I was hired to play piano at a strip club on 9th Avenue in Manhattan. I got the gig by chance, through a violinist who I got to know through his dismissive assurances that I should not worry about waiting to fill in my performance resumé with one concert at a time. He assured me that if I ever needed to use him as a reference or collaborator he would be happy to back me up. “Just say we did some concerts at the Kilgore Public Library in Texas. The organizer there is a friend of mine, she backs up and verifies any request she’s ever gotten from people wanting to prove I played concerts there. I also know people at 5 or 6 other libraries, same deal. I’ll get you their numbers, just use my name and you’re set.”

He went on to elaborate on how certain libraries and cultural institutions would be closed or go out of business, or else the concert organizer at the place would die. When this happened word got out among his ilk that the coast was probably clear as far as claiming to have played a concert or two at these locations, since nothing could be done to verify them anymore. Few concert organizers would have been savvy enough to notice a quiet spike in resumés listing concert performances from 5 or 6 years earlier in these locations.

I was just out of the conservatory, the same school from which Mr. Violinist had matriculated about 10 years earlier. He seemed to consider it his duty as an elder to describe to me the secretive but established practice of building musical careers on phony credentials and concert events that never happened. To be sure, he informed me, the practice was hardly limited to musicians.

Conversations with this person seemed inevitably to gravitate toward sex toys. He had a specific fetish for anal beads. He seldom wasted a conversation by failing to reference the subject. I would introduce him to friends of mine, who would usually stand uncomfortably by as the topics of conversation started with music but ended with anal beads.

I had no real interest in this stuff, except to be exposed to them as a life experience. I never heeded his advice to inflate my resumé with anything but real performances. But for a few weeks I, an elastic newcomer to New York with no one else to talk to, followed him around, landing with him one night at Playland on 9th Avenue. He paid for everything. Otherwise I could not have stayed long. “Pay me back in 7 years. That’s your timeline.”

I accepted the money of one who seemed to have earned it with a checkered patchwork of truth and lies. He could certainly play the violin. But either he or others did not think he played well enough to get by in the business without lying.

I would remember him 7 years later, with a thought toward paying back the debt of our night at the strip club. He was hard to find, given his very common name. But he was doing all right. Principal Violin at one of the top orchestras in the U.S. He was not smiling in any of his publicity pictures. This suggested to me he was actually happy.

Happy or not he did not need my $100, nor did I want to remind him of our brief friendship at the club. I had no way to know but I imagined his fake resumé bullet points might have become a sensitive subject by now, one he wished to keep swept asunder.

Playland, at the time I knew Mr. Violinist, was attempting to emulate a piano setup similar to a club in San Francisco in the 1980s, where a grand piano was lowered on to the stage from ceiling space above. That piano was the source of some infamy when a dancer and a club worker got trapped on top of the piano as it was lifted back up to the ceiling storage space. The man was asphyxiated but the dancer, pinned underneath him, survived.

(That’s a true story, unlike most of this ramble from the BakewayNYC on Broadway in AsLIC. Piecing together a few disparate stories with remnants of a dream I had last night.)

The night we were there they happened to be lowering the piano onto a stage from the ceiling. The piano landed safely but engineers on hand said it was not safe to lift it back up. The wood upstairs was too old and unstable. (huh huh, wood. Old wood…)

So there the piano sat, a shining white Baldwin baby grand on the stage where strippers ply their craft. It was Mr. Violinist who, a very familiar and respected face at the club, convinced the managers to let me get up there and see how the piano sounds. That was his ploy, sort of a pseudo-lie. Not to see how I sounded but how their new piano sounded.

It worked. A few seconds into some Liszt études everyone seemed to know that this sound might work for this place. Classical music in a strip club. Take that, San Francisco night club.

Playland was also experimenting with a new gimmick. The dancers stuck laser pointers in their assholes and used them to spell words on the ceiling or on the floor in front of their customers. Two or three of the girls, and sometimes one of the male bouncers, would get on their knees and point their asses upward, skillfully crossing laser pointer patterns to create spyrogyro like illusions and spell words and names, such as “SORABJI” and “PHILIP GLASS.” Those names appeared because those are the composers whose music I wound up playing at Playland. I had been hired to play Liszt’s “La Campanella,” based on a theme by Nicolo Paganini. But the girls put a couple of beers and some vodka into me and I told them the truth: I can’t play this stuff after even half a beer. So I switched from Liszt to Sorabji, and from Godowsky to Glass, as the names on the ceiling informed the enchanted audience of creeps and curiosity seekers who read about this show in a tiny ad on the back page of the New York Press.

It became a minor cultural relic. Never let it be said that strippers have no class. Most of these girls had training in classical ballet or modern dance, and knew how to pronounce “Mozart” and, with a little repetitive direction, “Sorabji.”

As I took my break from the Playland piano one 3am morning I wandered the rest of the facility. There was a semi-circle of doors behind which were booths. Those booths contained windows separating men (mostly) from women who sat in equally small rooms waiting. Someone would enter one of these rooms, drop a couple of club-issued tokens (worth $5 each) into a coin slot, and a set of curtains would open, revealing the naked girl on the other side of the glass.

I tried this once. I deposited coins. Curtains opened. A woman on the other side seemed to know I was about to appear, as she was already writhing and fingering herself. After a few seconds of her doing her job and me standing there nervously observing with my arms crossed she said “You can jerk off if you want. Most guys do.” I politely shook my head and said that’salright.

This nude, secluded burlesque lasted for however much time 2 tokens were good, and the curtains came down.

I exited the room and stepped back into the semi-circular space with a dozen or so other doors to my left, all of them holding the distinctly non-tantalizing possibility of a similarly smarmy encounter.

I noticed a sour-faced man pushing a bucket of hot, soapy water, and a mop. “Janitor” I thought at first. True enough. But the sour look on his face might have been blamed on what he was janitorizing. He opened each door and stuck his head in every room, sometimes shutting the door straightaway, other times rolling the mop and bucket into the room and stepping out several moments later.

This was the Mop Man at Playland. He went room to room, mopping jizz stains off the walls, stains the likes of which the woman I had just seen suggested to me I should create. I am happy to have not obligated this individual to mop up my jizz, as he knew me from working there and I did not want him thinking anything to do with my jizz the next time he saw me.

For years I would think: That is the worst job I have ever seen. I thought of the Mop Man years later, when a 3am worker at Kentucky Fried Chicken in Times Square had a look of soul-deadened defeat on his face. Every chicken drumstick he lifted, it seemed, felt to him like lifting a monotonous mountain of regret and failure. I thought of Mop Man when an extremely pregnant woman working at the Juilliard bookstore had tears welling up in her eyes. She could barely bring herself to hand change to the customers. She did not need a hug, or a smile. She needed a new existence, or none at all.

Mop Man, I thought, still had the worst job.

I only changed my mind about Mop Man in recent times, when I learned about what I now think is the worst job in the world. The U.S. State Department has analysts whose job is to verify that ISIS beheading videos are genuine. These analysts must watch every frame of these videos repeatedly to assure officials and citizens alike that ISIS is really doing these things. I remember comments from some of the 9/11 analysts, saying that their work was done out of patriotism but that they hoped never to have to do it again. Nothing to take anything away from that comment, but I think the ISIS beheading analysts have it worse. It is hard to imagine a more gruesome and mentally damaging way to make a living.

Well OK, then, this rambling was a bit incoherent, as might happen when stories from across 20 years are stitched together to fit the inspiration of last night’s dream about being hired to play Liszt at a strip club where the dancers put laser pointers in their asses. That was a funny dream.