Читать книгу One Hit Wonder - Charlie Carillo - Страница 13

Lynn Mahoney went to an all-girl Catholic school not far from the all-boy Catholic school I attended. She lived three blocks from us with her parents and her four brothers. You should have seen the groceries that went into that house. One entire shelf in the refrigerator contained nothing but milk, carton after carton of it. Whole milk, none of that sissy skimmed stuff. They drained it every day.

Lynn’s father was a legend in the New York City Fire Department, known far and wide as the Burning Angel. This was because of a famous photograph taken of him as a young firefighter, running from a blazing slum one cold night with a small child in his arms. His shoulders were literally on fire. The flames looked like wings. He set the child down and rolled on the snowy ground to douse the flames, but not before the picture was taken. The photographer won a Pulitzer Prize, and Walter Mahoney’s fearlessness was immortalized.

All of his sons were either firemen or on the way to becoming firemen. They were always in training for the grueling physical exam, running miles and lifting weights. Their mother was a pretty woman, nervous as a bird, and it was hard to believe that all those large boys had actually come out of her. She was constantly going down the cellar steps with baskets of sweat-soaked laundry and staggering back up with clean clothes. Every time you went to their house you heard the washing machine thumping away downstairs. The woman never got a break.

Mrs. Mahoney liked me all right, but her husband hated my guts. I think it started when he asked me if I was going to take the fire department test, and I told him I didn’t want to be a fireman.

“What are you gonna be, then?”

“I’m not sure yet, sir.”

“You might like being a fireman.”

“I don’t even like barbecues, sir.”

I was only trying to kid my way out of it, but he thought I was being a wise guy, and it wasn’t smart to piss off the Captain. He stood about six-five and must have weighed two-fifty, give or take, and every pound of it as solid as a fire hydrant. He had a pink complexion that went red like rare roast beef when he got mad, and when he frowned down at you it really did feel as if you’d incurred the wrath of God Almighty himself.

He loved competition, any kind of competition in which he could pit his sons against each other, the oldest and the youngest versus the two middle ones in football games, tag-team wrestling…. The grass in that yard never had much of a chance to grow with them tearing it up all the time.

Then there were boxing matches, with the Captain standing on the sidelines barking commands or insults as his sons swung at each other with pillow-sized gloves. The Captain and his three oldest boys were in the middle of a boxing competition one Saturday afternoon when I came up the path to take Lynn to the movies.

“Hey, Mick, you box?”

I’d been waiting for something like this. Before I could say a word he tossed a pair of gloves at me. I caught them against my chest. His sons stood staring at me, breathing as hard as horses.

“Put ’em on,” said the Captain, who pulled the gloves off his oldest son’s hands and began putting them on his own.

“Actually, I’m taking Lynn to the movies.”

“So you’ll miss the coming attractions. Let’s go.”

There was no getting out of it. I pulled on the gloves, which had no laces and went on like big mittens. I actually felt the whole thing was a little silly, until I looked at the Captain’s face. He’d been waiting a long time for this, and there was no compassion in his manic grin.

Gloves up, chins back, we squared off against each other, waltzing around in a circle bordered by his sons’ widespread legs. He threw a short jab, which I blocked. He chuckled.

“Hey, not bad. Eddie teach you that?”

“No.”

“Eddie never taught you to box?”

“No, sir.”

“I mighta known. Italians prefer guns, eh?”

“If you say so, sir.”

“Also, they believe in surrendering. World War Two. They were great at wavin’ that white flag in Dubya-Dubya Two!”

On “two” he let it fly, and I never saw it coming. It caught me on the chin and I went straight back, flopping on the grass like a kid making a snow angel on a winter morning. I don’t know how long I was out but I heard Lynn scream in the midst of my swoon, and when I opened my eyes she’d already pulled off my gloves and placed one under my head to make a pillow. She knelt beside me, stroking my forehead as the Captain regarded me from a standing position, his nostrils wide from exertion.

“You dropped your left, Mick,” he said evenly. “Never, ever drop your left.”

“I’ll remember that, sir.”

Lynn gazed up at her father, her throat choked with words she couldn’t quite release. So he helped her.

“Go on, say it,” he invited.

She spoke plainly and calmly, like a doctor giving a diagnosis.

“You’re a bully, Dad. You hit him on purpose because you’re a bully.”

The boys stepped back, as if to give their father room for whatever the hell he was going to do, but there was no need. The guy had taken it right in the heart-lung region. After a long moment he shook his head as if to get rid of a dizzy spell, and pointed a still-gloved hand at me.

“I taught him a valuable lesson in self-defense, is what I did.”

“No, you didn’t, Dad. You’re cruel. It’s just the way you are. Maybe you were born that way.”

This was even worse than what she’d already said. He was not to blame for his dreadful behavior. It was the result of a birth defect. He was a deformed soul.

All he could do was stand there and take it, suddenly looking silly and cartoonish with his heaving chest and those big gloves on his hands.

Lynn turned to me, so she missed the malevolent gleam in her father’s eyes as well as her brothers’ horrified faces. Had any of them said such a thing, Jesus Christ, they’d have been decapitated….

“You okay, Mickey?”

“I’m fine.” I pushed myself up to a sitting position. “Let’s go to the movies.”

“Are you up for it?”

“Sure.”

I got to my feet, dusted myself off. I grabbed the Captain’s gloved right hand with both of my bare hands and pumped it in farewell.

“Thanks for the boxing lesson, sir.”

“Get the hell out of here.”

We got out of there, holding hands all the way to the Little Neck Theater.

“Jesus, Lynn, I can’t believe you said that to him.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Still, the fact that you said it!”

“He’s a cruel man, period. Do you think he really wanted to teach you how to box?”

“I know now never to drop my left.”

“Don’t stick up for him!”

“I’m not! I just want to believe…I don’t know…he’s got to have some good qualities.”

“Oh, he knows what to do when a building’s on fire. That he’s good at. But once the fire’s out, he’s a menace to all living things.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“He doesn’t like me either, which is fine. Most of the time we can stay out of each other’s way.”

“What about your mother?”

“She’s numb to it. The only hope she has is to outlive the bastard. I hope to God she does that. She’s entitled to a few peaceful years, my mom.”

She shut her eyes, slid an arm around my waist. “Oh, God…Will you come with me to Italy?”

“Sure, baby.”

“I’m serious. We’re both saving money. I want to make this trip before we’re ancient.”

“We will, we will.”

“Promise?”

“I promise. Some day…”

It was about to get even worse between the Captain and me. He’d always loved cracking Italian jokes and I’d always let them slide, but no more. By the time we got back from the movies he’d showered and had a few beers, and was all ready to pick up where we’d left off.

“No hard feelings, Mick?”

“No, sir.”

“Good, good. Hey, I got a good one for you. Haddaya know when an Italian wedding is over? They flush the punch bowl!”

He roared with laughter, then put a hand over his mouth. “Whoops! Sorry, Mickey. No offense, huh?”

I was ready for it with a knockout punch of my own.

“That’s all right, Captain Mahoney,” I replied. “Being half-Irish I’m actually too dumb to get the joke, anyway.”

His eyes went pig-small in his squinty face, and from that day on I waited out on the sidewalk for Lynn to meet me.

“I don’t want that half-breed in my house anymore,” he supposedly said to his wife. (That’s what it was like out on the edge of Queens. Irish people were white, Italians were black. And if you happened to be both, you were always just a suntan away from trouble.)

But old man Mahoney couldn’t stop Lynn from going out with me. We were teenagers in love, looking to laugh any way we could.

“Why don’t you become a fireman?” she teased me.

“Why don’t you become a fireman?” I countered.

She shook her head. “Not enough money.”

“You want money?”

“Oh, yeah. Tons of it.”

“How’re you gonna get it?”

“I plan on marrying it.”

“Whoa. Guess I’d better succeed at something, huh?”

“I would if I were you.”

“How much money do you want?”

She thought about it. “Enough to fill a wheelbarrow.”

“Singles?”

“No. Hundreds, minimum. A wheelbarrow full of hundreds’d do me.”

I pulled a five-dollar bill from my pocket. “This is all I’ve got.”

“All right, then.” She took my hand, laced fingers and pulled me to her side. “What the hell, it’d be annoying, pushing that wheelbarrow everywhere. Take me to the movies, big shot.”

Kissing and groping was as far as it ever went between Michael Anthony DeFalco and Lynn Ann Mahoney. We’d come close once to going all the way, but something happened to interrupt us….

I didn’t despair, though. I always felt there was an inevitability to our being together, someday, somehow. It was a rock, this inevitability, a rock that wasn’t about to be washed away in a roaring rush of hormones.

We had time for everything, is what I’m trying to say, except that time ran out on us very suddenly one August day at Jones Beach.

I really must have loved her, because to make bucks in the summertime I was pushing a lawn mower all week long in the broiling sun, and the last thing I needed on the weekend was a day at the beach. But Lynn was cooped up all week punching that supermarket cash register, and she was starved for the sun.

So we went. We’d take the bus to the beach and spend the whole day swimming, lying around, and eating hot dogs.

It was always a good time, until the last time we did it. She was edgy and cranky. I wondered if she might be getting her period. I wondered if she might have met another guy. I didn’t dare ask about either thing.

“We’ve got to even out that tan of yours, Mickey!”

“What do you mean?”

“Look at you! Brown from the elbows out, white from the neck down! It’s a workingman’s tan!”

I shrugged. “I’m a workingman. What am I supposed to do about it?”

“I don’t know.”

I knew her as well as I knew myself, maybe better. She wasn’t upset about my tan. Something else was bothering her.

“Hey, baby, what’s wrong?”

She shook her head, poked my upper lip with her finger. It was something she did a lot. I have a chubby upper lip that sticks out, even now. It’s strictly a structural thing, but it makes me look as if I’m always walking around with an attitude. Lynn was always trying to push it back, so it would look like a “normal” lip.

“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 Mahoney 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.