Friday was singing night at the pub with the piano. Once a month, mostly the same men, and I'm still the youngest of them by a fair stretch (I'm told this will pass). I sang the low parts, sat some of it out, and had one beer more than planned. As usual.
Next to me sat the man whose son, nineteen, left school a year ago and, as he puts it, is still looking. Between two songs he told me how the looking goes. It doesn't. The boy sits in his room all day making cartoons. Not one letter sent, not one interview. "He says they'll pay him once the channel gets to ten million views." He rolled his eyes at the ceiling, and took a long sip.
On Monday my client abroad had taken down the ad for a junior bookkeeper, because the machine now does that work. A junior job like that is exactly what this father has in mind for his son. I didn't mention it. I took a long sip too.
I kept that to myself and asked about the cartoons instead.
Videos of a block-building game, it turns out, the kind every kid plays. The boy doesn't draw them. He wrote a little program that animates them for him, every night, while he sleeps. In between he cuts short clips out of other people's videos and talks over them. "Ten million," the father said again, shaking his head, and then the piano started and we all stood up for the next one. Billy Joel, of course. It's always Billy Joel at some point.
So I sang, badly, and I thought about his son, who never sent a letter because he never wanted that job in the first place. He built himself a small machine instead, out of free tools. I built the same thing in my forties, and I rent mine by the week.
None of that came out of my mouth. What would I have told him? That his son is fine? That the job he's waiting for isn't coming back, and that people like me are part of the reason?
At home I looked the channel up. The father had said the name twice, proud and worried at the same time. All his videos together: 9,214,566 views. I watched the newest one. It's exactly the sort of short I lose my evenings to, a little payout every few seconds: a blocky little man falls off a roof, again and again, and a boy's voice laughs over it. I laughed too, God help me, out loud, alone in the kitchen. I watched it to the end and refreshed the page. 9,214,567. That one was mine, and it felt better than it should.
I didn't send his father the link.
Sing us a song, you're the piano man.
— Billy Joel