot where an old friend’s house was, but I still see it. I still see their house. I still see them.”

——-

Even eight months after the storm — the “flood,” I mean — the city was still in ruins, looking like the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, much worse than what I saw in Mobile a few days earlier.

All industry that once occupied the beachfront had been reclaimed by the sea with nothing but bare bones parking lots remaining on its twisted metal banks, demolished signs still standing guard over the empty foundations of fast food chains.

Cemeteries were overturned, headstones cracked in half, tombs collapsed.

Highway 90 had once been a shady, tree-lined boulevard of mansions on the seashore. Now, only a few trees survived, their skeletal limbs raped and ravaged, some trunks completely ripped from the ground and displaced upon roofs, folding the houses inward, so vulgar it was almost funny.

The houses that remained were barely standing, many torn open and exposing to passersby like myself a glimpse inside at the life that once was — a decaying corpse of a living room that still retained its carpeted staircase leading upstairs to what might have once been a bedroom.

Another house bears a message scrawled in white spray paint: WE ARE HOME!! WILL SHOOT NO LOOTING!

——-

“Three in the front row,” Sister Mary whispered to me, not moving her mouth, as a small class of first and second graders filed into the classroom. “Four there in the second row. Four in the third. And all but one in the back row. All three teachers standing in the back of the room, too. Lost everything. I mean, everything. In the morning, there are pillows and sleeping bags lining the hallways here. These are middle and upper class families, sleeping on the floor of a Catholic elementary school.”

The room fell silent as the children waited for Sister Mary to reveal who I was and why I’d come to their school. She shifted to a cheerier tone, turning from me to the group. “Mr. Adam is here from Vermont, and has spent the whole year traveling all fifty states to play the piano…”

I played “The Night Winds” by Griffes, something I usually played for kids because it was fast and evocative, but here it felt different, and indeed the reaction was different, starting with the first student who shouted, “It sounds like Katrina!” And so began a crossfire of stories from children who had been at the frontlines of a hurricane, all outshouting each other, each story more fantastically surreal than the next, and of course I had no doubt all of them were true. Sister Mary had no visible reaction. Surely she’d heard these stories before.

Afterward, the room was jammed with students leaving, and a little girl close to me seemed trapped and upset by the commotion. I crouched down and whispered to her, “You know, my mom’s a teacher and she doesn’t like it either when polite girls like you have to wait for other kids to calm down. It isn’t fair, is it?”

She looked at me, the two pink ties in her hair a perfect foil to the two dark circles under her eyes. “Life isn’t fair,” she answered plainly, automatically, as if she’d heard those words many times before and, in a way, was just repeating them.

GEORGIA FRAGMENT

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 12:21:00 -0500

(AUGUSTA, GEORGIA, 3/23/06)

…at a visual and performing arts high school, [in] a concrete room with blue walls and bright fluorescent lights, a young girl was playing Bach’s Minuet in G on a Baldwin grand piano in the corner. When she got up, another girl took her place and began Bach’s c minor prelude from Book One of The Well-Tempered Clavier, the same prelude I once used for my conservatory auditions. Everyone else, almost all of them black and female, had headphones on, plugged into their own individual synthesizers. I watched their fingers tapping away, their concentrating eyes, and couldn’t determine if I was impressed by the uniform display of discipline and focus in this room, or disturbed by the strange, utopian pointlessness of it all — everyone playing but no one listening.

The teacher, a tall man with glasses, approached. “This group isn’t the best of the bunch,” he announced — I scanned the lab to see if anyone besides the performer of the Bach had heard him — “but they’re okay. Level two. Next period you’ll play for the fours and fives. They’re the best in the school.”

“But these are all first year students?” I asked, surveying the rows of girls and keyboards. “That’s great!”

“Yeah…” he answered reluctantly. “They’ve done well. But like I said, they’re not our best.” He stopped and looked at one of the girls. “Ayeesha!” She looked up. “Go play our guest something.” Like a machine, Ayeesha rose, made her way to the piano, and replaced the other girl, still playing her Bach, and began into a children’s piece I didn’t recognize. “Okay, that’s good,” her teacher barked a minute or so into it. ”Go back to your seat.” Just as mechanically, Ayeesha stopped and returned to her seat, resuming her practice. The click-clack of her classmates’ fingers continued; no one had noticed her performance.

Then the bell rang and everyone stood at once, making way for the Level Fours and Fives. I hadn’t touched the piano in two days, so my guess was that I was probably playing at a level one. But I would not be intimidated; the teacher introduced me and I started talking a little about America 88x50, eventually readying myself to play my Ives. “As I play this, I want you to think about what it means to you, what you think it’s about…” And when I finished the Three-Page Sonata with crossed hands on the final C Major chord [per Ives’s directions,] a girl with long fake nails pointed at me and said to her neighbor, “I gotta’ do that! Cross my hands like that!”

MICHIGAN FRAGMENT

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 18:04:00 -0500

(“FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE,” KALAMAZOO, MICHIGAN, 3/20/06)

“I was in touch with some residents who will have dinner with you,” said Corrine, my concert organizer, “if that’s okay with you.”

“Sounds great.”

“They’re eating at four forty-five, which is,” she looked at her watch, “now.”

“That’ll work.”

Corrine led me to a table in the cafeteria where three older women sat. They all had white hair and wore robes, and one of them had a walker that doubled somehow as a chair. She shouted at me from across the table. “You think you can handle three women?”

“I’ll try.”

During dinner the ladies, all born and raised in or around Kalamazoo, enlightened me on life in a retirement community. When one of them mentioned that women far outnumbered the men at Friendship Village, the lady next to me nudged my side and smirked. “The men die sooner.”

“But that means they have more of us to choose from!” one lady said.

“I think their days of choosing are long gone,” her neighbor answered.

“There are some couples,” the woman next to me argued. ”More than before.”

“Are there any troublemakers?” I asked.

“Besides us?” someone joked.

“No, not really,” one of them said. “Friendship Village is pretty selective of who lives here. We had one woman who started acting… erratically.” Everyone at the table nodded in acknowledgment.

“Like how?” I asked.

“Just aggressive.”

“To the other residents, or the staff?’

“To everybody. Anyway, they had her removed. That’s what they do if someone starts acting out.” My eyes widened. “No, it’s no big deal. They just put her in the psych ward.”

I excused myself and started to get up when the most soft-spoken of the group asked quietly, “Are you not getting anything from the dessert bar?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. ”I should really practice for tonight.”

“But I only ordered my sugar-free vanilla ice cream because I thought you were having dessert, too,” she said. I sat down and promptly ordered some ice cream, and as I did, she confided to the lady beside her, trying to conceal her words from me, “I just thought he was going to stay. He really didn’t need to order the sugar-free vanilla ice cream.”