READING TIME: 45 MINUTES
It was 3am and my phone rang. I was asleep, but pulled from the depths. Thomas was calling, he wasn't sure what to do, he was distraught. He had texted a picture to the group chat earlier of Ethan on the couch with blood on his head. It was funny then, a few hours ago, because Ethan was sleeping and harmless. But now he was up, out on the balcony, smoking cigarettes, drinking tequila, and talking to himself about how he we was not going to jump. Six floors up. So Thomas wasn't sure what to do about Ethan.
I rolled out of bed and went upstairs. Simon, who was sharing a room with Ethan, was there too. We didn't normally share, but these were spacious converted apartments with separate bedrooms and bathrooms. Each also had a kitchen, living room, balcony, and laundry, and the hotel was next to the venue. So that's why Simon was sharing a room with Ethan.
Simon and Thomas told me about their night. They had gone out for a nightcap after load out. Before they left, Ethan was passed out on the couch. When they returned, he was on the balcony talking to himself. He hadn't bothered to clean the blood off his head. They were amazed he was still up. He had been drinking since the afternoon, and it was now 3am. What was he on?
I went across the hall into Ethan and Simon's room. Ethan was there on the balcony mumbling to himself. There was a half-bottle of piss-cheap tequila on the kitchen counter. The apartment smelled like cigarettes. I said hi. He gave a big crooked smile and mumbled something about how beautiful the stars were. His eyes were cagey. His body language was demure and shifty.
I assessed and thought to myself, "This guy is just drunk. Maybe something else too, but I've seen this before. He's looking for attention." Given how the day had gone, I was over it. I was over Ethan.
I walked back through the kitchen, grabbed the tequila, and went back across the hall. I told Simon we could get his stuff out, and get him another room.
So we went back across the hall again. Ethan was inside the apartment now, smoking a cigarette. We walked passed him. He was waiting for us to yell or react in some way. He mumbled to himself about leaving. He stumbled, hopped on one leg while putting on his shoes. We ignored him. He mumbled to himself about the piano. He loved the piano. It was his baby. He was going to fix it, and take care of it. He cried and sniffled about how much he loved it. But he warned he would leave. He spoke as if there was a fourth person in the apartment. But there were only three of us, and we ignored him, so he was talking to himself. Simon got his stuff and we walked out of the apartment.
After Simon was out, I went back one last time. Ethan was sitting on the couch blankly staring at the TV. I said, "Be careful, stay inside" and left. He said thank you and laid down. He was fucked up but coherent. Something was cutting through the alcohol.
I went back to my room and went to sleep. "I'll deal with it in the morning." This wasn't the first incident. I'd have to find another piano tuner.
**********
The next morning, I woke up around 9am, looked at my phone. Ethan had written me about twenty emails. Mostly one-liners along the lines of:
- A wispier of smoke coils in the sky
- I’ll never let
Sent from my iPhone
Down. Don’t even think me
- You are the best
Those had come in around 4am shortly after we had left him, but around 8am they turned more towards:
- Can you provide me a chopper flight over this beautiful city today for my birthday. I’m paying for it
- Brother, if you don’t come up with the chopper flight I’ll never hold it against you. Luv always,
- My dearest friend, I’m going to be picked up in a motor home around the corner. I’ll be turning my phone off until the time comes when I yet again have to speak to the stupid world.
- Im sorry that my stupid friend died during the last tour I ever do. Please take all my money and spend it on the crew, for putting up with my snoring and my feet. 👍🙏💞
My first thought was that I didn't understand how he was awake at 8am. Was he already up, or still up? I stared at the ceiling for a few minutes. Sighed. Rubbed my eyes. Asked myself how or why. The typical existential "what am I doing with my life" stuff. "I hope he's ok" I thought. "I have to find a new tuner."
"I just need someone to tune the piano. It's an easy job. Good pay, get to travel, nice hotels, days off. For a specialist doing a specialized job, it's a great gig. Why couldn't I find some kind of Buddhist monk tuner? Someone quiet, peaceful. Someone who meditates, reads about Dharma, and visits Zen centers on off-days. Is that too much to ask?" My mind had drifted, but I came back.
I sat down at the computer, and went to work. Ethan was only supposed to be with us through that upcoming weekend. He had done a few gigs and toured with us that previous week. We had two remaining he was supposed to do that I now needed tuners for. It was Friday and we had gigs on Saturday and Sunday. The most pressing was the next day. I needed to find a piano tuner in a small rural town with twenty-four hours notice, who could come down at 8am-sharp, and be ok with tuning a piano outdoors on a festival stage. No big deal. I had already searched in that city previously.
I hit send a dozen times, then stepped back to give it time. In addition to searching for tuners, I also hit up the travel agent to book Ethan a flight home.
After a few hours, it all lined up more or less.
I wrote Ethan an email stating that his employment and involvement with the tour was terminated. He didn't have a working phone, so email was the only communication that worked. I thanked him for his time. Kept it professional. Gave two specific reasons why we couldn't have him on the tour: a.) he wasn't around during soundcheck at the last show and b.) when he came back, he was intoxicated. Pretty straightforward. Those two incidents were what preceded the balcony-blood-on-the-head night.
I got him a plane ticket. It was up to him to make it. Told him we would pay for his time, he just needed to send an invoice.
The next morning he wrote back:
- no bad feelings at all. I understand and apologise. I pride myself for my professionalism. I hope everyone can forgive me and I do hope your all have a safe and wonderful tour.
**********
I should rewind a bit to provide some context. First off, why were we touring with a piano tuner? No one does that. Tours hire tuners locally.
The answer is that, in short, because we traveled with an acoustic piano and our schedule was fucked.
What does a "fucked" schedule look like? Well, we were playing a string of regional festival dates in small towns, hours outside major cities. The tour had back-to-back-to-back-to-back dates over two weekends. In other words, Weekend 1 was three-in-a-row, and Weekend 2 was two-in-a-row. And we had to fly or travel by vans to each gig. Overnighting on buses wasn't an option. That meant we arrived late in the day, long after the music had started on our stage. The piano also arrived late in the day because it was being freighted from the previous city with the rest of our gear. These were two festival-weekends of a longer tour cycle.
Our stage was nonstop, which meant tuning a piano was a Wild-Wild-West gun-slingin' sort of ordeal. A-B-A-B-A-B bands. As soon as one act stopped, the next started. Never a minute of downtime. Our stage was loud all day. LOOOUUUD!!! Ear-plug loud. By the time the crew and piano arrived, music had already started, and had been going for hours. That is typical for a festival, and under normal circumstances, not a big deal. But tuners are used to performance art centers and family homes. Quiet in other words. quiet. Anytime you need to tune a piano for a show, you build an hour or two into the schedule for "quiet stage". There has to be silence. We didn't have that, so tuning was really a maniacal task.
Finding piano tuners in small towns is one level of difficulty, but finding tuners in small towns who will tune on a loud, dusty, outdoor, rock-festival stage is another level of difficulty above. In each town, there were maybe two or three tuners. Maybe. So, first, one of those would have had to have been available. Then, he or she would have had to have been ok with coming down and tuning under those conditions. Even if I was able to find a tuner, and explain the circumstances, there was a chance the person would show up but then just walk off the job. I had to consider the personality of any local tuner we might have ended up with on showday.
There are several cohorts of archetypal piano tuner personalities. Sometimes you get the laid back guy who shows up in sandals and floppy hair and tunes with an app on his phone. That's one cohort. But sometimes you get the temperamental, delicate-genius stern type, dressed in all black, who tunes by ear with a tuning fork and demands pin-drop silence. That's another type. And there are other types. The point is that you are never sure who you'll get.
We also could have avoided using a tuner altogether had we used a digital piano instead. But the artist wanted a real organic, flesh-and-blood piano, made of wood, steel-wire, and felt. A real acoustic piano is a living organism that creaks and groans. A digital keyboard doesn't look or feel the same. It doesn't have the same feel.
Another option was that we could have used a local acoustic piano. If we had, we could have had it tuned early in the day before we arrived, so that when we did arrive, it was on a riser ready to go. But again, not the same. The artist wanted his piano. I couldn't blame him either. Our piano was badass. It was an upright spinet-style, 100-years old. It's insides smelled like whiskey and cigarette smoke and aged cologne. It had the poetic character of a hardened Great Lakes factory worker. That's where I had bought it. I had flown to Buffalo, rented a truck, and picked it up from the family who sold it to us.
Anyway, that is what a "fucked" schedule looks like – a back-to-back-to-back string of dates, combined with a traveling acoustic piano.
In order to accommodate the piano and schedule, the best available option was to hire a tuner to tour with us over those two weekends. It was not a great scenario – a touring tuner was an added expense – but it was a good plan given the variables. At least if we toured with someone, he would be on our team and know the deal each day.
I got Ethan's name from someone I trusted. When I spoke to him, I laid it out. "These will be loud stages, tight spaces, dusty, we'll arrive late in the day." "No problem" he said. "Great, solved" I thought. That's how we got Ethan. He was with us for a total of six days before he fell apart mentally.
**********
Day 1. The first show with Ethan was also the start of a tour cycle. There was a new album and 12+ months of gigs booked.
The start of any new tour is a confluence of two primary emotions: excitement and uncertainty. First, there is the excitement of the new. New people, new toys, new music, new audiences. It brings new cities, new food, new experiences. New is novel and fun and there's an element of that at the beginning of any tour. But you also have the uncertainty of the time-crunch on Day 1, and simply wondering if everything is going to work. Sure, we had rehearsed for two weeks prior to the tour, but now we were seeing rental gear for the first time, and our gear, which had been freighted from rehearsals, for the first time in two-and-a-half weeks. Everything had to get unpacked, set up, and work perfectly in a time-crunch. It was absolutely imperative to get momentum from the start.
And what a way to start a tour – a festival – which meant quick changeovers, limited space, and limited resources in general. Festivals are more work to get trucks in and out, to wrangle stagehands, to make room for cases, to get consoles to and from FOH, to get risers set so we could build on them, and of course to find time and space to tune a piano. You also have entourages from other acts who come onto stage throughout the day, get in the way, take selfies, and leave half-empty red Solo cups everywhere. Festivals are just more work.
At least we had a soundcheck the night before the first show. And overall, the soundcheck nad first show went off without issues. There were a few hiccups, but nothing major. The band was happy so that meant it was a success.
Day 2. Here's how the day was set up: 5am lobby call, 7am fly to the next city, 2pm load in, 8pm our set, 10pm load out, then drive two hours, 1am arrive at hotel. That's a long, 21-hour day, and Day 3 was setup to be pretty much the same.
Here's how the day started: Ethan was ten minutes late for the 5am lobby call to the airport. He wandered off at 4:50am to find cigarettes, and wandered back with us all sitting in the van ready to go. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I said, "5am means 5am. Not 5:01 or any other time. We don't do late, especially going to the airport." He apologized "Got it. Sorry, it won't happen again."
We flew, arrived at the festival early afternoon, then found our green room tent and catering. We needed to drop our bags, get lunch, and get to the stage for load in.
During lunch, I looked across catering and saw Ethan casually holding a beer. Now, ideologically, I'm pretty Laissez-faire about the substances one chooses to ingest or imbibe. My thoughts are, that as long as someone can do his job well, that's all that matters. But to be honest, of the people I've worked with, the best simply don't do things like drink a beer before load in. It's just not a thing that top performers do. So, I guess my Laissez-faire attitude is more informed by ideology than practice. In other words, I tell myself I don't care so long as the person can do his job, but in practice, I do care. I want to work with the best, and the best are simply more disciplined, especially on Day 2. There are of course high-functioning alcoholics and fiends in touring. Either way, it's only an afterthought now, and it was just a beer. It's not like he was doing rails of coke between swigs of Jack Daniels. We were rushing around so it just was a passing moment. I remember the slight denial thinking to myself "Is he holding a beer?"
After the show, Ethan jumped in to help breakdown the gear and got in EVERYONE'S way. Here's the thing, load-out is sacred. To the crew, it's the most important part of the day. It's all about the load-out. Everyone has a specialized role and a specific way to breakdown their gear. And everyone moves fast. It has to be done in a precise way. "STOP, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING!!" is the Pavlovian response if you see someone fucking with your gear. If it isn't broken-down and put away in the right way, it causes more work the next day.
No one had expected Ethan to jump in, and no one had asked for his help. He went to three or four people and pissed-off everyone. He started ripping cables out of the back of a keyboard and had the playback tech yell at him. He pulled the legs off the floor tom and had the drum tech yell at him. Moved on to audio, and got eviscerated by the audio tech when he unpatched cables from a stagebox.
After load out, we started the two-hour drive back to the city. We had been moving since 5am. The next morning, lobby call was 8am for a similar type day. I was driving, our monitor engineer Danny was riding shotgun, and we were chatting. Ethan was on the bench seat behind us.
Now, it's hard to describe the nuance of an annoying conversation. A normal buoyant conversation is like ping-pong back and forth. A third person can make it like three-sided ping-pong where each person lobs the ball back to someone else. You can add more people too of course. Danny and I were casually lobbing back and forth about the day. We talked about the 20-hr plane flight a few days before, about Shure Audio's shop in Chicago, rehearsal spaces in London, etc. Just shooting the shit. Ethan kept doing this thing where he would mumble a retort to what we said, but sort of to himself, the way a child hovers around adults. It wasn't a three-sided ping-pong match, it was a two-sided ping-pong match, where he randomly kept interrupting by hitting his ball across our table.
He graduated from that by coming out of his shell a bit to tell us ever-increasingly-sounding fantasy stories about his life that just didn't really seem true. Like that he was developing an app with a billionaire friend. And that he lived in a stunning high-rise overlooking the harbor.
Eventually he tired and proceeded to take off his shoes and socks, fall asleep, and snore loudly. For the second-half of the drive, Danny and I were confronted with either listening to him snore, or waking him up and risking more bad ping-pong. We chose snoring.
There's something that happens in small groups when one or two people don't quite fit in. It's subtle. It starts with whispers, and builds a feedback loop. People break into cliques and the outsiders drift, they get ostracized over time. The cliques start with one or two snide remarks, and it feeds on itself. Once someone is on the outside, it's hard to get back in. The outsider has to perceive that he is on the outside and change his behavior in some way to reverse the trend. It's hard to put your finger on. People like to gossip, and tell stories. They recognize patterns, recognize that this one person, the outsider, is annoying to others too. It becomes him and us. Ethan was now ever-so-subtly on the outside. It was the little things that added up: late for lobby call, drank a beer at 1pm, fucked with load out, presented delicately-odd mannerisms in conversation, took off his shoes in the van, snored loudly. Little things.
Day 3. Lobby call was 8am. The day started with another two-hour drive to the next festival ground. These drives, again, were because the festival sites were in small towns outside the major cities. We had two vans. The cliques were already forming in the crew, and secretly, no one wanted to ride in the van with Ethan.
As far as the show that day, there were no issues. We had built momentum quickly, and pretty much had the show locked at that point. After the show, everyone was happy to have made it through the grueling weekend, and was looking forward to two upcoming days off.
At the end of the night, everyone was in the dressing room packed up with their bags and Pelicans, and the vans were ready to go to the hotel. The last act was on stage, so our goal was to get off the festival site to avoid end-of-show traffic. The crew was all ready to go. But wait. Ethan had lost his bag. We had had the train moving, but the inertia stopped dead in it's tracks. It was his backpack with his passport and wallet in it. In the moment, he thought he had left it on stage. So he and I walked there while everyone else turned the dressing room tent upside down. We looked for a half-hour or so, but eventually everyone's tiredness, and the fact that we needed to get off the festival site, trumped his lost bag. He had the following two days off to sort it out. The funny thing is, looking back, I don't remember if he found it that night, at the next show, or never. It wouldn't have mattered. Because it was now evident that this was his modus operandi. And I mean that quite literally – this incident was part of his particular habits of working and living. It was part of his particular method for walking through life. It wasn't the first time he had lost all his most important documents during a time-sensitive situation, and it for sure wasn't going to be the last.
It was another little thing.
**********
I should pause to say that Ethan had done a great job of tuning the piano on the loud, dusty, cacophonous festival stages. If only our relationship could have ended there each night. Unfortunately, tour is a 24-hour per-day affair and his personality had caused a chasm to form with him on one side, and everyone else on the other.
Fortunately, after a long, grueling, three-in-a-row weekend, the upcoming week was easy. Ahead of us, we had one headline show in five days. It looked like this: Monday travel, Tuesday off, Wednesday headline show, Thursday and Friday off. All in the same city and hotel. That number of off-days is rare. But it shows the vicissitudes of tour, the wild swings from ON to OFF that can happen. The following weekend we had more back-to-back shows.
Day 4. Monday. It was a quick fly travel-day. We flew in, went to the hotel, easy. We were staying downtown next to the venue. Everyone, happy for a night off, broke into small groups to explore, get food, hit a bar.
Day 5. Tuesday, off day. I woke up early and worked all day in the hotel. Also, the rooms had laundry, which was simply amazing. Again, they were converted apartments. Laundry on tour is a never-ending cycle of boom and bust. You gotta wait til you're down to the last pair, otherwise it isn't worth the time and effort. So you wait, push it. This creates a day of reckoning where, all of a sudden, laundry becomes an absolute emergency. On those days, finding some way to do laundry becomes an epic quest, a call to adventure. Sometimes you get lucky and it's easy. But sometimes, there will only be one machine in the hotel that everyone on the tour is trying to use, or there will be a laundromat down the street but they won't have soap, or the machines will be in a different language, or you can't get change in whatever currency of whatever country you are in. Not to mention that laundry is still a CHORE, and you would rather spend the better-half of an off-day sleeping, exploring, or eating. This is how hotels get away with charging exorbitantly high, price-gouging fees for dry-cleaning – because they know how much of a pain in the ass laundry is while traveling. So, all that said, it was nice that we had laundry in the room.
That night, I went out for food, and at one point, while walking aimlessly, a thought popped into my head: "I bet Ethan is up to absolutely no good tonight". Like AB - SO - LUTE - LY no good. I had just given out per diem the day prior, and had given several weeks' worth at once, which meant everyone had cash. Something told me that Ethan didn't do well with a pocket full of cash, that he wasn't used to it, and didn't understand the idea of rationing.
Lo and behold, around the time that thought had popped into my head, Ethan was getting handcuffed, and put into the back of a car. Turns out, he had met up with some buddies, got belligerently drunk before sundown, and taunted a couple of rookie cops in an outdoor tourist plaza downtown. He spent the night in jail. We didn't know anything about the incident the night it happened. It wasn't until the next day, when he boasted, that we found out.
Day 6. Wednesday, headline show. Ethan sauntered in just after load in. We had broken for a quick lunch and everyone was sitting around in catering. He dropped a piece of paper on the table – a flimsy yellow carbon-copy with messy handwriting. The fine was equivalent to $500. He had spent all his PD's, and he seemed proud of it. I guess he felt empowered to have had so much fun yet to have broken even.
He told us the story, including the remark that got him handcuffed, which involved the cop's height and a sexual position. He then sat back and waited for the backslapping and high-fiving to begin. He said, "Someone had to get arrested on this tour, that's how it's done!". He thought it was funny, and he thought that we would think it was funny. No one thought it was funny. What everyone was thinking, beyond "this guy is an idiot", was that getting arrested, especially for anything alcohol-related, makes it next-to-impossible to tour because alcohol-related charges on your record prevent you from entering certain countries. And with today's digital-databases and biometric border-crossings, you don't just slip through. It's a potentially career-ending move for a crew-person.
So there we were, Ethan was looking for approval, for a laugh, and there was just a disconnect. He thought everyone would be impressed, that we'd all huddle around, and eagerly soak up the story. Instead, everyone deflected, exchanged glances, and left the room.
Ethan went to stage, tuned the piano, and left the theater.
**********
A few hours later, during soundcheck, we moved the piano, the band wanted it in a different position, which meant it needed a touch-up tuning. Ethan was no where to be found. I called his cell, nothing, straight to voicemail. He didn't have service. His phone only worked with internet, which meant he only got email. As he had previously explained, the world was out to get him, the phone company had cut his service when he missed payment by "only one day". So, I emailed "Get over here pls we need to touch up the piano". I also asked the promoter if he had a tuner he could call.
Ethan came back an hour or so later stinking drunk, and crying. He was fucking crying. I walked into the production office after soundcheck, and he was there with our tour manager. Mark, our TM, looked at me as if to say "this guy is a mess!" In my head, I knew this was the last day for him. (As a reminder, the end of Day 6 was when Ethan was out on the balcony with blood on his head talking to himself).
Through snivels, Ethan mumbled that his friend had died. He wasn't able to get in much more detail. It caught us off-guard. We weren't sure what to do but we listened. My anger melted some. I felt bad, but strangely, part of me didn't really believe him. Maybe that wasn't totally fair, or shows a lack of empathy. But emotions are complex. He was drunk, you could smell it on his breath. He had been arrested the previous night, and had already burned so much goodwill. He was already on the outside. He asked if it was ok to leave for the night. We told him he should go to the hotel and stay. After he left, we went on with our business. We had a few hours before showtime, and catering was up.
The venue that night was a beautiful and historic art-deco style theater built in the 30's or 40's. It had a deep and wide wooden stage with a proscenium, a multiple-curtain system with ropes and pulleys, high ceilings with chandeliers, neat rows of red-velvet seats, and ornate carvings in the balconies. And like all old theaters from the same period, this one had a quirky maze-like backstage. There were underground concrete hallways that lead seemingly to nowhere, walkways over and under the stage, multiple side-entrances from the street, and control-rooms off stage-left and right for local crew. It would have been easy to get lost, or lurk in the shadows if one so desired.
A few hours later, we were in the final push to start the show. The crew changed over the stage after the opening act, a process that involves countless invisible and minute details like pulling black scrim off backline, nudging gear into spike-marks, checking audio-lines, flickering strobes, cranking hazers to 10, basically getting everything just right. I taped down setlists, folded and placed towels just so, de-labeled and uncapped water bottles. We got everything set and ready. The congo-blue stage-lights slowly faded to black. The house-lights stayed lit over a murmuring audience.
A few minutes later, I walked the band to stage. It was dark. We gave the call, house-lights went out, and the crowd screamed. As the band walked past me onto stage, I looked over and saw who I thought was Ethan standing in a corner. "Is that Ethan?!" I nudged Mark. It was. He was standing in a corner facing the wall. When the band started to play, he started to dance, off in his own world. What a strange man with strange behavior. He was facing the corner like a kid in detention, but was dancing.
I had a show to deal with. I skirted behind the stage, from left to right. Then out front to check on audio and lighting. When I returned minutes later, he was gone. I checked backstage. Asked the security guards if they had seen anything. Nothing. Ok. We didn't see him for the rest of the night.
Now, fast-forward through the show and load out, to the end of the night. Everyone was back at the hotel. That was when Simon walked into his hotel and found Ethan asleep on the couch with blood on his head. Thomas was there too. They checked on him. Thomas snapped a picture and sent it to the group chat. Then they went out for a night-cap.
Fast-forward another few hours, and that was when I got the call at 3am about Ethan being out on the balcony talking to himself. That time he was very much awake. That was when I went in, spoke to him, took the bottle of tequila, and got Simon's stuff. That was also when Ethan was mumbling about how much he loved the piano.
Fast-forward yet again to when I got Ethan a plane ticket home, and searched for piano tuners.
Now we're back where we started.
Ethan traveled with us for six days, and in that time, he broke down. We had three festival gigs in a row, followed by two days off, then a headline show.
When hiring crew, recommendations have to come first-hand from people you trust. You want to hire people who have been vouched for by others you have toured with. Track record is important. Why? Because you live with tour-mates. It's not one or eight hours, it's twenty-four. Ethan entered our world by way of a tour manager who knew a promoter who knew Ethan. It wasn't word-of-mouth enough. It was a last-ditch effort to find someone.
This tour was a great gig for a piano tuner. A very easy, well-paying, gig. An opportunity to travel a bit and make money. It was probably more contiguous, guaranteed days of work than Ethan had had in a long time. One hundred years ago, every home had a piano in the living room. Those pianos were replaced with televisions and guitars, and eventually video games and computers. In other words, from a long-range view, piano tuning is a shrinking trade. In a Darwinian sense, there are fewer piano tuners because there are fewer pianos. So you would have thought that someone would have jumped at the opportunity to do a great job on a tour like this, to have killed it.
The entire situation unfolded during a string of hectic rehearsal days – the band was learning new music and putting the live show together under a time-crunch. The artist decided last-minute he wanted to use his acoustic piano. That was ok, but it forced a hand. Hiring Ethan was a gamble. Sometimes gambles pay off and you look smart, and there are no issues, and no one even knows it was a gamble in the first place. But sometimes they backfire, shit hits the fan and goes everywhere, gets all over everything, and then you have to clean all the shit off of everything.
But this isn't where the story ends. Because the timid, eccentric, blundering Ethan 1.0 in our story so far, was replaced by Ethan 2.0 in Act II.
**********
Act II.
A week or so later, I was on the other side of the country in my hotel room hacking away at emails. Those were early days in the tour cycle, and I was also working remotely on another tour, so the workload was heavy. While the rest of the crew spent off-days running around cities or swimming at beaches, I worked.
I was there in front of the computer, morning sun coming through the balcony, when the emails and texts started to rain in.
- "pull your head out of your arse!"
- "dumb fuck!"
- "looser"!
Ethan was emailing me one-liners. I didn't reply.
He then emailed a picture of a handwritten invoice with "Pay immediately. You disappoint me. Unprofessional fuck" written on it. And threatened to sue for "$3.2 million legal action".
I received about ten messages before I called him. He answered but as soon as I spoke hung up. I rubbed my eyes. Ok. I wanted to pay him to put it in the past. I had asked him to send an invoice.
There was no bank info on the "Unprofessional fuck" invoice. No government ID number. He wanted me to have someone meet him and give him cash.
"I sent the invoice in a photo. Fuck’n pay me now or you will be hearing from my lawyer. Here it is. I don’t read emails from morons"
I was there in the hotel, buried in work. I had two tours for two different artists to advance. I had shit to deal with, three or four or five "top priorities". I wanted, needed, to get to other, more important things. I had real stress from things that needed to be done, the palpable kind that you feel in your shoulders and jaw, the kind that takes endurance. This was a distraction at best. I wanted to check it off my list. Push it aside so I could be done with it. But Ethan was a toddler who wanted more. I could sense his agitation. Something was going on inside his brain. Irrational, emotional. Something flipped. Or clicked. He didn't want to be paid, or to receive an email, he wanted nations to fall. He wanted misery and the fires of hell to rain down on the injustice of the world.
I realized this was going to take more than I had expected or wanted to give. I sensed his insecurity. I wanted to help, mostly because I wanted him to leave me alone, but I also felt there was more. I made a new, proper, invoice. Wrangled bank info out of him and sent it over to the business managers. It was Friday afternoon. Miraculously, they were just about to run payroll and said they could get him paid. It was dumb luck.
In the meantime he sent more messages:
- "30 minutes and it’s costing you $90000 out of court. Then $3.2 million"
- "24 minutes and counting. Get someone to walk up to me with the cash. I thought you could move mountains 🏔. Showing what a fake you are. I can’t fuck you over with 1 Facebook post"
- "See you in court you fucking incompetent looser."
When he threatened to ruin my career with a Facebook post, I found that humorous. The irony was, that inherent in my career, was putting up with people like him, in situations like the one he was causing. Who wants to deal with that!? While the rest of the crew were on the beach, I was working in the hotel and getting berated by a piano tuner. My career felt perfectly safe simply because few people will deal with this shit.
I emailed him back that they had processed payment. The last message I sent to him was:
You sent me a pic of a paper invoice with all the wrong info on it + a barrage of nasty emails. I made a new invoice for you and put the right info on it and turned payment around in less than 1 day. So please stop harassing
He replied right away and said he wanted an additional $6,000 on top of the fee from my personal bank account. I knew he was swimming deep in delusional waters then, which is why I didn't reply further.
All of this took a few hours. After I sent my final message and had gotten him paid, the berating of emails continued. They were easy to ignore because they were just emails flowing into the ocean that was my inbox. But also, like a car wreck, hard not to look at. At one point, he sent a picture of his friend who had died. This was the person who had caused the tears the previous week. It turned out, his friend had died a full year before, not last week. He was a twenty-one year old kid. I wasn't sure what to think. Ethan's "friend" was less than half his age. There was something about it that I just didn't really believe. It didn't help that he sent the picture in an email with one line of text that read "$6000!" for the money he believed I now owed him from my personal bank account. Either way, my moral obligation was sated – I had done my duty.
That night he left a voicemail:
"Where are you? Where are you you coward? Because I'm coming over and drag fucking you to a bank and get 6000 dollars out of you. Your a piece of shit. Don't you fucking think it's a joke. Like seriously I'll personally come fucking drag you. And I'm not fucking around man. You're a fucking coward piece of shit. I'm going to fuck you over. Don't come to [CITY] cunt!!"
Up until that point, I had found the entire situation mildly amusing. I had thought to myself "It'll make for a good story – not funny today, but some day." I had maintained a level of stoicism, and felt altruistic in how I had handled it. He clearly had issues, had fallen apart. He was a burning dumpster-fire of a piano tuner. He was demure and apologetic, but then flipped to a tyrant, demanding. Meanwhile, I hadn't said anything to anyone who worked in his city or country. I hadn't affected his career.
Either way, now I had a problem because now he had made a physical threat. Here's the thing – our next show was in the city where he lived! If not for that unpleasant coincidence, I would have moved on.
It was my job to look out for the crew and the tour. If, through audacity or stupidity, he came down to the venue, and something happened, either to him, to me, or to someone in the crew, I would have bore the brunt of responsibility for not having said something about his threat. He was going to come down to the venue and do what? Bring a weapon? Think he's a tough guy? Have a rush of blood, a spike of adrenaline? I didn't know, but in my experience, there are talkers and there are fighters. Talkers, talk, and fighters, fight. It's as simple as that. I wasn't interested in finding out to which cohort he belonged, or how crazy he was.
**********
The next morning, I went to our local promoter and gave her the rundown. We sat in her production trailer, and I recalled the story as best I could. When I finished, she sat momentarily, mouth agape. She knew Ethan from other gigs, but didn't know him well. She was shocked at not just the threat, but the ordeal in total, and agreed we were obliged to do something.
A few days later, on Monday, we flew in to [CITY]. We had Tuesday off, and the show on Wednesday.
The morning after we arrived (Tuesday) we went to the local precinct near the venue. The promoter had called their office prior to our arrival. We were met by a young, clean-shaven, officer who escorted us down a drab hallway to a windowless room with beige cinderblock walls, a linoleum tile floor, and fluorescent light flicking overhead. It smelled like cleaning fluid, like it had just been mopped.
While I recollected, he took notes with pen and paper. It was hard to explain our weird tour existence to an outsider. He asked direct questions. "How did you meet this person? How long was he employed? When did he exhibit odd behavior? Did he threaten you? Has he threatened anyone previously?" I could see how holes develop in stories. I couldn't remember all the details. I had to create a narrative, recount each day from memory. He asked, "You fly a piano around the world? Why did you need to hire him? You tune the piano every day? You were in different cities every day?" My answers sounded strange to him. I said, "We're in different cities pretty much every day. We travel with about 5000 pounds of gear. I met him from a guy I know who knew someone who knew him and we hired him two weeks before we arrived. He worked for us for six days. He hadn't threatened anyone previously that I know of, but he was arrested a week ago for harassing an officer and spent the night in jail."
The officer was uncertain of what to do or say. He took notes but hesitated as he wrote. He said, "This sounds like psychotic behavior, the wild swings in emotion." He pulled up Ethan's record on an old clunky cathode-ray tube computer monitor. The screen, green font on a black background, looked like some sort of primitive Oregon Trail software. Their computer system didn't give me confidence that they had the resources to really get at this problem.
Ethan had a few incidents on his record, but gauging from the officer's reaction they weren't major. He didn't disclose anything to us about past incidents. There was no family contact, but his residence was listed. We asked if they could send someone just to check on him.
The officer said that while he was concerned, and understood we were concerned for the wellbeing of both Ethan and everyone on the tour, there was nothing he could do unless an incident actually happened. In other words, "Ethan would have to come down to the venue and cause 'danger to himself or others' before they could take any action." Of course the world worked that way. I mean, what were they going to do – knock down his door and haul him away? Send some compassionate social-worker over just to check on him, clean him up, and give him a new outlook on life? I don't know what the answer should have been. I didn't actually want them to do anything. I just needed to do something. I needed to look out for the tour and cover my ass. I couldn't not do anything.
The officer gave us a business card with a direct number on it. He said if anything happened, we could call the number and there would be patrol cars minutes away, as the area around the venue was a hotspot of restaurants, bars, and night-life.
**********
The next day was the show. We hired a couple of security to be onsite from load in til the out, and posted a half-assed, low-resolution, printer-paper picture of Ethan at the back entrance. Luckily, I had nicked his laminate when I grabbed the tequila from the kitchen in his hotel room.
I wasn't sure what to expect, but I wasn't worried. I had a show to run, and a million after that. Maybe he'd show up at the end of the night, maybe drunk and with a friend. Maybe I half wanted him to come down so we could have a laugh – "No hard feelings you crazy fucker."
The show went off with no issues. We finished load out, and sat around for a bit backstage having beers and shooting the shit. Then, we went back to the hotel. The next day, we flew to the next city, and a few days later, to the next continent. And that was that.
But I left wondering ...
Why was there such a disconnect? Why can't people just be chill? Why did Ethan have to be destructive and late? And say strange things, and make people feel uncomfortable? What a weird fucking experience. Why did he take off his shoes and socks on the plane, and in the van, and in the convenience store, and in the green room, and at catering when his feet smelled so bad? Why did he wash his feet in the sink in the airport bathroom? Why, after he had lost his bag at the end of the night, and everyone had waited and searched, did he play us that tune from his phone while we were riding in the van to the hotel? Surely, he must have sensed that everyone was exhausted and agitated and didn't want to hear a weird instrumental sax-improvisation that he had recorded with his friend. Why did he berate and curse at the hotel front-desk attendant that one time about needing five extra towels? He thought no one knew, but we had seventeen rooms at the hotel. We were an entourage, a "Group Sales" booking. The staff were hospitable toward, and familiar with our party. Why, after he was fired from the tour, did he stay in his room until the hotel started calling the travel agent, the TM, and me, trying to get him out; we use that hotel all the time, did he not understand? Why couldn't he have been quiet and still, contended, like some kind of robed, ascetic, Monk-like sage – someone who taught us the virtue of impermanence? Why couldn't he have said wise things like, "The piano does not stay in tune permanently. Like life, like all things, it changes every moment of every day. Even the walls of this room are in silent decay as we sit." Was that too much to ask for??!!
I wanted a quiet person to come in and do a specialized job. The exchange was simple: get paid good money, stay in nice hotels, eat catering every day, and just arrive on time, do the gig, say thank you, and be available. What I got instead, was someone who constantly caused problems, created more work for me to do, and distressed everyone else on the crew.
**********
The sometimes annoying thing about people is that they have emotions, hopes, dreams, and ideas that are totally different from what we expect. Their brains steer them in wildly different directions. I might have an idea of what I want, or think should happen. But someone else will act in a way that is in a totally different direction.
I wish Ethan could write this story from his point-of-view. I know he would have a different take. Maybe he would have thought that I was crazy. He was looking at the shows, the travel, the people – the entire situation – from another view. He might have been looking at us from Day 1 thinking, "these fuckers are crazy". After all, he was on the receiving end of a last-minute phone call.
It might sound bananas, but we're all crazy in some way.
Some people are struck by madness, and are successful because of that orthogonal view: artists, writers, painters, inventors, musicians. But others flounder, anguish, and are left alone inside their own heads because of it.
It was easy for me to think that Ethan was crazy because I was part of a group who, all together, thought he was crazy. Humans are tribal – we connect with others who are similar. Tribes move in packs and tackle problems with a tribe-mentality. We tell each other stories and recognize patterns in order to make sense of the world. If a person doesn't fit in, he is slowly ostracized, becomes an outsider.
I had my idea of what I wanted in a piano tuner, and Ethan was not that, but maybe he wanted something totally different than what I was. Maybe he was excited for a new start, but was let down the same way he was by the phone company. Maybe he was let down by a relentless planet that, day-after-day, spins, and moves forward, at a dizzying, seemingly, psychopathic pace. Maybe the never-ending hustle this creates, where one has to run really fast just to keep up regardless of any mishaps or disadvantages, or regardless of how disorienting or confusing it might be, was a letdown too. Maybe he wanted something totally different out of life than what he got.
Please take all my money and spend it on the crew, for putting up with my snoring and my feet. 👍🙏💞