A Blind, One-Armed Piano Man From Baghdad

NEW YORK — At Liedy’s Shore Inn, many of the guitar aficionados and ex-roadies play The Rolling Stones by night and collect Social Security checks by day. Their nostalgic, tight-knit culture is maintained by Liedy’s geographic remoteness — it is sandwiched between empty lots on the North Shore of Staten Island — and the bar’s detachment from the rest of the city. Only members of Liedy’s inner circle seem to know the correct phone number, as opposed to the obsolete one outsiders find on Google.

“It’s family,” said Anthony Galante, 64, a bassist and Liedy’s devotee. “Everybody knows everybody, and everybody knows about everybody. And it stays here.”

But one Liedy’s regular stands out: Ahmed Shareef. At 21, he’s about 40 years younger than the average patron, who tends to be born-and-bred in Staten Island. Shareef is a refugee from Iraq. One day in April 2004, when he was 7, Ahmed was walking home from school in Baghdad when an explosion blew off half his right arm and burned his eyes, blinding him.

After the accident, Ahmed was brought to the United States for a series of medical procedures by Elissa Montanti, who runs the Global Medical Relief Fund, a nonprofit based in Staten Island that helps disabled children around the world. In 2012, Montanti took guardianship of Ahmed. She sent him to Staten Island’s Curtis High School, where he gained fluency in English and Braille. He still lives in Staten Island, in the South Beach neighborhood, with a roommate who also came to the area through the fund.

Despite his disabilities, Shareef leads a rotating cast of musicians in Blind Ambition, a band he named that frequently performs at Liedy’s on Wednesdays and weekends. Shareef plays the keyboard and melodica, a strange-looking keyboard with a tube that he blows into like a recorder, while singing bar band standards and originals he’s written in a classic rock style.

When the tempo quickens, and Shareef feels good, he uses his right-side stump to play chords in hard-charging, rhythmic stabs. Head tilted back, singing to the ceiling, he will mash his way to a crescendo.

Shareef isn’t aware of other pianists incorporating a maimed limb into performance. He might have invented the technique. “As a person who’d like to do something and have fun, you’re going to try everything,” he said.

Liedy’s stalwarts revere Shareef’s grit. “He’s just a real inspiration,” said a bandmate, Bill Moser, 59. “My kid starts bitching about stuff, I say: ‘Shut up. You have an arm, you know, and you can see it.'”

Yet Shareef is not entirely accepted at Liedy’s. Well-meaning regulars at the bar appear not to have connected their admiration for Shareef personally with their general view of his background.

“Not all Muslims are terrorists; all the terrorists were Muslims,” said Galante, the bassist. “My question is — and I will ask any person this question — why don’t the good people stand up against the bad people?”

Galante looks like most people drinking at Liedy’s: a middle-aged white man in the only borough in the city that went for Donald Trump. Gerry Di Costanzo, 59, a drummer who’s played with Shareef, said he agreed with Trump’s assessment of Muslims during the 2016 campaign. “I felt that way — that they’re terrorists, with all this garbage going on.”

Shareef, who started playing at the bar three years ago, has noticed a rise in Islamophobia. “People say stuff, but they don’t say it directly,” he said. “You can hear it, and they know you’re there.”

Shareef’s religion isn’t usually discussed at Liedy’s, but it can make people uneasy. “Is he a Muslim?” asked Larry Liedy, 67, the bar’s owner and a great-grandson of its founder. “Well, he loves Catholics, and he loves me, and he loves everybody in here. I don’t know if he’s practicing.”

In fact, Shareef started going to mosque this year. Since the election, he has become worried about being under surveillance, especially when contacting his mother, father and siblings, who still live in Iraq. “I went through days and days of being nervous to talk to my family, and say hello. I have these thoughts: What if the cops come now and take me?”

Onstage at Liedy’s, Shareef hears the sounds of inclusion. One patron, Donna Fagan, is nicknamed “Yeah Yeah Yeah” for her rowdy chants during his sets. As Shareef’s songs reach a climax, a bartender, John Grecsek, rings a mounted silver bell in clangorous approval.

Yet Shareef acts restrained. He can name who in this audience voted for Trump and the Muslim travel ban. If he says anything after a song, it’s often less the statement of a rock star or hometown hero, and more that of a polite guest: “Thank you.”