Free Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce

couldn’t wait to get in there and play.
    His second night in The Restaurant he’d closed the keyboardlid at eleven and left his bag of charts on the dais while he stepped into the bar. He asked the bartender—who also lived in the M Streets and whom he knew as a patron of Valentino’s, and who had done him the favor of telling Lissandri he knew a piano man, he knew the best piano man in town—for a glass of whatever Italian they were pouring. He took a stool at the end of the bar and had sipped only two sips when he felt an arm around his shoulder and there was the man himself on his left, saying Buddy you’re here to play not drink all right?
    All right, all right, so he played. He was a little late and he was quick to leave but he played. He played the requisite mix of big band and lounge and pop and he played Happy Birthday four or five times a night when the servers took out chocolate soufflés with candles in them. For kids he played The Rainbow Connection and songs from Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid . He played the Elton John, the Billy Joel, the Norah Jones their parents asked for. Hey sure I know Your Song! Comin right up! Come Away With Me? Sure I know that! You got it ma’am! When the guests asked he played the Jim Brickman, which he resented even more than the Cielito Lindo he played for Hank Earl Jackson, a gigantic six-foot-seven alcoholic with a head the size of a steer’s who owned an eponymous bar in the Fort Worth stockyards. Hank Earl’s was more than a bar, it was an A-list venue for any country act that came to Texas, and while Hank Earl was famous for it that wasn’t how he made his money. He was an oil man, like Lissandri was an investment man, their nightlife ventures only toys, things they did with the money they’d already made. Jimmy had been playingin restaurants long enough to know that actually making money from a restaurant was hard to do.
    Hank Earl never requested Cielito Lindo until late in the evening, after he’d had at least two or three bottles of chardonnay poured over ice. Cielito Lindo was a cow-herding song, a ranchero song, a mariachi song, and often Jimmy would hear a tired Mexican cook behind him sing along, Ay, ay, ay, ay , while he cleaned the broiler. Over the years Hank Earl had requested the song almost every time he was in the place, which was at least three or four times a week since he lived across the street in the Hotel Fitzandrew. His driver picked him up in the porte cochere at the hotel, made a right out of the driveway and then an immediate left into The Restaurant’s porte cochere, repeating the trip in reverse at the end of the night. Hank Earl had vomited, pissed, and passed out in the back of the town car on the way back across the street so many times that the driver, Hector, told Jimmy he was grateful when only one of the three occurred, and would have chosen piss if he could, since the man was impossible to wake or move and at least some of the piss would stay on Hank Earl’s pants. If Jimmy had found a prime spot on the street in front of The Restaurant, near where Hector waited with the town car, Jimmy and Hector would chat sometimes when Jimmy stepped out for his break at nine, to smoke his pipe in the minivan. He would sit in the driver’s seat smoking his pipe with the window rolled down, listening to Mose Allison.

    There are two other piano men who work for The Restaurant, Ted and Ed. He knows Ted, who subbed for him at Valentino’s and plays Pearl Jam and Prince covers at the height of service when he thinks no one will notice. Marie notices, Jimmy respects her for noticing even when she is so busy it takes everything to not fuck up. She notices and reports that Ted and Ed are nothing. She says Some of the other servers don’t even know who’s Ted and who’s Ed. Ted has his gimmicks and Ed his Delilah bullshit, she says. You’re not a radio show and you’re not background, you’re a musician. This is how they started