Dennis Hollingsworth

Piano Move

My cousin Patsy has moved in to Tossa with her new beau, Franz (a gentleman from Germany). She works in human rights work, currently in Afganistan and that's about all I can tell you all about her since she keeps her cards close to the vest. She has a fascinating bio and I was about to blog it when she put the kaibash on it. (sp? Is that really a word?)

I've already written too much.

They ended up moving a ton of stuff into their apartment. One of the items was this very well built German piano... meaning: extremely heavy beast of a musical instrument made with super dense wood from some dark forest that I have never heard of and metal parts that were forged with thick cast ingots of 19th century steel.

Their apartment is on the fourth floor (American floors, the third by EU standards). They asked me to be the fourth guy for the team headed by Kiko.

Kiko arranged a crane to lift the beast onto the roof. The calculation was that it would be easier to carry it down one flight of stairs than lift it up four.

That was the theory.

We got it on the roof, no problem but things went bad as we lifted it across the doorway to the stairs below. Kiko had his two workers, Jordi and Chavi. Chavi is Kiko's cousin. He has a sober personality... as contrasted with Jordi's ...um... intoxicated one (this is a figurative description, but Jordi is the kind of guy to etch this figuration into literal territory from time to time). Chavi and I were side by side and we were trying to get the beast up across the threshold.

About that time, the piano came down on Chavi's left index finger. I'm certain that we all had exclamation marks pop atop all our heads at that moment. With a grunt, we instinctively pulled the piano off his hand and blood flashed red in drips to ground. Incredulous, Chavi peered into the exploded finger. It was like what happens to a fruit if you stomped it open on the ground. Flesh flayed open and flapped back in a growing pool fo bright red blood.

Immediately, I felt the urge to reach for the camera. What rich blogging goodness this was! In the splilt moment, I gazed at his split hand and was split between the urge to document and the urge to apply first aid.

Sorry folks, I chose to pull off my shirt and apply pressure to the wound. Chavi kept pulling it off to assess the damage. But the way the flesh was flopping around, it was clear to me that he had to get to a medical professioinal for stitches. Chavi kept peering into the wound, pulling the flesh apart and I was getting irritated. By this time, the event was registering in his mind and he began to whimper, his voice leaping into the beginnings of howl.

Spanish pride was beginning to assert itself and the general attitude, mainly from Kiko, was to take it like a man and get thee out and to the hospital. Kiko was beginning to formulate dark taunting humor. Within moments, and probably to stuanch the taunts, chavi disappeared and on we all continued with our morning project.... less one man.

It was a bitch. There is no better way to express what happened. We had a centimeter on each side for clearance... all the way until the last turn into the room. There, the wheels stopped us in our tracks. Not able to get the wheels off, we decided to chip away at the walls.

This took us maybe an hour in one position.

Jordi, on the other side, happily provided comdeic relief with his mere existance.

Finally, of course, we made it in. Afterwards, Patsy and Franz treated us to lunch and Chavi was able to join us. The doctors applied three stiches and they wound a comic number of bandages until his hand looked Looney Tunes. Kiko was joking that it will be hard for Chavi to build the masonry walls in the next project, laughs all around over and over. They were a but conservative with the stiches thhough, blood was still dripping from the sangre soaked tip as he tried to casually eat his paella.