Merritt Tierce - Love Me Back

The piano sits on a dais in the middle of the open kitchen, right in front of the dining room. It’s a black Yamaha concert grand, and too nice to be in The Restaurant’s kitchen. When Lissandri hired him eight years ago Jimmy didn’t mention that, afraid he would sell it when he learned its worth, since the rate Jimmy was offered to play there was less than he was used to. That was right after Valentino’s burned down, and he needed the work so much he didn’t bother to argue with a man he knew from D Magazine to be one of Dallas’s wealthiest. Valentino’s had been a great gig, five nights a week and just two blocks from his M Street bungalow. He walked there, he didn’t wear a tie, the bartender poured him a glass of Chianti as soon as the rush was over. Best of all the owners liked to close early and often. That gave him plenty of downtime, and freed up New Year’s Eve for lucrative one-offs at mansions in Preston Hollow or hotel galas or even, once, he made a thousand dollars playing for Emmitt Smith and his wife while they sat on their couch and watched the ball drop.

Jimmy had to drive into Uptown to play at The Restaurant, and the valets were stingy with their spots so he parked his minivan on the street somewhere in the neighborhood. It was supposed to be a nice part of town, all the most expensive restaurants and condos, but his driver’s-side mirror had been broken off once before he started folding it in, and the managers wouldn’t let the girl employees leave at the end of the night without a man to walk them out. Jimmy had to wear a suit and tie but he left the top button of his shirt unbuttoned, and sometimes he wore the same suit and tie all week. He saw the servers being reprimanded for wrinkled sleeves or dirty aprons or ties tied sloppily and prepared an excuse for his unbuttoned button that had something to do with mobility and piano playing, but no one ever said anything to him. Often he had trouble finding a parking spot near the restaurant and this frustrated him until he settled into it as a believable excuse for being a few minutes late every time he played, and sat in the van for a short spell even when he found a space on the first try. No one seemed to notice that either, and when he did walk in he made sure it was with the same quick keen purpose every night. As if he couldn’t wait to get in there and play.

His second night in The Restaurant he’d closed the keyboard lid at eleven and left his bag of charts on the dais while he stepped into the bar. He asked the bartender — who also lived in the M Streets and whom he knew as a patron of Valentino’s, and who had done him the favor of telling Lissandri he knew a piano man, he knew the best piano man in town — for a glass of whatever Italian they were pouring. He took a stool at the end of the bar and had sipped only two sips when he felt an arm around his shoulder and there was the man himself on his left, saying Buddy you’re here to play not drink all right?

All right, all right, so he played. He was a little late and he was quick to leave but he played. He played the requisite mix of big band and lounge and pop and he played Happy Birthday four or five times a night when the servers took out chocolate soufflés with candles in them. For kids he played The Rainbow Connection and songs from Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid . He played the Elton John, the Billy Joel, the Norah Jones their parents asked for. Hey sure I know Your Song! Comin right up! Come Away With Me? Sure I know that! You got it ma’am! When the guests asked he played the Jim Brickman, which he resented even more than the Cielito Lindo he played for Hank Earl Jackson, a gigantic six-foot-seven alcoholic with a head the size of a steer’s who owned an eponymous bar in the Fort Worth stockyards. Hank Earl’s was more than a bar, it was an A-list venue for any country act that came to Texas, and while Hank Earl was famous for it that wasn’t how he made his money. He was an oil man, like Lissandri was an investment man, their nightlife ventures only toys, things they did with the money they’d already made. Jimmy had been playing in restaurants long enough to know that actually making money from a restaurant was hard to do.

Hank Earl never requested Cielito Lindo until late in the evening, after he’d had at least two or three bottles of chardonnay poured over ice. Cielito Lindo was a cow-herding song, a ranchero song, a mariachi song, and often Jimmy would hear a tired Mexican cook behind him sing along, Ay, ay, ay, ay , while he cleaned the broiler. Over the years Hank Earl had requested the song almost every time he was in the place, which was at least three or four times a week since he lived across the street in the Hotel Fitzandrew. His driver picked him up in the porte cochere at the hotel, made a right out of the driveway and then an immediate left into The Restaurant’s porte cochere, repeating the trip in reverse at the end of the night. Hank Earl had vomited, pissed, and passed out in the back of the town car on the way back across the street so many times that the driver, Hector, told Jimmy he was grateful when only one of the three occurred, and would have chosen piss if he could, since the man was impossible to wake or move and at least some of the piss would stay on Hank Earl’s pants. If Jimmy had found a prime spot on the street in front of The Restaurant, near where Hector waited with the town car, Jimmy and Hector would chat sometimes when Jimmy stepped out for his break at nine, to smoke his pipe in the minivan. He would sit in the driver’s seat smoking his pipe with the window rolled down, listening to Mose Allison.

There are two other piano men who work for The Restaurant, Ted and Ed. He knows Ted, who subbed for him at Valentino’s and plays Pearl Jam and Prince covers at the height of service when he thinks no one will notice. Marie notices, Jimmy respects her for noticing even when she is so busy it takes everything to not fuck up. She notices and reports that Ted and Ed are nothing. She says Some of the other servers don’t even know who’s Ted and who’s Ed. Ted has his gimmicks and Ed his Delilah bullshit, she says. You’re not a radio show and you’re not background, you’re a musician. This is how they started talking at first, when Marie was new. Chef didn’t like it when the servers stood with their backs to the dining room so she’d step up onto the dais next to him and look out at the guests, standing properly with her hands behind her straight back, in the ready meerkat posture Chef approved. He played whole concerts for her between requests. There was a Bud Powell night and a Chick Corea night and a Hank Jones night. After a few months he started quizzing her. When she swooped by with four steaks up her arm she’d say Ray Charles or Nat Cole as she passed. More often than not she was right. He didn’t register surprise at this, only delight. He had a two-note laugh that bounced like a rimshot and cracked him into talking about her like she was a racehorse, She’s a winner, ladies and gentlemen! Look at her go! Jimmy would you put all your money on me for the next one, she’d say. You betcha, sister, you betcha, I got one comin at ya, try this on, he’d say. He ran through everything he knew of jazz, R&B, blues, and Broadway before he started in on his classical repertoire, which wasn’t a great soundtrack for The Restaurant so he meted it out slowly.

You’re not gonna collect much hiding the tip jar under the lid like that, Chopin, she’d said once, and gone to move it out where people could see it. It was a snifter from the bar that lived on the far end of the soundboard. Ted and Ed would take it from its place there and put it up on top by the music stand, level with their heads — you looked at them, you’d see the glass there. Ed even put a twenty-dollar bill in it each night to make it look like somebody already appreciated him. But Jimmy stopped her from moving it. No, no, he said, serious, don’t. I’m just playing for you.