The Meadow Literary and Art Journal 2011

Drive By Pianoing by Robby Schlesinger The night after we longboarded through town, blowing vuvuzelas as we went, The van made of Deadhead stickers and rust pulls into the newly Refinished driveway, and inside’s the token neighborhood vandals. The ones that made galleries out of stolen road signs. Tom Sanchez had bought a stand up piano from some Methodists. He sits behind it in the cab, plinking the keys and singing, The girls are definitely gonna find this one sexy Or maybe at least interesting enough not to tell us to fuck off Like normal. So, you know, here’s hoping. Leo rolls down the driver’s window, releasing plumes of the dank smoke That was building up inside, honks the horn by way of telling me to jump in. And so we take off to assault pedestrians with improvised serenades, Patchwork ballads, and crude pick up lines set to music. Hooligans and punks? Maybe. But for a moment we ascend above minimum wage jobs. A mobile Algonquin Round Table with philosophy and psychedelics. Sanchez becomes Robert Benchley with a Kabala bracelet. We drive by a good ol’ boy getting into his lifted Dodge Ram With the trailer hitch and the NRA sticker, and he sang No prizes for guessing who you voted for, huh, Hoss? Leo, looking less like himself and more like Alexander Woollcott, Right down to thick, square-framed glasses, self-assured Well-read, and in love with graffitied overpasses, Leans out the window and asks for his mudflap girls’ phone numbers. Foxcroft wouldn’t have been unlike Harpo Marx if he wasn’t always sleeping off a hangover, drooling masterpieces on the passenger window; the girls we passed flipped him off from the sidewalk, thinking he was being suggestive with his tongue sticking out like that. Tom whistled to them from his stool, cracked his fingers, And skipped his fingers across a pentatonic scale. You ladies read Shakespeare? Because you’re like the shrew And I’d like to tame you, if you get my meaning. Chuck and I laughed from the back as the girls gave Tom The inevitable fuck off that always came eventually, signaling it was time to leave. The two of us were like a Kaufman and a Sherwood We were always caught up in our own work, but we felt lucky To be a part of something like this, watching secret artistic drives Peek through tangles of uncut hair and old Warped Tour shirts. At the end of the night, when Tom would run out of lyrics And Leo would run out of bud, they’d drop us off And we’d leave the Table, back to monochromatic Lives without piano scores behind them. 42 theMeadow

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