One Hit Wonder

by Charlie Carillo

  “Where’d you see it?”

  “Somewhere on the West Side.”

  Flynn jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “I got the Post in the truck. Go get it, Patrick, look it up.”

  Patrick fetched the paper and pawed his way to the movie section. “Here! Here it is. Movie’s called Don’t Push Me. Pretty good, I have to say. For once Scarlett and I both liked the same movie.”

  I took the Post from his hands and tore out the movie page. Flynn chuckled.

  “So now you’re gonna go see this movie tonight, ain’t you?”

  “I have to.”

  “Try to catch an early show, would you, Mick? If the both of you are tired tomorrow, I might have to get behind a lawn mower myself and do some real work, God forbid.”

  I was lucky with the trains, and it wasn’t even six o’clock as I settled into a seat at a movie theater on West Eighty-sixth Street to see Don’t Push Me.

  What a jolt it was to hear the first few notes of my song, just as the opening credits began! Behind me I heard a guy whisper, “I remember this song!” I sneaked a look back and wasn’t surprised to see that he was chubby and balding.

  Anyway, the song tailed off after the second stanza as the movie began. It was pretty much the way Patrick described it—poor boy meets girl, poor boy loses girl to a rich guy, girl dumps rich guy and decides to go it alone. There was a funky, offbeat quality to the whole thing that made it work. The housepainter was a little bit of a prick, the rich guy wasn’t a complete asshole, and the girl wasn’t a sap or a gold-digger. They were all just people. The actors were unknowns, and the director was an Australian making his first film in America.

  At the end of the movie the girl takes off by herself, and you see both guys getting on with their lives—the rich guy yelling at some poor slob in his office, the housepainter squatting on a dropcloth, stirring a can of paint. In the final image of the film he sheds a tear into the paint, which he stirs into the mix. As he does this the screen fades to black and my song comes up again, its final stanzas playing over the closing credits.

  Sweet days are gone

  But I will go on

  Knowing somehow, you care…

  Even though you’re not there….

  I’ll shed a tear and be through…

  Knowing I have lost you…

  Babe, I’m caught in a maze…

  And there’s just one…way…out…

  Sweet days!

  I waited for it, through credits for assistant directors and key grips and sound technicians and even the damn catering service, and at last there it was, in white letters over black: “Sweet Days,” written and performed by Mickey DeFalco, courtesy of the motherfucking record company that robbed me when I owed money in seventeen different directions and would have sold my soul for a hundred bucks.

  Funny thing was, nobody left the theater until the credits and the song were over. The house lights came up and revealed that most of the women were weeping. I sat very still for a little while, aware that my heart was pounding away. It was as if I’d just visited my own grave and found that the people who’d deemed me dead may have been slightly mistaken.

  On the way out I was caught in the funnel of people trying to wedge through the exit doors and happened to get shoved up against the guy who’d been sitting behind me. He was arm in arm with a hefty woman who obviously was his wife.

  “‘Sweet Days’!” he said, giving her an affectionate squeeze. “Man oh man, that’s the song we were listening to when Kevin was conceived, eh, Amanda?”

  To which she delivered a playful sock to his rib cage, then held him even closer than before. Thanks to me there was a kid named Kevin in the world, squeezing zits on his chin and bugging his parents for a bigger allowance.

  “Mickey DeFalco!” the guy’s wife said. “My God! Wonder whatever happened to him?”

  You just stepped on his foot, lady.

  My father looked at me in wonder, took a pull from his long-neck Bud and pursed his lips.

  “They can just use your song like that?”

  “It’s not my song anymore. That’s the point.”

  “Bastards.”

  We were elbow to elbow at the Little Neck Inn, which was pretty crowded for a weeknight.

  My father patted my shoulder. “It’s a lousy break.”

  “There’s nothing I can do.”

  My father shook his head, then shook a Camel into his mouth. He was just about to light it when Sully snatched it from his mouth.

  “Not in here, Steady Eddie. You know the law.”

  “Jesus Christ, Sully, it’s a stupid fucking law. Beer and a cigarette! They go together like Adam and Eve!”

  “I agree, but we must comply, mustn’t we?”

  My father snatched the cigarette back from Sully and walked outside to smoke it, leaning against the wall of the inn. I stood by his side, watching him savor that butt like a lifer in the prison yard.

  “If anybody ever told me a day would come when I couldn’t smoke in a bar, I’d have laughed in his face, Mick.”

  He took a deep drag, held the smoke, reluctantly let it go with a long, slow breath. “You good with Lynn?”

  “I’m seeing her on Friday.”

  “Not before?”

  “She doesn’t want to see me until Friday.”

  He took a last drag, snapped the cigarette toward the curb.

  “Women calling the shots, and no smoking in bars. Jesus Christ.” He jerked his thumb toward the bar. “One for the road?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  The pay envelope was short on Friday. I’d forgotten that Flynn stopped the clock whenever it rained, so that half a day I’d lost to the storm hit me in the pocket.

  But there was still enough for me to make a small deposit, so I hurried to the bank and went straight to Lynn’s window, my passbook and cash in hand.

  She gave me a strange stare, and I figured I’d messed everything up by not phoning her. Had she really wanted me to stay away until Friday?

  “Lynn? You mad at me?”

  “Why would I be mad?”

  “Because I didn’t call.”

  “I’d be mad if you had called.”

  She pressed her forehead to the bars of the teller cage and I did the same, so that our skins touched.

  “Will you come over tonight?”

  My heart flooded with sweet relief. “Of course I will.”

  “Can you sleep over?”

  My God. The words I’d waited twenty years to hear.

  “I’ll ask my mom.”

  “Don’t kid about it, Mickey.”

  “I always kid around when I’m nervous. You know that. I’m sorry. The answer is yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, I can sleep over.”

  She smiled. “Well, only if you’re sure.”

  She pulled back from the bars and became all business again, probably because somebody was waiting to be served behind me. But she still had a strange look on her face, and I found out why.

  “The weirdest thing happened, Mickey.”

  “What’s that?”

  She took my money, made the deposit, and slid the passbook back to me.

  “Right after you left the other morning?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I heard your song on the radio.”

  It cooled off that evening. A sweet, cold gust of wind swept down from Canada in the middle of the walk from my parents’ house to the Mahoney place, the kind of thing that made you feel all alive again.

  My overnight bag—a plastic sack from the supermarket—contained a fresh T-shirt, clean underwear, a toothbrush, my razor, and a three-pack of Trojans, just in case. I had just finished packing it when my mother appeared at my doorway.

  She held me by the cheeks. “Be careful, Michael.”

  “I’m always careful, Mom.”

  “And things still happen. So be very careful.”

  And just before I left the house my old man pressed a hard piece of paper into my palm
that nearly cut me. It turned out to be a twenty-dollar bill, folded many times.

  “Maybe you want to take her to the movies,” he said.

  But that wasn’t what Lynn had in mind. We ordered in a pizza and listened to an oldies radio program while Mrs. Mahoney slumbered away in the next room.

  “This is the station that played your song,” Lynn said. “Maybe they’ll play it again.”

  “I’m sure they will.”

  She looked at me in surprise. “Pretty cocky for a guy who’s been off the charts for twenty years!”

  “You don’t get it, Lynn. Something happened.”

  I told her all about the movie sound track, and how it had obviously rekindled some interest in the song.

  “You don’t get anything out of it?”

  “Not a dime.”

  She sighed, and with God as my witness it was just then that “Sweet Days” began to play on the radio. Lynn’s eyes widened, either at the sound of the music or at the sight of me standing before her with my hand out.

  “May I have this dance?”

  She laughed out loud. “This isn’t a dance song!”

  “I wrote the damn thing. It’s whatever I say it is.”

  She took my hand. I pulled her to her feet and began a clumsy close dance, putting all my concentration into not stepping on her feet as we moved around on the kitchen floor.

  She held me closer, let her chin rest on my shoulder. I kissed the side of her face, tasting tears. The song came to an end, but we continued to hold each other.

  “Man, did we ever have to wipe some dust off that one!” the deejay chuckled. “Mickey DeFalco’s one and only hit song, ‘Sweet Days,’ getting new life these days in the low-budget hit movie Don’t Push Me! Hey, whatever happened to Mickey DeFalco? Talk about your teen stars who vanish without a trace! He cooled off faster than today’s temperature, which, by the way, dropped an amazing twenty-two degrees in less than one hour’s time—”

  Lynn clicked off the radio. “What do you say we go to bed?”

  She just said it, as if we’d been married for twenty years and had fallen asleep watching a black-and-white movie on TV.

  “You sure?”

  “Yes. Go on, go upstairs ahead of me. I’ve got to get my mother settled.”

  I hadn’t been in Lynn’s room since we were kids. She still had that same sagging brass bed, facing a window overlooking the backyard. The walls were covered with Brendan’s watercolor paintings, held up with bits of tape. It occurred to me that I should have them framed for her, as well as the one she’d given me.

  I stripped down and looked at myself in her bedroom mirror, really looked at myself for the first time in ages. My face and forearms were tanned almost black, while the rest of me was fish-belly white. My hair was just starting to get touches of gray, and there were shadows under my eyes I’d never noticed before.

  Desperation personified. I looked like a deeply mortgaged farmer who’s just been told that a hailstorm is heading toward his crops.

  Right then Lynn appeared at the doorway, fully clothed, her face whiter than milk.

  “Get dressed, Mickey. We’ve got to get my mother to the hospital.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Lynn’s mother had gone into some kind of a seizure. The white of her right eye had turned red. She was shaking so much that the bed rattled like a tambourine as she lay there, with Lynn struggling to pin her down by her shoulders.

  “Mickey! Hold her down while I call an ambulance!”

  I did as I was told, and through the horror and the panic it did occur to me that this was the closest I’d ever come to hugging Mrs. Mahoney.

  A sudden surge of power—she wanted to get up off that bed! I had to lean all my weight against her bony shoulders to keep her down. It was as if she’d left some crucial thing undone, and couldn’t allow herself to die until she did it. Lynn rushed back to the bed, replacing my hands with hers against her mother’s shoulders.

  “Go out and wave down the ambulance, Mickey.”

  It was there in minutes. Two crew-cut guys in snug uniform shirts with Little Neck Ambulance Corp patches on their chests jumped out and jogged to the house, carrying a stretcher. Suddenly Mrs. Mahoney was putting up no resistance, as if some primal instinct detected that these were uniformed men, capable men, men to be feared and obeyed. They strapped her to the stretcher and carried her out, gently and efficiently.

  Lynn and I rode in the back. She held the hand of her mother, who regarded me with her one clear and wide-awake eye. She startled me by making a sound, two sounds in fact. To my ears it came out “I” and “Oy.”

  Lynn patted her hand. “He sure is, Mom.”

  I didn’t get it. “I sure am? What did she say?”

  “She said you’re a nice boy.”

  My scalp tingled. It was the very thing Mrs. Mahoney used to say about me, before her husband banned me from the house.

  Then her eyes closed, and she did not awaken for the rest of the short ride.

  And so from the rich promise of Lynn’s bed the weekend suddenly shifted to a semiprivate room at a local hospital, overlooking the Long Island Expressway.

  An enthusiastic young doctor who looked as if his skin had cleared up just last week told Lynn that something had “worsened” in her mother’s condition, and that she may have brought it upon herself by refusing to rest properly. The struggles to get out of bed, the restlessness…all of it served to further weaken the already damaged blood vessels in her head.

  Lynn cut right to it. “Is she going to die?”

  The doctor cleared his throat. “I’d say it could go either way.”

  “Depending on what?”

  “Depending on how she responds to what she’s done to herself.”

  Lynn rubbed her face, limp with exhaustion. “You make it sound like she’s trying to commit suicide.”

  “Well, in effect—”

  “In effect, you guys are scared to death that I’ll try to sue you for something. Let me put your mind at ease, Doctor. I would never do that. My mother has had a terrible life. All I want to do is make sure she doesn’t have a terrible death.”

  The doctor swallowed hard. “That’s reasonable.” He adjusted his glasses, cleared his throat, and resumed speaking in a calmer, deeper tone, clearly the voice he used when he wanted people to believe he was telling the truth.

  “It’s touch-and-go. What’s going on inside her head is not knowable until something happens. She could die in an hour or she could live another fifteen years.”

  Lynn nodded, then startled the doctor by grabbing him in a grateful embrace.

  “Thanks for being straight with me,” she said over his shoulder. “I truly appreciate that.”

  I doubt very much that he’d ever been touched by anyone as beautiful as Lynn. His face was still burning a bright red as Lynn released him, and suddenly he remembered that he had other patients to look after and staggered away, his white coat flapping.

  We sat in adjoining chairs at Mrs. Mahoney’s bedside and held hands, watching the rise and fall of her abdomen. With her eyes closed the horror of that lone red eye was hidden, and she seemed to be sleeping peacefully. Some kind of monitor had been wrapped around her upper arm, and intravenous fluid dripped into the other arm.

  In a bed on the other side of the room lay an enormously fat woman whose gentle moaning never stopped. A janitor who came in to empty the waste baskets cheerfully informed us that she’d just had her gallbladder removed.

  “Too many pork chops!” he giggled on his way out.

  I looked at the clock on the wall. It was eight-thirty. Less than an hour earlier I’d been lying in Lynn’s bed, awaiting her arrival. Now I was fully clothed, on a death watch for her mother.

  My life was often disappointing but rarely dull.

  I went down the hall and returned to Mrs. Mahoney’s bedside with two wretched cups of coffee from a machine and two packages of Hostess cupcakes from another machine. The coffee
tasted of the pipes that dispensed it, but we drank it anyway and ate the cupcakes.

  Lynn reached out to stroke her mother’s hand, which did not respond to her touch.

  “He crushed her spirit,” Lynn suddenly said, as if she were in the middle of a story, and she didn’t have to tell me who “he” was. “It got to the point where she didn’t even say anything, unless it was to answer a question from him, or respond to a demand. She dished up the food and washed the clothes. He sat there waiting to be served, like the king he thought he was. She waited too long to stand up to his bullshit. By the time she did…”

  Lynn’s voice trailed off. She looked at me. “Your mother’s lucky. Your father is decent.”

  “Yeah, but it’s hardly a marriage made—”

  “Steady Eddie never hit your mother, did he?”

  I was shocked by the question. “Of course not! What are you saying here?”

  Lynn’s eyes brimmed with angry tears. “Remember the day you and I met? That day you were collecting for all those weeks of newspapers?”

  “Of course.”

  “Know why my mother wasn’t around to pay you all those weeks?” Lynn pointed to the floor. “She was here. In this hospital. He’d fractured her skull. With one punch.”

  I had to sit. I fought an urge to puke, willed my stomach to calm itself. Lynn wasn’t quite finished.

  “Usually he was clever about hitting her,” she continued. “Bruises, maybe a few contusions. Nothing on the face, where people could see them. But that one time, he lost control.”

  “Jesus Christ Almighty.”

  “He told the doctors she’d fallen down the cellar stairs. And she played along. I begged her to tell the doctors the truth, report him to the cops, but she…played along.”

  “Why?”

  Lynn sighed, squeezed her mother’s hand. “Because she was just a shell of a person by that time. She’d disappeared. Disappeared without going anywhere. Ever watch a person disappear? It’s worse than watching them die. Much worse. And there was nothing I could do about it.”