The day I didn't feel like $10,000

MICHAEL BYWATER

You can tell the real thing when you hear it. Alfredo was the real thing; there was never any doubt. No. There was doubt, lots of it, initially. I first heard about Alfredo a couple of years ago in the remotest bar in the Australian outback. "You say you're going to Darwin?" said the remotest barman in the remotest bar in the Australian outback. He normally didn't pick up on things like that. He normally didn't pick up on things like anything, serving drinks on autopilot, his mind somewhere off with the crows, across the creek, way deep into the badlands of the Sturt Stony Desert, hunting for sheilas. He could tell when a sheila was on the way, hours before. He'd disappear silently, and come back spruce.

"You say you're going to Darwin?" he said. "You'd better look up a mate of mine. He's a musician. He's playing in Darwin. You'd better look him up."

Well; you know what that can mean. What that usually means. It usually means some poor jittery bastard, twitching on the edge of an alcoholic crisis, stumbling from bar to bar with a Casio keyboard and a voice like a corncrake, raping the old favourites in return for beers, and a hopeful tip-jug Sellotaped to the music stand. There's a $5 bill in the tip-jug, and you know it's the $5 bill he brought with him from Broken Hill or Phoenix or Gottingen or wherever it was his wife finally had enough and threw him out, pull yourself together or bugger off, I think you love that bottle more than you ever loved me...

But Alfredo wasn't one of those. I looked him up: a big fat handsome Italian with a sod-the-lot-of-you Roman nose and a proper belly, a manly belly, like a man should have, and when he sat down at his piano with a lot of preliminary plunks and twiddles the whole cavernous cocktail bar fell silent because this wasn't the sort of cocktail-bar pianist you talked over, hoping he'd go away. This was the sort you listened to, from the moment he stopped twiddling and the first chord came zinging down, right smack on a beat which must have been pulsing away all along, so that the next one would be right and the one after that even more so, and then the voice ... the voice. I didn't understand why this man wasn't world-famous, because the moment he started to sing, you were in no doubt. This was the real thing.

Alfredo rang up the other day. Said he was coming to London, passing through, changing planes, wanted to stay. Not "May I stay? If it's no trouble? I don't want to put you out." He is, as I said, Italian. "I am coming to see you. I am staying with you. Whatever you're doing, that's fine. I will stand next to you while you do it! And watch you! I love you! I have missed you! On Monday we will to be together!"

In the evening, fortified by six meals and a huge bout of threshing, roaring sleep, he wanted to go out. "Where are there girls?" he said. "I want to admire all those lovely English women." "I thought you were on your way home to your wife and children," I said. "I thought you wanted to talk to me." "Yes!" he said. "I want to talk to you about all the women that we are looking at in the places you're going to take me to."

The Pitcher & Piano in Dean Street was full of junior estate agents on the razzle, but he loved it. "I could really get this place rocking down," he said, eyeing the pianist, munching up the junior estate agents' girls in their trainee commuter-belt skirts. Then we went to the Colony Room club with my friend the millionaire Nazi bastard who has recently womanised once too often; she left her husband; now he waits for her while she has the two more dances which he's too knackered to have with her. There was us, Michael the owner behind the bar, a nice Scotsman. Not one of the busier, bawdier nights. "I love this place," said Alfredo. There were no women, so he eyed up a picture of Lisa Stansfield instead. "If she were here, we could really get this place rocking down." "Just the two of you?" I said. "How many does it need?" he said.

A grumpy couple came in, and we moved on to my favourite club, girls in Latex skirts, rich Arabs with no chance at all, excitable girls from the suburbs, a seen-it-all trio covering "Benny and the Jets" from a roped- off podium while everyone waited for the disco to open. My friend the owner - no names, or you'll think I'm on the payroll - signed a bar-tab for us. "I love that man," said Alfredo; "I love this place." Then it was open-mike time. "Anyone fancy singing?" said the owner. Alfredo illuminated like, I don't know, a bollard. Strode across the room in his evil bastard black leather coat, shovelled the piano-player off his stool. Everyone stood around, ready to be embarrassed but kind. Plunks and twiddles, and then the first chord came zinging down, right smack on a beat which must have been pulsing away all along, so that you knew the next one would be right and the one after that even more so, and then the voice...

I think it was that old David Gilmour number, "Wish You Were Here", but it didn't matter. The room fell silent. They knew it when they heard it. Girls' eyes shone. Men looked at each other knowingly, as if trying to take credit. The owner grabbed my arm. "You bastard," he said. "You've brought in the real thing."

Alfredo went off to Australia the following morning at dawn. "I loved it," he said. "It was the best thing."

When I got back from seeing him off, the bathroom looked like a horse had been in it. Downstairs, the phone was ringing. A world-famous business school. Would I give a speech to them? Not five bucks in a plastic tip- jug; $10,000, all expenses paid. I'd done it before. Two hundred sharp, bright, hard-eyed young men and women, clean and spruce and analytical, destined for millionairedom, destined never ever in their entire lives to make anyone's eyes shine, anyone's foot tap, anyone smile. The real thing. You know it when you hear it. "Sorry," I said, "but the answer's no." !