Death by Piano

Sixty-five years later, I still shudder every time I drive by the house.  It was there on Campus Road across the street from Occidental College that I gave my first and last piano recital.  Six months prior to the recital my mother and I were in a music store where I started fooling around with the keys of one of the pianos.  The salesperson was quick to remark, “He certainly takes right to it doesn’t he.”  

In a manner of a few days  the piano was sitting in our living room and I was signed up to take lessons from Paul Moncur’s mother who lived eight houses down from us.

I had just turned seven years old and already knew I had no future when it came to music.  My second grade class was rehearsing a song as part of a program for parents when the teacher took me aside and suggested I simply mouth the words rather than attempt to sing them.  I took no offense to this or to the reprimands from Mrs. Moncur since I was innocent of any wrongdoing.  I simply had come into the world completely devoid of any musical ability whatsoever.

I did have a good memory and this enabled me to memorize the sequence of notes for the songs Mrs. Moncur had me play.  I had no feel for timing or expression so I’m sure my playing sounded as bizarre as Stephen Hawking communicating through his voice synthesizer.  Soon after the lessons began Mrs. Moncur started pointing to a recital that I was required to take part in.  She selected something that was a bit of a stretch for me and I spent the remaining months committing it to memory.

I dreaded that recital more than a colonoscopy.  I remember only a few details from that day.  The exterior of the house itself was very imposing as was the room in which we sat until it came time for each of us to play.  While seated and waiting for my turn, I pissed my pants.  When it was time for me to play I did so despite a mammoth dark stain in the crotch and seat of my tan corduroy pants.  It was a very understanding audience and there was not a single smirk or giggle that I was aware of.  When the recital ended I walked home and didn’t touch our piano for more than a decade.

When I next touched the piano it was to move it, not to play it.  The upright piano my mother bought when I was seven was still in my parent’s house twelve years later but had somehow migrated from the living room to an upstairs bedroom.  I have no recollection of how this happened.  There was a single enclosed stairway inside our house connecting the ground floor and second story.  It would not have been possible for man or machine to have taken it up those stairs.  Nonetheless, now it was upstairs and my parents had decided to get rid of it. 

Since taking the piano down the stairs was impossible, my father had an alternative plan he picked up from a Laurel and Hardy film entitled The Music Box.  The film has the two of them delivering a piano packed in a wooden crate to a home situated at the top of a flight of 131 steps.  The steps still exist at the intersection of Vendome and Del Monte in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles.  Today the site has a plaque embedded into one of the steps commemorating two films that were made at the location and a street sign marked “Music 

Box Steps.”  The west side of the steps is no longer a vacant lot as it was in 1932 and the 

city has installed street lights and handrails along the steps for safety.

After a flurry of mishaps Laurel and Hardy finally get the piano up to the house at the top of the steps.  The house used in the film was not one in Silver Lake but was constructed for filming on the Hal Roach Studios lot which was in Culver City at the time.  Once Laurel and Hardy and the piano arrived at the house a new set of problems took place with the piano dangling by means of block and tackle off a second story landing. 

Surprisingly, the north end of my parent’s house also had a second story landing. There was an exterior set of wooden stairs leading up to it and atop the landing was a cupola with a red tile roof that made the landing into a small porch.  The house was built in 1927 before builders began scrimping on materials and the header for the cupola was a 10-by-12 beam to which my father attached the block and tackle.

Moving our piano out the side door onto the porch was relatively easy.  With the piano on the edge of the landing, my father lashed it to the block and tackle apparatus, removed the wooden railing from the porch and shoved the piano off of the landing.  There was a menacing “twong” sound that came from the rope but the block and tackle held it in place as it swung around a bit before coming to rest some fifteen feet off the ground.  

  

We slowly lowered the piano and it at first appeared as though it was working out smoothly.  Then with the piano about eight feet off the ground it started to tip forward so I ran down the stairs to see what was happening.  We had forgotten about the wooden tool shed that was on the ground level directly beneath the landing.  It was about seven feet tall and jutted out away from the house just enough so that the bottom of the piano had become hung up on it and the top of the piano had begun tipping at an alarming angle away from the house.  As my father continued to lower it the upright piano went from vertical to nearly horizontal.

I told my father not to lower it any more and looked for a way to free the bottom of the piano from the top of the tool shed.  At first I tried using a shovel to pry the piano off of the shed but it wouldn’t budge.  Then I decided to jump onto the piano which was easier to do than it might sound since it had ropes wrapped all over it.  With the piano hanging from the landing and me hanging from the piano, I began yanking as hard as I could on the ropes attached to the piano.  Suddenly the bottom of the piano slid off of the shed, came down hard and fast with the rope as a pivot point flinging the piano with a catapult action out away from the house and shed by a dozen feet. 

I held on as this over-sized pendulum came to a stop and reversed its direction back toward the house like a massive wrecking ball.  As the piano and I accelerated to the bottom of the pendulum’s arc I stuck my legs out under the piano so my feet would hit the shed before the back of the piano did.  Fortunately the tool shed had been built with wood far more forgiving than the landing.  My two feet hit flat against the shed door and blew it off its hinges.  The complete collapse of the door provided a perfect cushion, like a car’s air bag, and brought the piano to gentle stop.  I dismounted the piano and looked up at my father on the landing above.  He said, “What’d I tell ya, piece a cake.”