Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

He was a cauliflower of a man. “Play me what the kids are listening to these days.” He might have been my father’s more assimilated uncle. He had the accent — the ghostly highlights of Yiddish filtered through Brooklyn — that Da’s kids might have preserved, had Da stuck with his people and had different kids. “Something out of sight, why don’t you start me with.”

I waited for him to name a tune, but he just waved me to go, his fisted cigar a conductor’s baton. I sunk into a beefy “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,” a tune I’d heard on the radio driving down. Since my brother had abandoned me for another country, I was safe in liking it. I savored the descending chromatic left hand, pumping it out in soulful octaves. Two strains in, Mr. Silber grimaced and waved his hands for a time-out.

“Naw, naw. Play me that pretty one. The one with the string quartet.” He hummed the first three notes of “Yesterday,” with a schmaltz three years too late or thirty too soon. I’d heard the tune thousands of times. But I’d never played it. I sat there in the Glimmer Room at the height of my musicianship. I could have reproduced any movement of any Mozart concerto on first hearing, had there been any I hadn’t already heard. The problem with pop tunes was that, in those rare moments when I did recreate them at the piano, as a break from more études, I tended to embellish the chord sequences. “Yesterday” came out half Baroque figured bass and half ballpark organ. I covered my uncertainty in a flurry of passing tones. Mr. Silber must have thought it was jazz. He broke into a show biz smile as I hit the final cadence. “I can give you one hundred ten dollars a week, plus tips, and all the half-price ginger ale you can drink.”

It felt like a lot of money, compared to washing dishes. I didn’t even negotiate. I signed a contract without consulting anyone. I was too ashamed to run it past Milton Weisman, who, in a just world, should have had his cut.

I rented an efficiency a short walk from the Glimmer Room. I got my things from the Village apartment out of storage, sending the piano to my father’s. He now had two keyboards and no one to play either of them. I set up our old radio next to my bed and tuned it to an AM countdown station. With my first two weeks’ salary, I bought a trash can full of LPs — not a single track older than 1960. And with that, I commenced my education in real culture.

I played from eight at night until three in the morning, with a ten-minute break every hour. My sets for the first few weeks were shaky. Mr. Silber got on me for playing too much Tin Pan Alley. “Enough with the old people’s music. Nix the Gershwin. Gershwin’s for people dying of shuffleboard injuries up at the Nevele. We want the new stuff, the mod stuff.” The man did a little dance step he mistook for the frug. Had I been able to do a deafening “Purple Haze,” I would have, just to make Mr. Silber beg for a little Irving Berlin.

I learned more melodies in one month than I’d ever learn again. I could listen to an album of funk, folk, or fusion all afternoon and perform a reasonable facsimile that evening. My problem was never the notes. My problem was how to keep my performances as free and rangy as the originals. Up until midnight, I sounded pathetically trim. But I counted on late-night fatigue to kick in and help me find the groove. The tunes I played into the early-morning hours strained toward rules of harmony they didn’t quite grasp. I let them yearn, rough, aching, and tone-deaf.

It took me months in the Glimmer Room to realize that what most people wanted from music was not transcendence but simple companionship, a tune just as bound by gravity as its listeners were, cheerful under its crushing leadenness. What we want, finally, from friends is that they have no more clue than we do. Of all tunes, only the happily amnesiac live forever in the hearts of their hearers.

Every hour I was off duty, I listened to the radio. I had two lifetimes to make up for. With my brother on the other side of the world, I moved through my days, humming all the hooks. Once I overcame my body’s clock and learned the secret of the graveyard shift, I could play deep into the night, unafraid of ever being heard. Sometimes the keyboard felt like one of those cardboard foldouts that teachers in poor school districts use in group music lessons. Even on slow nights, the Glimmer Room was so choked with clinking glasses, catcalls, wolf whistles, hoarse laughter, cigarette-thickened coughs, waitresses calling drink orders out to the bar, air-conditioning kicking on and off, and the fused buzz of lubricated shaggy-dog stories that no one could hear me even if, out of some drunken nostalgia, they were actually trying to. I was just part of the general background radiation. That’s what Mr. Silber was after. He didn’t even want me using the short stick on the baby grand’s lid. Hunched over the keys, I sometimes doubted that any sound came out of the instrument at all.

Even so, I felt guilty if I played a song the same way from one night to the next. You never knew what someone might hear by accident. I reinvented every fake-book trick of barroom pianists all the way back to slave days. A dry-ice version of “Misty.” A slightly dyspeptic “I Feel Good.” A “Love Child” agreeing to drop the paternity suit.

The Glimmer Room was white, as white as the dying resort town of Atlantic City pretended to be. But with the rest of dying whiteness, it wanted not to be. For the length of one dress-up evening anyway, the Glimmer Room’s cash customers wanted out from under their long sickness, the rectitude that had kept their spines straight and their rights preserved for generations. They wanted a night out. They saw me and longed for the blues that had evacuated the jook joints fifteen years earlier. Unable to hear half the notes over the din, they thought they could make out the strains of real soul.

I played what I imagined they wanted. All I had to draw on was an out-of-tune baby grand and an incomplete Juilliard education. But the thing about music is that its tool kit is so small. Everything comes from everywhere. No two songs are further apart than half cousins by incest. A raised third or an augmented fifth, an added flat ninth, a little short-leg syncopation, an off-the-beat eighth note, and any tune could pass over the line. Music at night in a noisy bar didn’t stop at two colors; it had more shades than would fit into the wildest paint box. If the Supremes could do the Anna Magdalena Bach notebook, even I could do the Supremes.

Tucked away in the corner of the Glimmer with a music-stand light, a tumbler of ginger ale, and a tip glass seeded with a few impudent dollar bills, I’d lose myself for weeks at a time. My wrists healed, and I filled with anonymous comfort. The great enemy was 2:00A.M., when I’d hit a wall, my brain bleeding and my fingers numb. I’d be in the middle of a tune by some suburban quintet who thought they’d invented the submediant, when I’d completely lose my way. My fingers persisted after I forgot where the tune was going, and free association would lead me into half-remembered Czerny études. For lack of material, I’d put the strains of unrequited love through augmentation and diminution, stretti and inversions, as if they’d escaped from The Well-Tempered Clavier. I fished up old Schubert songs from my Jonah days and dressed them up like Top 40 hits, padding out the set until quitting time. Then I’d go home to my efficiency and sleep until afternoon.

When I got too strange in my tonal mixings, Saul Silber rode me back into the corral. “Play what the kids want to hear.” “Kids” meant prosperous couples in their late thirties, looking for aura out in Pageant City. “Play the chocolate stuff. The mahogany stuff.” Silber ordered music the way an interior designer bought books for nouveau riche libraries: by the size and color of the spines.