Читать книгу One Hit Wonder - Charlie Carillo - Страница 9

The woman sitting beside me on the red-eye recognized me. She had the window seat and I was on the aisle, trying to sleep, but I never could sleep on planes, not even in those long-gone days when I flew first class.

She was just the right age for someone that might know who I was, a slightly overweight thirty-something woman with crinkly brown hair and deep dark eyes, obviously a serious professional of some kind. She stared at me half convinced that it was me, and half afraid of making a fool of herself by asking.

This is what being a has-been celebrity is like—you get stared at, wide-eyed and then narrow-eyed. They wonder if you could be who they’re thinking you could be. They wonder if you might have died. They look at you as if you’re a ghost.

Then they hesitate, debating with themselves over whether it’s actually worth the trouble to find out. This woman decided to give it a shot.

“Excuse me. Are you Mickey DeFalco?”

Picture what it must be like to be ashamed to admit who you are, to know that whoever recognizes you is going to want to know about all the wasted years that have passed since you burst onto the scene.

I didn’t answer immediately. The woman continued staring at me, willing herself to be right. I sighed, nodded, shrugged.

“Yes, ma’am, that’s me.”

She covered her mouth with her hands, as if to stifle a scream of excitement. The hands fell away, the mouth was agape. For a few magical moments, she was no longer a serious professional hurtling toward middle age. She was a groupie.

“Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m meeting you!”

“Nice meeting you, too.”

“God, I loved ‘Sweet Days’!”

“Well, thanks.”

“I was sixteen when it came out. I played it so many times that the tape finally broke! That’s how long ago it was—the song was on a cassette! Remember cassettes?”

“Yes, I remember cassettes.”

“Oh, God, Mickey DeFalco!!”

She was getting loud. I was starting to panic. I had to calm her down. The last thing I needed was for everybody on the plane to know who I was.

And when I say “was,” I mean “was.”

“Sweet Days” is the name of the bubblegum love song I wrote and recorded in 1988. You’ll remember it if you were anywhere near an A.M. radio that year. For two straight weeks, I was number one on the charts.

However, things have not gone nearly as well for me in the ensuing thousand or so weeks, give or take a few.

At age eighteen I was a hot ticket. Riding on the crest of my hit song, I moved from my parents’ home in Little Neck, Queens, to Los Angeles to star in a TV pilot called Sweet Days. It was dropped after three episodes.

Which would have been all right, except that my follow-up record, Sweeter Days, went right into the toilet.

Even that would have been okay, except I got married at twenty, divorced at twenty and a half, and lost half my assets to my ex, L.A. style.

Then I got talked into investing in a chain of drive-in ice cream parlors called Sweet Days, a venture that lasted six months and took the other half of my assets.

After that, things got a little frantic.

I tried to stick with the music, but with the passing years it was clear that I was the very definition of a one hit wonder. Once in a while I played the piano and sang my song at country fairs, birthday parties, and bar mitzvahs. (I usually announced the winner of the raffle at such events, and sometimes I called the bingo numbers.)

For a while I sold cars, trading on my fading name often enough to make the sale that made my commission.

When the car dealership went belly-up I became a pool maintenance man. (Yes, ladies and gentlemen, step right up and have Mickey DeFalco check your pH levels and skim those dead dragonflies off the surface!)

Hardly anybody knew who I was out there in my white overalls, which means the horny housewives who lured me inside—in three years on the job, maybe half a dozen—were simply lonely, and not starfuckers. (Fuckers of faded stars? Whatever.)

Anyway, that particular gig came to an abrupt halt after I put too much chlorine in a pool that happened to belong to a vice president at Warner Brothers. His much younger wife dove in brunette, climbed out blond, and demanded the head of the idiot responsible for this atrocity.

Would you believe I only took the pool man job because I thought I would have access to show-biz people whose pools needed cleaning?

This is what it had come to. It was my only way in. Nobody in the music world would even take my calls.

Of course I was fired, and that ended the last of my regular-paying jobs in the City of Angels.

After that, I scrounged any kind of work I could find. I had nothing—no woman, no prospects, no hope. My California dream was a total nightmare.

When I boarded the red-eye from Los Angeles to JFK I was thirty-eight years old, and I was moving back home with Mom and Dad. They didn’t even know it yet. I hadn’t known it myself, until about two hours before takeoff.

You can move pretty fast when you’re desperate.

Of course, I told none of this to the woman on the plane. All I said was that I’d been doing a lot of different things, and now I was relocating to the East Coast to be close to my family.

Luckily for me she wanted to talk about herself. She was a corporate lawyer, and she looked as if she should have been sitting up in business class—good shoes, a smart black pantsuit, a brown leather briefcase that probably cost more than my one-way plane ticket.

I wore jeans and a gray T-shirt. Her brow furrowed as she noticed something on my elbow.

“Hey, what’s that?”

I looked. It was a splotch of white. My heart jumped.

“It’s paint,” I said.

“Paint?”

I hesitated. The less I said about it, the better. On the other hand, I didn’t want to seem as if I were hiding something.

“I was painting a house earlier today,” I finally said.

She couldn’t believe it. She didn’t want to believe it.

“Mickey DeFalco, a house painter?”

“I was doing a favor for a friend.”

She was stunned. She began shaking her head, a sad grin on her face.

“Man, if anybody had told me I’d be flying home with Mickey DeFalco, and he turned out to be a housepainter—”

“Hey! I said it was a favor for a friend!”

The woman was stunned by my tone, but I couldn’t help it. Pride dies hard. I was tired of strangers being disappointed by my life. Who the fuck were they to feel this way about me?

“Hey, man,” she said, “don’t get defensive.”

“I’m sorry. I’m just tired.”

“All right, then.”

She called for the flight attendant. I figured she wanted to change her seat, and that would have been fine with me, but what she did instead was to order a bottle of champagne, as if it were the kind of thing she did every time she flew. The flight attendant went to get it and the woman turned to me.

“I’d like to apologize and I hope you’ll join me in a toast,” she said. “Your song meant a lot to me, back in the day. Will you clink glasses with me?”

I clinked glasses with her. The champagne tasted as good as airline champagne can taste at thirty thousand feet. We polished off the bottle as she talked about her business trip, how well it had gone, how impressed the L.A. office was with her work, how badly they wanted her to relocate to the West Coast. Ah, to be wanted…

It was the middle of the night, and we were somewhere over Kansas. Everybody else on the plane seemed to be asleep. She leaned close, not for a kiss but to whisper. Her breath was hot in my ear. It was the perfect time and place for a tightly wound person like her to become somebody else, a person she could forget all about when the plane landed.

“I’ll bet,” she began, and then she broke down giggling and had to begin again: “I’ll bet you’re in the Mile-High Club.”

Oh boy. This. I could almost see it coming. Once a groupie, always a groupie.

“Yeah, I’m a member.” I sighed. “But it’s been a long time,” I added truthfully. “A very long time.”

“Do you remember how it works?”

“There’s not much to remember.”

She stared at me seriously. “I’m not a member, Mickey, but I’d like to join.”

There was a crinkling sound from her hand. She was clutching a condom, a Trojan, the brand I’d always sworn by. Jesus Christ. Did she carry them around all the time, like breath mints?

I shut my eyes, thought about fame. Even faded fame counts for something, I realized. My name hadn’t meant a damn thing for twenty years, but here I was, being offered sex in the sky by a not-bad-looking woman who’d treated me to a bottle of champagne.

“Mickey?”

I opened my eyes. She was staring at me all doe-eyed, waiting for my reply. I was either going to make her a member of the Mile-High Club, or I wasn’t. She’d done her part, gotten herself drunk to have an excuse for such behavior, and now it was up to me.

I gestured toward the front of the plane. “Go to that bathroom up on the left,” I said. “Close the door, but don’t lock it. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

She did as she was told, drunkenly bumping seat backs as she walked. There were a few drops left in the champagne bottle. I brought it to my lips and downed them. Then I got up from my seat to make a thirty-something lawyer’s pop-star fantasy come true.

I didn’t even know her name. It was the eighties all over again.

The term “Mile-High Club” implies something merry and giddy, but the truth of it is, you’ve got your bare ass planted atop a chemical toilet with very little straddle room for the woman on your lap, especially if you’re flying coach.

She’d taken off her slacks and was reluctant to drop them on the floor, wet with the splashings of those who’d preceded us. I rolled up her slacks protectively inside my jeans and set the bundle down in the tiny bathroom’s driest corner. I set our shoes neatly beside the bundle, side by side. It was an oddly sad sight. You should never set your shoes beside those of anybody you don’t love.

She climbed aboard and seemed to be enjoying herself. She clung tightly and buried her nose in my neck, rocking to the sound of music only she could hear. She kept repeating my name, which might have been all right, except it was my full name she repeated.

“Mickey DeFalco…Mickey DeFalco…”

She had to justify this wild, wanton deed by telling herself that at least it was happening with somebody who used to be famous.

Unfortunately I was now old enough to think past the thrill of the hump. I looked into the future, to a girly night at this woman’s apartment six months, maybe a year from now. A room full of her female friends, sitting cross-legged and barefoot on her living room floor, getting silly on white wine and chowing down on Cheetos and potato chips, the kind of stuff women like that never eat—and if they do, they double the workout at the gym the next day to sweat out those poisons….

But this isn’t the next day. This is tonight, a night for wild truths to be shared, things they’ve never told each other, and will she ever have a story to tell! Of course she’d let her friends go first—stories about one-night stands behind their boyfriends’ backs, the usual tennis pro or ski instructor boinks, and she’d wait until all these tales were told before casually dropping the bomb….

Be quiet, everybody, be quiet and listen to me!!…Do you remember Mickey DeFalco, the guy who sang “Sweet Days”?

Yeah, sure, I remember him! He was cute!

Well…I did him on a flight from L.A. to New York!

You did not!!!

Bullshit!

I swear to God it happened!

Was he still cute?

Sort of, I guess…we were both sooooo drunk….

I could hear the squealing and the laughter…and there I’d be, the big punch line on hen night….

I stood up. It’s not an easy thing to do in an airplane toilet with a woman wrapped around you, but fury gives you strength you never imagined you could have. She gasped with shocked pleasure, or maybe it was pleasured shock, and then I turned and completed this ridiculous deed up against the bathroom door, bumping her against it with as many thrusts as it took to finish myself off.

By this time she’d stopped saying my name, switching instead to “They’ll hear us! They’ll hear us!”

I knew it would bother her. That’s why I did it. Anything to get her to stop repeating my name.

Her feet found the floor. She pushed herself away from me, shoved her hair back, and began to dress.

“Mickey,” she hissed, “why did you do that?”

“The angle on the toilet bowl wasn’t working for me.”

“We were banging against the door!”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“What if somebody heard us?”

“What could they do? Stop worrying.”

She wanted to be mad at me but the whole thing had been her idea, so she probably didn’t feel entitled to her anger. Beyond that, I’m sure she felt lonely. I know I did. We were two semi-naked strangers in a chemical toilet high in the sky, and that’s as lonely as lonely gets.

I peeled off the condom, knotted it, and dropped it in the receptacle for used paper towels.

“Is that the best thing to do with that?”

She was worried about evidence. Typical lawyer.

“Nobody’s going to inspect the garbage,” I said. “Look, I’ll drop some paper towels over it. See? It’s buried.”

There were tears in her eyes. I touched her cheek, forced a smile. “Listen. That was nice…. You come okay?”

She blinked back the tears, blushed, nodded. “Several times, in fact.”

“Good.”

“How do we…get out of here?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, who goes first?”

“It really doesn’t matter.”

“You came in here after me. If somebody saw you, it might look funny if I go out first.”

“I’ll go first, then.”

“What if somebody’s waiting right outside to use the toilet? I’ll be in here when they come in!”

“So I guess we’ll just stay here for the rest of the flight, huh?”

I was trying to loosen her up, but it wasn’t working. She was worried. The champagne buzz had faded, and the gleeful aspect of the experience had totally evaporated. Now she wanted her respectability back, as badly as she’d thought she wanted sex ten minutes earlier.

“I’ll go first,” she decided. “I’ve got the window seat. I’d have to climb over you if you went first.”

“That’s very logical of you.”

She looked at herself in the mirror and took a deep breath before hopping out of the bathroom as if she had a parachute on her back.

I locked the door after her, sat on the toilet seat and buried my face in my hands. I thought about spending the rest of the flight in here, but the chemical stink would have killed me.

How many women had I tasted since “Sweet Days” hit the charts? The answer was a blur, like trying to count snowflakes in a blizzard. Unlike snowflakes, the women were all alike, except for one, the one who’d inspired the song. Sadly, she wasn’t the one I’d married.

She was the one who ran away and broke my heart. Things were getting better, though. Twenty years on, I didn’t think about her more than once or twice an hour.

A tap on the bathroom door—it was a flight attendant, asking that I please return to my seat and put my seat belt on, as the captain was anticipating turbulence.

I put my jeans on and went back to my seat. When I got there she was fast asleep with her head against the window, the airline blindfold over her eyes, a blanket tucked up under her chin.

Pretty smart. She was going to pretend it had all been a dream. She slept the rest of the way to JFK, greeting me cordially when she awoke.

Fine with me. I wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened, too. It would be easier all around.

We got off the plane and walked together down a long ramp toward the luggage carousel. She had baggage to pick up but I had nothing but my carry-on bag, so this was a perfect departure point. We stopped walking and shook hands, as if one of us had just sold life insurance to the other.

“It was really nice meeting you,” I said, well aware that the verb in that statement was a lot milder than it could have been.

She seemed to appreciate it, though. She hesitated before handing me a card.

“If you ever want to get together,” she said, leaving the sentence incomplete as she turned and headed for the carousel.

I watched her go, then looked at the card. Rosalind Pomer, Attorney at Law. Now I knew her name.

It was well past midnight in New York. I was exhausted in every way a body and soul can be exhausted. I couldn’t just show up at my parents’ house, unannounced and reeking of a sky hump. I decided to check into one of those cheap airport motels, the ones you drive past and wonder who in their right mind would stay in dumps like those.

It was only forty-eight bucks for the night, tax included. For the first time in ages I was rolling in money, plenty of money, so I paid in cash. They gave me a boxy room near the ice machine in the hallway, and between the clunking of the ice cubes and the roar of planes it wasn’t a particularly restful night.

But there was a good strong shower, and I must have stood beneath its hot spray for twenty minutes, scrubbing away paint stains, Rosalind Pomer, and, I hoped, all the sins I’d committed in the City of Angels.