Real Florida: Swept away by song

[Times photos: Bill Serne] Tony Graffeo mops the floor as he sings in the Lifestyle gym locker room. “I have daydreamed about singing as a professional,” he says. “But it’s just a dream.”

By JEFF KLINKENBERG, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published December 28, 2001

We all think we sound great singing in the shower. But the janitor at a St. Petersburg gym makes the tiles ring with everything from pop standards to opera.

ST. PETERSBURG -- What you are about to read is a story about art and beauty. Be warned: Everything happens in an unlikely place -- in a locker room filled with naked men at the Lifestyle Family and Racquetball Club in St. Petersburg.

It is about noon. The locker room is packed and noisy. Naked men towel off while studying a television tuned to a stock market report. Naked men talk about the war and argue about football. Naked men who can barely see their toes groan while stepping into flip flops on the way to the shower. Nobody seems to be thinking about art and beauty.

Hear Tony Graffeo sing:

To play the song, you'll need the free QuickTime plug-in

Nobody, that is, but Tony Graffeo, the janitor. Everybody knows him, a big lug of a guy who looks a little like James Gandolfini, the actor who plays Tony Soprano on TV.

Graffeo, 47, isn't your everyday artist. Usually you see him with a mop in his hand or a broom or maybe a rag with which he wipes down sweaty equipment. He is good at small talk, and at teasing, and making people laugh. At the gym he comes with the scenery.

So nobody takes much notice when he lumbers into the locker room with his mop. He walks past the guys drying off and goes back to the showers and the dirty floors. It's his favorite place in the whole gym.

It's where he can unleash the Voice.

"When Irish eyes are smiling," he roars, "it's a morning in the spring."

His tenor voice is so strong, and so pure, everybody stops to listen to the post-potato famine classic.

He sings a snatch of opera -- well, he made up his own tune -- and then moves on to the Perry Como classic, Oh Marie. All parlor singers know how tough hitting a high note can be. But Tony Graffeo isn't afraid. Nor is he afraid of evoking a tear or two, though he knows no naked guy in the gym would be caught dead weeping.

"Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way."

Relieved after the emotional pressure of Oh Marie, everybody applauds.

Janitors don't make curtain calls. With a dirty floor needing attention, he stays back at the shower and does his real job.

"I love singin' in the shower," he says later. "Great echo back there."

Lanza of the locker room

Of course, everybody thinks he sings well in the shower. Tony Graffeo actually does. He's pretty good outside the locker room too. Finished mopping, he gets some fresh air outside the gym and opens the door for a dark-haired woman who's heading back to work after exercising.

"Because your eyes are blue," Graffeo blurts out, "I'm going to sing for you."

"Whaaat?" she asks, alarm in those blue eyes.

"Because your eyes are blue, I'm going to sing you a song."

He takes a deep breath, lets it out. The Voice follows.

"Let me call you sweetheart, I'm in love with you."

The dark-haired beauty -- that's how a romantic guy like Graffeo sees her -- blushes at his rendition of the 1910 chestnut. Actually, she looks almost in shock. Close up she has just experienced a voice that might shatter glass. A hundred feet away even the kids on the basketball court shut up, stop dribbling and applaud.

"Most people don't sing good because they sing from their throat," Graffeo explains. "You got to sing from your belly. That's how the opera singers do it."

He was exposed to opera early. His parents, born in Sicily, moved to Brooklyn and eventually to Ellensville in upstate New York. Salvatore, his papa, was a butcher. His mama, Frances, kept the books. Salvatore was a shower singer, but Frances loved opera.

Her boy Anthony did too. He especially loved Mario Lanza, who had portrayed Caruso in the movies and who was once called "the greatest voice of the century" by Arturo Toscanini, who knew his way around an opera house.

Graffeo never took singing lessons, but never stopped singing for his own pleasure. He learned to cook when his parents opened a restaurant. He'd bake the bread and make pasta by hand and even throw together a sauce. If he had to wait on tables, he didn't mind.

Eventually he left home, moved to the Catskills, and became a waiter at the Granite Hotel. The Granite hired a guy to play the organ in the dining room. One night Graffeo walked by, took a deep breath and sang a line or two from a popular song.

The organ player stopped and told the new waiter, "You're a natural."

Encouragement enough.

Soon he was singing to patrons on request.

"I was known as the singing waiter," he says now. He got nice tips from the mostly senior citizen clientele and even made a few women cry with his moving rendition of the anniversary ballad When Your Wedding Ring Was New. In the winter, he followed customers to Miami Beach and waited tables at the Barcelona Hotel, only a block away from the more famous Fontainebleau, where another Italian singer sometimes sang in the celebrated Poodle Room.

"I can do some Sinatra, but I prefer not to," he says. "I guess I sang New York, New York one too many times. But Nat King Cole I like. Especially Mona Lisa."

Jack Frost gets confused

Tony Graffeo, left, gets a compliment from Rich Rayner, who has just stepped out of the shower at Lifestyle Family and Racquetball Club in St. Petersburg. Graffeo was once a singing waiter in a hotel in the Catskills in upstate New York. He now works as a janitor at the gym, often unleashing his voice in the locker room.

Three years ago, after his mother died, he inherited her house in St. Petersburg. He didn't miss shoveling snow, but he was lonely for his friends. Somebody told him a gym was a good place to meet people.

He joined the gym to meet women and to lose weight, but instead of washboard abs he got a job with a mop. He likes his work, though he is less fond of the music that blares from the gym stereo. It's mostly rap and techno, the music the exercisers in their 20s seem to like.

"Not enough melody or emotion for me," he says. "That was the thing about Mario Lanza. The emotion was in his eyes and in his hands and in his voice. He was an artist who understood beauty."

Sometimes he listens to Mario at home. In recent days, of course, his stereo has played Christmas carols without end. He sings along as he cooks. He can hit the high note in O Holy Night.

For Christmas dinner, he feeds at least a dozen friends. On his menu always is baked ham and his specialty, manicotti. He puts in five layers of cheese. He considers cooking an art, too.

He performs his other art in the men's locker room. He would enjoy singing for more women too, but his appearance in their locker room is limited. When he mops there, he is supposed to lack an audience.

Too bad.

"I'd like to meet a nice Catholic girl some day and get married," he says. "I'd like to have two children, a girl first, then a boy. I don't have any bad habits. I don't drink or do drugs, though I do play bingo."

He has a second wish.

"I have daydreamed about singing as a professional," he says. "But it's just a dream. I really don't know the words to that many songs. I usually sort of fake it."

For now, he accepts the enthusiastic applause of naked, dripping men, including some naked, dripping men who appreciate that art and beauty can show up in the least likely places.

"Chestnuts roasting on an open fire," he begins, sounding, to some middle-aged ears, every bit as good as Mel Torme. "Jack Frost nipping at your door."

"Tony," says a guy with a furry back, "that sounded great. But you don't always get the words exactly right. It's not "nipping at your door.' It's "nipping at your nose.' "

"All right, all right," Tony Graffeo growls. "Don't push it. Got me?"

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