Job 3: Menial times 88
After my short lived career as a barn destructor, I was encouraged to continue working for Complete Piano Service doing odd jobs and learning the exciting trade of piano repair and restoration. For those who don't know about the inner workings of a piano, it is basically a bunch of padded hammers that pound an array of strings strung on a huge iron harp. The hammers are attached to the keys by what those in the piano trade refer to as the mechanism. It is a complex set of levers and straps and pins that allow the hammer to strike the string whenever the player presses down on a key. It all sounds very magical and artistic, but to a lowly piano peon it is a monotonous nightmare. A normal sized piano has eighty eight keys. What this means is that any menial task, however small or large, needs to be completed eighty eight times. To add further monotony, Mr. Maguire was a classical music enthusiast. There would be a non stop onslaught of classical albums, tapes and radio shows throughout the day. How many time should an adolescent boy have to listen to Fur Elise before it violates some child labor law somewhere?
If I were lucky, there would be no mechanism work for that day, and I would be awarded the task of buffing out the finishes of newly painted pianos. On a really good day, I could polish piano brass on the polishing wheel. Nothing quite like polishing the heads of hundreds of brass screws. The only thing that made the job bearable was the veritable freak show of people that seemed to migrate to the field of piano work in Long Island. If you were a habitual pot smoker or had any level of mental illness or instability, piano work was for you. Mr. Maguire was the only sober and somewhat sane member of the bunch, but oddly enough, most of the piano people in town worked for him in some capacity or another.
Some days we would visit one of the local piano people in their natural setting. Their houses always smelt of old dust, older pianos, stale beer and pot smoke. Piano parts were thrown around. There would be an old bench here, a broken lid there, and jars and jars of odd mechanism parts or brass screws or some unidentifiable items laying everywhere. Piano people are fond of coffee cans and mason jars filled with crap. The master of all weird piano people was a man named Nick Fasina. He worked on player pianos. If I thought working on normal eighty eight key mechanisms was bad, I was dumbfounded by the complexity of the player piano mechanism. It contained miles and miles of tubing and plungers and parts and more tubes. His house was filled to the brim with cans and jars of mechanism guts and pieces. Nick could barely remember where he lived. He'd get lost driving around town. He'd lose his money, his wallet, his keys. He'd lock himself out of his house. But, Nick could pull apart a player piano, jar it all up, refurbish it, and place all the pieces back together again. It was like all the information about the player mechanism had filled up his brian and pushed out all other knowledge.
My mother and Mr. Maguire wanted to teach Kenny and I about work ethics, so they surrounded us with mentally ill disenfranchised pot head piano people. These guys were lucky if they got out of bed every day. They turned every piano job in late, if at all. They took two hour lunches, and quit work early to drink beer. I learned a lot working with these guys. I learned how to smoke pot, and to avoid people like Mr. Maguire. As one of the piano guys once told me, "You need guys like Mr. M. They keep the world turning, but you don't want them coming to your house". Amen brother.
