One Hit Wonder

by Charlie Carillo

  “I keep telling you,” I said, “I was born with it this way. It won’t stay in place.”

  “I don’t want it to stay in place. I just like to watch it spring back.”

  “Push it all you want, then.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me, is there, Mickey?”

  I didn’t see that coming. I was shocked. I’d always thought of Lynn as the most confident, self-assured person I’d ever known, the last person I’d ever expect to ask such a question.

  “You’re great, Lynn.”

  She pressed my upper lip again, let it go. “You don’t think I’m strange, or peculiar?”

  “You’re…unique. But that’s a good thing.”

  “How am I unique?”

  “I don’t know…. You’re the only girl I could ever talk to. You’re the only person I could ever talk to.”

  I was learning it as I was saying it. What I said was true. Lynn looked as if she were about to cry, but she managed a strange smile, the smile of a happy person who’s just bitten into a lemon.

  “Know something, Mick? Your father is a nice man.”

  This came out of nowhere. Why the hell was she talking about my father?

  “Eddie’s a nice guy? Eddie’s a frustrated, unhappy ballbreaker, Lynn!”

  “Yeah, sometimes, but deep down, he’s all right.”

  “Lynn, what is all this? What’s the matter?”

  She blinked back tears. “I guess I was just wishing I had a father like yours, instead of the one I got.”

  “Well, if we get married some day, you’ll have Steady Eddie for a father-in-law. That’d be good, wouldn’t it?”

  I was shocked by my own words. I’d never spoken with Lynn about marriage. I couldn’t imagine life without her, but I’d never even thought about marrying her. Marriage, as far as I could tell, was a total fucking mess.

  She stared at me wide-eyed, picked up a clamshell, threw it into the water.

  “Wow. Mickey DeFalco speaks the M-word!”

  “I didn’t mean it, Lynn. What I mean is, I didn’t mean to upset you with it.”

  “I’m not upset about that.”

  “Think you’d want to get married some time?”

  “I’d rather go to Italy with you first.”

  We stood at the water’s edge, watching ravenous seagulls tear into whatever left-behind food scraps they could find.

  “If only we had a sailboat, and we knew how to sail, we could do it from here,” I said.

  Lynn was puzzled. “Do what?”

  I pointed toward the horizon. “Sail to Italy.”

  She looked at me, and I thought for a moment she was going to burst into tears. “That’s a sweet idea, Mickey.”

  I let my imagination go, the way you do when you’re with someone you trust to the bone.

  “It could be done, right? It’s a straight shot across the Atlantic. If we had a big enough boat, with lots of supplies, and if we didn’t hit any big storms in the middle of the ocean…”

  I’d run out of “ifs.”

  “Well, anyway, I don’t see why we couldn’t make it,” I continued. “We’d have to make sure we had enough food, stuff that wouldn’t spoil, like canned goods, because it’d probably take a couple of weeks, and we might have to drink rainwater….”

  She embraced me, harder and longer than she’d ever held me before. I wasn’t through.

  “We’d sail to Genoa, or Naples,” I continued over her shoulder. “I think those are the main seaports in Italy. They’d have to take us in, even if we didn’t have passports…. Hey, how do you get a passport, anyway?”

  There I was, seventeen years old, not yet able to drive a car, talking about guiding a sailboat across the Atlantic to start a life in Italy with Lynn Mahoney.

  The sun was setting. Ever really watched a sunset? It’s a sudden thing, not gradual in the least, and on this evening the sun seemed to slip into the waves as if it were drowning, never to rise again. On the other side of the sky the moon grew brighter and larger, as if it were winning a battle against the sinking sun. It was like a sad wedding of fire and water, and at the moment the last bit of orange was swallowed, Lynn stood beside me, arms folded across her narrow chest, her big green eyes solemn as she took it all in.

  “It could be nighttime forever,” she said, more to herself than to me. It was what I’d been thinking, almost to the syllable. I was gripped by a sudden fear that I was about to lose her.

  That couldn’t happen. I could not let that happen.

  “I’m in love with you,” I blurted. “I want to marry you. I mean, not this minute, but eventually. There. I said it! I’m glad I said it. If that scares you, I’m sorry, but there it is.”

  She stared at me, those big eyes glistening with tears.

  “I know it sounds crazy. I don’t want to scare you.”

  “I’m not scared.”

  “You’re crying.”

  “Yeah.” She wiped her eyes, shivered. “Yeah, I’m crying.”

  I moved to hold her but the set of her shoulders told me to stay away, for my own sake….

  “Lynn?”

  “My parents were in love once, I suppose.” This was a strange voice coming from her, both vulnerable and distant. She giggle-sobbed. “Funny, huh? My father, who won’t even let you in the house, was supposedly crazy about my mother.”

  “Lynn—”

  “And look what happened. They don’t even touch each other. They don’t even talk.”

  I swallowed, felt the panicked pulse of my heart in my throat. “That wouldn’t happen with us, baby. We could be different.”

  “There’s more to it than that.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  “Things I can’t even talk about.”

  And then she broke down in sobs. I put my arm across her shoulders and led her on the long walk through the suddenly cold sand to what turned out to be the last bus home that night.

  She was silent the whole way, awake but with her eyes closed. On the short walk from the bus stop to her house she stayed a step ahead of me, no matter how hard I tried to keep up. She didn’t stop until she reached her gate, and then it was time for what would turn out to be a final good-bye.

  “Lynn, listen. I didn’t mean I want to marry you now. I meant someday. You know. When I can get that wheelbarrow full of dough, you know?”

  She managed a smile. “You know I was only kidding about that.”

  “I know, but still. Maybe I’ll get it anyway. We’ll go to Italy, change it all into lire and live like kings.”

  She nodded. “Maybe. But even if we don’t, we’ve had a lot of sweet days, haven’t we, Mick? More than most people get, that’s for sure.”

  I hated what she’d said. It sounded like the end of something, an obituary.

  “Yeah, we’ve had sweet days. And we’ll have a lot more.”

  She hesitated, then got up on her toes to kiss my forehead. “I’ll see you, Mickey DeFalco.”

  She turned and hurried into her house, and I knew by the way she’d used my whole name that something beyond terrible was about to happen.

  And it did. In the middle of the night Lynn took off, nobody knew where. No note, nothing. The whole neighborhood was shocked. She seemed to be a loving girl with good grades in a good Catholic school. She seemed to have a stable family life and a boyfriend who adored her. And just like that, she took off.

  But that wasn’t all. In the early morning hours after Lynn had vanished, a drunken Captain Walter Mahoney went into a rage over her disappearance. He tumbled down the rickety wooden set of stairs to his basement, snapped his spine and was paralyzed from the waist down. He would spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. The New York City Fire Department built a ramp for the Captain on the front stoop of his house, and there was even a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the ramp.

  BURNING ANGEL TRADES WINGS FOR WHEELS, said the photo caption in the New York Post.

  It was the beginning of the end for the entire Mah
oney family. A runaway daughter, a paralyzed father…and then, ten years later, all four firefighting Mahoney brothers died in a raging warehouse blaze in the Bronx.

  Of course by this time I’d been on the West Coast for a long time, and I’ll never forget the phone call I got from my mother regarding the quadruple service at Eruzione’s Funeral Home. It was attended by nearly everybody in Little Neck, along with TV crews from three news programs. All of the Burning Angel’s sons being laid to rest! Who could resist such an event? At least one person.

  “Well,” my mother informed me, “there was no sign of Lynn.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t know what happened.”

  “How could she not know? It’s on television!”

  “Maybe there’s no TV where she is.”

  “There are no excuses for her absence, unless she’s dead.”

  I swallowed. “You think Lynn is dead?”

  “I didn’t say that. I said that would be her only excuse for not being here.”

  I hung up on my mother. The concept that Lynn might be dead was unacceptable. I didn’t want to believe it. I couldn’t believe it. I’d been dangling from a thread of hope since she’d run away, and suddenly that thread was as slender as the strand of a spiderweb…ahh, but still strong…so strong….

  My parents had nothing to do with the Mahoney family, but my mother’s bulletins about them continued over the years, like dispatches from a war zone.

  The death of his sons took it all out of the Captain, she reported…. He began to shrivel and shrink, physically and spiritually…. Lynn’s mother had to push him everywhere until at last he died of heart failure, nine years after he’d lost his sons, nineteen years after he’d fallen down the stairs.

  Lynn missed that funeral, too, as my mother eagerly informed me in one of her last phone calls to me in Los Angeles.

  And it occurred to me that maybe my mother was right. Maybe Lynn was dead. Maybe it was time for me to stop thinking about her, once and for all.

  Maybe.

  A few weeks after Lynn disappeared I lost my virginity in the backseat of a rusting Ford Pinto to a girl named Rosie Gambardello, who worked the cash register next to Lynn’s and always went out of her way to flirt with me. We’d both gotten drunk on a jug of homemade red wine from her father’s cellar, rough stuff that left an acid tang on your tongue, unless that was the taste of Rosie.

  It was fast, it was furious, it meant nothing to me. We hadn’t even taken our clothes off. Just unzipped and unbuttoned what we needed to get it done, artichoke style. A flick of her hips and I was out of her, rolling over to my side of the car. It was like I’d stopped for gas. She sat up and lit a cigarette.

  “Ya still miss her, huh?”

  That’s how it is in Little Neck, Queens. Everybody knows everything.

  “Yeah, I do miss her.”

  “She put out?”

  “Shut up, Rosie.”

  “I knew it. I knew it! I could tell, just lookin’ at her. A snob. Too good for it. Too good for the Little Neck boys. That’s why she run off.”

  “Rosie, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yeah, well, I could tell you had a good time just now.” I saw her smile by the glow of her cigarette, a horrifying, gap-toothed grin. “This was maw like it, huh, Mick?”

  I tumbled out of her car and went home to puke, all that red wine coming up like an angry tide. I was crying at the same time, the one and only time I ever cried over Lynn.

  A few weeks later I wrote “Sweet Days,” the lyrics about my last night with Lynn, giving the song its story….

  Spoke too soon…

  Between the sun and the moon…

  Words you could not stand…

  While we stood in the sand…

  Took the last bus home…

  And I knew…I knew…

  I knew that you were gonna roam…

  What can I say? I know it’s not Shakespeare, but somehow it touched a chord out there. And all it cost me was an irreparably broken heart.

  I’d say my success was a combination of things—a catchy tune, luck, heartfelt lyrics, luck, good timing, luck, superb management, luck, crafty marketing, luck, a cute face, luck, luck, and more luck.

  And if I had it to do all over again, I’d probably have saved some of that luck for the rest of my life, instead of shooting my entire wad on that one damn song.

  CHAPTER SIX

  When I woke up I wondered why the room wasn’t brighter, then realized that the sapling my father had planted outside my window when I was a kid had grown into a big, droopy-leafed maple tree that blocked the sun.

  By the time I got showered and shaved it was almost nine in the morning. My mother was in the kitchen, and at the sight of me she cracked two eggs into a bowl and went at them with a whisk.

  “You certainly slept. Conked out without a word to anyone.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that.”

  “There’s coffee if you want it.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “It’s real coffee. I got real coffee for you.”

  I poured myself a cup, astonished at how my hand shook. It had always been a nervous house, the nervousness deeply in-grained everywhere. The arguments, the silences, the pouting…it had all soaked into the pores of the walls and floors, like endless coats of wax.

  “Dad at work?”

  “Where else would he be?”

  “Steady Eddie.”

  “In some ways he is, yes.”

  She poured the eggs into a skillet as I sipped my coffee.

  “He going to retire anytime soon?”

  “Retire? What would he do with himself?”

  “I don’t know. Take it easy.”

  “Why are you so eager for your father to retire?”

  Just like that, it was a situation. I spread my hands. “Mom, I’m not eager for it. I just wondered if he was thinking about it.”

  She worked the eggs with a spatula. “He’s only fifty-nine, Michael. It’s not as if he’s an old man.”

  “Mom, if he’s happy working, that’s great.”

  “Who said he was happy?”

  “He’s not happy?”

  “Work is work, Michael. It’s not supposed to make you happy.”

  “It’s not?”

  “Michael. Sit. Eat.”

  I obeyed, knowing I was the problem here, the intruder. I’d splashed down into this delicate ecosystem my parents had developed over the past twenty years, like some crazy salmon who’d swum upstream to rejoin his exhausted parents. I hugged my elbows to my rib cage as I sat there, as if to make myself smaller….

  “I have a job now, too.”

  She blurted the words, then stared at me as if she expected me to burst out laughing. I didn’t. My mouth fell open, and at last I said, “You’re kidding.”

  “Don’t be so surprised!”

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m helping out at Eruzione’s a couple of days a week. I’m on my way there now. I stayed to make you breakfast.”

  She emptied the pan onto a plate and set the fluffy yellow eggs before me. I tried hard to remember the last time I’d eaten eggs—that whole Los Angeles health food horseshit has a way of penetrating, even if you’re not a believer—but mostly I was awed by the idea of my mother working at the Eruzione Funeral Home, which had been planting Little Neckers for more than fifty years. I noticed for the first time that she was dressed in black.

  “You don’t like eggs anymore?”

  “I love ’em.” I wolfed down a forkful. “I can’t believe you’re at Eruzione’s.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well. Kinda depressing, isn’t it? All those dead people?”

  “Everyone has to die, Michael.”

  “I guess that’s true.”

  “You guess?”

  I took another forkful of eggs. “Go ahead, Mom, go. I’m sorry I made you late for work.” The last thing I wanted to do was be responsible for keeping the dead
waiting.

  She tied a black scarf over her hair. “Do you remember Ralph Mackell?”

  “Who?”

  “The old man we always used to see waiting for the bus?”

  I had no clue.

  “The old man who limped? He had that black cane?”

  I still had no clue. She was losing patience. “You know. The old man who used to come into church late and sit in the front row?”

  It finally hit me. “The white-haired guy who couldn’t stop coughing?”

  “That’s him!”

  “What about him?”

  “He died.”

  I put my fork down. “That guy just died? He was dying twenty years ago!”

  “Lung cancer. Eighty-eight. A smoker, like your father. We’re laying him out today. Not expecting many visitors. He didn’t have many friends in this world.”

  In this world? When had my mother adopted funeralspeak?

  “I’m off, Michael. Make yourself…” She caught herself, reddened. “You know.”

  “At home.”

  “Yes, well, of course. This is your home. That reminds me.”

  She gave me a shiny brass key, attached to an Eruzione’s Funeral Parlor key ring. It was a red plastic tag, shaped like a little coffin.

  “For the front door.”

  She leaned over to kiss my forehead and she was out the door, eager to run the show for Ralph Mackell’s final farewell.

  It was a relief to be alone, a relief not to have been asked what my plans were.

  But it was also shockingly, embarrassingly lonely. Maybe it’s just me, or maybe it hits all thirty-eight-year-old males who suddenly find themselves unemployed and alone in their mothers’ kitchens on a weekday morning.

  I scraped the rest of the eggs into the garbage, washed my plate (she’d already scrubbed the skillet, of course) and walked out of the house, my newly minted key snug in the pocket of my jeans.