by Finn Murphy
I’ve always enjoyed moving pianos. Piano moving has that magical combination of specialized knowledge, finesse, and bulldog determination that appeals so much to my personality. In fact, I like moving them so much I’m going to give you a sketch of how to move a baby grand. First off, when the piano is sitting in your living room, it’s on three legs with the pedal assembly below, a cover above, and a music stand above the keyboard. There are very few doorways that can accommodate the girth, so the piano is moved around on its side. First I take off the cover, which is on hinges. I lay the cover on several moving pads, cover the top with more pads, and then tape the whole thing perfectly so no wood is showing. Next I unscrew the hinges, remove the pedal assembly, and pad all of that. All of the hardware goes into a plastic bag, which is tied to one of the legs. Next I slide out the music stand and pad that. Now comes the harder part. To get the piano onto its side, I first take off the leg at the bass end of the keyboard. Each leg is attached by a metal flange, which goes up and then in to lock it into place. Most legs come off by taking the weight off the leg and tapping the top section inward to release the locking interface. I do this by taping a moving pad to the leg and then a piece of wood to the pad. While my two movers take the weight off the leg, I tap the wood with a rubber mallet, and the leg releases. The two movers gently lay the corner of the piano down onto a long padded piano board. Now one corner is on the piano board and the other two legs are still attached. Next, we lift the entire piano onto its side, and the other two legs are sticking out horizontally. These get tapped off and padded, and now the entire piano is on the piano board. We pad the piano and tape it to the board and then attach two heavy-duty straps to grooves in the side of the board and tighten the piano onto the board. It’s relatively stable there but I always have a guy holding it to maintain balance. Next, I attach a humpstrap to the front of the board, and two men lift the front end while I set a four-wheel piano dolly underneath. Now we can roll the piano on the dolly. This is all pretty straightforward, and pianos aren’t hard to move, provided you can wheel it to where it needs to go. You can even lift it over a step or two with the dolly. The difficulty starts when it needs to go up or down a set of stairs. You can’t use the dolly. The only thing that works is brute force.
The McNallys’ piano was not going up the interior stairway because of the narrow turn. The outside stairway had fourteen steps with a straight shot through the kitchen into the living room, so that was the only viable route. There was no walkway to the stairs, just grass. My plan was to lay plywood from the driveway to the bottom of the outside stairway. Since we were moving this in, not out, I’d put the piano on the board in the driveway (the previous movers took their piano board with them), put it on the four-wheel dolly, and wheel the piano to the bottom of the walkboard, which sat on step seven.
That all worked out fine, and we wheeled the piano up the walkboard with Julio on the front humpstrap pulling and Carlos on the bottom pushing. (I was standing next to it, holding the balance.) We pushed/pulled one step at a time until it got clear of the walkboard and dolly and was flush along steps seven through eleven. Now we had 600 pounds of piano, wood on wood, at a 45-degree angle. I couldn’t push or pull because I had to hold the vertical balance. With Carlos on the bottom and Julio at the top, they tried to muscle the thing up the incline. No dice. Basically we were short one strong man. I took a second look at the stairway. It was attached at the top by two galvanized joist hangers. I didn’t like the look of that at all and started doing the math. There’s me at 200 pounds, Carlos at 150, Julio at 240, and the piano at 600. That’s a shade under 1,200 pounds being held by two joist hangers. It was holding now, but the real test would be when the full weight of the piano got to stair fourteen and the two joist hangers would be holding the whole thing. It was time to stop and think.
First of all, I didn’t want anyone getting hurt. If the stairway gave way, we could all get very hurt or very killed. Second, this move was already a mess, with a much-distressed and unhappy family. Third, we were hired to execute. Fourth, we had to be in Laramie, Wyoming, the next day to load another shipment.
Here were my options:
1.I could get another mover out here to help push. I rejected this because adding another 200 pounds to the staircase looked even more dangerous, given the flimsy construction, and anyway, I didn’t have another mover available.
2.I could have told Mr. McNally the stairs didn’t look safe and he could contact a rigging company to hoist the piano. I rejected this because the McNallys were at the end of their rope, and I didn’t want to cause them even more stress. Also, I figured this was my problem, and I didn’t want to give up.
3.I could attach straps to the piano board, string the straps over the far railing of the deck, attach the straps to a vehicle, and have the vehicle pull the piano up the stairs, with Carlos and Julio holding the vertical balance with ropes on either side away from the staircase.
I took Mr. McNally outside and explained the options to him. He told me the piano was his wife’s treasured possession and he really wanted it in the house. He thought option 3 was the most practical and said we could use his Jeep. That’s when I brought out the release form and he signed it.
We set everything up. I was in the Jeep with the cargo straps attached to the piano board, and Carlos and Julio were on the vertical balance ropes. I put the car into gear, tightened up the slack on the straps, and began pulling. It worked perfectly. The piano moved easily up the incline, and the tip came over the top step. But just when all the weight was on the joists at the keyboard end, they gave way with a groan and the stairway fell apart. The piano did a back flip, pulled the jeep backward, and dropped ten feet onto the ground with a final chord just like the one at the end of Sgt. Pepper’s. Julio and Carlos dropped their ropes and ran. I’ll remember that sound to my dying day. Like a whale groaning in its final flurry, the baby grand sang its death song.
It got very quiet for what seemed a long time. Mr. McNally was standing some distance away with the infant and just stared. Mrs. McNally came out with the toddler and joined her husband. Carlos and Julio came over to where I was standing after stopping the Jeep. I looked over at the family and saw silent tears running down Mrs. McNally’s face. Mr. McNally put his arm around his wife’s shaking shoulders and started crying too. Then the kids joined in. We just stood there, silent, watching this nice young family take the punches. They hadn’t wanted to move to Colorado. He’d lost his job in New Jersey, and his in-laws who lived down the road had rented this wreck of a house out in the sticks for them to start over in. The move had gone over the estimate, the driver had abandoned them, and the A-team cleanup crew had just destroyed their most beloved possession. Julio was wiping his eyes; Carlos the Mexican bandit was bawling out loud. So was I. Julio went over and put his arm around Mrs. McNally’s other shoulder, and she put her arm around his. Then Carlos went over, and then me. There we were, a bunch of broken people with nothing left but our shared humanity and grief and loss and failure. There wasn’t anything left over for anger or blame or apology.
I don’t know how long we stayed there, but then the thunder cracked and the skies opened up for the afternoon rainstorm. At first there were only a couple of drops, and then came the deluge. Mrs. McNally looked over at the driveway, where all their stuff was still lying around where the driver had left it. The pads and boxes and furniture were all getting soaked. She stared at the pile for several moments and started to laugh. She looked at her husband and murmured, “I guess we keep on going, right?” Mr. McNally set his kid down and opened his arms to the rain and started laughing too. “Bring it on!” he shouted. Julio yanked off his shirt, put it on the infant’s head, and ran to load what he could into the garage.
I walked over to the truck, took the soggy release form from my pocket, and laid it carefully on the seat so it wouldn’t get ruined. I felt like a total shit doing that.
The storm lasted only a few minutes and passed away. The remna
nts of the piano were still attached to the board, and we wheeled it into the garage. We brought everything else into the house, assembled the beds, and unpacked all the cartons. We stayed very late putting everything where it belonged, setting up the kitchen, and putting away the linens. We all wanted the house to look like a home before we left, but there was no ignoring the gaping hole in the living room where the piano was supposed to go. There wasn’t a lot of chat. Finally, when there was nothing left to do, we put the wet pads into the truck and went into the house to say good-bye. Mr. McNally was sitting at the kitchen counter with his checkbook.
“What’s the bill for you guys today?”
“There is no bill. Nick in New Jersey said it’s all covered.”
“That makes sense. Here, take this and split with your men.” He handed me a hundred-dollar bill.
“I’m sorry, we’re not taking that.”
“There were plenty of mistakes made today all around. You guys worked hard. Please take it.”
“Not a chance.”
“Do you think I can file a claim for the piano?”
“You’ll have to talk to Nick about that. We were never here.”
“The phantom movers. In and out like the fog, never to reappear.”
“Pretty much. We tried to help you, and we tried to help Nick. All we did was make everything worse.”
“Believe it or not, everything was worse before you got here. After the piano went overboard and we got rained on, everything got a little better. It’s hard to explain.”
“I guess we all got banged on the head about what’s important and what isn’t.” I said. “Someday this is going to become one of those family legends you tell around the Thanksgiving table.”
We drove back to Erie in silence. Julio went to sleep in the sleeper, and Carlos just stared at the road. At the yard I parked the truck. Carlos took off in his car, and Julio woke up.
“Shit. Where’s my shirt?” He was only wearing his sleeveless undershirt.
“You left it with the kid.”
“Damn. That means we were there after all. I thought it was all a bad dream.”
“It was both, Julio. See you at five a.m. We’re off to Wyoming.”
Chapter 11
WAITING TIME
I knew I shouldn’t have stayed in Nebraska. I should have driven over to Denver and waited there for a General Electric or Verizon move. Instead I’ve got a military:
Shipper Howard 13500lbs GBL pack & load OA Omaha Line haul $12700 DA Anaconda Movers Brighton MI.
We call them GBLs for Government Bill of Lading. GBL moves are charged on a contract rate that the government negotiates with the big haulers and they’re all cut-rate moves. There’s very little money in hauling them, but there is something to be made on the packing. This one I’ve got is a GBL pack-and-load going to Michigan.
It’s not great but not horrible. At least I’ll get the packing. Military moves are different in that everything gets packed into a carton. I don’t often think about who’s moving where, especially for military people, but Lakeland, Michigan, seemed an odd place to send a lieutenant colonel of infantry. Still, I didn’t worry about it. I’ve moved lots of military folks over the years and though most them go where you’d expect—North Carolina, San Diego, Texas—there’s a lot of weird stuff going on in the post-9/11 world, and the armed forces have facilities everywhere.
The Howards lived inside Offutt Air Force Base. On-base housing is often a problem for movers because the security folks at the entry gates perform background checks on everyone coming in. Anyone trying to get on base with a felony record is turned away. This reduces the pool of available movers by about two-thirds. The Howard residence was your general-issue, senior-officer ranch house. I arrived with my crew at 8 a.m. and Colonel Howard met us at the door in full uniform. He was five feet seven inches tall with muscles that bulged out of his uniform. He shook my hand, very firmly.
“I don’t like moving and I don’t like movers. I’ve moved a lot. I think you’re a bunch of undisciplined vagabonds. If you’ve got a problem with that, I’ll take off my uniform out back and we can argue the point with our fists.”
This was odd. Our shipper wanted to beat us up, and we hadn’t even broken anything yet. I spoke for myself and, I assumed, the crew:
“We’re fine with that, Colonel. I am kind of an undisciplined vagabond. We’re just here to do our job.”
“I have work to do at the office. It’s just up the road. Call me if you have any questions. My wife will be here but do not bother her. I’ll handle all the details. Any questions?”
“No, sir,” I answered. I wanted to salute.
“Then go do your job.”
We started in packing cartons. Mrs. Howard spent the day sitting at the kitchen table chain-smoking, silently watching us pack her belongings. She was a ghost. There was a kid too, an awkward teenaged boy named Trevor who played with his electronic game thingy all day in his room. Neither one of them said a word. We packed the house the first day and loaded the second day. I was scheduled to unload three days later and only had 700 miles to travel so I didn’t have any time pressure.
I picked up Interstate 80 in Council Bluffs and spent the night at the Iowa 80 truckstop in Walcott. It claims to be the largest truckstop in the world and even has an antique truck museum on-site. Iowa has lots of truckstops, which means lots of competition, which means they still have actual restaurants. Most truckstops have gotten rid of their restaurants. Trucker staples like chipped beef on toast (also known as shit on a shingle), the iceberg lettuce salad bar, and the all-day breakfast menu are no longer available nationwide. Maybe that’s not the greatest loss to civilization, but did they have to replace every restaurant with a Subway franchise? The floor of my truck is usually carpeted with that Subway shredded lettuce product. You can’t smell it, you can’t taste it, but you can sure as hell spill it.
The next day I picked up I-94 west and stopped for the night in Ann Arbor. In college towns—like Chapel Hill, Boulder, Iowa City, Missoula, Austin, Madison, and Oxford, Mississippi, to name a few—all of a sudden, instead of unemployment, meth labs, and poverty, there are real jobs. Plus you can get a latte and a pack of American Spirit Golds. Municipal officials always seem to want auto assembly plants and call centers, but a real and lasting economic engine gets running when there’s a university in town. As far as I can figure, the only places left in America that can boast of vibrant downtowns are college towns and high-end tourist towns. In the rest of the country the downtowns were hollowed out when nobody was looking. You might think it’s only your town that’s been ruined by sprawl, but it’s happened everywhere. You’ve got the new CVS, the Walmart, the Home Depot on the fringes, while the old downtown is either empty or the buildings have a Goodwill store, an immigration law office, and an “antiques” store, meaning junk. The chains on the outskirts provide the nine-dollar-an-hour jobs and wire the day’s receipts to Bentonville or New York every night.
I hate it personally, but we deserved what we got. We wanted the eight-dollar sneakers and the forty-five-cent tube socks. Well, it’s not unlikely that those socks and shoes were made by a twelve-year-old girl in Madagascar more or less chained to a machine. While we were happily buying goods on the cheap, the developers were buying the local politicos on the cheap and getting the zoning changed so they could build even more big boxes. We didn’t consider that maybe it’d be a better bargain to pay twenty dollars for sneakers and buy them from the neighbor who owns the shoe store downtown and stocks sneakers made in Maine.
It’s too late now. The game’s been won by companies who don’t give two shits about community character or decent jobs. Congratufuckinglations, America! We did the deal. Now we’ve got an unlimited supply of cheap commodities and unhealthy food and crumbling downtowns, no sense of place, and a permanent underclass. Yay. This underclass isn’t relegated to urban ghettoes either. It’s coast to coast and especially in between. Take US 50 west from Kansas Ci
ty to Sacramento or US 6 from Chicago to California and you’ll see a couple thousand miles of corn, soybeans, and terminally ill small towns. It looks like an episode from The Walking Dead. If there’s such a thing as the American heartland, it has a stake through it. What’s left are factory farms and meatpacking plants far off the main roads jammed to the rafters with immigrant laborers getting paid who knows what. So let’s all enjoy the cheap pork chops while wearing our new sneakers, because we paid a heavy price for them.
This country has almost twenty thousand towns, and I’ll bet I’ve been in or through most of them. The pattern of sprawl on the fringes and decay in the center is firmly established everywhere. The other thing, just as firmly established, is American mythmaking. I love seeing tourist posters of America the Beautiful. In New England the cultural icon is the small town with a white church, in the West it’s the false-front frame saddlery with the hitching post, in the South it’s the roadside peach stand, and in the Midwest it’s a ruggedly handsome farmer in a John Deere hat. Oh really? Is that what America looks like? I’m all over the country all the time and guess what? There are barely any family farms left in the Midwest, hardly anyone goes to church in New England, the Georgia peach groves are tract houses, and towns in the West are either bedroom communities or ghost towns. If a tourist poster of America were made with some verisimilitude, it would show a Subway franchise inside a convenience-store gas station with an underpaid immigrant mopping the floor and a street person at the traffic light holding a cardboard sign that reads ANYTHING HELPS.
Central Michigan north of Ann Arbor was more of what I was just talking about. I arrived in Lakeland the night before I was scheduled to unload the Howard family. The Colonel had picked out the house on a day trip the month before. It was a decrepit farm dwelling outside of town, all by itself on a little rise. It was a lonely, windy spot. I had a couple local guys with me and we went in. Mrs. Howard looked upset. This being a military job I was required to get clearance for delivery from the transportation officer (TO) at the air force base in Nebraska. When I called in, the TO told me to hold off unloading. He said there were issues that might take a couple days to resolve but that I was authorized to receive waiting time. Waiting time is great because it pays something like $450 a day and all I have to do is hang around. I went to talk to Mrs. Howard.