Subway Pianist: Play It Again Sam

You can always count on two things when riding the New York Subway System:

1) There is always some type of unpleasant smell waiting to assail your senses. The source of these odiferous emanations most often come from those who never mastered the concept of bathing, never heard the news about deodorant or those who choose to use the subway as their personal toilet. You rarely witness the act, but the nose knows.

2) You can also count on some type of music from any wide variety of instruments or recording devices. This includes portable stringed instruments, drums and most often a couple a heavy-duty buckets and couple of wooden sticks.

But last night, as I walked off the train at West Fourth Street, it sounded like someone playing the piano. Of course, it seemed highly unlikely that someone would actually wrestle a piano onto the platform, but this is New York.

As the doors closed behind me, I realized that whoever was playing this music had some kind of classical training. As the train started to roll, the sound of the music disappeared. But coming around the stairs, I saw that the musician had indeed managed to get a piano onto the platform and was gently playing some classical piece written by Brahms.

The music was beautiful and the piano, well – it was a piano, not a mini, not a laptop keyboard or a Casio, but the real deal. As he tickled the ivories, I asked him how he had gotten the piano all the way down into the bowels of the station. He held up his right arm and made a muscle and smiled down at it. I laughed and said, “Really Piano Man, how did you get the piano down here?”

He told me he rolls it down a few times a week and then takes it back up at night. The pianist also says he used to leave it down here on the platform, but the police don’t let him do that anymore.

I dropped a buck into his bucket and finally said good night to the piano man.