Esposito led my father to the desk sergeant, a jowly man with bushy eyebrows who was writing something in a ledger. He didn’t even look up from his paperwork as he asked, “Another D and D?”
That’s cop-speak for Drunk and Disorderly. Esposito nodded. “Yeah, and this one assaulted me.”
At last the desk sergeant looked up at my father. “What’d he do?”
“Suspect was smoking a cigarette in a Starbucks. When asked to leave the premises, he refused, then flicked a cigarette at my chest.”
The bushy eyebrows steepled in surprise. “A cigarette? He was smoking a cigarette in a friggin’ Starbucks? That’s it?”
Esposito swallowed. “Well…he flicked it pretty hard at my chest.”
“Ooh, a cigarette butt, huh? Good thing you were wearin’ your vest, eh, Espo?”
Esposito blushed. A funny look came to the sergeant’s eyes. He was trying to look at my father’s face, but my father was hanging his head like a reluctant penitent.
“Hey. Look at me, buddy.”
My father sighed, obeyed. The sergeant studied his face.
“I know you, don’t I?”
“Don’t think so.”
“You sure about that?”
My father shrugged. “I don’t know any cops.”
“What do you do for a living?”
“Auto mechanic.”
It took a moment, and then it hit the sergeant. His face softened, then hardened as he turned to Esposito.
“Uncuff this man.”
“But—”
“Just do it, and get back out on patrol!”
Esposito did as he was told. My father brought his hands forward, rubbed his wrists. He looked in wonder at the desk sergeant.
“You work right over here on Bell Boulevard, right? Gandolfini’s Garage?”
“Yeah…”
The sergeant nodded. “You fixed the transmission on my Chevy, ’bout two years ago. Another guy said the whole thing was shot, two grand he wanted, but you did it for twenty-five. You found one little burned-out wire, and you replaced it for twenty-five bucks. Remember?”
My father shook his head. “I fix a lot o’ transmissions. Don’t remember yours.”
“Well, I remember, ’cause it’s the first time I didn’t get robbed by a mechanic. Hey, they had a nickname for you at the garage. What the hell was it?”
“Steady Eddie,” I said.
The sergeant seemed to notice me for the first time.
“He’s my dad,” I explained. “Steady Eddie DeFalco. Never missed a day’s work in his life.”
“Well, be proud of your father, because they don’t make ’em like this anymore.”
It was an oddly touching moment. For once, my father was the celebrity, and I was basking in his glow.
The desk sergeant shook hands with my father, then with me. “I’m sorry about this stupid mess. I’ll get someone to run you home.”
“We’ll walk,” my father said. “We need the air.”
“You take care, Steady Eddie.”
We left the police station and began the two-mile walk to Little Neck.
“You okay, Dad?”
He shrugged, rubbed his wrists. “Little sore. They cuff you pretty tight.”
I wanted to put my arm across his shoulders, but that’s not what I did. I was proud of him, sorry for him, sorry for myself, sorry for Lynn, sorry for the whole fucking world and its billions of inhabitants, bumping into each other and hurting each other and making an everlasting mess out of whatever gifts they had.
We were in the midst of a long, steep stretch of road between Bayside and Douglaston, a stretch with no traffic lights and no homes, just shuttered shops and weedy vacant lots. Hardly anybody ever walked this length of sidewalk. It was creepy in the moonlight.
“I gotta take a piss, Mick.”
“Me too.”
We had a back-to-back father-son piss in the weeds.
A car roared past, full of drunken kids who laughed and shouted obscenities at us. I finished pissing and quickly zipped up but my father calmly kept going, like a cherub in a Roman fountain.
“Mick.”
“Yeah, Dad?”
At last he finished, zipped up and turned to me. “Thanks.”
“Sure.”
“Let’s try not to wake your mother when we get home.”
“I’m all for that.”
We walked a mile or so in silence, passing a run-over raccoon in the middle of the street, his teeth bared in a final grimace of agony.
“It’s really a shame,” my father murmured.
“Driver probably never even saw him.”
“No, not the damn raccoon. You. You and Lynn.” His eyes brimmed with tears but his voice was steady.
“Nobody should lose the girl of his dreams twice, Mickey. Once is enough to kill you. It just ain’t fair.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Sunday morning breakfast. My mother always went to the seven o’clock mass and came home with a bag of bagels, a container of Philadelphia cream cheese, and the New York Post. You served yourself on Sunday morning. It was a good system for my father and me. It didn’t matter what time we staggered downstairs.
On this Sunday it was almost noon before I made it down. From the look of my father, he’d only gotten there a few minutes earlier. My mother was at the stove, making fresh coffee. She brought the pot to the table and poured cups for me and my old man.
“What happened to your wrists, Eddie?”
There were reddish rings around my father’s wrists, bruises where the handcuffs had been. He looked at them in false wonder.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.”
“I was workin’ on a foreign car. No goddamn room under the hood. Musta scratched ’em tryin’ to reach the fan belt.”
“Both wrists, all the way around.”
“Looks like.”
She knew she wasn’t going to get anything more out of him. He was a rock. He’d have made a great criminal. He wasn’t even nervous.
She gave up and turned to me. “And you. What happened to your eye?”
I wasn’t even going to try and bluff it. “Got into a little fight at the inn with Frankie McElhenny.”
“Oh my God.”
“It’s nothing. He just clipped me.”
“Why?”
“We were both drunk.”
“Why were you drunk?”
“Because Lynn dumped me.”
That froze her in place. She closed her eyes, shook her head.
“Easy, Mom.”
“She breaks your heart the first time. This time she almost gets you killed!”
“He didn’t almost get killed,” said my father, strengthened by the coffee. “For Christ’s sake, Donna, don’t turn everything into an opera.”
My mother almost sputtered with frustration. “I’m calling Frankie’s mother!” she blurted. “She should know what he did to our son!”
My father and I burst out laughing. We couldn’t help it. It was just so ridiculous.
“We’re grown men, Mom! What’s Mrs. McElhenny going to do, make Frankie stand in the corner?”
My mother wasn’t laughing. She’d had enough of us. She took the New York Post and tossed it on the table.
“I have to go to work,” she said calmly. “You guys just keep laughing. Meanwhile, take a look at page sixty-eight and see how funny you think that is. Put the cream cheese in the refrigerator when you’re finished.”
She left the house. My father grabbed the Post and flipped to page sixty-eight.
“Oh, boy, Mick….”
It was a half-page story with a publicity photo of me from back in the day, under a headline reading WHERE IS MICKEY DEFALCO?
It was one of those whatever-happened-to yarns, a story generated by the popularity of Don’t Push Me. As far as the writer of the article knew, I was last seen somewhere in Los Angeles.
My father tapped the page with contem
pt.
“Look at this. The guy says you ‘fell off the face of the earth.’ How can he write something like that? Just because he doesn’t know where you are, you fell off the face of the earth?”
“It’s just a dramatic touch.”
“Yeah? And where does he come off callin’ you a flash in the pan?”
“I was a flash in the pan, Dad.”
“Well, that’s more than he ever was.”
His shoulders sagged. He was still tired. He went upstairs to grab some more sleep.
The phone rang. I was going to ignore it, but on the zillion-to-one chance that it could have been Lynn, I grabbed it on the second ring.
It was Mrs. Kavanagh, calling to see if we’d seen the article in the Post. I assured her we had and hung up.
It rang again. This time it was Flynn, calling about the same thing.
“Jeez, you’re a star again, Mick!”
It rang a third time. I was going to ignore it but I just couldn’t.
“Is this my all-time favorite mouse-catcher?”
This wasn’t too surprising. Rosalind Pomer was the textbook starfucker. All it took was a surge of publicity, good or bad, to dampen her drawers.
“How are you, Roz?”
“Pissed that you never came back that night. Happy that your song is a hit again.”
“How’s your rodent problem?”
“I figured out what happened. That little mouse came in with the Chinese food. He sneaked in with the delivery!”
“I guess you’re suing the restaurant for damages, huh? Trauma and all that bullshit?”
“I thought about it, but you took the evidence away.”
“Sorry about that…. Did you like the story?”
“What story?”
“Come on, Roz. Today’s Post. You’re not calling me because of the story about me in the Post?”
“I’m a nice liberal Jewish girl. My family would disinherit me if they ever caught me reading the Post.”
“There’s an article about me in there.”
“Really?”
“I thought that’s why you were calling.”
“Listen, Mickey, come to town.”
“Now?”
“Yes, now. I’ve got a surprise for you. Been working on it for a while, and it came together suddenly…. Are you busy?”
“I’m the least busy man you’ll ever know.”
“Not for long. Come on, come to town. Don’t even think about it. Just do it.”
I hung up the phone and just did it.
She gasped at the sight of my eye.
“Little fight in a bar,” I explained.
“My God! You’re a brawler!”
“Why are you all dressed up?”
She was wearing black pants, a black top, a black leather jacket, and spike heels.
“We’re invited to a party.”
We?
“A party? You want to take me to a party?”
“I thought it might be a nice change of pace.”
“Your friends aren’t supposed to know about me.”
“These are my downtown friends. None of them know David.”
She had uptown friends, she had downtown friends. Me, I’d just lost the only friend I’d ever had.
I gestured at my clothes, a T-shirt and jeans that probably still reeked of the beery floor at the Little Neck Inn. I also needed a shave. “I’m not exactly dressed for a party, Roz.”
“That’s all right. It’s in SoHo. Lots of artsy-fartsy people.”
I followed her down to the street and got into a cab that took us on an eighteen-dollar ride to North Moore Street. All the way there she was going on and on about what a thrill it must be for me to have my song in a movie.
“I don’t get a nickel for that.”
She was shocked. “That’s ridiculous!”
“I signed away the song rights a long time ago.”
“I can look into that if you like. I am a lawyer, as you know. I’d like to expand into entertainment law.”
Here we go. No wonder she called me. It was almost a relief to know she was working an angle. It took away any guilt I might feel about bad behavior, past or future.
“Thanks anyway, Roz,” I said, “but a deal’s a deal.”
“Hey, are you okay, man?”
I took a deep breath, smelled a trace of Lynn on myself. “I’m just upset about the song,” I lied.
“Who wouldn’t be?”
It was horrible, absolutely horrible to be with the wrong person at a time like this, and I knew it. But the only thing worse was the thought of being alone. Or so I thought at the time.
So here I was in SoHo, going to a party with a woman I did not really like, much less love, and to make matters worse she was being affectionate, stroking my cheek with her blunt little hand as the cab reached North Moore Street. She took my hand, laced her fingers with mine, and even this tiny thing was wrong, all wrong. Her fingers were short and stubby. It was like holding five little cigars.
“Let’s just try and have a good time, okay, Mickey?”
A good time.
The loft was a converted factory space of some kind, with wooden beams high overhead and rough brick walls painted white. Music boomed from speakers in the corners, and dozens of white wine drinkers were shoulder to shoulder, eating pita bread sandwiches and raw vegetables off paper plates.
Rosalind introduced me to the hostess, a tall, spooky redhead named Marion. She had a pasty complexion and dark areas under her eyes, as if she hadn’t slept in days.
“You haven’t changed much,” Marion said, which is a funny thing to hear from someone you’re meeting for the first time. “I love, and I mean love your song.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s perfect in the film.”
“We haven’t seen the film yet,” Rosalind chirped, speaking incorrectly on my behalf. She had her arm around my waist and nervously gulped white wine from a plastic cup.
I stuck to what I’d been drinking the night before, Jack Daniel’s. Marion pulled my cup toward her face, took a whiff, and smiled.
“Ahh, you’re a whiskey man.”
“I never saw him drink whiskey until today,” Rosalind said.
“Hmmm,” said Marion, who peered into my eyes before turning and gliding away from us.
“Be nice to her,” Rosalind said. “Her boyfriend just left her. For another guy, would you believe.”
“Great time to throw a party.”
“It happened after the invitations went out. Hey, slow down, Mickey, that’s powerful stuff.”
“I know what I’m doing. What’s this surprise you have for me?”
“It’s coming, it’s coming….”
I broke her embrace and went to the bar for a refill. I could feel myself being watched. The word had obviously gotten around about the has-been singer in the shitty clothes.
Rosalind stayed right where I’d left her, having an animated conversation with a group of people. I worked my way through the crowd and sat down on a windowsill.
A slim black man with a shaved head and a pierced ear sashayed to my side and pointed out the window with a flamboyant finger.
“He lived right there, you know.”
“Who?”
“Kennedy. John-John Kennedy. That’s where he lived with his wife, right until the day they died.”
“Oh.”
“The paparazzi used to drive us crazy. That’s the only good thing, since the tragedy. No more damn paparazzi, night and day.”
“Uh-huh.”
“By the way, I’m Deron, from upstairs,” he said, extending his hand.
“Mickey, from Queens.”
“But not a queen, I take it?”
“Not yet, Deron, but I’m giving it some serious thought, the way my heterosexual life’s been going lately.”
He giggled. “I know who you are. Everybody knows who you are. We’ve got a bit of a surprise for you, a little later.”
&nbs
p; Because of the drinking I’d done the night before I was suddenly drunk, seriously drunk. Deron chirped on about his love for music while I continued to sip Mister Jack.
“So,” he said, “no new music from you?”
“Nah. I’m done with it.” I pointed to my wounded eye. “I’m a prizefighter now.”
“Get out! No offense, but aren’t you a little old for that?”
“I’m nearing the end of my career.”
“And then?”
“And then, Deron, I have no fucking idea, to be honest with you.”
Rosalind appeared and gave Deron a kiss on each cheek.
“I’m trying to steal him from you.” Deron giggled.
“Sorry, Deron, he doesn’t play for your team.”
“Not yet, he doesn’t.” He winked at me, put a hand to his lean throat and slinked away.
Rosalind stared into my eyes. “You’re drunk.”
“Extremely.”
“Let’s get some food into you.”
She dragged me to the pita bread and the raw vegetables, not exactly the stuff you crave to fight off alcohol. I grabbed a few pieces of pita and shoved them into my mouth, chewing like a dog.
“Mickey. You’re embarrassing me.” She pulled a bit of stray pita from my mouth. “Come on, man, don’t be like this!”
I finished chewing and swallowing. “I’m not some fucking show pony.”
“Excuse me?”
“My song pops up in a movie, and all of a sudden you want to trot me around?”
Rosalind wanted to say something but suddenly the music stopped and Deron was standing on a chair in the middle of the loft, calling for everybody’s attention. He spotted me and pointed my way.
“We have with us today the one and only Mickey DeFalco,” he announced. “Mickey, we’re pleased to have you here as we proudly present TFN—Three Fat Niggahs!”
Three young, enormously overweight black men in shiny black warm-up suits suddenly appeared and climbed onto a makeshift platform, waddling from side to side in a menacing shuffle. They wore unlaced sneakers, gold chains, and backwards baseball caps. Suddenly rap music was bellowing from giant speakers, rap music with a familiar beat.
It was my song. It was “Sweet Days,” gone gangsta.
Amazingly it worked, in a weird way. The lyrics had always been deceptively angry and these guys conveyed it masterfully, with a lot of finger-pointing and groin-grabbing. The crowd clapped in time with the thudding percussion, and when it was over, the loft exploded in applause. The biggest, fattest member of TFN came to the front of the platform and scanned the room.
One Hit Wonder Page 25
