Lester played organ for the Phoenix Firebirds—the San Francisco Giants’ Triple-A team—for thirty-two years, nearly the whole history of the franchise. Now that was a good organ, a customized Hammond B-3, electric but still with knobs and stoppers enough to make things interesting. He was a one-man effects studio: he had half a dozen whistles, a cowbell for home runs, woodblocks for clapping cheers … even a foot-wide spring to boing for foul balls. When the expansion team came to Phoenix—the Diamondbacks showed up in 1998—they scooted the Firebirds down to Tucson. Tucson’d offered him a job similar to what he’d had at Phoenix Municipal, but he’d declined. Not an awful city, but it was ninety minutes away, and if he keeps his hands on the steering wheel that long, the knuckles of his left were liable to start aching worse than normal, which is to say, hurting bad. And there’s no chance he’d’ve moved to Tucson, not without his Steinway. He can’t remember exactly how they’d gotten the grand piano into his third-floor walkup—they’d removed a banister and mashed the tread of three stairs, he recalls that much—and there was no way short of demolition to get it back out. He was stuck on the old side of Old Town Scottsdale until the wrecking ball or the undertaker came—whoever rang first.

The new Diamondbacks stadium had all the late-nineties flashiness you’d expect from a boomtown in the middle of going boom. A retractable roof, air-conditioning, a swimming pool and hot tub, right in the stadium! They could’ve built a primo organist’s booth, they had the money, but instead they bought some big computer loaded with all sorts of sounds and prerecorded crap. Lester heard they hired some “computers” major from ASU to press keys at the appropriate times, typing up fanfares and “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” like a secretary at her Underwood. Where’s the music in that? They didn’t even play the national anthem, just cued up a recording. A recording. Lester’d refused to set foot in the stadium when he heard that.

So Lester squeaked by on weddings and funerals, filling in for Cactus League games when somebody got sick. They all knew one another, the church-on-Sunday, ball-games-through-the-spring, we-also-do-bar-mitzvahs keyboardists around town, though most of them had families to keep them occupied when they weren’t at the keys. Lester’s closest remaining relative was a second cousin in Omaha, and he’d been unlucky in love for decades now. He was left with the Arizona Republic delivered to his doorstep, his daily trip to the diner, his Steinway, and his Stoli.