October 1965. Carmelo Espazito had been sitting behind that table since 6:30 in the morning. By 9:00, not one person had stopped. The man at the next table, plastic harmonicas, $2 each, had run out of change twice. Carmelo’s hands hadn’t moved from his knees in an hour. He was already thinking about folding the cloth, going home, eating alone.
But he couldn’t do that because at [music] 9:15 a man in a dark cap and plain dark glasses stopped in front of his table and picked up one of the harmonas. Wait, because what that man played in the next 4 minutes [music] would stay with Carmelo for the rest of his life. And neither of them would ever speak of it publicly, not once.
The morning had not started well for Dean Martin. It had started, as difficult mornings often do, with a room full of people who were absolutely certain they were right. The conference room on the fourth floor of the NBC building on Sunset Boulevard was bright and cold. Dean had arrived at 9:00, wearing a gray sport coat and no tie, carrying a cup of coffee from the cart downstairs, and the three men already seated had looked at him with the expression of people who had prepared extensively for a meeting they were not
sure would go well. They were right to be unsure. The meeting was about the show. Specifically, it was about what the network called broadening the appeal of the Dean Martin show, which had been on the air just over a year and was doing well enough that the network was now very interested in telling Dean how to make it better. There were charts.
There was a man named Gerald Hoffman who had flown in from New York to explain that the show needed more high energy segments and fewer moments where Dean simply stood at the microphone and sang. Dean had listened to all of this for approximately 11 minutes. Then he sat down his coffee and said very quietly, “You’re telling me to be less myself.
” Hoffman had a rebuttal prepared. “We’re telling you to be more of yourself.” A bigger version, “Gerald, the people who watch this show watch it because they feel like they’re sitting in a room with a friend. The moment I start performing at them instead of for them, they’ll know and they’ll go find something else to watch.” He picked up his coffee.
I appreciate the charts. He was in the elevator by 9:17. His driver, Tommy, was waiting at the curb. Dean got in, sat back, looked out the window. He didn’t say anything for two blocks. Then Tommy just drive for a while. They ended up in the Fairfax district almost by accident, or at least that was how it would seem in the retelling.
The Fairfax Street Market ran on Saturday mornings along a stretch of the neighborhood that smelled of bread and coffee and old wood, vendors with produce and secondhand furniture and things that had outlasted their original purpose and were waiting for someone who understood what they were. Dean told Tommy to pull over. He kept his cap low and put on plain dark glasses.
He moved through the market slowly, hands in his coat pockets, not looking at anything in particular, which meant he was looking at everything. The table was in the last row against the chainlink fence that marked the edge of the market grounds. Half the size of the surrounding tables. No sign, no banner, just a piece of dark burgundy cloth.
And on that cloth 17 harmonas arranged in a precise row, each one different, each one made by hand. Behind the table in a folding chair with a green canvas seat sat an old man. He was perhaps 70, perhaps older. His white hair was thin and combed carefully to one side. His face weathered and lined with a life that had contained a great deal of both laughter and its opposite.
His hands, resting on his knees, were large and thick-fingered. The hands of someone who worked with small, precise things, [music] carrying a permanent tension between power and delicacy. He wore a white shirt with a slightly frayed collar, a dark vest, trousers pressed with care. He looked like a man who had dressed for an occasion that had not yet materialized. Look at him.
His name was Carmelo Espazito. Born in a small town in the province of Reio Calibria in 1895. He had come to America in 1921 with a suitcase that contained among other things his father’s woodworking tools. For 45 years he had made things with wood furniture at first harmonas for the last 30 made the way his grandfather had made them in Calibria by hand.
Each reed cut and tuned individually. the body shaped and sanded until it sat in the palm like something that had always existed and simply waited to be found. He sold them at the Fairfax Market on Saturday mornings. His price was $25, what 3 days of work and 45 years of craft were worth, and he was not in the business of negotiating that number downward.
The man at the next table sold plastic harmonas from Ohio for $2 a piece, and Carmelo did not think about this more than necessary. He was adjusting the position of one of the harmonas, a slightly larger one in the key of G. Walnut body, a piece he’d been saving for 2 years, when he became aware that someone had stopped in front of his table.
He finished what he was doing, then looked up. The man in front of him was wearing a dark cap and plain dark glasses and a coat that was good quality, but worn casually, the way men wear good things when they’re trying not to be noticed. He was looking at the harmonicas with an expression Carmelo could not quite read. Not the polite blankness of someone killing time, and not the performative interest of someone about to ask the price and walk away.
Something else, something that looked like recognition. Good morning, Carmelo said. His English carried the particular music of someone who had learned it as an adult, the vowels slightly elongated, the consonants careful. Morning. The man’s voice was low and relaxed with a trace of something in it.
Not quite an accent, more like the ghost of one. Did you make these? Yes. Each one by hand. The body is walnut mostly. The reads are brass cut and tuned individually. It takes me 3 days to make one. The man nodded slowly. He reached out and picked up the sea harmonica. Medium-sized chestnut colored body with a small geometric pattern carved along the side.
He turned it over with a slowness Carmelo recognized. Most people who picked up the harmonas handled them with aggressive curiosity, turning them quickly as if looking for a defect. This man turned it over slowly, the way you handle something when you’re listening to it with your hands. Can I play it? He said, “Do you play?” The man’s mouth moved in something almost a smile.
“A little.” “Go ahead,” Carmelo said. The man brought the harmonica to his lips. He held it with both hands the way you hold one when you’ve held one before. thumbs underneath, fingers curved over the top, not gripping, but cradling. And then he breathed in and played a single note.
It was a Dote, clean and warm, and it came out of that harmonica the way a note comes out when both the instrument and the player are right for each other. Not loud, not showy, just present. Carmelo’s hands resting on his knees went very still. Then the man began to play a melody. It was slow and old. The kind of melody that doesn’t announce itself but arrives the way certain weather arrives gradually and then all at once.
Carmelo had heard it before a very long time ago in a village in the province of Reio Calabria where the hills went down to the sea and the evening smelled of salt and wood smoke where his grandfather used to sit on a stone step after dinner and sing it so quietly you had to be close to hear it. Carmelo did not move. The man played eight bars, maybe 10, then stopped.
The last note held for a moment in the cool morning air and then was gone. He lowered the harmonica and looked at Carmelo. Carmelo was looking back with an expression the man had not expected. Not surprise exactly. Something older than surprise. Where did you learn that? Carmelo said. His voice was very quiet. My father used to sing it, the man said.
When I was small. We were from Ohio, but his family was from Italy. He used to sing it in the evening sometimes when he thought nobody was paying attention. A pause. I always paid attention. Carmelo was quiet for a moment. That melody is from Calabria from a very small village. My grandfather sang it. He stopped.
I haven’t heard it in 50 years more. Notice this moment. Because everything that followed, everything grew from these 10 seconds of silence between a folding table and a chainlink fence. My name is Carmelo, the old man said. Dean, the man said. They shook hands across the table. Carmelo’s grip was firm, the grip of someone who had spent his life working with his hands.
And Dean shook it back with the same directness. Just two men meeting. Sit down, Carmelo said, and gestured to a small wooden stool beside the table. If you want, Dean looked at the stool, then at the market around him. Nobody was watching. He sat down. They talked the way men talk when they’re not trying to impress each other.
Honestly, without structure, one thing leading to another, the way conversation does when there’s no agenda. Carmelo talked about the harmonas, about walnut versus maple, about the brass reads that needed to be tuned and left alone for a day before tuning again because metal had a memory. Dean listened with the attention musicians give to other musicians.
Talking about craft, the attention of someone who knows what the work actually costs. Dean talked about Ohio, about Stubenville, which he described as a place where everybody knew everything about you and most of it was wrong. About his father Genno, who had worked as a barber and sung Italian songs in the shop on Saturday afternoons and played the harmonica sometimes in the evenings on the back porch of their house on South 7th Street.
He had one harmonica, Dean said. An old honer completely beat up. Half the reads were dead, but the ones that worked. He shook his head slowly. There was something in those sounds. A man stopped briefly at Carmelo’s table, looked at the harmonicas, picked one up, put it back without a word. Dean watched this without expression.
“How many have you sold this morning?” Dean asked. “None,” Carmelo said. “How many do you usually sell on a Saturday?” One, sometimes two, sometimes none. Dean picked up one of the harmonas. You’re charging $25. Yes. The man at the next table is selling them for $2. Yes. So, why don’t you lower your price? Carmelo looked at him the way a man looks when he has been asked a question he has answered many times in his own head and is mildly surprised to hear it asked out loud.
Because this harmonica took me 3 days to make. The reads are cut by hand. The body is walnut I kept for two years waiting for the right use. The tuning was done in four stages over two days. He set his hands back on his knees. If I sell it for $2, I am saying that 3 days of my work and 2 years of waiting for the right piece of wood is worth $2. I am not willing to say that.
Remember this. Dean was very still. He was thinking about a conference room on the fourth floor of the NBC building on Sunset Boulevard, about Gerald Hoffman with his charts, about 11 minutes of someone explaining how he should be a bigger, louder, more energetic version of himself in order to appeal to people who weren’t watching him yet at the cost of the people who were.
He was thinking about what he had said, “You’re telling me to be less myself.” And about what it had always cost to say the true thing in a room full of people who had decided on a different truth. He set the harmonica down. Then he picked it back up. “How many do you have today?” he said. “17. I’ll take all of them.” Carmelo blinked.
I’m sorry. All 17. What does that come to? Carmelo looked at him for a long moment. $425, he said slowly. Dean reached into his coat and produced his wallet. Carmelo put his hand flat on the table. “Why?” he said. Dean looked up from the bills. “Why do you want 17 harmonas?” Carmelo’s voice was careful in the way that a man who has spent a long time not asking for anything is careful when something is offered. You don’t need 17 harmonas.
I like them. You can like them with one. Dean was quiet for a moment. Carmelo, I’m buying them because they’re good. Because somebody should. My father had one harmonica his whole life and it was nothing like these. If he’d had one of these, he would have played every night and meant every note. He paused.
That’s the only reason. Carmelo studied him. The careful look of a man taking measure. You are sure this is not charity, Carmelo [music] said. Not quite a question, Carmelo. I don’t do charity. I do transactions. You made 17 harmonas worth $25 a piece. I’m buying 17 harmonas for $25 a piece. That’s arithmetic, not charity.
Something moved across Carmelo’s face. Something behind the eyes before it reached anywhere else. He nodded. Dean counted out $425, laid on the burgundy cloth in a neat stack. Carmelo looked at the stack and did not touch it yet. “You’re on the stool,” he said. “For a man who doesn’t need 17 harmonas, you seem comfortable sitting there.
” Dean looked down at the stool, then back at Carmelo. It’s a good stool. I made it, Carmelo said. Dean laughed low and genuine. The kind that happens when something catches you without warning. Carmelo smiled. the kind that changes the whole architecture of a face. After a while, Dean stood and put the sea harmonica in his coat pocket.
He picked up the package Carmelo had made of the other 16, wrapped in brown paper and tied with kitchen twine the way things were wrapped before wrapping became a performance and held it under his arm. “Are you here every Saturday?” he said. “Every Saturday,” Carmelo said. 22 years. Same spot. Same spot. Dean nodded. There was something he wanted to say and wasn’t saying.
Carmelo could tell because of the particular quality of the paws. Not an empty pause, but a full one. Then Dean put out his hand. It was good to meet you, Carmelo. Carmelo shook it. And you, Dean. Dean put on his dark glasses and walked back through the market, cap low, the package under his arm.
By the time he reached the street, the market had absorbed the space where he’d been. Carmelo sat in his folding chair for a moment without moving. He put the bills in the inside pocket of his vest next to Rose’s photograph. Then he looked at the empty table and began to fold up the burgundy cloth.
He had never packed up this early on a Saturday. He didn’t know who Dean was. He found out 3 days later it was his neighbor’s son Anthony who told him 20 years old worked at a record store on Melrose. He’d come by to return a borrowed wrench, noticed the package on the workbench, picked up one of the harmonas, and asked who had bought the others. Carmelo described him.
The cap, the dark glasses, the gray coat, the particular quality of ease. Anony’s expression changed slowly. Pieces of information arranging themselves. Did this man have a sort of low voice? Anthony said carefully. Relaxed like everything was fine even when it wasn’t. Yes, Carmelo said. Anthony set the harmonica down.
I think that was Dean Martin. Carmelo [clears throat] looked at him. The singer, Anthony said. The television show. Dean Martin, Dino, that is not possible, Carmelo said. Why not? Carmelo thought about the stool, about the conversation, about the way the man had said. My father used to sing it with a quality in his voice that had nothing to do with being famous and everything to do with being someone’s son.
Because, Carmelo said slowly, “A man like that would not sit on a stool at a market table for an hour.” Anthony looked at him for a long moment. Then he said very gently, “Carlo, maybe that’s exactly why he did.” That evening, Carmemelllo sat in his workshop under the bench light without working. He picked up the dharmonica he kept for himself and held it in his hands and thought about what Anthony had said.
Then he put it to his lips and played a few notes into the quiet, and they were the only sound, small and warm and entirely themselves. Two weeks later, a young man appeared at his workshop door, a production assistant for the Dean Martin show on NBC. The music director, he said, was inquiring whether a Mr. Carmelo Espazito made harmonicas by hand and whether he might provide six for an upcoming program, who asked the music director to make this inquiry.
Carmelo said the young man consulted his notebook. I’m not sure I have that information. Carmelo nodded. What are the specifications? Just that they be handmade. and a pause. There was a note. It says, “Make each one the way you would make it for yourself. No rush, no signature.” Carmelo read it twice. He folded the note and put it in his vest pocket next to Rose’s photograph.
Tell the music director, “I’ll have them ready in 3 weeks.” He worked on the six harmonas with the full attention he gave to things that mattered. Mornings only, hands steadiest, then tuning each set of reads four times over two days, and letting the metals settle between sessions. He finished each body with beeswax rubbed in by hand until the grain of the wood showed under the surface like something seen through still water.
When they were done, he wrapped each one in cloth and placed all six in a small wooden box he made for the purpose. He did not mark the box. He included no note. The box was delivered to the NBC lot on Sunset. Addressed to the music director of the Dean Martin show, Carmemelllo went back to work. The following Tuesday, the Dean Martin show aired at 9:00.
Carmelo watched every week, not because he was expecting anything he told himself, but because he always watched it. He sat in his armchair with the small television on the table across the room, the lamp on beside him. Rose’s photograph was on the shelf above the television where he could see both at the same time. That night, and noticed the third song, Dean sang three songs and did two comedy segments.
In the third song of the evening, a slow ballad, the orchestra full and quiet behind him, Dean finished the verse. The orchestra held the last note and then Dean reached into the pocket of his tuxedo jacket and took out something small. Carmelo sat forward in his chair. It was a harmonica. Small, wooden, handmade. From where Carmelo sat, he could not see the grain of the wood or the detail of the finish, but he didn’t need to.
He knew the shape. Dean brought the harmonica to his lips and played a melody. It was not the Calabrian melody. It was something built from the same emotional bones, moving with the same quality of quiet inevitability, unhurried, going nowhere except where it was going. It lasted perhaps 40 seconds. The orchestra was silent, the audience was silent.
Dean played with his eyes open, looking at some middle distance beyond the cameras, and the sound that came out of that small wooden instrument was the sound of a man playing entirely for himself in the middle of a room full of people. When he finished, the silence held for one beat. Then the audience applauded and Dean nodded and put the harmonica back in his pocket and finished the song.
He did not say what the harmonica was or where it had come from or mention a name. Listen, because this is the part nobody saw except Carmelo in the armchair in the small house on the east side. Carmelo sat very still. Rosa looked down from the shelf above the television with the expression she’d had in the photograph taken on their 40th anniversary.
the look of someone who knows more about you than you know about yourself. Carmelo stayed in the chair for a long time after the show ended. He was not a man who cried easily, but his eyes were wet and he didn’t try to do anything about that. He went to his workshop. He turned on the bench light.
He took a piece of maple from the rack, a beautiful piece, clear and straight grained, the kind you save for something that deserves it. And he set it on the bench and picked up his marking gauge and began to lay out the dimensions for a new harmonica. It was 10:30 on a Tuesday night. He worked until midnight. He didn’t notice the time.
The following Saturday, Carmelo arrived at 6:30 and set up the burgundy cloth. 21 harmonicas in their row, the stool beside the table. He sat down and waited. At 9:15, a man in a dark cap and plain dark glasses came around the corner of the last row. “You’re early,” Carmelo said. “I’m never early,” Dean said.
“I’m exactly on time for when I decided to show up.” He looked at the new harmonicas. Maple. Maple. Carmelo said. I’ve been experimenting. What made you start experimenting? Carmelo looked at him with the expression of a man who will not answer that question directly, but wants you to know he knows the answer. Tuesday nights, he said.
I watch television. Dean nodded very slightly. He sat down on the stool which Carmelo had brought again. Sat out without thinking. The way you leave a lamp on for someone who might come home late. He came back on perhaps eight or 10 Saturday mornings over the months that followed. Never on any schedule, the stool always waiting.
He paid $25 each time, no more. They talked less as the season turned, more comfortable with the quiet. Two men who had said enough that silence had become another form of conversation. The last time Dean came that year, the sky was the color of old pewtor. He played the Dharmonica Carmelo had spent 3 weeks making, darker and fuller than anything before.
That’s the one, he said when he stopped. I know, Carmelo said. Dean paid $25, shook his hand, and walked back through the market, and was gone. Carmelo reached into his vest, passed Rose’s photograph, and found the folded note. Make each one the way you would make it for yourself. No rush. He folded it back, put it away.
Some things change slowly and then all at once, and some things change quietly in the back row of a market with nobody watching. between two men who understood the difference between price and value, between performing and playing, between being heard by many and being understood by one.
The following Saturday, Carmelo arrived at 6:30 and set up the burgundy cloth and arranged 23 harmonas in their row. He brought the stool, he sat down and waited. He would be there next Saturday, too, and the one after that. If this brought back a memory or a thought you’d like to share, leave it in the comments. I read every single one and I reply to each one personally.
