The Accordion Incident

It’s Sunday, over a week past the opening of the “Sex in the City” movie, and I still haven’t seen it yet. I don’t know what sort of cruel joke I’m playing on myself but I’m pretty sure it can’t go on much longer.

Anyway, it is pretty hot outside and- not unlike the “Sex in the City” movie- people just won’t stop talking about it, including me. I have air conditioning in my apartment but it’s really only effective if you press your body directly against it, which makes it difficult to sleep among other things. Yesterday (in this crazy heat), I happened upon a street fair (it was actually across the street from my apartment so it didn’t really take much happening upon- I pretty much just had to look across the street), where I spotted an old accordion on sale for $120. I’ve been wanting an accordion since about the mid-90’s, so I was pretty excited about it. Still, I decided to play it close to the vest and acted not all that interested in it to the guys who were selling it. My plan was to return later and try to snatch up the accordion just as the guys who were selling it were packing things up for the day.

And it almost worked.

At around six o’clock yesterday, after a seriously killer workout at the gym, I swung by the street fair again. And- just as I had planned it- there was pretty much no one still there except for the guys I saw trying to sell the accordion a few hours earlier. There they were packing up their junk in the slowly setting sun. It was exactly as I had imagined it. I’d walk up just as they were gonna load up the last of their stuff into the truck (including the accordion) and I’d be all like “Hold up a second- maybe I can save you the trouble of loading that accordion back into the truck. Does....$40 do anything for you?” And then they’d be all like “$40? Hell, we’d probably pay you at this point for taking it off our hands! It’s yours!” The only problem was when I finally got up to the table there was no accordion in sight.

“Where the fuck is the accordion?,” I sort of asked.

“Oh, we sold it. Of course we sold it! You thought we wouldn’t be able to sell that beautiful accordion? Fuck you!,” one of the accordion-selling guys said something along the lines of back to me. “We sold it to a musician too! He could really play it,” he added as if to suggest that I wouldn’t know what to do with an accordion if it punched me in the nuts.

“I’m a musician too,” I whimpered, my $40 accordion dreams shattering before me.

“Oh,” he replied before getting back to packing up his boxes and stuff.

Now I sit here, accordionless, wondering what went wrong. And who is this fucking musician guy who snatched up my accordion while I was off building up my soon-to-be accordion-wearing shoulders at the gym? Anyway, I guess the moral of the story is if you see a reasonably priced accordion for sale on the street you should totally buy it before some other fucker does and you are left to face your sad, accordionless existence head on. Damn.

Of course now I still have accordions on the brain and figure I have to go out and buy one or something. I can’t wait to get in on some of that hardcore banging that undoubtedly comes as a result of owning an accordion and (most likely) sort of being able to play it a little bit. It’s going to be pretty awesome. I’ll keep you posted.

Dave Hill