One Hit Wonder

by Charlie Carillo

  “Maybe if we had a flood.”

  She sat back in her booth and stared at me. “You’re smart,” she said softly, “but you don’t have to be a wise guy, Mickey. It doesn’t help anything.”

  I was burning with humiliation. “How come you know so much about Italy?”

  “Books.”

  “But you’re not Italian.”

  “That’s right. I’m Irish on both sides.”

  “Well, don’t you want to go to Ireland?”

  “No.”

  “But that’s your heritage.”

  Lynn waved me off. “Irish people drink and they sing sad songs. Who wants to go all the way across the ocean for that?”

  Our voices had risen to almost argument levels. It was as if we were booking a trip abroad together and couldn’t agree on where to go, two fifteen-year-olds on their first date in Ponti’s Pizza Parlor.

  Lynn was staring at me. “Listen,” she said, “are you busy tomorrow? I want to take you somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  “Are you busy, yes or no?”

  “I…no. No, I’m not busy. Except for my paper route. I can do that pretty early.”

  “Well then, is it a date?”

  The sparkle in her eyes was dazzling, almost dizzying.

  “Yeah, okay, it’s a date,” I said at last. “What should I wear?”

  “Wear your clothes.” Lynn Mahoney giggled. “Be good if you wore your clothes.”

  The next day Lynn took me to Manhattan, via bus and subway, and through tunnels and transfers she still wouldn’t tell me where we were going. I just had to stay at her side until at last we stopped walking at Eighty-second Street and Fifth Avenue.

  “We’re here,” Lynn announced, and then we were climbing the steps to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, my first time there.

  I was in Lynn’s hands, all the way. There was a Renaissance exhibition, with statues and paintings by the ancestors of me and Enrico Boccabella, long-dead Italians with the kind of talents that apparently did not survive the journey to the New World.

  Lynn came all alive as she spoke about the artists, as if they were friends she’d grown up with.

  “Are you an artist?” I asked.

  She laughed. “God, no! My brother Brendan is the artist in the family. Eight years old, and you should see his watercolors! But I love art. I want to major in art history. I’d like to teach it some day.”

  She cocked her head at me. “What do you want to do?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Ever painted?”

  “Not since finger paints in kindergarten. I was never much good at it.”

  “Well, you might be a word person.”

  A word person. What the hell was a word person?

  Lynn continued the tour through the museum, with me following like a loyal puppy.

  “There are Little Neckers who’ve never even been here,” she marveled. “Fifteen miles from home, and they never make the trip. I think that’s so sad.”

  “Hang on a second, Lynn.”

  A painting had literally stopped me in my tracks. We were in the American wing, and I was looking at a nineteenth-century work by Winslow Homer. It showed a bunch of barefooted boys in a country field playing a game called Snap the Whip, running and tumbling with joy. A perfect portrait of an idyllic childhood, the kind nobody really has. You looked at it, and you just wanted to be there.

  “Incredible,” I breathed.

  “Yeah,” Lynn agreed, “Winslow Homer was a good painter.”

  “Is,” I gently corrected her.

  She laughed. “Mickey, look at the brass plate. He’s been dead since 1910.”

  “No, he hasn’t. Not really. See, this painting’s in our heads, now, so we keep the artist alive, you and me and everybody else who sees it. Know what I mean? So this Winslow Homer guy…he’ll never really die.”

  I couldn’t believe what I’d just said. It was a wild thought that had become verbal without my consent.

  Lynn was quiet for a long moment. Tears shone in her eyes. “I knew you’d get it,” she said. “And I think maybe I was right about you being a word person.”

  We left the museum and walked downtown through Central Park. The backs of our hands bumped and suddenly, we were holding hands, just like that. We were approaching the zoo when suddenly, Lynn came to a stop.

  “This would be a good spot,” she announced, as if we’d just reached a desirable campsite and were about to start banging tent pegs into the ground.

  I was confused. “A good spot for what?”

  “Our first kiss.”

  My blood tingled. I had never kissed a girl before. Lynn pointed straight overhead at the Delacorte clock, with its menagerie of musical animals frozen in place. It was one minute to three o’clock. I stepped closer to Lynn, but she stopped me.

  “Hang on, Mickey, not just yet. The clock’s about to strike the hour.”

  And sure enough it did, and as the animals rotated in a circle around the clock and a carnivalesque tune filled the air, Lynn Mahoney and I shared our first kiss, and nothing would ever be the same.

  A current ran through me, a true circuit, from my lips down to my toes and up my back, over the top of my head and back to my lips. My whole being hummed with the sheer joy of it, this thing I was certain nobody else in the history of the world had ever experienced quite the way I was feeling it.

  The kiss lasted as long as the music, and upon the sudden silence we at last broke apart and looked at each other, eyes and hearts wide open.

  “Wow,” I breathed.

  “Yeah,” she agreed, “I wanted our first kiss to be special, so we’d both remember it. I didn’t want it to happen on Northern Boulevard, outside Ponti’s Pizza. Aren’t you glad we waited?”

  I was. I was even gladder that she’d referred to it as our “first” kiss.

  We held hands again as we resumed our downtown walk. What Lynn and I ignited under that clock was the real deal, the only thing in the universe without a price tag, a definition, or a substitute. I was afraid to talk about it, so I talked around it.

  “I gotta say, Lynn, I’m really glad…”

  “Glad about what?”

  “Glad your father didn’t tip me. Because I wouldn’t have met you if he had.”

  A brief shadow crossed her face at the mention of her father. I wondered if maybe I’d imagined it, because it was gone so fast. It would be years before I realized I hadn’t imagined anything.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  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 go
ing 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.�
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  “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.