“Do you want regular? We don’t drink regular.”
“No, no, this is fine.”
“There’s a Starbucks now on Northern Boulevard,” my father said. “They line up for it. Latte. They need latte, these kids. Three bucks.”
My mother’s eyebrows rose. “How do you know how much it is?”
“I checked it out. Three bucks. More than that, if you want a grande.”
“You had a latte?”
“No, I didn’t have a latte. Calm down. I said I checked it out, that’s all.”
“A whole can of Maxwell House is two eighty-nine,” my mother said from the sink, where she had begun to wash the dishes.
My father nodded, turned to me. “Hear that?”
“I sure did.”
“A can costs less than a cup. Crazy.”
Having exhausted the coffee topic, we sat and looked at each other. Something was different about my father, really different, and at last it hit me. This was the longest I’d ever seen him without a cigarette in his mouth.
“You quit smoking, Dad?”
He laughed out loud, not in a happy way. Then he lifted a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket, just long enough for me to get a peek at it before shoving it back.
“I quit smoking indoors. Your mother doesn’t allow it in the house anymore.”
“Why should I breathe your smoke?”
“No reason I can think of.”
She turned to me. “It’s good for him. He smokes a lot less this way.”
“Yeah. Nineteen a day instead of twenty. That oughta keep the tumors away.”
He stood, shook a butt into his mouth, and turned to go outside.
“Welcome home, Mick,” he said before leaving.
Home. It’s supposed to be a comforting word, isn’t it? Everybody wants to go home. Home is where they can’t get you. Home is safety.
So why did the very sound of the word make me knock over my coffee?
In a flash my mother was there, mopping up the mess as if she’d expected it to happen. She was so quick on the scene that not a drop of coffee made it off the table to the floor.
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
“It’s all right, you’re jet-lagged.”
“I’m not jet-lagged.”
She tossed the wad of paper towels into the trash and reached for my empty mug. “I’ll give you a refill.”
“No, no. I think I’ll just take my stuff upstairs.”
“Your room’s made up!” my mother called after me as I climbed the stairs.
The air in my room was tart with the smell of Lemon Pledge. My mother had obviously run up here and given it the once-over right after I called from the airport.
Here was my bed, narrow as a monk’s, with the same pebbly-patterned red bedspread that left an imprint on your cheek if you fell asleep with your face against it. My Hardy Boys books were still lined up in a row on the windowsill, and beyond them was the little desk where I’d done my homework by the light of a black twist-neck lamp…still there, of course. There were clean towels at the foot of my bed, hotel-ready for my needs.
I closed the door to my room and wished it had a lock. Then I made sure they were both downstairs before opening my duffel bag.
Nestled among my clothes was an old coffee can with a taped-on lid. I peeled off the tape and dumped the contents of the can on my bedspread.
It was piles and piles of cash, neatly rolled up and rubber-banded, an absolutely obscene sight. I didn’t even know how much it was.
Hoping and praying that my parents would stay downstairs, I took off the rubber bands and counted the money. The grand total came to $5,740.
This was funny money. I hadn’t exactly stolen it, but at the same time, it wasn’t exactly mine. I was going to have to think long and hard before I decided what to do with it.
I realized how stupid I was. My duffel bag had gone through the X-ray machine at LAX. What if the security guards had been alarmed by the bomb-like outline of the can? I was lucky I’d gotten through. I was also lucky that nobody had robbed me at that shitty airport hotel where I’d spent the night.
But then, people have always said I was a lucky guy.
Now I faced the biggest hurdle of all—figuring out a place to stash the cash.
I didn’t know what my mother’s housecleaning habits were like these days but she used to fine-tooth the place once or twice a week, and how was I going to explain a coffee-can fortune? She’d think her only begotten son had become a drug dealer, and who could blame her, the way I’d landed on them out of the blue in need of a roof, a shave, and a soul, not necessarily in that order?
And then I remembered something, and I knew what I had to do.
I stuffed the cash back into the coffee can, taped the lid in place, and dragged the desk chair to my closet.
Way up inside the closet, higher than its highest shelf, was a kind of a hole in the wall, a deep gap in the bricks where I used to hide Playboy magazines. I had to climb up on a chair and stand on tiptoe to reach it, which meant it was completely out of my mother’s radar range.
I got up on tiptoe, set the can into the hole, and told myself she’d never find it. Then I unpacked my duffel bag, putting my clothes neatly in the bureau drawers.
And then a funny thing happened. I was suddenly completely exhausted, as if I hadn’t slept in weeks.
It was a warm night. I opened the window, stripped down to my skivvies and got into bed. Then I noticed something I hadn’t noticed earlier, hanging on the wall over the foot of my bed.
It was the jacket from my one and only hit record, hung in a gold frame, as if it were some kind of religious icon. My hair had been barbered into a sort of punkish buzz cut, with slanted sideburns and a glaze of gel. My head seemed almost to be ablaze, as the photo was taken with the sun setting behind me. I stood on a beach with my arms folded across my chest, the top two buttons of a snug black silk shirt undone (“Let the chest hair peek out!” the photographer had shouted).
I stared at myself on that wall, twenty years younger and twenty pounds lighter. Young Me stared back just as hard, grinning as if God had just whispered in his ear that the rest of his life was going to be a toboggan ride down Whipped Cream Mountain.
“The fuck you lookin’ at?” I asked the record jacket, but I got no answer.
I was just about asleep when a coughing sound jolted me. I got up, went to the window and looked out at the backyard, where my father was lighting up a fresh cigarette. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, like a man waiting for a bus that was never coming.
I got back in bed and shut my eyes. I could smell cigarette smoke and hear the clatter of pots being scrubbed by my mother down in the kitchen.
Smoke and clatter. I was home, all right.
CHAPTER THREE
I guess we never know how or when the key moments of our lives are happening. Musically speaking, my inspirational life had just one big day. More like an hour, really.
I wrote “Sweet Days” one dreamy afternoon in September of 1987 on the inside flap of my American History notebook, right above the printed chart they give you to lay out your class schedule. While Mr. Malecki droned on about the Civil War, I jotted down the first few words of the song that would change my life.
Sweet days…
Feel like a haze…
A summertime craze…
But it ain’t just a phase…
That afternoon when I got home I went straight to the piano my mother had insisted we have for the lessons I’d taken with Dot Molloy, a kooky neighborhood character whose pedigree included a claim that she’d once played at Carnegie Hall. Mrs. Molloy was a longtime widow, and a lot of Little Neck mothers made their sons take piano lessons with her because, as my mother used to say, “She’s on a fixed income.” She was past sixty but she had wild bleached blond hair and wore bright red lipstick that smeared beyond the boundaries of her lips. She may have looked like a clown, but she was dead serious about music.
“What are you doing?”
My mother stood there looking astonished, a dusty rag in one hand, a can of Pledge in the other. By this time my lessons from Mrs. Molloy were long over, and she was the only one in the house who ever played the piano. She’d had classical training when she was a child, and the sounds of Mozart she coaxed from the box weren’t half bad, in a stilted sort of way….
“Nothing, Mom.”
“What was that song you were playing?”
“It’s not a song. I’m just fooling around.”
“Well, my God. After all these years it’s a little bit of a shock to see you playing the piano of your own accord.”
“Mrs. Molloy was an influential woman. It just took time for me to become influenced.”
“Michael, you never do pass up an opportunity to be sarcastic, do you?”
“It’s an Irish thing. The smart-ass gene. I get it from you.”
She shook her head. “The way you speak to me.”
“Did you want to play the piano, Mom? Am I in your way?”
To which she leaned over the side of the piano, spritzed the keys with Pledge and gave them a musical wipe before turning on her heel and striding off to the dining room, where I heard the fizz of the Pledge and the snap of the rag.
Over the next hour I fooled around with the melody, singing softly under my breath. It wasn’t even as if I’d written it. It was more as if I’d stumbled upon it, an achy, melancholic sound of something precious lost forever.
That night, after we ate and my mother went off to help run a bingo game for the elderly at St. Anastasia’s Church, I played and sang the first stanza for my old man, who listened as he gripped a can of Budweiser. It was like he was waiting for some awful lyric accusing him of something horrible he’d done to me, and when I finished playing he was more relieved than impressed.
“You wrote that, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Get out of here!”
“I swear to God.”
“It’s very…uh…” He sipped his beer, swallowed, nodded. “Professional,” he finally decided.
“It’s just the first stanza.”
“It’s almost like…I don’t know…you’re mourning something, ain’t it?”
“How do you mean?”
He reddened, sipped more beer. “I don’t know. This sweet days stuff…it’s happy and sad at the same time. The words are about happy times, but the music sounds like they’re already gone. That make any sense to you?”
My skin tingled. Just like that I was filled with the terror that comes when a teenage boy feels he’s really connecting with his father, far from the comfort of the distant camps they usually inhabit under the same roof.
“Yeah, it makes sense,” I all but whispered.
He was scared, too—the fear was right there in his dark eyes, as if he were afraid of his own extraordinary perception. To break the mood he drained his beer, crushed the can in one powerful squeeze of his hand. “Anyway, the Yanks are at Cleveland.”
“Yeah?”
“Come watch with me when you’re through foolin’ around there, Mozart,” he said over his shoulder.
The next day at school I played the entire song on the warped, weather-beaten old piano they kept for no good reason outside the cafeteria at Holy Cross High School.
The guys didn’t believe I’d written it. A big mouth-breathing German kid named Hans Merkle insisted he’d heard Herman’s Hermits perform the very same song on American Bandstand years earlier. I swore up and down it was mine, until nobody was standing there but a toady student named Ronald Robinski, staring hard at me through the thickest eyeglasses in the entire junior class.
“Is that really your song, DeFalco?”
I shrugged. “What’s the difference whose it is?”
“It’s not bad.”
Robinski was a goofy, squeaky-voiced eccentric, the target of endless pranks played for the sheer thrill of hearing his terrified shriek echo off the walls. It wasn’t a good idea to get chummy with the guy. On the other hand, he was the only one being decent about the song.
“Well,” I finally said, “what would you know about it, Ronald?”
“Play it again.”
“I don’t do requests.”
“Come on. We only have a few minutes ’til the bell. They’re all gone.”
It was true. It was just the two of us, so I once again played and sang “Sweet Days,” a little slower this time, with more feeling.
Robinski was serious until I finished, and then a smile tickled his lips. “That’s it. It’ll be a hit.”
I laughed out loud. “You kill me, Ronald. What’re you talking about?”
He took off his glasses and wiped them with a snow-white handkerchief. “Boy oh boy,” he said, regarding me through sparkling-clean lenses, “you don’t even know who my father is, do you?”
Ronald Robinski’s father, it turned out, was Richard Robinski, a record company executive with an ear for the novelty song, the bubblegum pop tune, the kind of music that makes the hip cringe and the un-hip empty their pockets.
The next afternoon Ronald made me come home with him to play the song for his father, and I was astonished to learn that they lived in Manhattan. Nobody else at Holy Cross lived in the big town. Ronald rode the bus and subway back and forth from Central Park West and Seventy-second Street every day.
He actually lived at the Dakota, where John Lennon had been shot dead seven years earlier! As we approached the giant wrought-iron gates I began to feel a new respect for Ronald. The security guard gave him a friendly nod, and then I was tingling all over as we walked over the cobblestones where Lennon fell. We rode the elevator to the sixth floor and walked down a long, gloomy hall.
“Man,” I said, “this is too cool for words.”
Ronald shrugged, pushing his key into the door. “It’s all I’ve ever known. Hey, Pop! Pop!”
His shouting jolted me. We were in a home with a knock-you-on-your-ass view of Central Park, and for the first time in my seventeen years I felt my nose bump up against the barrier that separates the rich from the poor.
I understood that as much as anything else it was about light and air. The long, wide windows of the Robinski living room looked straight out onto the seemingly endless park.
“Mickey, this is my father.”
I was shocked to discover that my feet had taken me to the window—my breath was practically fogging the glass. I turned to see Ronald towering over a short, blunt man with a fringe of snow-white hair around a gleaming pink skull. He was coming toward me, hand extended, a diamond pinkie ring glittering.
We shook, and the power of his grip was almost enough to bruise my knuckles.
“You da boy wit’ da song.”
A rat-a-tat-tat statement, words like bullets. The man was a proud immigrant, doing nothing to hide his Polish roots.
I nodded. “I wrote a song, yeah.”
“So let’s hear it already,” he said, as if I’d kept him waiting for hours.
He gestured toward an enormous Steinway piano I somehow hadn’t noticed before. I slid onto the bench and flexed my fingers.
“Dis song you’re gonna play, it’s a rock song?”
“More like a love song, Pop,” Ronald answered for me. “Go ahead, Mick.”
The tone of that piano was like nothing I’d ever known. I could barely believe the sound coming from it traced to my trembling hands.
I didn’t know where to look as I sang, so I shut my eyes most of the way and opened them only after I’d turned my face to the right, toward the park. The setting sun was turning it into a leafy world of golden wonders, and I realized through my terror that I’d never
seen anything quite so beautiful. Not until I finished the song did I turn to look at Mr. Robinski, who stood staring at me with his arms folded tightly across his chest.
“Once more, please.”
He said it without enthusiasm, but behind him Ronald’s eyes opened wide and he made the A-OK sign with his thumb and forefinger. I shut my eyes and played the song again, and when I opened them this time Mr. Robinski was standing at my shoulder, scowling as if I were a suspect in a police lineup.
“Dis song, you wrote it all by yourself?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Wasn’t nobody else helped you?”
“No, sir.”
“All right.” He allowed himself a smile. “All right.” He patted my shoulder. “I give you a call, okay?”
And before I could answer he walked off without a word of good-bye. Ronald put his bony arm across my shoulders as he walked me to the door.
“Hot stuff, huh? What’d I tell you? Didn’t I tell you it was gonna be a hit?”
I arched my back to make his arm fall away. “Your father’s kind of weird, Ronald.”
“Oh, totally. Totally. But he knows what he’s doing. So do I, huh? Guess I can pick ’em, too!”
I nodded, not wanting to dash Ronald’s dreams of Robinski & Son Music Moguls, and suddenly I was out on West Seventy-second Street with no idea of how to get home. I got on a subway going uptown instead of downtown and didn’t catch my mistake until I was past Harlem, and by the time I got back to Little Neck it was eight o’clock, a full two hours past suppertime.
My mother was out of her mind with worry. I hadn’t bothered calling because I’d never really thought about it. I never really thought I was going to follow Ronald home that afternoon in the first place, or that he’d live all the way in Manhattan, or that his father would want to hear the song not only once, but twice.
It was all like a dream, is what I’m trying to say, and who phones home from a dream?
“We thought you were dead,” my mother said.
My father rolled his eyes. “No, we didn’t. Don’t tell him that. You want him to be afraid of the world?”
One Hit Wonder Page 3
