Author: Mike Bruckman

-Superhost 14 times in a row. Over 100 5-Star reviews.

https://www.airbnb.com/users/show/18471873

-Hosted properties that ranged from $500-$1,500+/night for over 5 years.

-Stopped all rentals once pandemic hit in March 2020 indefinitely 

-Best rental: $27,000 for 4 nights during RNC convention in Cleveland when Trump was nominated in ‘16. Guests barely even used the space.

-Worst Rental: There were many, but probably at a property I called ‘Treasure’ when the guest decided to host a secret event (common happening) and got robbed at gunpoint by one of his guests…or maybe when a bachelorette party flushed an entire roll of TP and it clogged the plumbing throughout the building and backed up waste through two floors and then when improperly cleared spilled out into an event space everywhere…or was it that time that very flamboyantly gay couple had a wedding shower and must have ceremoniously deficated with several guests all over the master bedroom of a posh 5,000 square foot penthouse…or it could have been the time the blood was puddling out beneath the locked bathroom door to no response, or the time when the strippers were butt naked on the precarious and rusted through 6 stry fire escape passed out, or the time the obliterated drunk guest climbed through the elevator shaft onto the roof and was tightrope walking on the edge of a thin concrete ledge 80 feet above the street singing to a seagull which was attacking him…or those times I don’t feel comfortable sharing but you’re welcome to ask about. Trust me, if you stretch your imagination, it’s worse.

Early on in the short term home rental days, I made it a point to identify all varieties of spaces I could list on AirBNB and VRBO/HomeAway. I listed everything from vacant warehouses to giant malls to entire skyscraper floors to secret penthouse suites to a haunted mansion, etc. My AirBNB experience is quite unique, as I rarely owned or occupied the spaces I would host and rent…instead, my role in operations was to monetize unused space, communicate with guests, and facilitate the rentals. Most of my guests would host an event such as: weddings, graduations, fundraisers, speaking engagements, and perhaps most of all and most obnoxiously bachelor and even worse…bachelorette parties. Anyone who works in hotels or bars will understand how incredibly insightful it is to witness people when they either book a place or check in to a place as compared to when they leave a place. It’s a total ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ situation in so many cases ..especially the bachelorette parties. If I have to find one more random penis confetti stuck to my shoe again I’m going to cry.

I have performed well over 1,000 cover songs written in the past 100 years, 100 classical compositions, and 200 completed original pieces in their entirety during my time in public settings in front of the piano thus far. As a self taught musician, I have developed a deeply personal relationship with the piano by spending thousands of hours with them…hundreds of them. During a period of time when I spent 7 out of 10 years living on the road while in my 20’s I would gravitate to pianos like a moth to a flame. It became a 6th sense of mine to find them and make a qusi-home around them. I’ve slept on pianos, under pianos, head on keys drooling, next to, nearby, behind, with others…you name it. I’ve been arrested on more than one occasion within one foot of a few different pianos and also crashed more weddings than I can count at any and every hotel or country club I knew of or could come across with a piano…no guest list necessary…I just spontaneously become the entertainment and go from there. 

I’m not your typical player. I’m not a duelling piano player. I’m not looking to improv and solo every chance I get. What I specialize in ranges from putting people in a trance and or sleeping state and maintaining it to playing songs people are not used to hearing arranged for piano in environments they least expect. 

I often compare playing piano to speaking a universal language, as I’ve discovered in foreign countries and around foreigners in general. It is a bond that ties. Moments that unify. I love to wake sleeping pianos from their long slumber and make no excuses for their condition or state…an otherwise out of tune piano beneath confident hands is like a junkyard Mustang to a master mechanic. How many times I’ve heard ‘No one has touched this piano in as long as I can remember’.

I can best describe my experiences thus far with pianos as the familiar feeling of walking through the woods, anywhere, alone…without the particular knowledge of identifying every tree or leaf that comes across, but nonetheless integrating with the air, and time, and peace of the moment…looking up often to the pillars of growth beset before me in wonder and amazement, yearning to know more about the inception of their design yet content with the simple nature of their existence as it is in the moment.