Tales of the Ivory T's: I -- The Organ Lady: A Memoir of Sorts

By C. F. Brughere

The Ivory Ticklers Anonymous operates more like a medieval guild than a modem association, yet its precepts and activities point to the future, not the past. No professional musicians are allowed in, membership is conferred by election, meetings are frequent, kids are made much of - - an extended family, if you will, with music at its balance point. Making the most of one's membership, however, does require a grand piano ....

Meet Charlie Brughere, political non-believer and co-founder of the Ivory T's. His idea of a good time is salvaging sunken vessels in the Napa Estuary in exchange for a 75 year old piano. For himself, he wants nothing so much as a family of his own - - even if he has to rehabilitate a lovely, young recluse before he can achieve it.

A memoir for the times, this is; together with a view of our political future that may not be entirely welcome to the fans of big government. Read it aloud to someone you care about, and don't hide it from your teenagers, despite its candor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456603045

Book preview

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DEEP DRILLING

San Mateo County

Sandwiched in amongst the machinery dealers, the tool crib outfits and the routine job shops like Shelhammer’s, where I work, is a small San Carlos institution known as Fybie’s. George, its proprietor, admits to being forty-some. To us younger chip-curlers, he seems like an elder statesman, imperturbable, level as a salt flat.

Aside from a typewriter and a Fax machine, Gopher, as he’s better known, has only two pieces of equipment that matter to him: a large deep hole drill and another smaller one. He makes his entire living with these, producing long, straight, accurate holes to the customer’s specifications. He thinks nothing of coring a half-inch hole down the centerline of a three foot bar of steel that won’t vary from that line more than twice the thickness of a human hair in the whole 36 inches.

This is specialty work, tricky, but tedious, and Gopher Fybie (George on Sundays) charges accordingly.

For a long time, any one of our ten man crew would jump at the chance to deliver a job over to Fybie’s. The draw was never the machinery or the results; rather it was Gopher’s step-daughter, the voluptuous and musical-mystical Magdalena. A steady, eight seconds’ look at her could make a man’s day.

Some years back, Gopher added a mezzanine to his south wall, better constructed than a simple storage loft, and installed a picture window. That gave him some welcome sunlight. Next, before anyone knew what he was up to, he borrowed a fork lift and hoisted a big Hammond organ up there—one of those flashy jobs that you might expect to see in a movie theater of times past, or an arriviste suburban church. Gopher swears his business took a jump after Magda started playing it.

I shouldn’t wonder.

What the heck, ‘said Gus Shelhammer, reflecting on it when the subject came up one lunch break, she’s a stunner; never had kids. Rumor is, she’s a weight-watcher." My boss was as taken with her as anybody. Her enigmatic qualities were what people talked about; She was dark-eyed, yet blonde, wore tight-fitting jump suits and avoided the customers. Gopher took care of them, while she concentrated on atmosphere.

She had to climb a ladder to reach this keyboard-in-the­clouds, (no room for stairs) but once ensconced, power on, and a dreamy expression settling over her, young Magda could truly enchant. Old-time love songs predominated, with an occasional dive into heavier things. I heard her do Schubert’s Ave Maria one rainy afternoon. Her registration made the music too sugary, but her phrasing and dynamics were quite in order. Whatever she chose to play, she played slow, as tradition took a back seat to expression. Nobody ever fell asleep to any of it, though. If her high seriousness wasn’t enough for you, there was always her divine, art-calendar figure.

Gopher seemed not to care what she played, and seldom brought her into a conversation with a customer, even inferentially. But I was there one day when the fire inspector was also visiting, discharging his duty in wrathful Thou Shalt Nots. The music had ceased. When the inspector left, I saw Gopher give his angel in the loft an urgent look that meant, now.She switched to a simple flute/clarinet registration, and gave us the love duet from Iolanthe. Gopher hummed along. Good song, there. She does OK. Considering how quickly the anger had left his face, that seemed a bit of an understatement.

So there it stood, up until last year: a man whose livelihood was deep holes, and who created them while his sexy stepdaughter massaged an organ. By then, this Freudian slapstick had been on the boards for enough time to give most of the shops off Industrial Way a chance to acquire their own anecdote or running joke about the organ lady.

Ours, at Shelhammer’s, took a turn one September morn that changed my life. Between two bearing walls at the rear of our shop, there runs a heavy, three inch pipe. It doesn’t carry anything; it used to help support a stock rack. Someone painted it flesh color, and got our shag boy, Robby Archuleta, to complete the illusion with a realistic-looking vulva centered on the pipe’s vanishing point in the furthest wall. Robby, who will have a sumptuous artistic future if he can ever subdue his passion for fast cars and stay away from places like Sears Point, has never shown any squeamishness about depicting the human form, approaching the task with no more self-consciousness than a ten year old might display in sketching the Easter Bunny. The next items to appear were two leather sacks stuffed with steel wool dangling from the pipe’s near end, and below the mural, a pink card which read: Where two organs meat....

You could see it two ways: bad taste or little boys’ bathroom fixations. Murdock Raines, of course, was the entire inspiration behind it. Murdock is a shop foreman with a scatological mind. Moreover, he’s a bully. Even Gus Shelhammer, who owns the shop outright, is leery of him. But this was too much of a gauntlet thrown down:

Cover it up, Raines, and shit-can that card. Word travels—as if you didn’t know.

Murdock just shrugged. Someone else soon deployed a chip screen which occluded most of Robby’s artwork. I still felt uneasy. My first music teacher was an organist. I sang in his church choir until my voice changed. Something deep inside me was fomenting retaliation, and Magda herself fascinated me, lovely, yet unapproachable. We all knew that one of the salesmen at J.W.’s had tried to get a date with her. His rebuff had come, in no uncertain terms, from Gopher himself. I packed a lunch the next day and ate it on the run. I suppose it was a quest of sorts. All I needed to look the part was a horse, a suit of armor and a nice, clean sword.

After two dead ends, I hit paydirt at San Mateo Steel. Their comptroller, a tall, chinless number-cruncher named Pincus Graham, was a man I knew quite well. We’d done some trout fishing up in Tuolumne County. He had a tiny redhead for a wife, and a crippled teen-age son.

Pinky had nearly finished his box lunch and was skillfully peeling an apple when I walked in on him. Steering him onto the Fybie situation was no great challenge.

Those two aren’t related, he reminded me.

Right. He lets you know she’s his step-daughter.

Un-huh. Y’know, her mother, Ethel, was ten years older than Gopher. Magda was already in her late teens when Ethel and Gopher tied the knot. I went to their wedding.

What happened to Ethel?

Lost a battle with cancer. Lemme see... that’d be going on four years now.

That fitted. I’d hired on with Gus four years previously, and had known Magda, at least to listen to, for about half of those. How did Gopher react to losing her?

Pinky folded his sandwich paper around the soda straw from his Sprite and pitched the two away, followed by his apple core. "Shut down for a