One Like No Other, Essay Example

Blind Music

One glance and you’d know that he was blind. Watching his fingers in cut-off, dirty work-gloves is like watching hummingbirds around a feeder in the heat of summer. He plays a Casio keyboard on a trembling stand and it sounds like at least three keyboards, not just one, are playing. His face is white, fat and looks moon-like with its acne-scar craters, propping up square-lensed sunglasses. You have to imagine what his eyes might look like: tiny and pink and useless. Or were there simply empty-sockets there? Or was it all a put-on and he wasn’t blind at all? But pretending to be blind to make his virtuosic playing seem that much more brilliant.

Strange to see such an accomplished musician playing to…no-one. Or just a few pigeons and passers-by — litter in miniature tumble-weeds: candy-wrappers, cigarette butts, fly around his feet, which tap at pedals wired into his old keyboard. There’s money in his fish-bowl, but only about twenty dollars all in quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies. Everything about the scene seems dated, from the mere fact of a blind man playing music for tips on a sidewalk, to the slash of sunlight across his weirdly twisted lips as he plays. If one word should describe him, that word would be: loneliness. The only feeling you get watching him, hearing his songs which jazz into the afternoon, something between an organ at a baseball game and a funeral dirge. Something about his posture and his melodies seem already posthumous.

This afternoon, I followed him into the Starbuck’s to watch what he eats for lunch, to see how he manages to make it into the already-humid afternoon with his wrung-out expression and bird-like hands. I watched him order a bagel and coffee and he held out a handful of money for the counter-girl to count. All his life he’d probably trusted people to make change, to not make faces at his blind, mock-inspiring face, to button his shirt, his pants, and place his Cubs cap, at a slightly cocked angle, over his enormous, baby-like head. He never noticed me approaching, a few minutes later, while he sat back at his keyboard. He stared empty-eyed at nothing while I quietly lifted his fishbowl full of money, slipped it under my jacket, and walked away.