One Hit Wonder

by Charlie Carillo

The Little Neck Inn was a little bit like a funeral parlor without the corpse, the bar lined with men who hunched over their drinks like mourners. The place reeked of beer that had probably been spilled during the Eisenhower administration. My eyes needed a moment to adjust to the darkness before I spotted my father on a stool at the end of the bar, watching the Yankee game on a TV set high on the wall.

  The sound was off so people could hear the jukebox, which seemed to have been stocked with oldies. It was truly a relic, filled with rotating 45 disks that played at the touch of a needle. Bobby Darin was tearing up “Beyond the Sea” as my father turned his head and did a double take at the sight of me.

  “What the hell are you doin’ here?”

  “Got a message from Mom. We’re eating at four.”

  He rolled his eyes. “We’ve eaten at four every Sunday since fire was discovered. Why the hell would she need to remind me?”

  “I don’t know, Dad.”

  “Sit down. Have a beer.”

  A balloon-bellied bartender came to us, a dark-haired, light-skinned guy who moved with the cocky strut of a prizefighter.

  “Sully, meet my son, Mickey.”

  We shook hands. He had a hard grip that would have popped my knuckles a few weeks earlier, but the yardwork I’d been doing made it possible for me to return the squeeze, volt for volt.

  “You’re the singer.” A lilting voice, straight from Dublin.

  “If you say so.”

  “Pleasure to meet you.” He turned to my father. “Couple of longnecks?”

  “Good idea, Sully.”

  “If the guys who drink here had long necks, they could do to themselves what they can’t seem to convince their women to do for them.”

  “Poetry, Sully, pure poetry.”

  “Just a thought.” He set a pair of long-necked bottles of Budweiser in front of us before strolling away.

  We clinked bottles. It was hard for me to figure how a guy who made a stink over a $3 latte at Starbucks was willing to shell out $5 for a bottle of beer. It was even harder for me to believe I was actually sitting with my father in a saloon. We were both a little shy about it, as if we were a couple of guys waiting for our turns at a whorehouse.

  “Well,” said my father, “what do you think of the place?”

  “They do a lot here with the color brown, huh? Brown walls, brown floors, brown bar.”

  “They don’t go in for the hanging plants, if that’s what you mean. Anyway, I’ve been comin’ here once in a while since your mother got goin’ at Eruzione’s.”

  “Mom have anything to say about this?”

  “Ahh, she made a little stink in the beginning about me comin’ home smellin’ like a brewery. But I pointed out that she comes home smellin’ of formaldehyde, and which is worse?”

  I laughed out loud—man, when was the last time I’d done that?—and then my old man dropped the hammer.

  “Got laid last night, didn’t you?”

  It was shocking to hear such words from my father, who kept his eyes on the ball game.

  “Yeah,” I told the television, “but not with the one I want.”

  “Mickey.”

  We turned to look each other in the eye. He hesitated, like a kid trying to remember his lines in a school play.

  “Be true to your heart,” he finally said, as if these were the last words he’d ever be speaking to me. I let them sink in.

  “I’ll try, Dad.”

  “Don’t try. Just do it.”

  Right then I noticed a guy about my age standing at my side, eyeing me like I owed him money, tottering like he might topple at any second. He wore soiled coveralls and he smelled like rotting vegetables. His pug nose was wrinkled in recognition.

  “Hey,” he began, “I went to school with you, didn’t I?”

  “Are you Frankie McElhenny?” I asked, but I wasn’t asking. I knew.

  “Yeah. Yeah, and you’re Mickey, ain’t you?”

  “Good to see you, Frankie,” I lied.

  We shook hands for no good reason. “What are you doin’ here, man?”

  “Just havin’ a brew.”

  His heavy mouth-breathing was unmistakable. Back at St. Anastasia’s school I used to feel it on the back of my neck all day long, and I think the only reason Frankie McElhenny got through grammar school is because I kept my elbow high to give him an unobstructed view of my test papers. He dropped out of school even before I did and got a job in private sanitation. Apparently, he still had it.

  He gave my back a swat. “I don’t believe I’m seein’ you here, man!”

  “Long time.”

  “How’s the music? Got another song comin’ out?”

  “Working on it.”

  I could get away with an answer like that with a guy like Frankie. The passage of twenty years between songs wouldn’t seem strange to him. After all, what was time? Merely the thing you endured between the closing of the Little Neck Inn at four A.M. and its reopening the following night. If only Einstein could have seen it that way….

  And then it happened, right after Elvis finished “Don’t Be Cruel,” which by the way was written by the vastly underappreciated Mr. Otis Blackwell (I always like to note the songwriter, as he/she is usually the person who takes such a screwing when it’s time to dole out the credit and the money). At first I thought I was imagining it, but that plaintive piano was unmistakable coming from that ancient jukebox, followed by my rather angelic voice piercing the beery air of the Little Neck Inn.

  I looked at the grinning Sully, who snapped his hand to his forehead in a half-mocking, half-serious salute.

  “I forgot to tell you,” my father said sheepishly. “They got your song on the jukebox here.”

  “I wonder who could have provided it to them.”

  Frankie McElhenny whacked me on the back as if he were trying to dislodge a bone from my throat. “Hey!” he shouted to nobody and everybody. “This is the guy! This is the guy! I went to school with this guy, here!”

  And so with my back being pounded by a drunken grammar school classmate I sat and listened to myself sing. Those were the longest two minutes and forty-six seconds of my life.

  When the song ended, my father and I decided to have one more beer, and then one more on top of that. Things were looking pretty good, all of a sudden.

  We got home two hours late. The roast beef was overdone and the chopped onions were scorched to cinders. My mother was fuming.

  “I’d like to propose a new rule,” she said through tight teeth as she sawed through the bloodless meat. “If you’re going to stay out all night, I must be told. Otherwise, I wait up and worry all night. Is that fair?”

  I let the words sink in. I was about to say something, but my father beat me to it.

  “Who you talkin’ to, Donna, Mickey or me?”

  I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it. Then my father was laughing, and then my mother, bless her heart, was smiling, though she fought it hard.

  “This meat is like shoe leather,” she said as she set down our plates.

  My father took a friendly swat at her ass. “Hey, that’s great, Donna! I need new shoes!”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I was afraid that Flynn was going to bust my chops with a lot of questions about Lynn, but I caught a break. There was bigger news than our reunion, much bigger news.

  Patrick Wagner, the all-American boy, had gotten a tattoo over the weekend.

  It was a green barbed wire thing around his right upper arm. It had been Scarlett’s idea. She had gotten the same tattoo. Flynn thought Scarlett was too wild a soul for Patrick, and here was his proof.

  “Jesus Christ, Patrick, are you nuts or somethin’?”

  He flexed his muscle, making the barbed wire bulge. “Don’t you like it, Mr. Flynn?”

  “What’d that thing cost you?”

  “A hundred.”

  “Christ!”

  “Scarlett says the tattoos are better than rings, because they’ll never co
me off. They’re there for eternity.”

  “Like your love for Scarlett, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Bet your parents were thrilled.”

  “Ahh, they’ll get over it.”

  We were in the truck, rolling down Northern Boulevard toward Great Neck. Flynn pointed out the window at the tattoo parlor, a grubby-looking place.

  “You better hope they used clean needles, boy.”

  “They did.”

  “If that thing gets infected, I ain’t payin’ you disability.”

  We got in half a day’s work before huge black rain clouds rolled in behind our heads, turning day to night, and suddenly drops of rain the size of robin eggs were pelting down.

  We scrambled like mad to get the equipment back up on the trailer and covered with burlap to keep it from rusting away, then roared back to Flynn’s garage. The workday was over.

  It was strange to go home late in the morning of a weekday. The rain hadn’t let up a bit, so I burst through the door as wet as a seal.

  “Don’t move!”

  My mother’s voice startled me. She held a hand up, palm out. “Just stay there a second.”

  I obeyed, dripping on the mat inside the door, and a few seconds later she returned, handing me a towel. I dried myself off as best I could.

  She stared at me in a panicky way, and that was understandable. I’d upset her rhythm. Normally she had this time of day and the house all to herself, and here I was in her midst, chased home by a whim of the weather.

  I hadn’t even thought about it. If I had, I would have gone to the movies and sat through whatever was playing, twice, just to get home at my normal time.

  But it was too late. We were together in the house, and that was it.

  When I got myself as dry as I could I passed the towel back. “Thanks, Mom.”

  “I’ll get you a dry T-shirt.”

  “This one’s all right.”

  She didn’t seem convinced. “Did you eat your lunch?”

  “I guess I left it on the truck.”

  “Come on, I’ll make you a sandwich.”

  “I’m not hungry, Mom…. What’s that smell?”

  The air was sharp with the odor of a cleanser I recognized without being able to immediately identify. She didn’t answer but led the way to the kitchen, where dozens of knives, forks, and spoons covered the kitchen table, atop a protective layer of newspaper. Half were tarnished, half were shiny. A blackened rag lay beside an open jar of chalky silver polish. She’d been in the middle of the job when she heard me at the door and came running.

  “It’s Silver Day!” I exclaimed.

  She was surprised. “That’s what we called it when you were a little boy.”

  “Yeah, I remember. Let me help you.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Mom, I want to help.”

  “It’s a messy job, and it’s got to be done just so.”

  “I did it when I was seven. Think I can’t do it as well now as I did when I was seven?”

  “You didn’t do it very well when you were seven. You always left polish between the fork tines.”

  “I never knew that.”

  “I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

  “Give me a chance to get it right. Please.”

  She hesitated. “I’ll get another rag.”

  It was elegant silverware, a set of knives, forks and spoons—forty pieces in all, a total of eight settings with a rosebud pattern on each handle.

  It had been a wedding gift to my parents from my father’s mother, a brooding, suspicious widow who died when I was five years old. I remembered her black dresses and her frightening face, like an old catcher’s mitt with chin whiskers, and the way she stared at me as if she meant to melt me into a puddle with her gaze.

  Apparently the old girl thought her son and daughter-in-law would be doing a great deal of entertaining, but in my memory the only time the silverware ever came out was one Thanksgiving when Grandma DeFalco herself came over to eat with us. She took one look at the four fancy place settings and announced it wasn’t necessary to get the good stuff out for her. Over great protests from my father and tears from my mother, the good stuff went back into the cherrywood box and we ate the bird with the bent-tined forks we used every day.

  And since that day, that cherrywood box with its recessed compartments in the shapes of each utensil was taken out from its place under the stairwell every six months or so, its contents emptied, polished, and replaced in an event my mother used to call “Silver Day.”

  Now I remembered that it was usually raining on Silver Day. It was the kind of task a woman like my mother found for herself to salvage an otherwise wasted morning, when you couldn’t wash windows or hang laundry on the line.

  “Not too much polish on the rag,” she warned, handing me a tattered bit of one of my father’s old undershirts. “A little goes a long way.”

  “All right, Mom.”

  For a few minutes there was nothing but the sound of our blackening rags rubbing the tarnished silver back to a low luster. Finally, she broke the silence.

  “Did you have a good time in the city?”

  “It was all right.”

  “Who’d you see?”

  “Somebody I knew from L.A.”

  “A girl.”

  “A woman.”

  We were quiet for a moment, busy with the rags and the polish. It was easier being together this way, watching our hands instead of looking into each other’s eyes.

  She opened her mouth, closed it, thought things over, and suddenly said, “Your sex life is none of my business, Michael. Whatever you do, you do. I know you have…needs. You’re your father’s son.”

  I felt myself blush, and took a moment to gather myself. “Thanks, Mom,” I finally said. “I’ve always felt that your sex life was none of my business, either.”

  A pink flush rose to her cheeks, then receded. We were even. We’d made each other blush. It was a standoff.

  Now what?

  Luckily for both of us thunder rumbled, and it was just the sound to change subjects upon.

  “Had quite a time with your father at the Little Neck Inn, didn’t you?”

  “It was okay. You ought to come with us next time.”

  “I think I’ll pass on that offer, thank you very much.”

  “I mean it, Mom.”

  “Oh, I spent enough time in saloons when I was a child, looking for my father.”

  I was shocked. She had rarely spoken to me about her childhood, which I knew to have been rough: a hard-drinking father who ran off, a mother who died young trying to keep the family going. The little bit I knew, I’d learned from my father, not her, nuggets of information he’d shared with me when I was a teenager who wondered why his mother sometimes had sudden crying jags for no apparent reason. As it turned out, these jags happened twice a year—once on the date that would have been her father’s birthday, once on the date that would have been her mother’s.

  I rubbed a soup spoon with my rag, buffed it clean, and looked at the reflection of my upside-down face in its bowl. “You actually went from saloon to saloon?”

  She nodded, eyes steady on her hardworking hands. “And me no more than twelve at the time.”

  “Jesus, Mom.”

  “It wasn’t pleasant. He cut quite a swath in his time, your grandfather.”

  Funny, but I’d never thought of this man who died before I was born as my grandfather. I’d never known a grandfather, or aunts and uncles, as each of my parents were only children. Besides my parents the only relative I’d ever known was Grandma DeFalco, whose spirit, if it existed, was certainly snickering over the cruel curse of her enduring legacy, the gift of The Silver That Was Too Good to Use….

  “What was he like?”

  “Who?”

  “Your father.”

  She made a funny sound, half laugh, half snort. “Good-looking, charming, and lazy. A deadly combination.”<
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  “Pretty rough for your mother.”

  “Yes, Michael, it was.” She finished shining a knife and picked up another. “That T-shirt of yours is still wet. I’ll get you a dry one.”

  “I’m fine, Mom.”

  She wanted to get away, but I wasn’t about to let that happen. I put a hand to her shoulder, eased her back into her chair.

  “Look, when you do the forks, don’t leave any polish between the tines.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Because it hardens up like a rock if you don’t get it all off. Work the rag between the tines. It’s the only way to do it.”

  “I will. What was she like?”

  “Who?”

  “Your mother.”

  She sat back in her chair and stared at me. Rain lashed at the windows, and just then my mother’s eyes went wet, as if with the rain.

  “Michael, she never got one break. Not one.”

  I put down my rag and made what might have been the bravest move of my life as I reached my smudged hand across the table to take hold of hers. It was a lot smaller than mine, like a child’s hand, if you ignored the roughness. I gave it a squeeze.

  “I’m sorry, Mom.”

  She squeezed back. “She tried, Michael. Until the day she died she made sure I had my music lessons. I was good, you know.”

  “I’m sure you were.”

  “If there hadn’t been so many distractions at home, I might have become…”

  She hesitated, not sure she wanted to tell me what came next. Then she drew a long breath, and I knew it was on the way.

  “When I was in fifth grade I could play Chopin. Really. They had me play in the auditorium, in front of the whole school.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yes, well, in the middle of it my father staggered in drunk and collapsed in the center aisle for all to see.”

  “Jesus!”

  “It broke my concentration, I promise you that. I just sat there on the stage with my hands in my lap, staring at my father flopped on the floor. It didn’t even seem real. Like I was watching some horrible movie, all about my own life.”

  A shiver went through me. My mother shook her head and sighed.

  “I don’t know how she did it, little thing that she was, but my mother got him to his feet and dragged him out of there. He was no lightweight, my father. I can still see him draped over her shoulder like a six-foot eel, feet dragging the floor as she went off with him.”