“Because the past is precious,” I finally said. It might have been the truest thing I’d ever said.
Schmitter rolled his eyes, as if I’d just read him something out of a fortune cookie.
“All right, man, now I’m gonna tell you something I don’t have to tell you. This story airs tomorrow night, with or without you. We got other people talkin’ about you, see?”
“Who?”
He grinned at my sudden vulnerability. “You wanna know who we got, and what they had to say, you gotta give me the interview. Otherwise, tune in tomorrow night and see if they think the past is precious.”
“I’ll tune in tomorrow night.”
“You’ll wish you’d talked to me.”
“Whatever.” I extended my hand, which he grudgingly shook. “I think you’re an asshole, Schmitter, but I do admire your persistence.”
“All right, Mickey. Now there’s one other thing, and you don’t have a choice in the matter. We’re gonna shoot some footage of you cuttin’ this lawn.” He held his hands up, palms out. “Long as we’re out on the street, on public property, you can’t do anything about it.”
“Get my good side.”
His face sagged. “Come on, talk to me. Don’t make me take the fuckin’ red-eye home with nothin’ but this bullshit Home and Garden b-roll and a few lame-ass sound bites from people in this neighborhood.”
People in this neighborhood. Jesus Christ, could he have approached Lynn? “Excuse me, Miss Mahoney, I’m Joel Schmitter from the sleaziest show on television. How’d you like to tell the whole world about you and Mickey DeFalco, and how your doomed romance inspired his one and only hit song?”
No way she would talk to him, no way in the world. She was too private, had too much class, too much dignity. But those qualities eluded a lot of other Little Neckers.
I tried to act nonchalant. “You talked to people in Little Neck?”
Schmitter shrugged. “Maybe one or two. How do you think I found out where you work?”
“What’d they say?”
“Nothing exciting. The kind of shit you only use when you don’t get the sound bites you want. See, if you talk to me, we won’t even use those other sound bites.”
He had a bottomless bag of tricks. The only thing to do was to walk away without another word to him, which is what I did. Patrick and I got the mowers off the trailer while Flynn gathered up the lunch junk.
“Everything all right, Mick?”
“Yeah. Might want to comb your hair, though. These guys are going to shoot us cutting this lawn.”
Flynn looked over at the van. Already the short, ponytailed cameraman had his camera on a tripod, while an exasperated Schmitter was telling him exactly what he wanted with a lot of flamboyant hand gestures.
“Well,” said Flynn, “I might have to show ’em what I can do.”
To the astonishment of Patrick and me, Flynn gripped his belt buckle and proceeded to dance an Irish jig on the sidewalk, his big belly jiggling, his feet amazingly deft and light despite his old war injury. The cameraman and Schmitter could only look at each other and wonder why they’d ever gotten into such a line of work.
Schmitter was good to his word. The crew stayed on the street while the camera rolled. It was pretty dull stuff, following me going back and forth on the lawn, but it was all they were going to get. Once I looked over and saw Schmitter on his cell phone, having a heated conversation with somebody who had to be his boss back in California, busting his chops over the interview that never happened.
It was a pretty big lawn, so they had plenty of footage of that, and then of course came the truly thrilling footage of Patrick and me loading up the machines on the trailer. Schmitter held up the contract and wagged it like bait. I ignored it.
He had just one move left, and here it came, just as I was getting the tailgate locked up. I heard footsteps, and there they were in my face for the ambush interview, the soundman hovering a fuzzy microphone on a stick over my head.
“Mr. DeFalco,” Schmitter said, as if we’d never met, “we’re here from Hollywood Howl. Could we have a minute of your time?”
I looked at Schmitter, who clearly both loved and hated what he was doing for a living. The cameraman stood calm and steady, rolling on whatever it was I was going to do.
And then I did it. It was stupid, but I did it. I looked right into the lens and gave it the finger. A three-thousand-dollar shot, and they had it for nothing.
“All right?” I said softly. “You guys happy now?”
I got into the truck, where Patrick and Flynn were waiting. Flynn put it in gear and we roared away as if we’d just knocked over a bank.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The next night, nearly seven P.M., just minutes until Hollywood Howl airs. I pick up the kitchen phone, dial four digits, hang up. Pick it up again, dial six digits, hang up. Pick it up a third time, dial seven digits, hear it ring once, hang up.
What a fucking idiot I am. “Just do it,” I say out loud.
So I dial Lynn’s number once again and feel my heart pounding away. I actually have a sheet of paper with notes on it, to guide me in case a brain freeze hits. It’s the same thing I used to do when we were first dating.
“Hello?”
Showtime.
“Lynn, it’s me.”
The jagged sound of her breathing.
“I just wanted to see if you’re okay.”
“I’m okay.”
A flat-out lie, but I let it ride. “How’s your mother?”
“Still in the hospital. I’m just leaving now to see her.”
“Want me to come with you?”
“Mickey. What are you doing?”
“Lynn, I apologize.”
“For what?”
“For the way I reacted.”
She actually giggled, or maybe it was a swallowed sob. “Mickey, you can’t apologize for a reaction. It’s like apologizing for having brown eyes. You were shocked by what you heard. Anybody would be.”
“Baby—”
“You feel how you feel. I respect it.”
“Whoa, whoa—”
“I’d be wasting your time, Mickey. Rock bottom, that’s the deal. And maybe that’s the worst sin there is in this world, wasting somebody’s time.”
“Let’s go to Italy.”
“Oh, my God.”
“What do you say, a trip to Italy? You up for it, baby?”
It just came out of me, this crazy idea from a man who could barely afford bus tickets to Hoboken. Lynn said nothing, but I could hear her crying.
“We’ll go to Venice,” I continued. “We’ll ride a gondola. We’ll go to every museum on the boot. Italy’s boot-shaped, isn’t it?”
I could no longer hear her crying. She’d hung up.
I looked at my notes: “Ask if okay. If needs anything. Say you love her.” I crumpled up the paper and threw it in the garbage.
“Michael, it’s starting!” my mother called from Planet Earth, and then I gathered myself and joined my parents in the living room to watch Hollywood Howl.
I was the top story of the night, introduced by the anchorman as a “musical mystery.” On the screen behind him was a giant publicity photo of me from my heyday, grinning like a jerk.
“Mickey DeFalco seemed to have it all—and then suddenly, he vanished,” the anchorman said. “Now his one hit song is fast becoming a hit all over again, and the world is wondering: Whatever happened to Mickey DeFalco? Hollywood Howl found out.”
The segment started with washed-out footage of me in a corny old music video, singing “Sweet Days” as I walked along a beach, the very beach, in fact, where Lynn and I went for our last date. Long shots of me walking and singing. None of that quick-cut bullshit they do now, two-second shots, thirty to a minute, rat-a-tat-tat, tailored to the all but extinct American attention span.
“Back in 1988, it was sweet days indeed for young Mickey DeFalco with a love song that rocketed to the top of the charts,” t
he narrator began. Then the music video footage dissolved to crystal-clear footage of me from the day before, pushing the roaring lawn mower.
“But now, it’s ‘sweat’ days for DeFalco, who at age thirty-eight toils as a gardener for hire back in his hometown of Little Neck, New York.”
I had to chuckle at that one.
“That was nasty,” my father murmured. “They go out of their way to be nasty.”
“They call it being edgy, Dad.”
“Edgy, my ass.”
“Eddie!”
There was a sudden cut to a woman identified as a “celebrity journalist,” who said my rise and fall was one of the most baffling in the history of the music business.
“Who the hell is that?” my father demanded.
“An expert on my life, Dad.”
“What the hell does she know?”
“Nothing. They probably threw her a few hundred for the interview.”
“Shh!” my mother said. “We’re missing the whole thing!”
They cut to a clip of me and Lois from our TV pilot.
“Oh, my God,” I said, “where’d they dig that up?”
“DeFalco starred in a TV show named after his song,” the narrator continued. “It was dropped after just a few episodes. He married his costar, the former Lois Butler.”
And suddenly there was the surprisingly chubby face of my ex-wife, and these were the first words from her mouth: “He was always a mystery to me.”
There was footage of Lois splashing around with a couple of kids in a giant swimming pool, as the narrator explained that even though Lois was happy now as a mother of three and the wife of a TV producer, she was still “haunted” by her short-lived marriage to DeFalco.
Haunted.
“He had so much anger,” Lois said. “He’d had his heart broken when he was a kid, and he never got over it. As much as I loved him, it was a relief to walk away from him.”
“With a quarter of a million dollars!” my mother exclaimed. “I’ll bet that was a relief!”
Oh, it got worse. They even had a publicity photo of me opening a “Sweet Days” ice cream parlor, cutting a ribbon with a giant pair of scissors. They went on about how that venture went belly-up, and that I pretty much “disappeared” after that.
They dissolved from that photo back to me cutting grass. “So here he is now, back where he started,” the narrator said. “According to his ex-wife, he’s a heartbroken man. The question is…who broke his heart?”
Cut to Rosie Gambardello serving up a Western omelette to somebody at the International House of Pancakes.
“Mother of God,” my mother said. “Tell me I’m not seeing this.”
“Rosemary Gambardello is a divorced single mom, working as a waitress at the International House of Pancakes in Little Neck,” the narrator said. “She says she and DeFalco were once sweethearts.”
“I was his first girlfriend,” Rosie said with a straight face. “You know, puppy love. It didn’t work out. Just one of those things. Next thing you know, he writes this great song.”
Back to footage of Rosie on the job, as the narrator says: “So is this the great love of Mickey DeFalco’s life, the one who inspired the song that continues to delight us now, all these years later? Well, we tried to get an answer to that and many other questions…without much luck.”
Cut to the camera approaching me as I’m putting up the tailgate on the trailer. You hear Joel Schmitter say who he is and where he’s from, asking if he could have a minute of my time.
“That’s the man who came to the door!” my mother cried.
And then I give him the finger, a gesture the technicians at Hollywood Howl blurred so it could air in prime time.
I can hear my mother’s hands as they slap against her cheeks.
“That’s tellin’ him!” my father yells.
“All right?” I ask Schmitter. “You guys happy now?”
“The question,” the narrator says, “is not if we’re happy…but if you are happy, Mickey DeFalco.”
Back to Lois: “I don’t know if he’ll ever be happy. He was a troubled, troubled boy. And now, he’s a troubled man.”
Back to Rosie: “I’ll always remember him the way he was, not the way he is.”
And the piece ends, of course, with me moving in slow motion, once again flipping the blurred bird to the camera. The shot freezes, there’s a dramatic music sting and at last, it’s over.
“Well,” I said as they went to a commercial, “you are now the proud parents of America’s favorite psychotic.”
“I really, really don’t like that particular gesture,” my mother said.
“Do you know what it means, Mom?”
“Oh, I know what it means, all right. It means fuck you.”
My father and I couldn’t have been more shocked if the pope had suddenly appeared in the living room and pissed on the rug. I had never heard her utter that word before.
“Jesus, Donna,” Eddie said. Her lips were curled into a Mona Lisa smile, which she turned toward me. Yes, the smile said, I’m a woman of the world, I know things you never thought I knew, so please, please don’t treat me like a crazy, sheltered Catholic.
I managed to say, “I rarely use that gesture. I was provoked.”
“Oh, I know. I saw what happened. But in the future, Michael, don’t let other people diminish you with their crudity. That’s my advice.”
The phone was ringing. My father rose to answer it but my mother told him to sit.
“We are not answering the phone tonight,” she announced. She got up and pulled the plug on the phone, mid-ring.
“Mom. I’m sorry I got rude with that TV crew.”
“I know you are.”
“They’re lucky he didn’t throw a punch,” my father said.
“No, Eddie. We’re lucky he didn’t throw a punch. They could sue.”
“What could they get from him?”
“Not him, us. He lives here now. We’re responsible for him. They could take our house.”
They started to argue about whether that was legally possible when I interrupted by yelling, “For Christ’s sake, I didn’t throw a punch!”
Silence. We sat looking at each other as Hollywood Howl continued with a story about Britney Spears’s sudden weight gain.
“Is it true about you and Rosie?” my mother asked.
“Of course not! You know the song’s not about her!”
“Did you date her?”
“We sort of went out for a little while.”
“Went out? I don’t remember that!”
“Mom—”
“Tell me! I have a right to know!”
I rolled my eyes. “I screwed her in a car. Once.”
She looked at my father. “Nice, huh?”
Eddie spread his hands. “You asked for it, Donna. He told you.”
She sagged back in her chair. “The things I don’t know about your life,” she said in a voice of wonder. “Eddie, did you know about Rosie?”
“I found out from the TV, just like you.”
She pointed at me. “Whoever watched that tonight is going to think you have a thing for fat girls. My God, Lois certainly let herself go! I always knew she would.”
She got up and left the room. My father grabbed the remote control.
“Let’s see if there’s a Yankee game on. Get the taste of that garbage out of our mouths.”
I didn’t need a baseball game. I needed my woman back. And suddenly, I realized that I needed another woman’s help to get that done.
I headed for town, not even phoning first to see if Rosalind was home. The night doorman at her building was a menacing-looking Puerto Rican who seemed ashamed of the frilly gold-braided jacket they forced him to wear. He told me she wasn’t home.
“Do you know where she went?”
A sly grin crossed his face. “I can’t tell you that.”
“So you do know.”
He shrugged noncommittally.
He took the bill, slipped it into his pocket, looked away from me and said, “She’s at her gym. Eightieth and Lex, I think.”
“The gym? At this hour?”
He chuckled. “She never stops, man, never stops….”
I ran there to find an all-female ground-floor gym called Power Babes, with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on the avenue. It was past ten o’clock but the place was in full swing, with dozens of highly paid white women on exercise mats, tread-mills and stationary bikes.
On the bike closest to the window sat Roz in sweatpants and a snug tank top, furiously pedaling away while reading the Wall Street Journal on the machine’s handlebars.
I tapped on the window. She looked up from the newspaper, scowled at me, and began pedaling even faster, as if to put distance between us. Tough thing to accomplish on a stationary bike.
I entered the place, told the receptionist I had an urgent message for Ms. Pomer and went straight to Roz, still pedaling like mad.
“Did Pedro tell you I was here?” she gasped. “I’m going to have his ass fired!”
“Look, I’m really sorry about what happened in SoHo.”
“What you did was the worst thing that ever happened to me. The worst.”
“I know. I was an asshole.”
“We’re all finished, Mickey. You and I are through.”
At last she stopped pedaling and let her head fall forward. Drops of sweat soaked the Wall Street Journal.
“Hand me a towel, would you?”
I meekly obeyed her.
“By the way, Mickey, you fucked things up royally with TFN. They wanted to meet you, but you dissed them by ditching the party. Now they don’t want to record your song.”
“Like I said, it’s not my song anymore.”
She rubbed her face with the towel. “So what’s this all about? You wanted to end it like a gentleman, face-to-face?”
“Well, there’s that. Plus…can I ask you something?”
“I’m listening.”
I took a deep breath. “My old girlfriend told me she can’t have kids, but she won’t tell me why.”
She cocked her head, narrowed her eyes. “Excuse me?”
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