Free Nine Fingers by Thom August Page A

hot and cold drafts of air from the heating system and from the outside part of
     the pool created a perfect environment for fuck-ing up a piano. This was an excellent one, a Steinway baby grand, but it had
     no chance in a room like this, and wouldn’t stay in tune for more than a day.
    I hit a middle A and compared it to the fork—not one iota of resonance. The piano was almost half a tone flat. High A was
     flatter, but Low A was sharp, not just in tune, but overshooting it. This was what you’d expect this crazy microclimate to
     produce. It was good that I had the time: this was going to take a lot of it. I rapped the 440 Hertz tuning fork again, and
     started with the A’s.
    Tuning a piano is an awkward process, especially a baby grand like this Steinway. If you wanted to be civilized, you would
     play a note, walk all the way around to tune the string, walk back to play it again, and on and on. Fuck that shit. The way
     I do it is to basically sprawl myself on top of the piano so I can reach the keys with my left hand and the tuning pegs on
     the sounding board with my right without moving. It must look a little weird, like I’m trying to hump this big black beast,
     but hey, this ain’t some beauty contest; I’m working here.
    At the same time, you can’t help but get some looks when you’re doing it: it’s an announcement that something is going to
     happen. No one tunes a piano in a club on a Saturday night unless someone is going to be playing it. I was concentrating on
     my ears, but I could feel the looks, and I could also hear a spasm of quiet ripple through the room.
    I don’t have perfect pitch—that’s why I carry the tuning fork. But I do have perfect relative pitch: give me one note, tell me what it is, and I can pick out what any other note is, pretty much every time. I’ve known
     a few people who supposedly had perfect pitch, and I mean absolute perfect pitch, the whole auditory genius thing, and I’ll say this: they were all absolutely miserable motherfuckers: nasty,
     cranky, and depressed. We live in a noisy world, and to hear it all too clearly would probably fuck anyone up. My ear is good
     enough for tuning, thanks, but no more than that. Some failures are blessings.
    There’s something almost Zen about tuning up. It’s solitary, you get in this zone, you work quicker and easier as you go,
     and the rest of the world disappears into the background. There’s a guy named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, another U. of C. dude,
     who wrote a book about the Flow. A big best seller, rare for a serious tome. I signed up for one of his classes twice and
     never got in, but copped the book from Paul. I sense the Flow sometimes when I’m driving, like turning right not knowing why
     I’m turning right, but knowing that right is just right …and the fare is right there. I sense it sometimes in that moment after the light turns green and we all surge forward, and suddenly there is a pattern
     established, a current, a tide, and your foot eases off the pedal a hair and you slide right into it.
    It also happens, sometimes, and I’m afraid it’s only sometimes, when the band is really playing our asses off, playing things
     we hadn’t even thought of considering, and it’s all fitting together like some magical mosaic where all the pieces are slammed
     into place simultaneously.
    But the flow runs deep, real deep, when I’m tuning. People have come up and tried to interrupt me, asked me what time the
     show starts. I just wave them off. I can’t recalibrate myself to whatever channel they are on. Probably seems very arrogant,
     very off-putting. I admit it, it’s my guilty little pleasure, my free rush, and I refuse to share a second of it with anybody.
    Although that’s not what I’m thinking in the moment, that’s not what I’m feeling. All I’m thinking is A, C#, A, C#. All I’m
     feeling is A, C#, A, C#. And the way I do it, laying out on top of the piano, accentuates the kinesthetic