Daron's Guitar Chronicles: Vol 4

209 TV PARTY

TV PARTY

One morning I was woken by the doorbell. By the time I got down there, Chris was there too, and we opened the door to see Bart standing there in a plain white T-shirt and very dark sunglasses.

“Want a piano?” he asked.

“What?” I shaded my eyes, wishing I had some sunglasses on, too.

“What kind of piano?” Christian said from behind me.

“Not sure. You remember Chris from Buffalo Tom?”

I rubbed my eyes. “Yeah, what about him?”

“His girlfriend, I think–or maybe it’s one of the other guys’, I’m not sure–anyway, they’re clearing out a house and there’s a piano and they don’t want it.”

That was as good an explanation as I was going to absorb before having some coffee, apparently. Later, in the van on the way over I gathered that Bart had come to wake us up about this because he couldn’t be expected to move a piano by himself in his car; both the van and either my or Chris’s help was needed. Also, his place was too small for a piano and he thought we should put it in our basement for rehearsals.

We pulled up to a house in Brighton to find the small square of lawn and most of the sidewalk had been turned into a yard sale.

“How much is the piano?” I asked as Christian paused as we went up the front walk to paw through a crate of old record albums on a card table.

Bart grinned. “No no, the question is how much are we not going to charge to haul it away for them.”

“Ah.”

Bart bounded up the stairs and talked briefly to a girl I didn’t know, and then beckoned us into the house.

It was a grand old house much fallen into disrepair. But there was stained glass in the windows and the living room was dominated by a huge fireplace of glazed tile with ceramic lion heads.

The piano, I was relieved to note, was an upright and would easily fit in the van. I went and backed it up the driveway to get as close to the door as possible, and we got the piano out of the house and into the van with no trouble.

Then we stood staring at it in the back there, wondering how we were going to keep it from falling over while driving.

I’m sure our insurance company would have hated the answer we came up with, which was that I drove very very slowly back to our house, with Chris and Bart in the back with the piano, one on either side, trying not to get crushed by it falling on them.

Hey, it worked, didn’t it?

Then came the getting it into the living room, which was not that difficult.

And then came the contemplation of the basement stairs.

“Now I know why that company is called Deathwish Piano Movers,” Chris said, measuring the doorway with a tape measure and looking dubious.

“Let’s eat lunch before we try this,” Bart suggested.

It was actually two in the afternoon by then, as it had been nearly noon when he’d woken us up, to be truthful about it.

So we walked down to the Sunset Grill, because the weather was warm and breezy, and it seemed like a good idea. (No, as far as I know the place has no connection to the Don Henley song.) Christian had one of the hundred microbrews I’d never heard of and which would have been wasted on me.

“Hey, let me ask you something,” Bart said, as we munched on our food.

“Sure, what?”

“Do you guys think I should bring Michelle on tour?”