We All Need Old Friends

I was feeling particularly nostalgic the other night - winter’s diminished daylight hours do this to me - as I looked over at one of my two oldest friends, a made-in-Boston 1921 Lexington player piano. [The other is my restored ’65 motorcycle, and do keep reading, although seemingly incongruous they will come together.]

A stickler could make the case that inanimate objects can’t be a friend: there is no living organism here, no life form or energy.

But this 85-year-old collection of breathing bellows and wires that sing through rolls of perforated paper is my friend: it has been with me since 1974 when I resurrected it from a still life-long friend’s home in Nahant, Massachusetts. The piano had become a derelict to time that could claim unique fame: we had to remove a window casing to get it out. [How did it get in there in the first place?]

Professional movers then trucked it to my apartment, rigged ropes and pulley’s from the roof of the three-storey brownstone, and lifted it past the nose stuck to the glaring face of old Rosie our second-floor landlady. The amiable but motorcycle-gang-looking-crew got as much pleasure alternatively yelling as we did hearing “heave, up, to the right, to the left, ok we’re going to swing it in now,” which did nothing but increase that yenta’s scowl. (Little could she have anticipated that the piano was later to become only one-third of the show.)

The next step was to find someone to tell me how to restore it to life; the Yellow Pages and a couple of telephone calls are all that were needed. I became the student of a very proud, very professional and gregarious piano man named Peter Peters. Have you had a great, unforgettable person enter your life? Well, Peter was one in mine.

For months thereafter I shuttled piano parts and sections back and forth between my apartment and his meticulously kept basement workshop in his Belmont, Massachusetts, home. My old window-curtained meat-wagon - V-8 Chevy C-10 - which we had painted grey with rollers was always up to the task.

Peter was a man who had a genuine passion not only for his craft, but for life, which he passed along to me. I can still see his face lit up as he told me stories of how women would swoon - for the 25 cent admission - to the likes of early silver-screen idol Rudolph Valentino.

Of course back in my apartment my comings and goings were always subject to bumping into Rosie in the creaky, wooden circular stairway, where she would have to step back or slither out of the way - well, maybe slither is a bad choice of word: can a pumpkin slither? - to let me pass with a large piece of player piano wedged between my outstretched arms.

I made a point of always giving her a big-smile special “Hi Rose” at each such encounter.

The smallest of pieces – the tiny pneumatics, mini-bellows – one for each of the 88 keys, were laid out on the apartment living room floor on a sheet of three-quarter inch plywood. Every one had to have its disintegrating cloth cover ripped off and replaced with modern rubberized material.

As the months went by and with Peter’s patience and guiding my hands, the project incrementally moved toward success, and two totally new and unrelated things entered my life: that motorcycle that I mentioned earlier, and a real wooden pin ball machine.

Imagine: player piano, pinball machine and motorcycle. What more could a man want?

Well, the pin ball machine was made available on a long-term loan basis from my cousin in Connecticut. All I had to do was go and get it, which I did. Upon return my buddies helped me carry it up that circular staircase. I recall that we managed to sneak it into the apartment without having to give added pleasantries to Rose.

The motorcycle had surfaced after a co-worker offered it to me for a nominal amount in as-is-condition: $50.00. I had always wanted a Honda 305 Scrambler. It was in pieces and in boxes. Leaving the frame in my nearby garage I lugged the engine up those three flights of stairs, and rested it on a very heavy, round, old wooden coffee table in the living room next to the plywood with the pneumatics from the piano. It was to get new piston rings.

As you might imagine, since it worked from the start, the pinball machine was an immediate hit. This original wooden model could be persuaded with a little body English to get the flippers to hit the steel ball just that much harder against the bumpers creating a cacophony of ping, ping, ping, ping….. as the bell rang and the score increased on the colorful illuminated painted glass that rose up from the far end of the clear glass covered playing surface.

Well, the night of truth for the piano ultimately arrived. I can’t remember for sure just how much time was needed for the complete restoration, but it was at least six months. That final day I even worked into the night to tie up all the loose ends.

It was two in the morning when I flipped the switch to the vacuum motor: the drive chain creaked, the roll of paper jerked down over the tracker bar, the wind motor started to chug and it came alive! The tinkling sound of Those Old Piano Roll Blues wafted through the air: years of neglect thrown off with the flip of a switch.

The apartment, now with a pinball machine and a player piano, had taken on the trappings of a neighborhood bar.

One summer’s night was special.

The guys were over for a few beers. It was Boston summer hot, and we had no air conditioning, so the floor-to-ceiling windows of our third floor apartment were open wide.

The early morning hours arrived and anyone on the street below would have heard the relentless ping….ping….ping…. staccato from the non-stop pinball machine as if they were errant notes in the tunes from the back-from-the-dead tinkling player piano, with a cappella accompaniment from our beer-induced raucous laughter.

That was music to my ears.

And now, more than thirty years later my pal, my player piano, has resurrected some of the best times in my life.

That is what old friends are for.

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