a thirty second story...'stoney'

Stoney always said.

He always said if he had one super power it wouldn’t be to be able live forever, or to fly, to swim under water, or run faster than a Cape Hunting Dog. 

Stoney always said his super power would be to be able to play Barrelhouse piano.

Fair enough!

His middle aged friends, on the other hand, all wanted to be Clark Kent.

Well, who wouldn’t?!

But Stoney knew this: that his super power would bring the most joy to the most people – the joy of music. 

Let it be known: nothing, and by that I mean, zilch, zero can change one’s physical chemistry more rapidly than three minutes of popular song.

Or Barrelhouse piano.

The keys are positively jumping!

~

At school, when Stoney was a boy, he had tried to learn the Trumpet.  For the first five lessons Stoney remembered blowing raspberries into a mouthpiece, and when at last the mouthpiece was connected up with the rest of the instrument, the result was somewhat disappointing.  After ten lessons he could just about manage a just about passable version of Boo-ga-loo, but in truth, it was too much like hard work.  And Boo-ga-loo was not exactly the Rolling Stones, besides the Rolling Stones didn’t play Trumpet, any of them – they used Session Brass.

Then, towards the end of his teenage years, Stoney, like so many adolescents in search of an identity, or in some cases notoriety, dabbled with Guitar.  Similarly, after ten lessons, he could, with a little finger gymnastics, play the opening three chords of Yellow Submarine, a nursery rhyme by the Beatles. 

That was it! 

And lo he gave up on his dream of becoming the next Charlie Mingus or George Harrison, the next superhero, and devoted himself to Sports.

~

Unfortunately for Stoney, his subsequent endeavours to become the new Hank Aaron or Bobby Orr didn’t fare a great deal better.  Stoney was tall and thin.  His limbs grew so fast between the ages of fourteen and sixteen the rest of his body had to play catch up, and his brain encountered all sorts of problems re-establishing communication with Stoney’s increasingly distant appendages.  Swinging a bat, catching and kicking a ball, hitting a hockey puck, all proved troublesome. 

It was Stoney’s Sports Coach in High School that made Stoney wearily familiar with the magnanimous cliche: ‘it’s the taking part that counts’.

Then again, taking part in Sports was as much as Stoney could aspire to (if taking part involved running awkwardly around a football field and never receiving the ball all game, or bringing round the water for the boys during the 9^th innings).

~

Anyway, Stoney’s admiration for Barrelhouse piano stemmed from his Uncle Ned.  Uncle Ned was a jazz obsessive.  He even had a tattoo of a tenor saxophone on his forearm.  Uncle Ned used to take Stoney to a juke joint called ‘Po’ Monkeys’ every Friday night.  There Stoney heard a whole plethora of Boogie-woogie, and had his first drink (an American Corn Whiskey), his first dance (to Big Joe Turner’s ‘Roll ‘em Pete’), and his first kiss (with Ana-Lee Lewis, a big, frumpy girl in her early twenties, who wore horn rimmed spectacles). 

Uncle Ned also played a bit of Boogie-woogie himself: in hindsight, he might have been Stoney’s superhero!

Superheroes, however, are often immortal or indeed indestructible – Uncle Ned proved to be neither.  In a gruesome, but ultimate and somehow fitting manner, Uncle Ned hanged himself with piano wire when Stoney was twenty two.  It later emerged Uncle Ned had been in oodles of debt, including an eye-watering bar tab still outstanding at ‘Po’ Monkeys’.

In the aftermath of Uncle Ned’s demise, Stoney revisited his Guitar and tried to write a song in Uncle Ned’s memory.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, it ended up sounding like the beginning of Yellow Submarine.

‘In a town, where I was born..’

~

Another thing Stoney always said.

Stoney always said he wanted to die with a smile on his face.

‘Dying is the easy part!’, his middle aged friends would say, and Stoney would smile.  Stoney smiled a lot – it was as if he was in practice (perhaps with Uncle Ned in mind).

And yet, the unusual thing about Stoney, other than his desire for his super power to be able to play Barrelhouse piano, was his ability to smile at life: to see the good things, not always the bad things; to see beauty in people, even in Ana-Lee Lewis, and not only the ugliness – Ana-Lee Lewis again. 

For this reason Stoney was happily married with two kids, a boy and a girl.  Also for this reason Stoney wanted to die with a smile on his face, and not with piano wire around his neck, no matter how strong his love of Boogie-woogie. 

He had as good a chance as any!

~

When the Big Day came – arguably the most momentous day in anyone’s life, and one of which we (typically) have zilch, zero memory, and very few photographs – Stoney was watering the front lawn of his house, fondly remembering Uncle Ned, and ‘Po’ Monkeys’ (and quite possibly Ana-Lee Lewis). 

On the Big Day, his two kids came back from school with their mother to find Stoney prostrate on the lawn with the dog, Truman, yapping loudly and darting in and out of the jets of water springing from the hose in Stoney’s hands.

To Stoney’s four year old daughter, Stoney seemed very happily asleep.

He was in fact, dead.

What can you say other than ‘practice makes perfect!’

(Expect maybe: ‘it’s the taking part that counts’)

~

Still, at Stoney’s funeral the mood was significantly lighter than it had been thirty years previously at Uncle Ned’s.  How good of Stoney to die happily, people said; and how much more comfortable it made the people he left behind feel about it all.  Indeed, Ana-Lee Lewis was the only one who cried at the funeral, and the wake that followed was talked about by Boogie-woogie enthusiasts all over the county for months thereafter. 

And let’s not forget the funeral casket that ferried the rigid, yet smiling, six feet, four inches of Stoney up the conveyor belt and into the oven: it was constructed from the timber of an old Barrelhouse piano.