Page 65 of Protect Your Queen

Bro

Chris

“Hey, Joe, can I get on the piano?” I asked the bartender behind the wood and brass bar.

“Sure, brother,” he said, throwing a towel over his shoulder and waving to the double doors that led into the theater.

Joe was a bearded hipster with a profound limp received in Fallujah. After a tough recovery, he decided to get a dog, a studio apartment, and served drinks and listened to concerts at his workplace. I envied that simplicity.

The American Legion in Hollywood is unlike any of the other ones across the country. It’s big, square with a pyramid steeple. It’s got a theater, and an Art Deco bar. It used to be a church on the corner of Hollywood & Vine, until C.B. DeMille, Adolph Menjou, Walter Long and Mary Pickford got it on its feet.

Since then, Clark Gable, Gene Autry, Mickey Rooney, Red Buttons, Ronald Reagan, Charlton Heston, Stan Lee and other figures became members. I’m not a superstitious man. I don’t believe in ghosts, or hauntings, auras or spirits. Except when it comes to music. This piano had a lot of greats play on it, and I felt it in the air around that auditorium.

The door slammed shut behind me, and I was in the silence of the stage, with its red velvet curtains, high ceilings, and the empty red chairs.

A lot of musicians say that there’s nothing as good as a packed theater. I had to respectfully disagree.

To me, an empty theater was where the magic happened. Magic was in the rehearsals. It was where you could find your greatest inspiration and try out thatthingthat didn’t quite work in the small music rooms of a conservatory, but suddenly clicked when you had the vast emptiness of a real performance space.

The papers in my hand felt heavy. I was so fucking excited!

A full song, mostly written out with my right hand, as I played the treble and bass cleft with my left. But now, I was going to do something that I hadn’t had the courage to do in years.

I relished the process. The way I laid out the three sheets of paper on the music stand. The feel of moving the bench back and forth so I got the right knee bend as I pressed down on the sustain pedal, hearing the slight creak of it as the mechanism engaged and disengaged.

My right hand ached, not from pain, but anticipation.

I looked at the music, staring at the first chord in the right hand: B, D and G.

My fingers trembled as I pressed down on the keys. Thumb, middle, and pinky pressing slowly until the first notes sounded out, echoing back to me as it bounced down from the domed ceiling.

I don’t know what I expected. Pain? That my fingers would be stiff, and unable to bend? That it would sound like dissonant trash? I had stopped playing because I knew that I couldn’t reach my former glory. I’d never play Carnegie Hall again. But I had no reason to think that I couldn’t play at all.

Then again, if you couldn’t do something well, why bother, right?

When I had looked at my stitched, and mangled hand, all I heard was the music in my ears go silent. Like standing in the midst of birds taking off, and hearing their flapping wings grow distant and quiet.

Twelve black stitches had stared up at me in a jagged line. More, really, because of the work they had to do to repair it below the skin. Then there was the physio needed to get me back in line so that I could shoot a weapon, and write, without that weird shaking.

But I didn’t even bother to play. I thought that if that happened, I’d taint all the music in my memory. Every performance I had done, and every song my hands had learned would all be stained by the blood that poured from this hand. Every line of melody could be cut like the tendons that had to be pieced back together.

But this was something new. I was starting a new life.

Hell, I didn’t even know if the song worked. It was in 5/4 time, which was unusual. What songs were in that time signature? The Mission Impossible theme song, Morning Bell byRadiohead, Take 5 by Dave Brubeck. Benjamin Britten, a post WWII composer, wrote "Green Leaves Are We, Red Rose Our Golden Queen" to that time signature… That was all I could conjure from the top of my head. It wasn’t exactly a beat you could dance to, so it didn’t do well in pop.

The lyrics were probably bad, but she had sung them, and so they were written in stone. But the rest? That was from me.

“It’s a story we can weave,” I sang, as I played the simple accompaniment, letting it ride through the empty theater. “With the drifting autumn leaves.”

I had to pause a few times to take a pencil and correct what I wrote. But overall, it was complete from my early morning writing session. A song about finally getting the person you want. The person that’s worth the wait.

I stumbled through the song, hating myself for each wrong note. My fingers weren’t where I thought they were. My muscle memory was a liar! I’d think my ring finger was pressing down squarely on G flat, only to see it on the top of A4.

But once my brain figured out how the nerves had altered my perception, it got better. It wasn’t great. My hand had lost dexterity and flexibility but it was passable. I could play better than the kid whose mommy had to bribe him with fast food to get him to his lessons.

I sloshed through it, liberated by a big, empty room. No audience, no recording equipment. Maybe I’d bring Jes here one day and have her sing under the great acoustics of this ancient place of worship.

When I played the song a second time, it was a little better. A third, and I was playing while imagining her on top of the piano in a red, sequined dress, the kind with a high slit that showed too much thigh. By the time I imagined her in silk, elbow-length gloves, I knew I had to stop or I’d be sporting a hard-on in the middle of my version of heaven.

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