Читать книгу One Hit Wonder - Charlie Carillo - Страница 11

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.

I had talent but no discipline, according to Mrs. Molloy, who said she could tell I never practiced between piano lessons. As a matter of fact she was right, but on this particular afternoon I did voluntarily put my ass on the piano bench and pick out the tickly tune that was buzzing around in my head.

“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?”

“I want him to have sense.”

“If he grows up afraid, he won’t have a chance!”

“If he gets killed he won’t have a chance!”

“I didn’t get killed,” I offered, but I don’t think either of them heard me. I was off the radar for a few minutes while they went at each other, and even as they fought, my mother guided me by my shoulders to my place at the kitchen table, where a plate of food awaited me. A clear glass lid covering the chicken croquettes and mashed potatoes was beaded with condensation from the steam that had risen off the food, two hours earlier. See how long you were missing? Long enough for steam to turn into water!

I dug into the food, hungrier than I’d ever been.

“I can reheat it if it’s cold.”

“It’s fine, Mom.”

When I finally looked up from my plate the two of them were seated there, staring at me, waiting to be told.

“I was in Manhattan.”

My mother’s hand went to her throat. Manhattan to her meant sex, narcotics, minorities, crime, and rudeness. “Why were you there?”

“It’s where Ronald Robinski lives. I went to his house to play my song for his father. He’s in the music business.”

My father’s eyes widened as my mother’s narrowed.

“That little song you were playing yesterday?”

“Yeah, Mom, that little song.”

“What are you saying, here? You auditioned?”

“I don’t know what I did, Mom. I played the song on the school piano and Ronald thought it was pretty good, so I went home with him and played it for his father.”

“Where do they live?”

“The Dakota.”

She turned to my father. “That’s where that Beatle got shot.”

“I know that, Donna, I read the papers.”

“You make fun of me for worrying, and meanwhile he’s at the exact spot where bullets were flying!”

“Seven years ago,” I said. “They’ve stopped flying, Mom.”

“Hey.” My father slapped the back of my head. “Watch how you talk to your mother.”

“For Christ’s sake, it’s safe there now! They’ve got security guards all over the place!”

My mother covered her face with her hands. “He talks to me this way all the time,” she said through the forest of her fingers. “Constantly. Never misses a chance to be fresh.”

“Fresh?”

“You heard me—”

My father’s fist came down hard on the table, making my plate jump. It put us into a shocked silence, and then he was almost whispering when he spoke.

“Did he like the song, Mick?”

His face was bright with wonder at the idea of his son coming up with a song that maybe, just maybe, would be made into a record.

I shrugged, still tingling from the impact of his fist on the table. “He said he’d call me.”

“That’s not a good sign,” my mother said.

“No? Jeez, Ronald thought it was.”

My mother held strong and smug, with the patient grin of one who’s been there before. “I used to audition,” she said calmly. “When they want you, they tell you on the spot.”

“Donna, why do you have to discourage him?”

“I’m not. I’m just speaking from experience. It’s a rough business.”

“Every business is a rough business.”

“This one’s rougher than most.” She stroked my hair. “We’ll see what happens.”

“Yes, we will, Mom.”

It was a funny moment. In a way my mother was trying to cushion the blow for the almost certain failure I was facing. But I suspected that in another way, she was hoping I’d fall on my face.

They were staring at me in a new way, as if I were a stranger who’d been dropped into their lives. All these years I’d been an average student and a marginal athlete, a devoted son and garbage-taker-outer, nothing special, nothing terrible, just another tart-tongued teenager growing up on the edge of Queens.

At the same time, I was their only begotten son, their only child. No siblings to pick up the slack, or distract them from me. Embarrassment or pride: It was all riding on my shoulders, and until now the future had seemed foggy, at best. I’d be lucky to get into a state university where the tuition wasn’t ruinous to study to become…what?

That was the big question for me and just about every other kid in the neighborhood. A lawyer? Slim chance. A doctor? No chance at all, with my dismal grades in math and science. Some kind of civil service job was looking more and more likely….

Or maybe I could write songs for a living. What would that be like? I couldn’t help getting giddy about it, giggling like a child….

“What’s so funny?”

“Nothing, Mom.”

“You must be laughing about something.”

“I’m just a little excited. I mean, it’s only hitting me now, everything that happened.”

“Delayed reaction,” my father said.

My mother hesitated. “So tell me about their apartment.”

She would never admit it, but despite her fears she’d wondered all her life about what it would be like to live in the big town.

“Amazing place,” I said. “Huge windows looking out over Central Park.”

“Noisy?”

“Seemed pretty quiet to me. You hear the traffic sounds, but they’re pretty faint from the sixth floor.”

She was fascinated, and at the same time she needed to find a way to be better than the Robinskis. At last it came to her.

“Did you eat anything while you were there?”

“No.”

“Drink?”

“Mom, I played my song twice and I left.”

A dark gleam came to her eyes. “See that? These Manhattan big shots don’t even offer you a glass of water. No class.”

She turned to my father in triumph before going upstairs to take a bath. My father lit up a Camel, considerately blowing the smoke toward the ceiling.

“Play me the whole song,” he said when I finished eating.

So I did. The song was two days old, but I felt as if I’d been playing “Sweet Days” for years, and when I finished he was smiling.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. “It’s about Lynn, isn’t it?”

I felt myself redden. “Yeah, I guess so. Hadn’t really thought about it.”

“Not much you didn’t.”

He knew I was lying, right through the teeth he’d paid so many thousands of dollars to have straightened.