“What do you mean, you can’t have kids?”
“Something happened to me. I can’t get pregnant.”
It didn’t immediately register. Something happened? What did that mean? An accident? An infection? A pregnancy that went wrong and destroyed the reproductive structures? As with most males the female anatomy was a mystery to me, but somewhere in my head I heard the sound of a vault door slamming shut forever.
It wasn’t that I was child-crazy. I had no particular feeling about kids either way, but I had feelings about Lynn, and the concept that Lynn would end with Lynn hit me harder than I ever could have imagined.
“Since I was twenty-one,” she added in response to the question I hadn’t yet asked.
Now my eyes went wet, and why was that? A million reasons, maybe, but most likely over the death of a dream I never even realized I’d been carrying. You don’t just want the woman when you’re crazy in love. You want the whole thing, and all the possibilities that come with it.
“I’m sorry,” I finally said.
She chuckled. “Sorry for me, or for you?”
“Just…sorry.”
“Well, Mick, it you were planning on future generations of DeFalcos, they won’t be happening through me.”
I felt myself shiver. She pulled the sheets up around herself in sudden modesty, Eve tasting shame for the first time.
“I guess you feel differently now, huh, Mick?”
I shook my head. “I’m just sad, Lynn.”
“Well, be sad somewhere else. This house has had enough sadness to last five centuries.” Tears ran down her cheeks. She pointed at the door. “Just go, Mickey. I’m so sorry I disappointed you. Please, please go.”
I dressed and left without saying another word. Dead men can’t talk, and I was a dead man.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
No death is as painful as the death of a dream, and suddenly I realized just how elaborate my dream of the way it was going to be with Lynn Mahoney had been. A lifetime’s worth of wishing and wondering, blown away like a feather in a hurricane.
Ever since she’d run away, teams of night laborers had been toiling away in my dreams to build a castle in the air, the castle I would one day gallop toward aboard my white horse with Lynn seated behind me, her arms tight around my waist.
It was a nice castle. I didn’t know it was there until it was gone, and that went for the muscular steed that evaporated between my legs, and those arms around my waist that suddenly lost their grip….
I was standing on the sidewalk outside Lynn’s house. No, I was in the middle of the street, and a car was honking to get me out of the way.
How had I gotten out here? Had I walked down the stairs of the Mahoney house, opened a door? I must have, but I had no memory of it. I moved to the sidewalk, staring in wonder at the sullen, goateed kid behind the wheel of the car, who flipped me the bird before roaring away.
“Asshole!”
The crickets were loud, and it almost sounded as if they were scolding me as I began walking home.
Home? Did I say I was walking home? Bad plan. Very bad. Back home I could only disappoint my parents with tales of how horribly wrong things had gone, and my mother would want to help me, somehow, but you can’t have a funeral service for the death of a dream, can you?
No, you can’t. What you can do, though, is head to the Little Neck Inn, where the elite are known to meet on Saturday nights.
I shouldered my way to the bar, hoping my father would be there. Maybe I could talk to him about what had just happened, but Sully shook his head when I asked if Steady Eddie was around.
“Here and gone. Came in with a bit of an attitude tonight and left when I wouldn’t let him smoke.”
“What was he upset about?”
“Tell you the truth, son, he wasn’t in a chatty mood, though he did mumble a few choice phrases about slow horses on his fifth or sixth lager. Are you drinkin’ tonight? Because if you’re not, you’re takin’ up a prime piece o’ real estate.”
I slapped the bar. “Beer and a shot, my good man.”
“We call that a boilermaker around here.”
“All right, a boilermaker.”
He hesitated before putting a longneck on the bar, then filling a shot glass.
“That’s eight bucks.”
“And well worth it.” I threw a twenty on the bar, downed the whiskey, and chased it with a swallow of beer. Sully made change and slapped the bills down hard to get my attention.
“Let’s take it easy, now, Mick.”
I pressed my hands to my chest. “Am I causing a problem?”
“You’ve got a look in your eye. I know that look. Nine times out of ten it leads to broken furniture.”
“Sully. I just want to get drunk.”
Sully sighed. “All right, all right. Here’s a speech I’ve made a million times, so once more won’t hurt.”
He leaned over the mahogany, the bar halving his balloon belly. “Whoever she is, she’s not worth it. You’re better off without her. No matter what you do, you’ll never make her happy. Nobody knows how to please them, especially us. Now drink up, go home, and pull your pud.”
“I will. But first, another shot, please.”
“Comin’ up.”
Sully poured with a deft hand. The world was starting to lose its hard edges. I downed the second shot, chased it with a swallow of beer, motioned for a third shot. Sully poured it and set a fresh longneck on the bar.
“You ain’t drivin’, are you, Junior?”
“I haven’t owned a car in years. And lay off the Junior stuff.”
“Sorry. Merely my awkward attempt to indicate how youthful a person you appear to be, despite your advanced years.” He went to the other end of the bar, and just then a heavy arm fell across my shoulders.
“Hey, pal!”
It was my old back-pounding classmate Frankie McElhenny, redolent of sweat and garbage. I actually put my arm around him and pulled him close, like a long-lost friend.
“Frankie! Good to see you!”
I meant it. I was starved for a distraction, any distraction. Frankie seemed puzzled, almost startled.
“Really?”
“Absolutely. Let me buy you a drink.” I stood on the rungs of my bar stool, like a man on horseback standing in the stirrups. “Sully! The usual for my good friend!”
Sully brought Frankie a dripping mug of draft beer, the cheapest drink they sold. “The rungs of that stool ain’t what they used to be, Mickey. Kindly be seated.”
I obeyed. Then I clinked my bottle against Frankie’s mug, he settled down on the stool beside me, and we were on our way.
It’s hard to remember what Frankie was talking about after he first sat down, but I do remember that the word “suck” came up a lot. His boss sucked, the people whose garbage he hauled sucked, his ex-girlfriends sucked…. Every swallow of beer seemed to raise another one of his enemies above the tree line. I put another twenty on my money pile and wouldn’t let Frankie pay for a drink. He had no problem with that.
Suddenly he whacked my shoulder, nearly knocking me off my stool.
“Hey. You ain’t gonna believe what I heard. Know that song you wrote? I hear it’s in some new movie.”
“I know.”
Frankie’s eyes narrowed. “You know?”
“I saw the movie.”
“I heard it sucks.”
“That’s not true. It’s a pretty good movie.”
His nostrils widened. “All of a sudden you’re the big movie critic, huh?”
For the first time, I sensed that there could be trouble, the kind of trouble Sully’s antennae had picked up the moment I’d entered the bar.
“All I’m saying is, it’s not bad.”
I could hear his breathing, almost a growling sound, like a guard dog slowly getting angry. “You always thought you were better than everybody else. You and your shitty little song.”
The world was whirling. I was in no shape for a
fight. But I was also angry enough not to care about whatever happened next.
Stupidly, defiantly, suicidally, I got to my feet.
“I’m not better than everybody else, man.” I poked his chest. “But let’s face it. If I hadn’t lifted my elbow to show you the answers, you’d still be in eighth grade.”
It took a while to get to Frankie, as if my words were being delivered by a carrier pigeon fighting a hard wind. But the bird got there at last, and the flame burned hot in Frankie’s eyes as he lunged for me.
His fist found my left eye, luckily for me a glancing blow, or he would have caved my skull in. I countered with a shot to his chin, and then he wrapped his arms around me and the two of us crashed to the floor.
He was a lot stronger than me, and all the rage of his wretched life went into a bear hug that crushed my rib cage. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t break his embrace. The world was going dark when suddenly he let out a cry and his grip went loose. I saw Sully, billy club in hand, drag him to his feet and set his ass down on a bar stool, so that Frankie looked like nothing more than a passed-out drunk.
Then Sully pulled me to my feet with astonishing strength. He was still gripping the club. I thought he was going to clock me one, but I was wrong. He put his lips to my ear to deliver the message, urgent and angry.
“Get your ass over to Starbucks, Junior. I’m hearin’ that your old man’s got himself into a bad situation.”
I was still woozy. “Starbucks?”
He pushed me through the crowd and out the door. “Just get goin’, man, get goin’!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The walk and the air helped sober me up, and the sight of my father in the front window of Starbucks hit me like a pail of ice water. He sat alone at a small round table in the middle of the place, leaning back, legs crossed. He seemed to be in a trance as he lifted a cup of coffee for a sip, which he followed with a drag from a Camel. It was a long drag, a get-the-smoke-all-the-way-down-to-your-ankles drag, and he held the smoke for a good five seconds before slowly letting it go in a long, puffy plume.
I went inside. The other customers were huddled by the cash register, clutching their cappuccinos and their laptops and staring in disbelief at that atrocity in their midst—an indoor smoker!
A frantic kid in a green apron and a Starbucks baseball cap came up to me and said, “Do you know this man?”
“He’s my father.”
“We can’t get him to stop smoking. He’s on his third cigarette! The manager wants to call the cops.”
“The cops?”
“Please, just get him out of here.”
I crossed the highly polished floor and sat in a chair across from my father, directly in the line of his smoke stream.
“Dad? Dad!”
He blinked his way out of a daydream and looked at me. A smile lit up his stubbly face, then a frown.
“Hey, Mick, what happened to your eye?”
“Little fight at the inn.”
“Yeah? Hope you got in a good punch or two.”
I could tell from the glaze over his eyes that he’d downed at least half a dozen beers. He was speaking softly, though. This was an unusual thing about my father. He was blustery when sober, quiet when drunk.
His eyes drifted as he took another drag. I patted his hand to get his attention. My own buzz was fading fast, in the midst of this crazy crisis.
“What are you doing here, Dad?”
He sighed. “Oh…guess I just wanted to see what a two-dollar cup o’ coffee tasted like.” He leaned forward, looked left and right before adding, “It’s nothin’ special, I can tell you that much. Your mother’s instant is as good as this stuff. Guess what they’re sellin’ here is…” He hesitated, sought the right word…
“Ambience.”
He chuckled, sat back, took a last drag from his Camel, dropped it on the floor, and squashed it under his toe, where he’d mashed two other butts on the otherwise immaculate floor.
He shook another cigarette into his mouth and lit up.
“Dad. What do you say we get out of here?”
“In a minute. I still ain’t finished my two-dollar coffee.”
“You can’t smoke in here, Dad. You’re upsetting these people.”
He arched his eyebrows in mock surprise. “They’re really upset?”
“Yeah.”
“Fuck ’em.”
“Dad—”
“Look at this.” He pulled a ticket from his pocket. It was from the local off-track betting parlor. “See this? This is a trifecta bet. Know what a trifecta is, Mick?”
I knew. “You have to pick the first three horses in a row.”
“In a row, that’s right. Look at this ticket.”
He handed it to me. I saw that he’d placed a twenty-dollar bet on the L, M, and N horses, in that order.
He cleared his throat. “As you can see, I played L, M, N. Wanna know what the winning combo was? L, N, M. The M horse got nosed out by the N horse. Nosed out! I’da had it, Mick. Woulda paid six grand for my twenty. Six thousand bucks. My fucking luck.”
Six grand. Just about the same amount Lynn and I had given away.
My father suddenly jabbed a finger toward the floor.
“Know what used to be here? Right here, on this spot? Julius Bernstein’s candy store. You old enough to remember him? Fat Jewish guy, always had a big cigar jammed in his mouth?”
“I remember.”
“Nice guy. He had a soda fountain. Stools that swiveled.” He twirled his finger in midair. “You could sit there and swivel and read the paper and drink an egg cream and have a cigarette, without anybody botherin’ you. And now…”
He couldn’t finish the thought. He waved his hand around the place to indicate the pompous prints on the walls, the ridiculous coffee bean displays, the dribble of toothless jazz from unseen speakers.
“I just wanted to sit where I used to sit and smoke where I used to smoke.”
“Let’s go home, Dad.”
“Yeah, yeah. Soon’s I finish this butt.”
A red strobe light cut across the Starbucks walls. A cop car had pulled up in front of the place. The asshole manager had actually called the cops. My father’s smoking was now a police matter. Somewhere else in Queens some old lady was being clubbed over the head for her handbag, but she’d have to wait her turn as New York’s Finest dealt with this emergency—a deranged nicotine junkie.
“Dad. The police are here.”
He didn’t seem to hear me. “I’da bought something nice for your mother with that money, Mick. I’da shared it with you, too, so you could do somethin’ nice with Lynn.”
“Lynn and I are all through, Dad.”
Those words got to him, pierced his buzz. I could see it in his suddenly focused eyes.
“You had a fight?”
“I don’t know what we had, but this thing isn’t going to work. We both know it.”
His shoulders sagged. Just like that, he was sober, or damn close to it. “Aww, Mick. It happened to you all over again. Goddamn.”
A big-bellied cop strolled in, followed by a skinny cop and a weedy little guy who turned out to be the manager, the knucklehead who’d called the police. Both cops were young. Their name tags read ESPOSITO and DENINNO. The big one, Esposito, seemed amused by the whole thing. He pushed the bill of his hat up a notch with a forefinger, just like cops in the movies do when they find themselves in an absurd situation. He seemed confident that he could Hey Pal his way out of this one.
“Hey pal, whaddaya say you put out that cigarette, okay?”
My father looked at the cop. “I’m not your pal.”
The cop turned to me. “He with you?”
“He’s my father. He’s having a rough night.”
“Get him outta here.”
“I’m trying, Officer.” I got to my feet. “Dad, please, let’s go.”
My father remained seated, slumped back even deeper in his chair. He took a drag from his butt a
nd blew a stream of smoke straight at the cop’s bulging belly.
“Don’t you guys have real criminals to chase?”
Jesus Christ. Esposito, no longer amused, pulled his cap down snug. “That’s it. Get up.”
My father obeyed, rising slowly to his feet. I felt a flood of relief. He knew he’d taken it as far as he could, and wisely chose to pull his horns in, except he took one last drag from his beloved Camel, exhaled through his nostrils like an enraged bull, and flicked the butt as hard as he could at the cop’s chest.
Sparks flew. Esposito grabbed my father and pushed him face up against the wall, where DeNinno cuffed his hands behind his back.
It happened as fast as a snake bite. Through it all was my father’s laughter, which continued even as they frog-marched him to the police car and threw him into the backseat.
I begged them to let me ride with them to the 111th Precinct, and they gave in. I sat next to my father and pondered the possible charges. Endangering the lungs of others? Assault with a deadly cigarette butt?
As the car pulled away I looked back at Starbucks. The geeks were back at their tables, and the kid in the green apron was sweeping up the butts and the ashes with the world’s faggiest little broom-and-shovel set.
Esposito drove, while DeNinno got on the police radio to let headquarters know they were bringing in a suspect. We roared down Northern Boulevard. For a moment I thought they were going to turn on the siren.
The cops didn’t even look at us. We got nothing but the backs of their necks.
My father’s handcuffs clinked as he leaned forward.
“Hey, fellows. Either of you guys got a cigarette?”
My father’s demeanor had changed by the time we reached the 111th Precinct in Bayside. He knew he was in trouble, knew he’d be taking all kinds of hell from my mother over this ridiculous situation and the court appearance he’d have to make. He hung his head as we were guided into the station.
“I fucked up, Mick.”
“Don’t worry about it, Dad.”
The place was a zoo. Shouts of outrage from the nearby holding pen echoed off the tiled walls. It was a Saturday night roundup, drunks and junkies and wife-beaters tossed in there to cool off.
One Hit Wonder Page 24
