s u m m e r
a piano saturday
Last week the girl next door moved. I never knew her at all. Occasionally I'd see her smoking out back on the steps. Once she watched me tear down the carbs on the car while she did dishes. She leaned in the doorway with her jeans rolled up and said, "So, why have you got two...carbs I mean, why two?"
That was about all that was ever said between us, but today she moved.
I came in from work and the movers were rolling out an old crank record player. The kind that plays big thick heavy wax hard grooved records. The kind with the cornucopia for an ear. The kind of record player where scratches and hiss are just as much a part of the recording as anything else.
I watched the guys roll that thing all the way through the courtyard and down the three steps to Tate St. and up into the white truck where it disappeared along with the girl next door.
I wonder what she listened to on that thing.
Amazing Grace. I heard it once. Faint and dirty. Last summer. I was doing something to the car. Scraping my back on the gravel lot, grease and blood on my knuckles as I twisted a box wrench this way or that to get at something, and then I heard it.
I'm sure of it. Sure as if I'd been sitting in the club with a scotch watching it all unfold on the keys before me.
Sure as I hear the same thing now coming through my computer. Radio Free New Orleans and "A Piano Saturday" . Yeah, that same dirty instrumental version.
And I'll be there soon.
goodnight 4.9.99