One Hit Wonder

by Charlie Carillo

“Mickey. There’s a lot going on, understand? I’ll call you when I’m ready, but please don’t call me. Okay? Do we have a deal?”

  Deals. I was making deals with her now.

  “Will you really call me?”

  “I will. I promise.”

  “Well then, it’s a deal.”

  She opened the gate and walked up the mossy brick path toward the front door. I called out her name, as I should have called it out on that summer night so long ago. She stopped, turned to look at me.

  “How the hell did someone like you become a banker?”

  An easy question. She was so relieved she giggled. “I guess I just have one of those faces people can trust, huh?”

  “I trusted it,” I said, and that’s the line that got to her. Her face went pale as she turned to rush inside. Moments later the day nurse came out, a skinny woman with gray, close-cropped hair who stared at me as she went around me. As she headed for Northern Boulevard she kept sneaking peeks at me over her shoulder. She probably thought I was some kind of a stalker. If she did, she wasn’t too far off.

  I stood and stared at the Mahoney house. It wasn’t as if I expected Lynn to come running out and flying into my arms. I knew that wasn’t going to happen.

  I was remembering the last time I’d stood here, wishing Lynn would appear.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It was raining that day, a misty, almost greasy rain, the kind that comes late in November, when autumn hasn’t quite made the turn into winter and water isn’t quite ready to turn into ice. It was only around four o’clock in the afternoon but already darkness was falling.

  Lynn had been gone for three months and I’d avoided her street ever since she’d disappeared, but on my way home from school I had this wild idea that maybe, maybe she’d be there.

  She’d be there because it was my birthday, and all I wanted for my birthday was the return of my girlfriend.

  It was a stupid, foolish dream, and I knew it even as I was walking toward the Mahoney house. It was all about hope, I guess. Even false hope was better than no hope.

  The Mahoney yard was covered with big yellow leaves. The house was dark and looked almost abandoned, and then my heart soared at the sight of somebody moving at the end of the path. It fell just as fast when I recognized who it was. The Captain in his wheelchair, trying to roll himself up the ramp the city had built for him.

  I was transfixed by the sight of him. In those few months since his fall down the basement steps, he’d lost a shocking amount of weight. His shoulders looked bony within the folds of a windbreaker that seemed way too big for him.

  The rain had plastered his thick white hair to his skull, and his cold-reddened hands gripped the wheels of his chair. He was having a hell of a time of it. He rolled himself a few feet up the incline, groaned to a stop, and then rolled back down to where he’d started.

  It was a shock to see this man in such a weakened condition. He actually had to rest and catch his breath after that little bit of effort. It was like watching a man die, but actually it was even worse than that. It was like watching a man who wanted to die unable to follow through with it, being deprived of that final step that would have put an end to his humiliation.

  He must have heard me breathing. He turned his head to see me standing there stupidly in the rain. He squinted at me, and then his eyes widened in recognition before narrowing in suspicion.

  “You,” he said, and further words were barely necessary.

  I wanted to run from him but I couldn’t. I hated the man, but he needed me. He needed anybody, and there was only me on that rainy, rapidly darkening November afternoon.

  By this time the rain had penetrated my school jacket. I shivered, but not from the cold. I made my way toward the Captain and stood before him like a bill collector.

  He wouldn’t lift his chin to look at me. He kept his head level and rolled his eyes upward to regard me, like an angry altar boy.

  His legs seemed even skinnier than his arms, so skinny that the shoes on his feet looked enormous, a clown’s shoes propped up on his wheelchair stirrups. The handles of his wheelchair seemed to protrude straight from his shoulder blades, like a pair of horns.

  I cleared my throat. “Would you like a push, sir?”

  “What the hell are you doin’ here?”

  “I was just…passing by.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Would you like a push, sir, or not?”

  He thought about it for a long moment. “The wheels are wet,” he finally said. “Can’t get a good grip on them.”

  That was a lie. The truth was that he lacked the strength to haul himself up that ramp. The Captain, who’d carried innumerable people out of burning buildings, was too weak to hoist his own weight. He could never admit that to himself, much less to me.

  Now I saw that his hands gripped a brown paper bag, which was coming apart from the rain. He lifted the bag to his face and tilted it toward his mouth with a glugging sound. I smelled whiskey.

  It was easy to figure out what had happened. In his condition, the Captain was totally dependent upon his wife for everything. She saw this as a perfect way to eliminate his drinking—she brought him food and beverages, but no booze.

  Now she was out somewhere, and he’d taken it upon himself to roll his way to Little Neck Liquors. A perfect plan, except that he couldn’t make it back up the ramp.

  He still hadn’t answered my question.

  “Would you like a push, sir?”

  “Just get me up this fucking ramp, already.”

  I got behind the chair and rolled him up the ramp. “That’s enough,” he said when we reached the flat part. “I got it from here.”

  “Okay, sir.”

  I opted for the steps on the way down, and when I reached the path he called to me.

  “Hey, wait a minute, wait a minute.”

  I turned to face him. Now he could look down at me, just as he did in the old days. He stared at me in open contempt, as if he were trying to figure out a way to avoid thanking me for getting him up the ramp. Then something else occurred to him.

  “You don’t live this way. What the hell are you doin’ on my street?”

  His street. Jesus Christ.

  “Like I said, I was just passing by.”

  “Bullshit, boy.” He gulped whiskey for courage. I saw a shiver catch him and travel right from his feet to his face, as if he’d stepped on a live wire. He cleared his throat and hesitated before speaking.

  “Is she coming home? Is that why you’re here?”

  “I don’t know where she is, sir.”

  “If you did know, you wouldn’t tell me, would you?”

  “If I knew where she was, I’d be there with her.”

  “Guess she didn’t love you the way you loved her, eh?”

  He chuckled, the same cruel chuckle I remembered from the day he’d invited me to box, or all those times he’d break his son Brendan’s chops for being a delicate boy. Maybe that nasty chuckle was the only thing about this man that was as it had been before he took that header down the cellar steps.

  I climbed three of the five steps, so the Captain and I were eye to eye. His eyes were glassy from booze but he was still as dangerous as a cornered rat. I thought hard of something to say that would hurt him, and then it came to me.

  “Would you like me to open the door for you, sir?”

  “I can open the fucking door myself, thank you very much, guinea-boy.”

  “All right, then. It was good to see you, Captain Mahoney.”

  “I’m not a captain anymore, I’m just a retired cripple.”

  For an instant I almost felt sorry for him, but I got over it fast. “Well, enjoy your retirement,” I said, which is just another way of telling someone they don’t have long to go.

  I made my way back down the steps, deliberately smacking the soles of my shoes as I walked so the man could both see and hear this simple, precious action of which he was no longer capable.

 
; “Mickey!”

  He’d hardly ever called me by my name. I stopped and turned to face him. The tears on his face were mixed with rain, or maybe it was all rain, but either way the man was in hell. He swallowed and cleared his throat.

  “You really don’t know where she is, do you?”

  I shook my head.

  “She hasn’t been in touch with you?”

  “No.”

  He seemed to accept this as the truth. He turned his wheelchair toward the front door, dug into his windbreaker pocket for his key. I took his turn as a dismissal and continued walking, and then came the last words I ever would have expected from this man’s mouth.

  “If you hear from her, tell her…”

  I stood staring at him, waiting for the rest of the sentence.

  “Tell her to come home,” he said in a quaking voice. “Tell her all is forgiven.”

  I’m sure that in his whole life the Captain had never, ever offered forgiveness to anyone, for any reason. Now, reduced to a skeletal cripple, he was finding compassion in his heart, a willingness to forgive his daughter for running away from home.

  I cleared my throat before speaking. “Why’d she do it, sir?”

  His jaws clenched. He began the answer by shaking his head.

  “She’s a crazy, crazy kid,” the Captain said. “Not like my boys. My boys obeyed me. But that…girl…”

  That was as far as he got, and it was clear he regretted the few words he’d spoken. He shut his mouth and ducked his head. I opened my mouth to speak, but just like that he was inside the house, shutting the door behind him with a thunderous boom.

  At last I found my tongue.

  “It’s my birthday,” I called to the empty front porch, and then I went home, toweled off, and changed into dry clothes in preparation for a spaghetti and meatballs dinner, to be followed by a Carvel ice cream cake we’d be having to celebrate the eighteenth anniversary of my arrival into this lonely, fucked-up world.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  So now, I had a bargain with the great love of my life—don’t call me, I’ll call you. In other words, I’d been slapped with a restraining order.

  I dropped the news on my parents at the dinner table that night. My mother’s lips tightened but she said nothing. My father shrugged.

  “All right, so you wait a while,” he said. “It won’t kill you.”

  Suddenly my mother spoke up, as if to remind me of something she’d already told me.

  “Listen,” she said, “you’re singing at a birthday party tomorrow for Eileen Kavanagh’s grandson, who’s dying.”

  It was incredible. It sounded like some kind of sick joke, but I knew it wasn’t. She said it the way a mother tells a child to take out the trash. We’d picked up where we’d left off when I went away. I was the world’s oldest eighteen-year-old, just a kid being ordered to do something.

  And what a fucking order this was!

  “Mom. What are you talking about?”

  “It’s at three o’clock. You don’t have plans, do you?”

  “Plans? Apparently you’re the one making all the plans!”

  “Is it so much to ask,” she said in an aggrieved voice, “to sing a song or two for a doomed boy?”

  I literally gripped the sides of my head, as if to keep it from exploding.

  “You’re droppin’ it on him kinda sudden-like, Donna,” said my father.

  She put a hand to her chest. “What could I do? Eileen asked me! She was in tears! The boy wants to hear you sing! Was I supposed to say no?”

  “I can’t sing, Mom. I’m too traumatized to perform, ever since the sinking of the Barca D’Amore.”

  “Don’t be fresh!”

  “It would have been nice if you’d asked me, Mom.”

  “It would have been nice if you’d remembered that Eileen’s husband died, Michael.”

  Oh Christ. “I’m sorry, Mom. I can’t remember everybody who dies in Little Neck.”

  “I was mortified when Eileen told me you asked how her husband was. Mortified.”

  My father chuckled, patted my back approvingly. “You did that? That’s pretty funny.”

  “Oh, it’s just hilarious, Eddie.”

  “Don’t feel bad, Mick. That poor guy was dead years before they buried him.”

  I took my hands off my head. “What’s this kid supposedly dying from?”

  “Supposedly?”

  “I’m sorry. You’re right. Who would lie about a doomed child?” I cleared my throat to wipe the slate clean. “What’s he dying of?”

  “He’s got leukemia. He’s eleven.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Without a bone marrow transplant, he’ll die. And so far, they can’t find a match.”

  “And he wants to hear me sing.”

  “That’s right.”

  I gave it a second for everything to settle in. I proceeded with caution, but I did proceed.

  “If this kid’s eleven, Mom,” I said softly, “there’s no way in hell he ever even heard of me.”

  “Michael!”

  “It just doesn’t make sense! I’ve been off the radar for twenty years! Why would he want me to sing for him? No way I’m on his Make-A-Wish list!”

  “How can you sit there and make fun of a dying—”

  “I’m not making fun of a dying kid! I’m just wondering what the hell is actually going on here!”

  My mother held her hands up, palms out, and closed her eyes. “Michael, if it’s too much trouble for you to take ten minutes out of your busy schedule—”

  “How about this? How about if I have a test to see if my bone marrow is a match for his? Wouldn’t that do him a lot more good than a song from a singer he’s never even heard of?”

  She just looked at me, the way mothers look at sons who have no respect or pity for the pain they’ve endured to bring us forth into the world.

  “Okay, Mom, you win.” I sighed. “I’ll do it.”

  She pursed her lips and shook her head. “You certainly put me through the wringer first, didn’t you?”

  “I’m sorry. I just had to ask a few things.”

  “Nothing’s changed, Michael. You’re still full of questions.”

  “Questions are what separate us from the animals.” I turned to leave. “After this, please don’t volunteer me anymore.”

  With that, I went to my room and my father went outside to smoke, leaving my tearful mother to clean up the dinner mess.

  I hated working birthday parties. That was the lowest rung of my musical career, and I swore to myself that I’d done it for the last time at the thirteenth birthday of a Los Angeles kid named Eliott Weintraub, whose parents wanted to celebrate his bar mitzvah in grand style.

  This was a year or two before my Barca D’Amore gig. It was one of those parties where the parents basically stuff a cannon full of money and fire it at the sky. A sculptor was hired to carve a refrigerator-sized block of ice into a statue of The Terminator, Eliott’s favorite movie hero. There was a juggler, a fire-eater, and a magician. Three hundred guests wandered around the immaculately groomed grounds of Peter Weintraub, tax attorney extraordinaire to the rich and obscure.

  Dom Perignon flowed for the adults, Shirley Temples for the children. Buffet tables groaned with enough food to feed a third world country. High in the sky, a blimp drifted overhead, flashing an electronic message in red lights:

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ELIOTT. TODAY YOU ARE A MAN.

  The wildest touch of all was the peacocks—two dozen of them strutting around the grounds, preening and pecking and spreading their glorious tails. The peacocks were the idea of the tax man’s number one deduction—his wife, Eva Weintraub, who’d also thought to hire me. I sat at a huge white piano on a patio overlooking the grounds, tickling the ivories and singing for the crowd.

  The bar mitzvah boy, a chubby kid with an angry face, barely gave me a glance. Now and then I’d overhear a guest or two talking about the piano player, the “Isn’t-he-the-guy” kind of remark
s I was getting used to hearing.

  The best crack of the day came from a woman whose chocolate-dark tan was accentuated by the contrast of her freshly bleached teeth. It was as if Lena Horne had converted to Judaism.

  “I hear they tried to get Elton,” she said to a friend, “but he wouldn’t wear the yarmulke.”

  Elton would be Elton John, of course.

  Me, I gladly wore the yarmulke. The job was paying a thousand bucks, and I was so desperate that I probably would have worn a brown shirt if Eva Braun had been throwing this shindig instead of Eva Weintraub.

  I couldn’t help wondering how much money they’d offered to Elton. They probably saved enough on me to pay for the rest of the party.

  The bar mitzvah was not a total success. As evening fell The Terminator was melting into a hunchback, the kids were totally sugared out, and nobody, absolutely nobody was listening to the piano player.

  But the biggest problem was the peacocks. The birds were gorgeous to look at but they made an incredible mess. The Weintraub lawn was spattered with peacock droppings, big chalky globs of it all over the place. People were skidding on it, falling on the grass as if they were sliding into second base. One elderly aunt was taken away on a stretcher amid much hand-wringing. Eva Weintraub’s elegant idea had literally turned to shit. You see this a lot at Los Angeles parties. Rich people shoot for The Great Gatsby, and they wind up with Apocalypse Now.

  I’d been paid to play from two until six. At six P.M. Eva Weintraub, her eye makeup smeary from what could only have been a crying jag, handed me an envelope and thanked me for my time.

  All the kids seemed to have vanished—off to smoke dope someplace, probably. The adult guests were gathered down on the lawn, where silver-haired Peter Weintraub, his paunch reined back by a pair of green suspenders, was holding court. He got to the punch line of his story and his buddies erupted in laughter.

  “I don’t remember the last time he made me laugh,” said Eva. “I don’t remember the last time he really looked at me.”

  I looked at her. She was holding up all right for a woman in her early forties. She might have turned heads in the Midwest but in Los Angeles, she wasn’t even in the game. Hell, she wasn’t even on the bench.