He played anyway-Rachmaninoff, on the living-room grand, a move he got from “The Seven Year Itch.” She says, “It was like he couldn’t not be ‘Billy Joel’ at that moment.” He asked her if she wanted to hear him play. “They usually have a car.” She drove him back to Centre Island. “I always try to go out with North Shore girls,” he likes to say. He introduced himself, got her number, and, when he was done eating, called her on the phone from across the restaurant and asked if she would give him a ride home. They met five years ago at a restaurant in Huntington, where they’d both gone with friends. He called through the screen door leading to the kitchen: “A-Rod!” A-Rod was his girlfriend, Alexis Roderick, from Northport, a thirty-three-year-old former risk manager at Morgan Stanley. He has the short, wide, halting gait of an old lineman-two fake hips. “Oh, my helipad got flooded,” he says, with the lockjaw of Thurston Howell III. Joel often attempts to inoculate himself with self-mockery. He’d recently had to resurface it, after Hurricane Sandy. “He’s early.” A helicopter zipped in over the oystermen and landed down by the water, at the hem of a great sloping lawn, where Joel had converted the property’s tennis court to a helipad. I’m gonna beat your ass.” Vinny did, repeatedly. Still, a girl across the street said he’d grow horns, and a neighborhood kid named Vinny told him, “Yo, Joel, you killed Jesus. His mother took him and his sister to Protestant services at a local church he was baptized there. Though Jewish, and an atheist, he had, as a boy in a predominantly Catholic part of Hicksville, attended Mass, and even tried confession. To prepare for the flight, he’d put on a necklace of good-luck medallions-pendants of various saints. The back of his head, where hair might be, was freshly shorn, and his features, which in dark or obscure moods can appear mottled and knotted, were at rest, projecting benevolent bemusement. Joel was wearing a black T-shirt tucked into black jeans, black Vans, and an Indian Motorcycle ball cap. He commutes to and from his shows by helicopter. But this schmuck is usually looking down on the highway from an altitude of a thousand feet. And then, a few minutes later, I’m just another schmuck stuck in traffic on the highway.” It’s true: the transition is abrupt, and it has bedevilled rock stars since the advent of the backbeat. He often says that the hardest part isn’t turning it on but turning it off: “One minute, I’m Mussolini, up onstage in front of twenty thousand screaming people. That’s my routine.” Joel has a knack for delivering his own recycled quips and explanations as though they were fresh, a talent related, one would think, to that of singing well-worn hits with sincere-seeming gusto. Whenever anyone asks him about his pre-show routine, he says, “I walk from the dressing room to the stage. He told a joke that involved Mozart erasing something in a mausoleum the punch line was “I’m decomposing.” He knocked off an ash. “Actually, I composed myself a long time ago,” he said. His next concert, his first in more than a month, was scheduled to begin in five hours, at Madison Square Garden, and he appeared to be composing himself. Weeks of idleness, of puttering around his motorcycle shop and futzing with lobster boats, of books and dogs and meals, were about to give way to a microburst of work. Out on the water, an oyster dredge circled the seeding beds while baymen raked clams in the flats. Beethoven on Sonos, cicadas in the trees, pugs at his feet. It was a brilliant cloudless September afternoon. He had chosen the seating area under a trellis in front of the house, his house, a brick Tudor colossus set on a rise on the southeastern tip of a peninsula called Centre Island, on Long Island’s North Shore. Billy Joel sat smoking a cigarillo on a patio overlooking Oyster Bay.
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