Friends, Comrades, Piano Players, Distinguished Guests, thank you for coming to the annual meeting of the BOP. This year we’ve been working hard to entertain you [cheer] to be the players instead of the people getting played [laughter]. We thank the bar owners for listening to our demands and we thank the bargoers for listening to our music. And I thank my comrades. I know pianists aren’t usually a part of the marching band, but here at the BOP we’re here to tell you we’ll march if we have to [cheer and voice louder over cheers keeping on] we’ll stamp our feet if we have to [louder!] we’ll stop sitting on our stools and stand up! [cheer] stand up! [and the pianists in the audience stand up and the audience follows standing up and raising their glasses] and I know, I know, that usually there’s only one piano player in the band [it quietens down, they’re listening nodding their heads slowly] and so I thank my comrades for showing me just what a whole band of piano players can do. [Cheers, cheers! some tears in some eyes including the speakers] So, let’s hear it, raise your glasses, to the Butch On Piano [to the butch on piano] and they drink.
Lily wasn’t a very good drinker, it made her bendy and she slurred and slurring didn’t mean anything to Lily. Lily was sharp or she was quiet. Frankie’d liked that. Frankie was a singer and she did. “Yeah when we were kids we pushed each other down hills in the park” “Oh so you really go back a while” “Yeah back to rolling down hills age” “Way back then” “Oh way back.” Lily’d spotted her. “Frankie?” Frankie turned round to look, like a person would turn to look if they could manage it after having had a knife plunged between their shoulder blades. Lily had known they’d all be there. Sammy Silver’d said: “We’ll all be there, at the annual meeting, all the union members and we’re playing you know? So Frankie, Frankie’ll be there too” “I’m invited aren’t I?” Lily said and Sammy Silver’d sighed. Lily could have fallen in love with Sammy, this first one, and Sammy would have sat her on top of her piano and wheeled her round the city and when she’d have been tired Sammy would have opened the lid of the piano and she’d have crawled inside it and yawned and Sammy would have touched her lips with her piano fingers and she’d have slept under the lid on the strings, pushing the keys when she breathed. But it had been Frankie. Frankie turns around: “Lily” There she was, Frankie: one long curl between her eyes, the sleeves of her shirt pushed up over her elbows and her top pocket spilling all sorts of things. Looking at Lily the way she always had, like she was the severed head of a king and on the stage the host said “Our first act of the evening, a pillar of the BOP and comrade to piano players everywhere, ladies and gentlemen, your Harry Harlem.” But the spotlight, as the light dimmed, seemed to land on Lily and Frankie, reunited. And you can hear Frankie’s heart beating and see Lily sway. And Frankie reaches out and then back. And Lily reaches for her then stops. And Frankie turns her head away again and turns it back [and Harry’s playing] and Lily holds her head steady and tries to keep it together and Frankie’s heart beats da dum da dum da dum da—and Lily’s heart whirrs and Frankie shuffles her feet [and Harry’s playing] and the sound of their breathing is like a wind section—dum mmm ah da dum mmm ah da dum—and their hearts are beating da dum da dum da dum da—their arms are reaching out and back and out and back like a string section da dum mmm ah zzzz da dum mmm ah zzzz da dum mmm ah zzzz and though Harry’s playing they can’t hear it over all the music they’re made of together, over all the memories of how they played. “Fancy a dance Lil?” It’s Sammy, upstanding member of the BOP and Lily’s date. Harry’s music floods in now. “Hey, you must be Frankie, good to meet you, you and Lily are old friends so she’s told me, and Sammy Silver said, said you all were Red Diapers” “Goldman Babies” Frankie says loudly over Harry’s music which fills the room and makes each guest feel as if they are a black key or a white key being pressed gently on their heads and dipped under Harry’s touch and their bodies vibrate, go from cold ivory to warm music, touch, touch, touch “Of course of course” Sammy says, and Frankie says “Yeah when we were kids we pushed each other down hills in the park” “Oh so you really go back a while” “Yeah back to rolling down hills age” “Way back then” “Oh way back.”
“The best part” Frankie Gold and Sammy Silver are together at a table, “is playing.” The party goes on around them. They’ve always been gentle together. Everything about Frankie’s life and Sammy’s life had been gentle even when it was hard even when it was violent even when it was to do with dying or with really going for it really playing [plonk plonk plonk on the piano and singing until your lungs hurt] gently it had come upon a rising tide the way anarchism comes like a spring. Someone left the tap on, Sammy said, and now here we are. She stressed the we: “Someone left the tap on” [Sammy] “and now here we are” as if they were clouds. And to what portent? “What’ll it be?” Sammy asked “What is ours?” Frankie asked “Howsit feel?” Sammy asked “What’s it sound like?” “Can you hear it?” “Are you hungry?” “Is it over?” “Do we have to?” They asked questions and never answered them knowing answers don’t rise. The scene is them sitting together in the carpeted hall at the annual meeting of the BOP. The mood is carpeted and red and around them people move and meet and sway and somebody’s singing and cheering and some people dance. At the table beside them Louis says to somebody “Swing’s over” “Bebop’s done” and the blues stays like a siren. At the table next to them Frankie and Sammy finish each other’s sentences “We never went “back and forth “nothings ever “ended it’s always “just “just been going on “I know “what “you’re about to tell me how you love “the moment we take a bow” “I knew it!” Sammy said shaking her head. “You’re a broken record Frankie” “You’re a gold tooth Sam” “You’re a butter knife Frankie, that’s what you are” “You’re silver Sam” “You’re gold” wet stones and lap lap “I do love it though!” “Tell me again” Sammy wanted to hear it “I love taking a bow Sam, how at the end once we’ve played, you and I, I turn around” “You turn around” “And you’re there” “And there I am” “And you stand up and I turn back to the crowds” “They’re all there” “And I know it’s done” “For tonight” “And we take a bow.”
“I have been your host this evening!” Frankie imagines what it would be like to stop the music, whether the show would sound so different? Sammy would be kind of miming the piano. Or the piano would become a typewriter and as Frankie spoke as if she were about to sing she would be accompanied, as she always was, by Sammy clack clacking on the typewriter keys. Sammy would touch the keys on the score a, a, a, e, e, bbb cccc dd eee ff ggg spools and spools of paper with only octaves on, a b c d e f g she’d type it, over and over whenever the music told her to and in front of her she’d see Frankie, the back of her, the part of her she saw the most. The wiggly line where her hair wiggled down her neck her collar getting wet in the stage lights and the packet of cigarettes in her back pocket so she could reach for them almost as soon as she’d got off the stage “You wanna sing again?” Sammy’d say and snuff it out and Frankie’d say “After that performance?” Sammy wanted to walk across the stage and hold Frankie round the waist and call her comrade. Sammy wondered if Frankie sometimes forgot she was behind her. If she was only company, a buffer against complete aloneness. But Frankie could feel Sammy behind her like a spine. To Frankie Sammy accompanied her the way bones accompany muscle. Frankie would bend backwards completely, would wiggle and wave without Sammy behind her. “Comrade!” Sammy’d call and Frankie’d turn and she’d grab hold of her, hold her arms down tightly to her sides as if she’d come to collect her, to take her away, she’d squeeze and squeeze her, Sammy’s strong arms around Frankie softly lit in the stage lights but Sammy had never done it and she needn’t have because Frankie’d felt as if she were being held by Sammy the whole time. The way the most accomplished accompanist holds their players. They’d played together. Sometimes they had played such fine fine music. Had had nights where the audience had melted away for both of them, and they both knew, they both knew without telling each other or sometimes Frankie’d turn and wink at her this is it she’d wink the whole world’s here now the stage had become something else more like a country of their own, and suddenly they knew at once together without having to say it that they wished the stage would be rushed. That the audience, the bartenders, the doormen and the people outside would rush in, rush and rush up onto the stage to this new country they’d made. Sometimes they played like that. Oh they’d played together. They had played. “But did they hear us?” Frankie asked “not what I was singing but what I meant by it? Did they hear it Sam? Do they know or should I have said it?” Now Frankie Gold and Sammy Silver take the stage at the annual meeting of the BOP where all the factions of the butch piano players union have been mingling this evening, have been making eyes and shaking hands and creating little rumbles when they tap their feet. Frankie looks out across the hall, Sammy behind her at the piano. In the audience Lily closes her eyes, not against it, but so as to be more there, there more. She closes her eyes and sees Frankie singing and Sammy on piano. Just the three of them, apart from next to her with her eyes open the other Sammy, the one she loved now, maybe, or certainly loved the feel of, how her lips felt and her hands felt and the look of her certainly loved the look of her, her jawline and her fingernails. And certainly the sound of her, she loved the sound of her how her rings clacked on the piano when you sat near to her as she played and she reached for sharps yes the sound her pinky ring made, a tiny clack against the edge of the black keys. Yes she loved that. But still she closed her eyes now and it was just the three of them, how they’d played. And Frankie saw Lily in the audience with her eyes closed and imagined she was playing in the living room some Friday night in the past and the audience were crowded on the carpet of Asha’s apartment “Comrades” she said “I know you’ve heard of syncopation, but how about syndication? This is the era of hard bop” sounds as though she’s about to sing but Frankie’s thinking maybe she won’t this time. Behind her, Sammy Silver’s piano turns into a typewriter clack clack clack like someone had put a microphone to the tiny tapping of Sammy’s pinky ring and somehow it still sounds like music. “The best orators” Asha used to say “sound as though at any moment they are about to sing that they might burst into song, that they might burst” that’s the feeling of it, Frankie’d thought and she’d said it “Comrades I know you’ve felt as I do, as though you might burst” the butches shuffle “I always say, I shoulda been a talker not a singer” “You are!” “Alright alright!” Frankie smiles and looks like a boy and Lily closes her eyes and sees them, the three of them in a room all the middle parts cut out, and Frankie sings right to her or is she speaking? “Remember nights at Rosa’s?” “Who me?” “Of course you Lil, who else is listening?” the butches shuffle “I remember nights” “Just the three of us” like a chord “Oh I don’t remember it ever being just the three of us” Sammy says “Life was always busier than that” “You’re right” “It was always the three of us” “And everybody else” “Of course” “Isn’t that it?” “Yeah that’s it, Frank” Frankie’d never worn a coat that wasn’t everybody’s. “Wouldn’t it be a grand piano?” Frankie said now to the whole room eyes wide, no spotlights just everybody at the BOP lit up, all the members and all their guests [shuffle] “a grand piano which stretched to octaves so low they’d always catch us. And stretched so high, so high—” surely now she’d sing “so high we’d never reach it just dream of it such a long, long piano that all of us could sit down at and play. A grand piano, isn’t that the truth?” Shouts from the crowd: “And you could take a seat wherever you liked at it?” “Sure you could!” “And you could play whatever notes you wanted?” “Of course you could!” “And you could eat your dinner off it!” “Always” “And you could crawl up under it” “For shelter” “For shelter” “And all the notes we all played, all the melodies they’d sound so sweet together” cheer cheer! “they’d sound like a music we could never compose on our own our little lonely melodies those strains I’ve been singing all these nights on all the stages all these shows I’m wondering what it’d sound like if we all sang, you understand, if we all played” cheer cheer “it wouldn’t sound like music at all” “It’d sound like overflowing!” “Yes Yes Yes!” “But maybe overflowing” Frankie said “is a perfectly fine type of over.”