The Piano
By Gene Aronowitz
Joan Grossman called me and said she needed help moving a piano from one apartment in Brooklyn to another, just a few blocks away. She hired two men who did odd jobs to earn a little extra cash but Frank, the bossier of the two, said they couldn’t do it by themselves.
I was a little reluctant to do this. My wife had been asking me to move a sofa bed from the second floor of our house to the third and I kept putting it off, worried about hurting my 57-year-old back. I don’t need this shit, I thought but didn’t want to come off as pathetic. What made it worse is that Joan said she had commitments from two other friends, Don and Hankjan. I reluctantly agreed.
We had an easy time getting the piano out of her apartment since there was a service elevator just outside her door. The truck had a hydraulic lift. But we could see that getting it upstairs in the other building was going to be really tricky. Joan’s new apartment was on the second floor and it would be necessary to turn the upright piano upside down so its flat top would be on the bottom. We would slide it as far up as we could get it on the much too narrow stairway and then would need to pick it up and tip it over onto the second floor like a seesaw using the rickety railing as a fulcrum.
Ninny, a retired and somewhat salty cousin of the landlady, lived on the first floor and acted as the super. He shouted, swinging his arm like the downward thrust of a windshield wiper, “You can’t do that. That railing’s gonna collapse if you put a piano on it.
Frank countered, “No it won’t. It will only be on the railing for a second, just enough time to tip it over.”
“What if you can’t tip it over?” Ninny said.
“We will, don’t worry about it,” Frank responded.
Ninny muttered something and walked into his apartment shaking his head. I think he went in to call his cousin.
The piano was lifted up on its end, so the keyboard was vertical. I went up the steps and held the other end of the piano as it was eased down onto its flat top.
Don looked at the piano the way a skilled mechanic might look under the hood of a car, tilting his head this way and that. Then he twisted his lips, hesitated a few seconds, and said “No way. I ain’t doin’ it.”
Frank glared at him, shook his head, and then told Billy, his very muscular partner, to get ready to push it up. Using his pointed finger, he instructed Hankjan to take his place beside Billy. I remained halfway up the steps, instructed to pull while Billy and Hankjan pushed.
I started out trying to pull the piano but, almost immediately, realized that if I continued, I could end up an invalid. But I didn’t have the nerve to just walk away as Don did. I admired his directness but was not willing to accept the scorn that would come my way at this point in the project. I began to make facial expressions that feigned exertion, my body posture as if in a tug-of-war. And that’s what I did until the piano was pushed up to where the stairway narrowed. Poor Hankjan’s face was red and his arms were shaking.
Ninny came rushing out of his apartment and started yelling. “That piano is not goin’ upstairs.
Frank walked over to him and said, “What are you talking about. It’s already up at the top.”
“I don’t care where it is. It’s not touchin’ that railing.”
“I know we can get it over, Frank said.”
I started laughing when I heard the word “we.” Frank wasn’t doing shit. He wasn’t doing any more than I was. Maybe less.
The dispute went back and forth but Ninny wouldn’t budge and the piano had to slide back down the steps. He also insisted that it would be a fire hazard to leave it in the hall, but he knew of a place where it could be kept until other plans were made. We moved the piano into the truck and drove around the corner to the ground-level storage facility. It was no problem to send it down the hydraulic lift and wheel it in.
All of us assembled in a circle on the sidewalk. Frank said he was upset about not being able to get the piano into the apartment but insisted that everything that could be done had been done. He looked at Don and dismissed him with a hand gesture that looked like he was swatting a pesky mosquito. Then he looked at me and Hankjan, and said, “But you guys…you’re OK.” I felt my chest swell and I’m told that a broad grin covered my face. I couldn’t think of any reason to admit that I had faked most of the episode and felt an astounding amount of satisfaction from the respect that my imagined accomplishment had garnered.
But the story doesn’t end there. When my wife and I returned home, I said, with considerable bravado, “You know that sofa bed? Let’s do it!” Once it was standing on its end, with my wife holding it so it wouldn’t tip over, I actually picked it up from step to step by myself. And not only that; we immediately moved a refrigerator from the third floor downstairs to the cellar, also a long-overdue task.
That declaration, “But you guys, … you’re OK,” made a real man of me.
