But instead of being held at bay by my rescuers, Manager Dan would Lombardi away, and those around me, the converted, would shout and cheer themselves into a fervor as they prepared for their missionary work, in whichever region they were assigned that week. We sold paintings, prints actually, door to door to around Rochester, New York. Now, of course that by itself sounds about as demeaning as possible, but it was these cult sales meetings that really got to me. And having had a bit of experience since then in more ‘respectable’ businesses, I’ve come to realize that sales is sales, and if you don’t believe… they have ways to bring you into the fold.

There was a brotherhood here that I never quite caught on to myself. The whole thing was like a game where my coworkers and I were in competition with each other in a very obvious, macho way, but also we were all in competition with the customers. And it was that battle that Dan prepared us for each day.

“Warren!” he’d yell from the front of the room, with the rest of us sitting in wooden chairs, about six rows deep, “how many paintings are you gonna sell today?”

“I’m gonna sell nine paintings today Dan!!” Warren would roar. Then he would turn and take high fives from Cal next to him, bobbing his head as if he had actually just sold the nine paintings, it was all over!

And in the rows behind him the other sales people would murmur in appreciation, “Jeez, nine paintings! Alright!”

Then Dan would tell a story from his selling days, and the group would roar with laughter and cheer with approval and envy. It was not idle boasting. Everyone in the room knew that Dan could walk out the door that day with the same paintings the rest of us carried and sell twelve; fifteen if he was motivated. In fact, everyone in the room knew who all the heroes in the room were, because that’s exactly what they were: heroes. Every Monday, Dan would announce the who had won the prize of the week. There was some arbitrary sales quota picked each week, and whoever reached that quota first won the special prize of the week. On top of that there were the standard bonuses that were always in effect, anyone who made a certain number of sales in a month, a number which didn’t seem too hard to reach, would gain not only their commission for those sales, but an extra five hundred bucks. Now, like I say, those bonuses were not tough to get. In any given month probably a third to a quarter of us would get them (notice how I say ‘us’ as if I actually ever came close to that cash?). There were higher bonuses too. A person could add more than a thousand bucks monthly to their commissions with these bonuses, and quite a few did.

There was Warren who I mentioned, who was just a kid really, a year younger than me. Warren had the aggressive, super personable, heavily competitive style that you would associate with the clichéd picture of a succesfal salesman. I couldn’t stand him. Well, a lot of people couldn’t stand him, because they were salesmen too, and he was better and often let them know it. Bit I really just couldn’t stand him. A few of the other top salespeople (there were about thirty of us in the ‘team’ in all) were similar in style to Warren: bombastic, cheerful, and above all, confident. There was really no cut and dried recipe for what type of person would make a great salesman, though. There was Al, who was a, well, a zhlub, in his forties or fifties. A little, ugly fellow with a pot belly and ugly old sport coats that didn’t fit properly. He had a quiet, almost bitter personality. He was not aggressive at all, in fact he hardly seemed to have any self-assurance. When I first met him, I assumed he was one of the people Dan had told me about initially, the 20% who come in and try it for a few months, squeak by a living and then decide that sales just isn’t for them. But he was actually one of the heavy hitters of the group. There was a story I heard where he literally stuck his foot in the door when a man tried to slam it in his face. The man had rushed out of the shower and stood there dripping wet in his bathrobe, quite upset. Al sold him three paintings, all at a fair mark-up. Then there was Corrine. Corrine was a young girl, probably in her late twenties. She was French originally, and spoke in a pretty, quiet voice, with a strong accent. She also kept to herself and was never one of the loud voices at the morning meetings. She was absolutely beautiful. I was single, but I never could have considered making an advance at her, I just assumed it was impossible. I had decided that if I were to try for anyone at work that summer, it would have to be Jen, the sharp-mouthed secretary.  Corrine was tell and very slender, with long, perfectly shaped legs and beautiful little hips. Her face had very fine features, with a tiny sculpted nose and little angular eyes. She had medium length blonde hair which swept away from her face. She was a hell of a salesperson. Some weeks, she was the top in the team. Warren was absolutely in love with Corrine. He was constantly coming on to her in a brash but joking way. Behind her back, he and Dan would talk about her constantly. Warren’s face would tighten up and he’d smile a strange, frustrated smile and say, “Oh my God! I have to have her! She’s incredible!” She was a great salesperson.

In theses morning meetings, Dan would call one of the salespeople up to practice their pitch, using him as the cutsomer. He would kind of alternate between the pros, like Al, and the weaklings, like myself. We would go through all the possible objections and cover all the proper responses. Then, as soon as the little play was completed, he would turn back at the group and suddenly shout something like:

“Dave, how many paintings are you going to sell today?!”

At which point I would shrink back in my chair and try not to make eye contact with anyone, purely out of embarrassment. The whole idea of grown men and women sitting in a warehouse shouting affirmations at each other daily made me very uncomfortable.

“Uhh…five,” I would say quietly, five being basically a pretty good day for me.

Then the group would laugh, and Dan would walk up to me with a huge smile, “Five, Dave? You don’t sound too confident! Everybody, you just heard what Dave said he’s gonna do today. Did you believe it?”

“Nah!”

“No way!”

“Pussy!”

The scattered shouts came from the peanut gallery.

“Dave,” Dan would bark, but always with that smile, “Did you hear what someone just called you? Now come on, how many are you gonna sell today?”

“Five!” I would yell a little louder.

“Alright!” Dan would shout, “Now I think I believe you! I’m just about ready to buy five off you right now, you seem so confident. five’s not much, but it’s a great start for a beginner Dave. Hit that goal!”

And everyone would cheer for me too. Five paintings, why it was in the bag. Dave had said he was gonna hit five, and there was confidence in his voice! Done deal. It was at least a very supportive group.

When I first started, they put me with Cal, a Warren-Lite type, for two days training, to learn the ropes. These were the ropes: Within a couple hours drive radius of the city, each salesperson would pick an area they wanted to hit. It was somewhat arbitrary, but if someone tried to cover an area that was too large (which would be unfair to the others), Dan would cut it down. He also wouldn’t allow someone to cover an area that had been hit within the last six months or so. Depending on the size of the area, how many doors there were to knock on, and your success with it, you could stick with that area anywhere from a couple of days to a few weeks. We would go door to door to businesses; restaurants, shops, offices, and try to sell to the manager. For the business or even for their home if they wanted. It wasn’t unusual to go to homes out in the countryside, but Dan explained that we had a better shot with the businesses.

We sold limited edition prints, although the “limit” seemed to be somewhere in the thousands. They were nice paintings I have to say, mostly wildlife scenes by big name upstate artists. Well, this is what we were told to say in our pitch. For all I knew they could have been done by Dan’s brother, or Da Vinci. The prints, with the frames, cost $70. That is, for each print sold, we had to pay Dan, who was part owner of the company, $70.  Anything we could sell it for above that was ours to keep. In general you’d start out looking for about $120 or $130, and allow yourself to be haggled down. Everyone had different philosophies and methods for what they would ultimately sell for, but of course, if you were close to hitting your bonus, you’d sell at a loss just to reach the quota.

Of course, the customers never knew that anything over $70 was profit to us. $120 was simply the price to them. Why? Because I would say it was $120 and that made it official. So if the price was their objection, we could cut them a deal. It would often so happen that I was at the end of a great day, I had only three left in my car, there on the back seat! and if they would give me a clean sweep on the day and let me go home early, why, I would give them all three for ninety bucks each, just so I could go home. They didn’t need to know there were another four in the trunk. Or perhaps I was close to reaching my quota (well, as far as they knew maybe I was close to reaching my quota), and… No matter how you cut it, dropping a price when I knew how much I would still make off it, made me feel queasy. None of these tricks were as bad as the ghost call. In the ghost call, I was again at the end of my day, with just a few left and I was willing to lower the price for them. The ghost call was then brought into play if further measures were necessary. That was when I would say, “Okay, well, I’m not allowed to go below ‘X’ dollars. But I really want to finish off what I’ve got today. Maybe if I call my manager he’d let me go below price. Do you have a phone I could use?”

No, like I say, Dan didn’t care what we sold for. He got his seventy per and that was that. So I would call the office and Jen would answer.

“Hello Jen, how are you? It’s Dave. Is Mr. Gershon there?”

“Ghost call?” she would say.

“Hey Mr. Gershon, it’s Dave, how are you?”

Then, from the potential customer’s point of view, the conversation would go like this.

“Listen, I’ve got just three prints left now, and I have someone who’s interested.”

Pause.

“Uh-huh. Well, what I was wondering was if it would be possible to give a lower price, since these are just my last three.”

Pause.

“Yes, I know but… oh, ‘(X+15)’ would be okay? Well, the thing is, I told them I would see if I could go as low as ‘X’.”

Pause.

“Okay. Yeah, great! Thanks Mr. Gershon. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Of course, Jen was at the other end of the line the whole time doing anything she could to try to make me crack up. The ghost call. I feel dirty all over again just thinking about it. At least having done it makes me a little more realistic whenever car/ furniture/ appliance/ computer salesmen tell me they have to speak with their manager.

So, those were the ropes. In two days with Cal, we made a pretty good amount, three hundred. And I had done a lot of the work. The first few I mostly watched, but after that we worked as a team. I even did a couple on my own. All the money at the end of the day went to Dan, who would then pay us our profits at the end of the week. Except that at the end of the week he only paid me for the profits I had made in my three days alone, after working with Cal. After I looked at my check I went to his office to find out what was going on. He explained that I was just in training when I was working with Cal, and that Cal got the money. When I started to complain he told me that Cal would probably have been able to do even better on his own, and it wasn’t fair to penalize someone for volunteering to help train the new people.

“Look,” I said, “this is absolutely ridiculous. I worked those two days the same hours as Cal did, and I was talking to the customers the same way he was. I’m not going to get shortchanged because you think he’s a better salesman so I must have been holding him back. I know that at least two of the sales I did myself, and most of them we worked as a team. I want my cash.”

The long and the short of it was, Dan paid me my half out of his pocket, and let Cal keep the full amount he had been given. In spite of how much I hated those meetings, and how dirty I felt with every sale, I liked Dan and I knew he really was trying to help and really thought that his people could do very well for themselves if they were good. I wasn’t.

On my own, I gradually degraded from my peak days working with Cal. I could sell no more than a few paintings a day, netting me about seventy or eighty bucks. Over the weeks, things got worse. From the first, I had hated the selling aspect. Not a promising sign for a salesman. I detested trying to convince people to do something they didn’t want to do. What did I care if they had this painting? Why should I force it on them? Why do we have to be divided so that half of us are always trying to tell the other half what they should do? What was money anyhow? Why couldn’t we all just get along? Existentialism is not a trait to put on your resume when applying for a job in sales. After a while, the morning meetings began to wear on me even more. At first I had been amused by them, I had gone out with friends and tried to convey the comic aspects of the whole thing. But the cult atmosphere began to bother me seriously. I wondered why people needed such an obviously artificial support to be able to perform their jobs. I started to question exactly what kind of people these were, and by extension whether people in general need to resort to similar but more subtle measures to feel comfortable with what they do. Conversely I wondered what kind of job it must be that the only way in which people could feel comfortable was with such outside motivation. Then, as far as the job itself, it wasn’t just the selling that bothered me. After about two weeks, I began to dread the moment of entering the doorway of each potential customer, clumsy with two or three framed prints under my arm. I thought that the moment I walked in, everybody noticed and detested me. The salesman. I felt like a leper, whether I sold or not. Most often, not.

I mentioned that at that time, I was trying to earn cash for my last year in college. As you can easily imagine, I was somewhat concerned with what life after school would hold for me. I was a history major, but I knew that that meant, dollars to doughnuts, that I would probably end up working somehow in the business world, as most with liberal arts degrees do. I began to cast all of consumer business in the light of my experience here. It was quite unsettling. I spent sleepless nights worrying about working in marketing or advertising, coming up with gimmicks to make the salespeople’s jobs easier, to convince more people to buy something which they didn’t want, and for a price that of course could be lower, to be truthful with you ma’am. I began to use the salesman/ customer dichotomy as a metaphor for other aspects of life: sex, relationships, politics. I saw everything through this filter.

I would arrive for the eight o’clock meetings tired and depressed and my workdays took on a bizarre routine. I would drive out to my area, and spend a few hours trying to hit as many doors as I could. If they didn’t want it, who was I to argue? I’d forget about our mornig meeting charades and move on to the next door. Finally, if I could sell two or three prints, (or, oh the hell with it, one) I would say to myself, ‘That’s eighty bucks (or sixty bucks, or twenty bucks) profit. Even if you don’t sell anything else, at least you’ve got that. It’s not a waste.’

Then I would go back to my car and go to sleep in the back seat. I’d sleep for two, three, four hours depending on how tired and/ or depressed I was. Then in the late afternoon, I took a leisurely approach. I’d hit a few more doors. If I sold, I sold, if I didn’t, what the hell? Eighty bucks (or sixty or twenty).

After a few weeks of that attitude, it was time for an intervention. It was obvious that I needed re-indoctrination. My numbers were down. I had forgotten the way. Dan decided to have Corrine retrain me. I was to spend two days with her, and then go out on my own again. This time that Dan told me explicitly that we had to make our own financial arrangements. Corrine was in charge, and she would decide who was to get the money. This worried me because Corrine was notoriously known as being a solo artist. She hated partners and always refused to help in training. I was surprised she had agreed to take me on at all. In fact, Corinne agreed right away to split even with me. I had mentioned at some point that I was familiar with the small town of LeRoy, as I had visited my grandparents there as a kid and used to play golf there. She thought that my familiarity with the shops there, and ability to drop a few names would do well in a small rural community.

The first day went well. Basically, I just watched, which is pretty much what the customers did. In taverns, auto repair shops, and even on farms, Corrine’s method basically was to make her pitch and then wait. The customer, and whoever else was around would just kind of scratch their heads and take her in. The silences would be so long I would want to sneak out. Corrine would just stand there with a totally blank expression on her face as the head man would tip his head back and forth and say, “Aww geez, I don’t know…. I don’t think I should… I don’t really have room for anything… it’s pretty expensive.

To any of these comments I would have, during my first, more aggressive weeks, used this as an opportunity to give my standard responses for overcoming objections. In my later, weaker weeks, I would have used these as an excuse to leave. Corrine did neither. In fact, she did nothing. She stood there looking completely, beautifully inscrutable, and everyone in the room would become quietly uncomfortable. And then the manager would give her money, and she would give him the prints. It was amazing. She had a completely unique approach to sales. Nobody wanted to tell her to leave, as they would have told me, so she would just wait until they were so uncomfortable they would give in. Of course, I was twice as uncomfortable as anyone, as I had always dropped some name as a pretense that we had some connection to the locals, and then I had to stand back and let her do her thing. Corrine by the way never bargained below one hundred. She was insulted even by my asking about it. Away from the customer she was actually a lot of fun, and we had quite a good time telling jokes as we drove through the countryside. We cleared three hundred in one day. I liked her a lot.

The next day, Dan was away and he had asked Warren to run the morning meeting and mind the office for the day. At the morning meeting Warren made a few jokes at my expense regarding my aspirations with Corrine, and then off we went.

We had a similarly successful time that day. Over two hundred. Even with only getting half of the two day total myself, it was almost as much as I would make in a whole week alone. On the long drive back to the warehouse, where she had to drop me off to get my car, she talked about her fiancé.

“You know,” she said apropos of nothing, yet so sweetly, “we haven’t had a great relationship lately.  Really not sure I can stay with him. But I still would never do anything behind his back.”

I didn’t quite understand where this was coming from so I just stayed quiet.

“You know, it is quite insulting to me really when Warren says these things. I know he tries to guess who I will be with from work, but I will not do that. Especially not with him, of course.”

I laughed.

“That’s great,” I said, “especially not him.”

“We-ell,” she laughed, “he is very unappealing. It is one thing to say I would fool around on my fiancé, that is bad enough, but then to imagine it would be with such a man, it is crazy!”

“I can understand why this would be insulting,” I said.

“And look, I have been with you for two days, and he makes all these joke, but we have not done anything.”

Now I shut-up. How did I get into this? This was unexpected. I tried to look away from her eyes to hide how surprised and thrilled I was that  the idea was something she could mention aloud without laughing. But looking away, all I could see was her skirt, slit way up her thigh and the smooth and rounded flesh which showed pale and pure in the long v cut in the fabric.

“After all, David, if I were to be with anyone it would be you, but I would not do that.”

Now I had to look at her face because I needed to see if she was making fun of me. But instead of laughing she just looked calmly out at the road. She turned for a moment and smiled in a shy way at me.

“Well, I understand,” I stammered trying to think of something to say, “I can certainly see why you would not enjoy…”

“I have an idea!” she shouted as she turned to me with a great, excited smile, and I almost cried looking at her perfect tiny teeth, “Why don’t we play a joke on Warren? We can pretend we really, you know…”

She shrugged her shoulder, kind of embarrassed, and I grinned like a monkey. My heart was beating out of my chest. Was I going to wake up alone in the back seat of my car with my afternoon selling shift still ahead?

When as we parked in front of the warehouse, Corinne put on some fresh lipstic and gave me a few kisses on the cheek, and one just half on my lips. The smell of her hair and the feel of her cheeks against mine would have done me in if I wasn’t so excited to see the look on Warren’s face. She messed her hair up suitably and I told her her lipstick was smeared well enough. Then I had an idea. I pulled a condom from my pocket and tore it from the wrapper. I unraveled it and winked.

“I’ll just throw this in the trash as we pass by the desk. Give him something to really think about.”

We walked in through the office, carrying the leftover prints. Jen had already gone home, but Warren sat at Dan’s desk. He looked at Corrine, and then at me and his jaw hung open. For the first time since I knew him he was speechless. I looked down at the unrolled condom I held in my hand, shrook my head and tossed it in the garbage pail as we walked back into the warehouse. We dropped off the paintings and left.

The next day, when I had to go back to working on my own I could tell from the way people looked at me that Warren had told the story. He cornered me after the meeting.

“Dave!” he cried, “Did you and Corrine really?… I mean, what happened??”

I shrugged and smiled benignly.

“Dave! You’ve got to tell me! I mean, you? Really??”

I left him there and carried out my prints to the car.

That morning I didn’t try any new doors. I hadn’t slept at all the night before. I had wondered about Corrine, being in an unhappy relationship but staying true to it, and I wondered about Warren making his bonuses and pining after Corrine, and I wondered about me. So that day I just drove out to my area, found a park with some shade, then lay down in the sweet August grass and went to sleep. At about one o’clock I drove back to the office and told Dan I couldn’t do it anymore. He nodded with understanding. He said he kind of expected it since I hadn’t called in at all yet that day. I gave him back the paintings and he wrote me out a check for the money he still owed me. I never made the promised land in the sales game, the land of milk and honey, and fat cash bonuses. Still, I guess I did alright all in all. I wondered how Corrine would look in a big black hat and robe.

One thing he was fairly steady with was Tuesday night at the Rainbow Bistro. Blues Tuesday. Every week we’d meet up there. I’d play harp, which is to say harmonica, and Billy piano. Afterwards we’d sit and have a drink and he’d get philosophical about the things he loved. He believed, for example, that real musicians spoke through their music, and that that was the only way to get to know what somebody had inside. He had another theory about perfect relations. He felt that out there somewhere was both the perfect piano and the perfect woman for him. It was his holy mission to find them. As to pianos, he was devoted to uprights. A grand piano had just too much room in there for the music to move around in, but in a little upright you could hold that music as tight as you want. The way he played it, the piano bounced, and when Billy was really cooking it would jump right along with him like the two were in some kind of a dance. You couldn’t do that with a grand. The perfect upright would have to be old, so that the wood would have shrunk and stretched so much from the winters that it was all settled into place and there were no more surprises from it. It would have original keys, real ivory that you could only get to fully shine by polishing with vodka. When he hit the keys he wanted them to hit back. And the sound… well, he couldn’t explain what he wanted out of the sound. He just hypothesized that there was a perfect sound in a perfect piano somewhere and he would find it.

One night after playing a set at Blues Tuesday we went upstairs by the pool table for a beer. It was quieter there and he could sermonize me some more about his theories.

“You know John,” he began, “I believe that I am not alone in my feelings. In point of fact, I believe that I am actually just one in a long line. Now you take Plato.”

“Okay,” I said, it never being wise to argue with Billy with a beer in his hand.

“Plato I’ve read a lot about. And he had a theory about a world of forms. Are you familiar with these ideas?”

I conceded that I was not.

“The world of forms is the perfect world upon which our reality is based. You take a triangle.”

“The instrument or the geometry?” I asked.

“The geometry,” he answered. “Now, you know what a perfect equilateral triangle should look like, right?

“Certainly.” I had already displayed ignorance on the point of Plato’s theories and I had no desire to appear a complete idiot.

“Well, do you believe you’ve ever seen an actual perfect equilateral triangle? And remember I said perfect, like you could picture it.”

To tell you the truth, I couldn’t really picture one so perfect, but I knew what he meant.

“No,” I said, “I don’t think I ever have. That is, I guess nothing that we can ever make is going to be perfect.”

“Right. In the real world, we have just representations of the idea of a perfect triangle. There’s no actual perfect triangle. Now Plato, he would say that a perfect triangle exists only in the world of forms.”

“But he’d say it in Greek.” I was catching on.

“Right. And not just that, but he’d say that there is a relationship between every flawed thing in our world, and a perfect counterpart in the world of forms. Our human bodies, they exist in the real world. But our souls, they exist in the world of form. And of course, perfect music, and perfect love, and even perfect upright pianos… they’re all there in the world of forms. That’s Plato.”

I had a sip of my drink. It was a lot to take in.

“Now,” he continued, “I just take Plato a little step further. I think that if my soul can speak through me, which you must agree it does, then the perfect piano must speak through a real piano. And that’s just what I intend to find.”

He educated me until closing. That night I slept with visions of perfect harps, dancing through the Acropolis, Hohner Marine Band Harmonicas with every note in perfect pitch and with no reed ever getting stuck.

Not too many weeks after that I went out to meet Billy to listen to a new band we had heard about. They were called “Bald Headed Phil and the Mississippi Blues Band”, and we had heard they were good. When I got to the Downstairs Club, the show had already begun. Through the smoky crowd, I found Billy sitting by himself at a table, and he looked like he was under a spell. His eyes were wide as saucers and his jaw hung slack. Looking up at the bandstand I immediately found what must be the source of his distraction. The piano player was a beautiful girl. She had a long, thin body which stretched out and swayed above the keys. Her arms were slender and white and her fingers were a blur as they played. She had long blonde hair that fell straight down the arch of her back. This was a woman who knew her Dorian from her harmonic minor. She was beautiful and I could have fallen for her myself, but I knew it never turned out well for me to think in this manner for a girl Billy has thought of first. I said nothing to interrupt Billy’s reverie as I sat down, only motioning the waiter for a beer. The song went on into an extended jam, and Bald Headed Phil wailed away on a tin kazoo, running over the echoing tones of the walking bass lines from the piano’s left hand. Finally, the song ended, and after that marathon they took their first break.

“She’s beautiful isn’t she?” I said to Billy, smiling.

He shook his head as if I had awakened him. He turned to face me with a look I had never seen in him before. His cheeks glowed as if some light from the inside was trying to get out. His eyes looked like they weren’t actually there. Just colours.

“Did you hear that?” he asked me.

“They were fantastic,” I said, “better even than we were informed. I’m surprised you noticed though, the way you were staring.”

“Did you hear that piano?”

This time I shook my head in surprise.

“John, there can no doubt. That upright piano is the one for me!”

“Well, it was some nice playing from a nice looking player, I’d definitely say that.”

“No, John,” and then his face became real solemn and he spoke in almost a hushed tone, “The form of that piano was speaking to my soul. I know it. I can feel it… I have to have that piano. I need to play that piano to make the music that I have in my head. That that piano needs to make.”

He made me real uncomfortable the way he was staring at me so I tried to smile to shake him out of his trance.

“Billy, I believe there is already someone playing that piano.”

“It can’t be stopped John. That sound resonates within me. That is the piano that was meant for me. Or vice versa.”

I spent the next few minutes trying to discourage Billy from getting his hopes up too high. After all, walking out with that piano in a packed house without being noticed would be a very tall order. But Billy was not arguing. He had decided most certainly that this, and only this piano, in all the world, could make the sound he had been waiting for. I was very relieved when the band came back on and we could put this conversation on hold. I watched him through the next set, watching her. Or rather, watching the piano, and I could see the faraway look kind of falling from his eyes as he began to think things through. I began to hope he was talking himself out of all these ideas and would leave them with the Greeks.

Finally, the band finished their final set and their several encores. The house lights came on and the crowd slowly streamed out. Billy turned to me.

“John,” he said, “I’m a reasonable, practical man,” which, in the interests of honest reporting I must point out is not at all true, “-I think the reasonable thing to do is just go up to this young lady and explain the situation. I have some money these days, and I believe that there is no reason why she should not concede that I should have her piano, which is meant for me anyways, and she should have my money.”

I watched Billy get up and walk towards the bandstand. Billy is a well-spoken individual, and I’ve seen him talk young women into propositions before. But I could see the body English of this one, and she was not buying what my friend was selling. By the pleading look on Billy’s face it was clear he was trying very hard to convince her that money, music and Plato were all on the side of his getting that piano. But she just laughed and shook her head as she pulled a velvet cover over the upright. After a time, Billy’s expression slowly changed. The conversation had evidently moved on to greener pastures as he began laughing right along with her. Finally, Billy came back down to me.

“Well, I suppose we’d best move on John. If she won’t give up her piano I can’t do any good making a fool of myself here.”

I was a little surprised he seemed to be taking it so well, but I agreed with his assessment and so we left, walking back to our cars in silence. When I got home, I took out my harps and played over the music in my head that I remembered from Bald Headed Phil’s show.

The next day I got a call from Billy in the middle of the afternoon.

“John, I think you should come down and meet with me, I want you to hear something.”

As was often the case I wasn’t busy that afternoon, but it still bothered me that Billy should assume so. Nevertheless, I agreed to come down to his apartment and hear what he had.

“I’m not at home,” he said, “I’m at the Downstairs Club.”

“I thought the Downstairs Club didn’t open till 7.”

“It didn’t, and it isn’t. I had a key made some time back however, so it is open to me at all hours.”

I didn’t need to ask the next question as I remembered Lorraine the barmaid, and so I skipped ahead to the part where I told him I would be right there.

I found the door locked, and had to wait for Billy to let me in.

“Very responsible for a B and E,” I said as we walked downstairs to the barroom.

“John, this is no time for your sarcasm,” Billy said quickly, “we have decisions to make.”

The room was dark but the stage lights were on. As I expected, the piano was there. Uncovered. An open beer sat on the pine top.

“Oh, yes, help yourself,” John said, following my eyes, “the fridge is just under the bar at the far end.”

As I opened my beer, Billy sat down at the piano.

“Sarah, the girl from the band, mentioned that they were here for another night, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to hear the piano on a personal level,” he said in an offhand way.

He started right off with a mambo, which I took to mean he’d been playing for some time and had warmed up his left hand considerably. I sat and sipped the beer, scratching the harp in my pocket with my free hand as was my habit. Billy was magnificent, and that piano sounded like a full orchestra. It made the beer taste great and bubbly on my tongue. When he finally stopped, he pulled his hands away from the keys and looked down at me with eyes wide open and his smile. The empty club seemed to still resonate with the ghosts of the notes just played, bouncing around the room. Then, there was another voice from behind us.

“Sorry to interrupt the show boys.” It was the piano player. “I just thought I could practice a little on my piano.”

Billy jumped to his feet and at once launched into his dissertation.

“Okay, you are a musician and I understand that you love music and love your piano.  We’re both musicians so we speak frankly- if you love something, set it free they say, and I believe that that maxim applies here. If you love music, and your instrument… you’ve been lucky enough to find a special instrument here. Now, I believe it is important to always allow the music to speak first and last, and I know that this is the instrument I have always needed to find the music inside me, and that I am the player to bring the music out of this piano that this piano was born to make! This is a most serious issue I have to tell you, if you take music seriously.”

As the girl remained cool he was becoming hotter and hotter, redder in the face in fact.

Finally she said, “We’re playing here tonight. Next week we’re at Take 5. If you love the instrument so much, you can buy a ticket and come listen to it.”

I have never accused Billy of straight thinking, but her response stopped him and he clearly saw that his talking would do no more good today than the night behind us, for all the weight of his having thoroughly tested his piano, or I should say, her piano. So with that math done, Billy walked out wordless. Now I felt the pressure of the girl’s eyes on me.

“You want anything else here,” she said, “or do you just like to beat the crowd?”

“I, uhh,” I paused. It seemed to me, here in a club that I was so at home in, talking to a beautiful girl who made such beautiful music, that there must be a perfect thing that I could say at that moment. I couldn’t find it.

“I play harmonica with him,” I said instead, pulling the harp from my pocket to show I was not lying.

“Well, go play with your friend,” she said, tilting her head to the door.

I scurried off and felt like a little mouse. Before I left I said, “I love your band. But you could use a harp.”

This all set in motion a strange few weeks. Billy and I followed the progress of Bald Headed Phil and the Mississippi Blues Band with great interest. There are about a half dozen good blues venues in town, a handful for jazz, a handful of large theatres that had all types of music, and perhaps a dozen good rock clubs. Bald Headed Phil was already playing at the biggest and best of these, and we were always there too. There were no shortage of barmaids Billy knew, and so, wherever they played, Billy would be there in the morning, playing on his piano. Or I should say, hers.  If he had to meet new barmaids, he did not seem to mind the extra effort. I went with him once or twice, and played along a little. Every evening, at least when I had no gig of my own, I was there to watch her. Or I should say, the band. I really did like that band, they really knew how to play. There were a few nights I had gigs with Billy, and he was sure making his own upright sing and swing those days too.

One night, I went to see Bald Headed Phil at the Black Sheep Inn outside of town. As the band took a break between sets, the girl came to my table with two beers in her hands.

“My name is Sarah,” she said as she sat down, “can I buy you a beer?”

This seemed a rhetorical question as the beers were already on the table. Assuming one of them was meant for me. Which maybe was a hopeful assumption, but after all, the bar wasn’t so far away that she needed to buy two at once for herself. But maybe she was very thirsty too from the set.

“Not the talkative type,” she said, “I figured I owed a beer to a loyal fan like you.”

She edged the bottle across the table with her long fingers while tipping the other back to her mouth.

“Thank you,” I said, “I love your music. I think your band is really going to make it big.”

“Glad you don’t think the piano is wasted in my hands.”

“Oh no, well, Billy never meant that, you see, he just feels-“

“I know how he feels, he’s explained it enough times. How do you feel?”

“Oh, I like your playing very much. I feel like I know you pretty well now.”

“Well then, I guess I have something to my relationship with the piano that your friend doesn’t- a listener… Do you really play yourself?”

“I play around town, Montreal and Toronto from time to time. Different groups, sometimes with Billy when he is able to both commit to a job and still consider it a priority when it comes around.”

“Maybe I’ll get to see you play sometime. Enjoy the rest of the show.”

“I’m John,” I said as she walked away.

That night I thought of triangles, the equal kind. I dreamed of triangles with myself, Sarah, and the piano, and Billy, myself and Sarah, and Sarah, Billy and the piano. It seemed I could imagine perfect triangles now at least.

As it happened, I had a gig with Billy the next night. We were playing at Barrymore’s, a big night with a big crowd. I was on that night, and if I may say so, I can get a crowd worked up the way you like it when I blow right. I traded off riffs with the sax player and with Billy and the night went well.

“You know,” Billy said afterwards over beer, “the painters Gaugin and Van Gogh used to paint the same subjects, giving different interpretations of the same subjects when they lived together. That’s what trading riffs is like when it works well. Like there’s an underlying theme to the solo, and you each are taking turns interpreting it. But, like, with those painters, their interpretations influenced each other, and that happens the same when you’re trading riffs.”

“But faster.”

“Sure, but much faster. You’re interpreting the theme, but also extending the last interpretation so even when you think you understand the theme, you really don’t know where you’re gonna start because you’re always reevaluating based on the other guys understanding.”

I liked that. It was like my harp was giving new ideas to the sax, but he was seeing it his own way so that I would always be surprised with what I got back four bars later. You can’t change something that much in four bars, but enough.

“It’s like broken telephone,” I said.

“Certainly. In the end Van Gogh cut his ear off and tried to give it to the ladies at a whorehouse when Gaugin was away.”

“I did not know about the whorehouse.”

“So I suppose he probably did not play much broken telephone himself.”

I’ve noticed that girls seem to have a natural sense of timing, which is maybe why I like girl bass players, so I was not too surprised when our friend the piano player showed up then.

She sat with us and complimented the show.

“It sounds like you get quite a bit out of the piano you’ve got,” she said to Billy who was looking at her kind of queer over the rim of his glass.

“Thanks.”

“Maybe all that extra practicing has been helping.”

Then Billy laughed, “Ah, yes, the practicing, sure. The piano has been most kind to work with.”

“My piano.”

“If you believe in ownership of things like that. I think of your relationship as a stewardship.”

“And I think you’re pretty selfish to think that the piano wants only to play with you, just because you want only to play with that piano. Anyway, you can think whatever you want, we’re going on the road next week, so I just thought you might like to know that. We’re swinging down the coast, and it will be a long trip- a month at least, maybe longer if we land more gigs. So I hope you’ve gotten enough out of it to last you a while.”

“Big instrument like that doesn’t travel well,” Billy said, but I could see that he couldn’t find a punchline.

“How about a harmonica,” she said, still looking at Billy, “Do they travel well?”

“It’s not enough that you take my piano?” he asked, “Besides, he hasn’t even played a note with you before.”

They both slowly looked at me.

“I’ve spent enough time listening to the piano,” I said, “and your band does need a harp.”

I tried to remember about relationships and couldn’t remember what Billy or Plato had said on the subject. I wondered if I was more excited by the band or the piano player- I hoped it didn’t matter. I turned to Billy.

“Don’t cut your ear off while I’m gone.”

On an autumn night I walked into the Chateau Lafayette tavern to meet The Greatest Storyteller of All Time. It was bitter cold, but that only made me more excited for the night. Once you closed the door and stepped into the Laff, it didn’t matter how cold or dark it was outside anyways. In here it was bright and warm and loud with laughter and conversation from all the tables. The Laff was the old reliable of the Ottawa Market. Somebody had told me once that it was the oldest bar in Canada. In the years I’d been coming here it hadn’t changed at all, and I liked that. Whatever changed around it, I liked that it could always be the same.

I was the first one there, so I grabbed a table and ordered pitchers of Canadian. I was waiting for old friends. The group of us had all lived together as students at Carleton. Danny, I had known since high school. We’d all grown up in Ottawa, but I didn’t know Paul and Ian back then. We hadn’t seen a lot of each other the last few years, but Danny Costello was in town, and if that wasn’t enough reason to get together I don’t know what is.

Danny was a gifted storyteller right from when I first met him, back when there wasn’t much to tell. I’d seen less and less of him since university, but I had always been a bit glad of it. I knew he was doing what he’d always wanted. He was getting out of the city and having his great adventures. From about the time we went to university, he started doing more and more things on his own- especially travelling, tramping, or camping- and that was when he really became The Greatest Storyteller of All Time.  He’d had more jobs, and more queer jobs, than anyone I knew. He’d been a cowboy in Alberta, and a miner in Cape Breton. Then he’d come back and I’d get to hear about it.

He’d once told me that the sign of a good story was the way it made a mark, it left a notice in someone’s mind that the storyteller had been there. And his stories did that for me. He’d been gone three years. That’s what excited me that night.

Ian walked in, tall and cadaverous in his huge overcoat. His glasses were frosted up like a cartoon. I shook his hand as he pulled up a chair with his free arm.

We didn’t catch up. We just talked and laughed, waiting for the main event. After half a glass, Paul and Danny came in together. We jumped up and shook their hands- we were never huggers. Their red, frozen faces looked like they would crack from their smiles. I remember thinking how old we all looked, especially Danny who had stayed so young in my mind. We all sat down, and I filled their glasses.

We joked for a few minutes, and then the conversation hushed down a bit as we all took a little more time with our stories. Gradually, the conversation spun more and more around Danny’s latest experiences. He didn’t push it on us, but let’s be honest, we weren’t there for each others’ stories, just Danny’s. If you have a friend like that, you know what I mean. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been working for me at the shop. He’d been at that for over a year, and then, in the early spring, he’d given me three week’s notice. The weather was too nice, and his feet were just tapping too loud indoors. He’d always dreamed of exploring Ontario’s far north, so he said, and he decided he was just going to do it. That was further than most of his explanations ever went. Since then, I’d received a couple vague postcards, written drunk from Indian-named places I’d never heard of.  Then the phone call last week.

“Did you make any money?” Ian asked. “You still owe me from that poker game.”

Danny laughed.

“No, sorry. I’m stone broke,” Danny said. “Well, wait. I got something out of it.”

He pulled from his coat pocket a piece of craft; a small hoop, with a long feather dangling from it. Inside the hoop was an irregular piece of netting with a hole in the centre.

“This is an Ojibway dreamcatcher. You see them hanging on rear-view mirrors sometimes. Except mine works. Soon after I left Ottawa, I worked at a fishing camp up near Big Trout Lake. I got sick for a little bit, and the manager of the camp and his wife really took care of me. They were Ojibway, a few years younger than us, and they’d become involved in a lot of the old traditions. And they really believed it. Their parents had abandoned the old ways, and they’d re-adopted them. Anyway, after my first summer, when I was sick, she made me this dreamcatcher. In the Fall, you get the Northern Lights. She wanted to make sure their spirits only brought good dreams for me after my sickness. I slept under the lights, bright like fireworks, twisting like snow in the wind. I had my dreamcatcher, and I had the greatest dreams of my life. I felt like that was the real beginning of my time in the bush.”

“How does the dreamcatcher fit in?” Ian asked.

“There’s a whole legend of the origins involving ancient wise men and spiders, I think, but the way it works is, the net catches the bad dreams, but the hole in the centre allows the good dreams to get through. Of course, the eagle feather is for courage, boys.”

The dreamcatcher was passed around the table. I’d seen these in shops, but the idea that this one had been made by someone who believed in it, and had been given with a purpose, made the object seem special. Like all it took was belief to make the magic real.

“So you worked for a bit?” Paul asked.

“Yeah,” Danny said, “a little. But most of the time I just went on my own. Remember, Sam, when I left I had about three and a half grand.”

“I’d been overpaying you,” I said. “Should have kept you broke so you couldn’t leave.”

“Yeah, right. So, I had some money to live off of. After I left the fishing camp, I rented a cabin for a while near James Bay that I used as a home base. I just pretty much fished and lived off that. I was able to sell fish commercially on occasion. With the fishing quotas on the coasts, it’s a lot better market.”

“Isn’t it different fish though, than what they’d catch in the Maritimes?” Paul asked.

Danny laughed. “This was just sold for fish sticks. I’ve never seen anyone check the dorsal fin of a fish stick.”

“So you really lived off the land?”

“Well, like I said, I caught my food, and made a little cash, and used that to buy whatever supplies I needed; I was not too far from a small town. I took jobs from time to time. I got on alright up there. I came back because I just couldn’t take another winter of pickled herring and shadow puppets.”

I could see in Danny’s eyes that the best was still coming. Three years and just returned, I knew he would be bursting with stories. I poured fresh glasses to keep his tongue wet. Confirming my conviction, Danny took a sip, closing his eyes. Then he put his glass down and really started.

“With the cabin as a base, I stayed as far from civilization as I could. The country up there is absolutely stunning, boys. If you remember the cartoon, The Racoons… That’s what this is like. It’s unimaginably vast, a hundred per cent wild, hundreds of lakes, dark with glacial silt, sitting below rock cliffs and crowded by forests. The cities are for the most part ugly mining or forestry towns. Also just like in The Racoons. So I stayed as far away as possible, with just my tent and gear. That was, I guess, two summers ago, after my first winter in the cabin. At that time I was just a little north of Lake Nipigon. Now, Lake Nipigon is an Ojibway centre. The Ojibway were forced up there by the Iroquois tribes in the 1650’s. And the reason I’m telling you this is because of a story my friends at the fishing camp told me the year before. This is a really quite amazing local legend, the kind of thing you’d only hear about in the Canadian bush: the Legend of the French Trapper.”

Danny told us then how the French colonists had traded with the Ojibway from the early 1600’s. In 1712 (according to him), the French entered into a war with some tribes to the south, and they dragged the Ojibway in as their allies. The story goes that there was one Frenchman who decided that this wasn’t what he had signed on for. He’d left France to get away from people and war. He came here for a simpler, more peaceful life. He felt betrayed by the way history was going here, how his people manipulated the Natives into their conflicts. One night he left the camp and struck out on his own, leaving his people behind. He was skilled at living off the lands and was familiar with the Native leaders, who he could barter with for whatever he couldn’t make on his own. He built himself a cabin in the land beyond Lake Nipigon and lives out there still, almost three hundred years later. And he protects the people who travel through the woods on their own.

“Now, I thought this was a pretty incredible story for people to believe,” Danny said. “So when I got up to the region near Lake Nipigon, I started asking around about the French Trapper, to see what people thought, and to use that as an entrée to ask about people’s ideas about spirits and such. Most people called the trapper an old wives’ tale, but a few said they knew someone who had seen him. White people and Indians, both. Some even knew stories of people finding lines of fish or furs when they were lost and desperate out there. But they would explain that they didn’t think it was actually the old trapper. They didn’t want me to think they were foolish. They believed that someone lived alone out there, though. Because fish don’t just hang from trees, and men don’t just disappear, especially when they have a line in the water. So the legend is totally self-perpetuating, which is beautiful, no one will ever knew where it began.

“So, anyway… I was out there in Racoon country, in the land of the French trapper. I loved it. Muskeg wetlands, everything full of life, it really made you think you could live forever out there. Even the dead pines would glow green from the moss which grew out over their trunks and branches. And the fishing was incredible. I’d catch walleye, small-mouth, lake trout, and in the rapids you could find brook trout. I got pretty good, I got to say. For while I ate like a king, travelling near towns when I needed provisions.

“Towards the end of the summer, I became sick again. I was a few days hike from anywhere, and I got feverish. I couldn’t eat, and I had no food anyway because I couldn’t fish. My canteen was empty, but I was too weak to go find water. After two days, I couldn’t even stand. I began hallucinating. I knew I was going to die, but I didn’t care, all I wanted to do was sleep. I lay in my sleeping bag all the second day, but I finally took it off because I was sweating and burning up. That night the temperature dropped and I shook violently from the cold, but I was too delirious to get back in my sleeping bag. I finally fell asleep and I had wild dreams. When I woke on the third day, the sun was already high in the sky. I felt warm, and I realized that someone had wrapped me in my sleeping bag. My canteen was filled with water. I drank, then slept all the rest of that day and night wrapped in the sleeping bag. And when I woke the next morning, there was a line of fish waiting, hanging from a tree. I managed to clean and cook some fish, and I ate a little. That day, the fever broke. I felt like I was coming out of a phantom world, and I forgot all my hallucinations.  I found my way down to the river to refill the canteen. Sitting there, on a rock, was my rod and reel with the fly still on it.”

All around us in the Laff people were laughing and yelling, but within our little circle it seemed to fall dead silent.

“Once in a while since then, I remember bits and pieces from the delirium. Sometimes I remember opening my eyes, and seeing an old man standing over me under the stars. And sometimes I remember walking down to the river, carrying my rod in the middle of the night. And honestly, they both seem as valid as far as I can remember.”

“I’m glad you always verify that you’re nuts,” Ian said. “Otherwise I might have to quit my job and leave my wife and come with you.”

“Sure, he’s nuts,” Paul said. “but what’s everyone else’s excuse that sees the Trapper?”

In Danny’s eye I saw that same sign that said he still had a story in mind, and I thought it might be just for me.

We talked for a while longer. Eventually, Ian and Paul had to go home, and I thought, “Danny Cos-te-llo”, so we went back to my place to talk till sun-up like we used to, and I would open up late in the morning. We sat in my living room, and talked for a little while before I asked him if he told anyone that knew the legend his own story.

He smiled and said, “Sam, when I first got up there, there wasn’t one person who knew that legend. But I stuck to it and told it as much as I could, and, yes, left a line of fish out for campers here and there, and by the time I left, I could tell people about my days in the fever, and they would not only tell me about the Legend of the French Trapper, they could tell me about their friend who had seen him!”

“You mean there was no legend?” I said.

He fell back in his chair and laughed. “A three hundred year old legend, I created in three years.”

After a moment I fell back laughing too.

A few months after that Danny left us for good, joining his spirits of the Northern Lights. Many know that story of the French Trapper now- people do love these legends. Of course, no one will ever know its origins. I wouldn’t undo the work of my friend, the Greatest Storyteller of All Time.