I blinked at him, not yet fully awake.
“Hey, come on, get up. Up. You can’t live here.”
I think it was the word “live” that got to me.
“I don’t live here,” I said. “I just passed out last night.”
“Yeah? Where were you last night?”
“At a party.”
“A party where?”
The problem with lying to cops is that you’ve got to keep the lies coming. I just didn’t have the steam for it.
I slowly rose to a sitting position. “I can’t remember.”
The cop slid the door open all the way, and it was horrible to see it all in the early morning dazzle of the California sun. Cupcake wrappers littered the floor around me. I was covered by a burlap sack I’d found on the beach and pressed into service as my blanket. My rolled-up jeans were my pillow, and on a tiny cement shelf I’d placed my bar of soap, toothbrush, toothpaste, and disposable razor. An empty Gallo wine jug completed this stark picture of solitary domesticity.
There were no two ways about it. I was a homeless man, a bum, a wino, and this was my pathetic attempt at creating a home.
“A party, huh?” The cop chuckled. “Looks to me like the party was in here.”
I was still sitting. I looked at the cop, a heavyset guy who seemed to be my age, maybe slightly older, a little too old for a beat cop but safe and secure with a pension to come and a second career in private security, as long as he could avoid getting killed on the job. He probably had a kid, maybe two of them, and a wife in stretch pants who played the lottery once or twice a week, just for the hell of it. And they had a house. Walls, floors, ceilings, maybe even a yard. The screen door squeaked. She was on his ass to oil it. He kept meaning to do it….
I was overcome with envy for that cop. It was the first time in my life I’d ever felt jealous of another man’s worldly goods, and it was so overwhelming that I put my face in my hands and burst into tears.
This startled the cop. Now he wasn’t just giving a guy the bum’s rush, he was dealing with a basket case. He squatted, put a seemingly friendly hand on my shoulder.
“Hey, buddy, calm down.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Lemme see some I.D.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“Hell, no. You got any I.D.?”
I was thinking about saying I didn’t have any I.D., but figured I’d seem like more of a citizen if I could show him something of mine with a former address on it. I unrolled my pants, dug my wallet out of the back pocket and passed him my driver’s license, which I kept up to date even though my car had been repossessed years earlier. It was made out to DeFalco, Michael A., and when the cop’s eyebrows went up, I knew I’d been made.
“Holy Mother of God, are you Mickey DeFalco?”
I shrugged. “Some people call me Mickey.”
“Are you the guy with the song?”
I struggled into my jeans without standing up. How well he had put it. The song, singular.
“Yeah. That’s me.”
The cop’s face was bright with wonder, his eyes shining like two brown suns. His name plate said O’Brien, but for the moment, he’d forgotten all about being a cop. He was a fan.
“Man, I love ‘Sweet Days’! Shit, that’s what was playin’ on the radio when I proposed to my wife!”
“No kidding.”
“Yeah, champagne, red roses, and you!” He chuckled. “Later on she told me she’d only said yes because of the song!”
This wasn’t a particularly stunning thing to hear. Sappy songs inspire a lot of foolish behavior.
I hesitated before asking, “You still together?”
“Oh, yeah. Nineteen years now. Still in love, like a coupla kids.”
“I’m glad for you.”
The wonder of it was wearing off. The squatting cop shifted his weight, shifted his mood. “Jesus, man,” he said, as if I’d just been in a train wreck, “what the hell happened to you?”
“Am I under arrest?” I asked again. I’d never been arrested. It was one of the few things I had left to be proud of.
He looked at me as if I were insane. He rose to his feet, the handcuffs on his belt clinking as he did.
“Arrest? You think I’d arrest Mickey DeFalco?”
“Well…”
“Come on, man, I wouldn’t do that!”
I’d caught a break. Officer O’Brien’s hair was thinning in front and his belly was lapping over his belt buckle, but his face glowed like that of a child on Christmas morning.
I was his youth, his hope, a reminder of all the good things that ever happened to him back when his hair was full and his belly was flat. A younger cop might have run me in and grabbed himself a bit of fame for arresting a one hit wonder who’d hit the skids, but Officer O’Brien, I was beginning to realize, was not just a fan of mine.
He was a disciple. And that’s not always a good thing.
He watched me put my shoes on, one at a time, like any mere mortal. I snapped a shoelace and had to make do with the longer piece, pulling it out and rethreading it through half the holes. Then I folded the burlap sack and set it in a corner of the shed, put my meager toiletries in a plastic sack and crumpled the cupcake wrappers up in my fist. I picked up the wine bottle, and my work was done. I may have been a skel, but I was a damn neat skel. I emerged from that thing with my head held high, as if I’d just checked out of a five-star hotel.
“I’ll get out of here now, Officer O’Brien.”
“Billy. Call me Billy.”
“Okay, Billy.”
He loved hearing me say his name. “Listen, Mickey…Can I call you Mickey?”
“Why not?”
“You need a ride anywhere, Mickey?”
“I don’t exactly have anywhere to go.”
“Can I walk with you?”
A cop, asking permission to walk with me.
“Sure, Billy. I’m just going to throw this stuff in the trash.”
We walked together in the sand. It was not yet seven A.M., which meant the public bathroom was still locked. We were the only ones around, save the occasional jogger. I threw the cupcake wrappers and the wine bottle into a wire trash basket. Now that I had a free hand, the cop held his hand out to shake with me.
“I can’t believe I’m walkin’ with Mickey DeFalco!”
“I can’t believe I’m walking, period.”
“Feelin’ stiff?”
“Yeah.”
“What the hell do you expect, sleepin’ on a cement floor at your age? Hey, are you hungry?”
I hesitated. I figured he was going to offer to take me to some greasy spoon cop diner, where I’d wolf down eggs and doughnuts while he asked questions about my life. I was hungry, all right, but not that hungry.
“I’m not really hungry,” I lied. “But if you’re going downtown, I’ll take a ride.”
“I’m not going downtown.”
“Hey, no sweat.”
“My shift’s just about up. I’m goin’ home. You want to come home with me? I’d like the wife to meet you.”
I laughed out loud. I couldn’t help it. The whole thing was so freaking absurd. The laugh was almost painful, because the laugh muscles in my throat had atrophied.
“What’s so funny, Mickey?”
“You want your wife to meet me?”
“She’s a huge fan! You think I’m actin’ goofy…man, she is your Numero Uno! Whaddaya say? Please?”
I didn’t want to do it, but I didn’t care for the rest of my options, either. I couldn’t bear the thought of sitting in a public library, reading a newspaper on a stick. I didn’t want to sit on the beach and look at the waves. I didn’t want to wander.
I wanted to be some place where I was wanted, even by strangers.
I cleared my throat. “Do I look all right?”
Officer O’Brien was almost gleeful. “You look fine, just fine!” He clapped me on the back. “Oh, man, this is going to be great!”
We got to the cop car and I hesitated, not knowing whether to get in the front or the back. Officer O’Brien opened the front door for me. The back was for suspects, the front was for flashes-in-the-pan.
It was nice to be sitting on something soft. I checked myself in the rearview mirror. I needed a shave, but that was to be expected. I tilted my chin back, checking my neck for those ridges of dirt you always see on bums. I seemed pretty clean, though maybe a little briny from all those Pacific Ocean baths.
“Hey, Billy. Mind if I brush my teeth?”
“You mean now, in the car?”
“I got a system. I won’t make a mess.”
He nodded and watched as I squeezed a bit of toothpaste onto my toothbrush and went to work, sucking hard the whole time to avoid leakage. I rolled the passenger window down.
“Spit hard,” he said. “I don’t want toothpaste on the door.”
I did as I was told, my head and shoulders all the way outside the car window. Then I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, and I was as ready as I’d ever be to meet the cop’s wife.
The O’Brien residence was a weatherbeaten little salt box of a house surrounded by a cyclone fence and shaded by a solitary palm tree. I expected to see toys and bikes in the front yard but it was bare of everything except a yellowing cover of rough desert crabgrass, the kind you didn’t have to bother mowing since it grew outward and flat, but not up. Weeds grew up and through the links of the fence, clinging like the fingers of a desperate old lady.
We entered the house through the kitchen. Two parakeets were singing in a cage, and on the windowsill was a bowl with two small turtles.
Billy’s wife was at the stove, a tall, angular woman straight out of the West Coast beauty guidebook. She looked as if she’d been born on a beach, a mermaid doing her best to conform to life on land. Strawberry-blond hair tumbled over her shoulders. Her eyes were as blue as the summer sky, and they had a perpetually sleepy look, maybe because her husband worked odd hours, maybe because of her nature. She wore a red silk robe and nothing else as she poured hot water through a coffee filter. The robe swished when she moved. Her feet were long and flawless—straight toes, and her toenails shined like mother-of-pearl.
This was the natural state of her toenails. She wore no polish or makeup of any kind.
“Hey, Robin,” said Billy. “Got a surprise for you. Say hello to—”
“I know who he is.” She closed her eyes and was silent for a few moments, as if to thank the forces of the universe for bringing me to her door. “Oh my God, this is just too hard to believe!”
She extended a hand. I took it in my own and she held it for a long time, as if to confirm the reality of my presence.
And a funny feeling went through me, a tickle of a warning saying I didn’t belong here, I didn’t need anybody’s charity, and who the hell were these people?
But the kitchen was warm, the coffee smelled heavenly, bread was toasting and oh, good God Almighty, how sweet it was to be out of the wind!
“Mickey DeFalco, in my home,” said Robin, holding my hand in both of hers, like a fortune teller. She was obviously an aging hippie, a flower child only now starting to wilt, with a smoky voice and rings on almost all her fingers. In her day she’d attended antiwar rallies, been tear-gassed, marched on Washington. Not your typical “Sweet Days” fan, but a fan she was, right to the core.
“Well,” she added breathlessly, “this is one to make the gods sit up and pay attention.”
Billy stood by, grinning like crazy as he unbuckled his gun belt and slung it over the back of a chair. Suddenly I saw that he was a man who existed in a state of apology, typical of schlubby guys who marry beautiful women. He was sorry that he was just a beat cop, sorry that they lived in such a small house, sorry he’d had the audacity to fall in love with a woman so far out of his league.
But not today. Today Billy O’Brien wasn’t such a mug, after all. He was the greatest husband in the world, because he’d delivered Mickey DeFalco to his wife.
“I was tellin’ Mickey here that his song was playing when I proposed to you,” Billy said.
Robin nodded. “It certainly was. To what do we owe the honor of your presence?”
She was still holding my hand in both of hers. I broke the grasp, and didn’t sugarcoat it. “Your husband found me asleep at the beach. Instead of dragging me in for vagrancy, he took pity and gave me a break.”
Robin stared at me in disbelief. “You have no home?”
“I’ve, ah, had a little bad luck lately.”
“Stay here.”
The words came from Billy O’Brien, who seemed as surprised to have spoken them as I was to hear them. I had known this man for less than an hour, and his wife for less than five minutes, and here I was, being invited for—well, for what? An overnight stay? To live there? It was too much to process.
I felt dizzy. I had not eaten properly in days. My jeans hung low on my hips. I tugged at my belt loops to keep from stepping on my cuffs. Before I could say anything Billy O’Brien turned to his earth mother of a wife.
“I mean, if it’s okay with you, Robin.”
She seemed surprised by his question, as if he’d just asked her if she thought the earth was round. “Well, of course it’s okay! We’ve got the room.”
Billy sighed with relief. He put a strong hand on my shoulder, gave it a squeeze. “You’re staying, and that’s all there is to it. Come on, let’s have breakfast.”
I asked to use the bathroom first. The soap was scented, some kind of wildflower mix. I was careful to wash all the grime off my hands and face before using the fluffy hand towel, and then I had to force myself not to gulp the coffee or wolf down the scrambled eggs.
It was an unbelievable situation. I was in a cop’s house, eating and relaxing and being treated like a king because of a song I’d sung twenty years earlier, three thousand miles from this sanctified kitchen.
My imagination didn’t carry me past the conclusion of breakfast. I wasn’t really considering Billy O’Brien’s invitation to stay. I knew the hot food and coffee would give me that same rush of optimism I’d seen on the faces of countless homeless guys braving the light of day with bellies full of soup kitchen slop.
Today’s the day, you tell yourself. Today’s the day my luck is going to turn around.
But it doesn’t. It never does. You pound the same streets all day long, and hope to hide from the wind at night.
I was tired of it. I was happy to be at the O’Brien breakfast table, happy to listen to Billy tell me about drug raids in East L.A. and hear Robin talk about the yoga classes she taught at the local Y.W.C.A. They were only two or three years older than me but they behaved as if they were my parents, and that suited me fine. I could use some parenting. I hadn’t been a kid in a long, long time.
So I stayed. Billy drove me to the bus station where I had my stuff in a locker. I picked it up and brought it back to the O’Brien household, and just like that, I was one of the family.
I got sick almost immediately, with a raging fever that lasted for two days. My immune system was probably all messed up by those weeks of living in that tool shed. It was as if my body had waited until I was in a safe place to go into a complete collapse, and that sweet, soft mattress in the O’Brien guest room was that place. I stayed in bed, where Robin and Billy took turns bringing me cups of broth, saltine crackers, and ginger ale. By the third day I was strong again, sheepish about my weakness and feeling like a freeloader.
Robin sat on the edge of the bed and stroked the hair away from my forehead, the way my mother used to. “You’ve been living hard, Mickey. You needed time to heal.”
“I’m okay now.”
“You just take it easy. Let us take care of you.”
“I’d like to do something for you. I mean, if you’ve got any work around the house that needs doing…”
Billy came into the room, unbuttoning his uniform shirt. It was morning. His shift had just ended. “How you fee
lin’, pal?”
“I was just saying how I’d like to do something for you and Robin.”
“Want to paint the house?”
“Billy!” Robin scolded.
“Hey, I was only kiddin’.”
Robin turned to me, rolled her eyes. “He’s been meaning to paint the house for about two years now.”
“Ahh, I’ll get around to it.”
I sat up in bed. “Let me do it,” I said. “Please. I’d be delighted. I’ve got the time, believe me.”
They looked at each other. I put a pouting look on my face.
“Come on, Mom and Dad,” I begged, “I promise I won’t spill any.”
They both laughed out loud, and then Robin shut her eyes, clasped her hands together.
“Mickey DeFalco is actually going to paint my house,” she said, in what appeared to be a prayer of thanks. “Oh, my goodness, this is just too much.”
We all had breakfast together, then Billy took me out to the garage and showed me where the supplies were—half a dozen cans of white exterior latex paint, drop cloths, rollers, and brushes. He wished me luck, went to his bedroom, pulled the shades and went to sleep. If nobody disturbed him he’d sleep until about six in the evening. He told me that this was his pattern, ever since they’d put him on the midnight-to-eight shift a few months earlier.
I got to work right after breakfast. It was a big job that was going to take three or four days, but I didn’t mind. At least I didn’t feel like a freeloader anymore. The O’Briens were getting something in return for room and board besides the charming company of a one hit wonder.
The house was pretty far inland, and at midday there wasn’t so much as a breath of a breeze. I was up on a ladder, sweltering as I rolled the paint onto those faded shingles. Robin kept bringing me lemonade while Billy slumbered away in his air-conditioned bedroom.
“Mickey,” Robin said, “why don’t you take a break?”
“I’m all right.”
“I have to teach a yoga class but I can cancel it if you’re feeling sick again.”
“No, no, I’m fine, Robin.”
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