She took in the singer’s camouflage colors, the sunglasses that were the deep mahogany of his skin, the silver hoop earrings in triplicate on each side of his face. His shoebox was half-full with loose change and single dollar bills, but he hadn’t started to break down his “stage” yet, so she knew she hadn’t missed the finale.
She had first taken in his show a few weeks earlier, when, on a lark, she decided she’d ride the subway to Times Square. She hadn’t been on one in years. As the crowd poured out of the train, she found herself paddled in the direction of this busker, who was singing “Just the Two of Us,” the smooth Bill Withers hit from a year or two ago. Most of the performance was this sort of light jazz or R & B — until the final song. After a few weeks she realized that, while the rest of the set changed, the finale never did, and so she kept going just to hear that one, the one that had changed everything for her, for them.
It was that feather duster of a song that nobody thought would be a hit, not even the marquee songwriters who wrote it. It was passed to her and the brother as, essentially, sloppy thirds after it had already been recorded by a couple of the biggest names in the business, to little effect, and after even their own label boss, H., the handsome trumpeter and vocalist, had tried and abandoned it (he couldn’t quite hear himself singing those fluffy lines about angels and moon dust and hair).
After the brother worked up a different arrangement, a slow shuffle, it sped to No. 1 so fast they were still scraping together shake money for Bob’s Big Boy when they got the news. The next spring, when the name of the song was found inside a few awards envelopes, no one was more shocked than they were, except perhaps the other nominees. Now, some 12 years later, here was this blind, black behemoth of a man, a jazz and R & B singer no less, his voice a shade deeper than, say, Lou Rawls’s or Arthur Prysock’s, singing it amid the rattle and hum of the New York City subway system.
She hadn’t worked with many black musicians in the course of her career, save for that last time in New York, during the solo sessions. One night after they finished recording, the studio crew presented her with a mocha cake in the shape of a phallus. She sliced it up for them, in a deep blush, somehow forgetting to leave a piece for herself. She had never been prouder in the studio. But then, of course, the album was shelved. “It’s a white girl trying to sound black,” someone said.
No subways arrived to disrupt the finale, and she stayed for the whole song, mouthing the words along with the busker, sometimes even singing along softly, closing her eyes once or twice as she rediscovered the lilt of the melody, the halting cadences — her idea back then, on the record — reigniting the aroma of it, which had naturally dimmed over the years and the hundreds of times she had sung it. It was in fact the second time today she’d heard the song in public. She’d been out walking earlier when she picked up the scratchy sound of a radio playing somewhere, tuned to WABC- AM. The promotion guys at their label always said that your song wasn’t really a hit until it was played on WABC. Since then she and the brother had had lots of songs played on WABC, a couple that were even bigger on the station’s surveys than they were nationally.
Today, though, WABC was going all-talk at noon, and in the morning it was playing one song from each year in a retrospective of its Top 40 glory days. When the D.J., a kind of lechy guy who once said of her, “Have you ever seen this girl’s legs?” got to 1970, he played that very song, their first big hit. No lechy comment this time. Well, she figured, it was an honor to have one of the last songs played on WABC. Now she guessed she and the brother would have to start concentrating on videos.
When the busker finished, she crept up past the magazine stand and in front of his shoebox, holding her breath, and dropped a 50, folded six times, into it, before taking several giant steps backward away from him. One day, maybe, she’d get up the nerve to tell him he was always late on the downbeat.
2. Queens, N.Y., Spring 1982
Sib Kelly pressed her cheek against the gray metal pipe holding up the basketball hoop in her driveway. She had just finished drills of layups, jump shots and three-pointers and needed to steady her legs, take a swig of Gatorade. She was starting to feel every second of the almost 48 hours she’d been awake, ostensibly from celebrating her pending college graduation; but her fatigue was pretty constant these days anyway. She hadn’t been able to sleep more than a couple of hours a night for months. She told her father, who had been suspicious of her late nights right away but said something to her only a few weeks ago, that she was cramming for finals and also trying to catch as much as she could of the last weeks of WABC-AM, the legendary Top 40 station, which was going all-talk at noon that day. Forget the fact that by March she could have neglected to turn in another exam or paper and still graduated magna cum laude, or that WABC had been pretty lame for years, drifting away from true Top 40 after the disco crash into pallid adult contemporary. The station couldn’t even play the No.-1-selling record in the city in the last weeks — Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll” — because it was too raunchy for the suits left to preside over the final days. So the countdown stopped at No. 2 those last few weeks. But her father, she thought, would worry less about her lack of sleep if she had a neat, clean reason, and school and WABC for now were providing it. It figured that her insomnia would catch his attention just when he had stopped the accidental clanging of pots, the absent-minded jingling of keys, the unconscious clodhopping on the stairs, almost nine years after her hearing had returned.
It was already hot for 8:00 on an early May morning, and as Sib — short for Siobhan — massaged the back of her neck with the cold bottle of Gatorade, she stared down at the concrete around the base of the hoop pole. The squiggles she noticed the last time had deepened and widened into mini-fissures. She was surprised her father hadn’t troweled them over by now. Maybe this was a sign that he was finally thinking about selling the house, now that he could, if he wanted, retire from the Post Office and the block had become a kind of widow’s’ row. Most of the other men — WWII or Korean veterans like him — had died or divorced their wives, and no one really took care of their small lawn plots anymore the way he did. Some of those widows had fled the big South Asian influx in the neighborhood — Sib could smell the curry even this early in the morning, and she chortled softly when she remembered the four of them, her mother and father and her brother, Kieran, and her, going to an Indian restaurant in Manhattan when she was about 7 and how she thought they would be eating corn and squash and turkey and how she cried when it turned out not to be corn and squash and turkey at all and how it was her father with his big, soft hands and calm, ruddy face who soothed her and told her it was O.K., they’d make her spaghetti, while her mother just sat placidly, as she usually did, waiting for the storm to pass. Sib had been like that all the time — fidgety, squealing, unsatisfied, suspicious — in restaurants when she was a kid; now, particularly since she had gone to college, she could and did eat practically anything. Indian food, the kind from India, was one of her favorites.
She dribbled to the end of the driveway and looked for her father down the street. She had waited until he left for 7 o’clock. Mass at the Church of the Immaculate Conception to at least allow him the illusion that she was sleeping, then threw on her shorts and a tank top and hit the hoop. She had propped up the old transistor, the battery compartment held in place with Scotch tape, against the screen in the kitchen window, and when she paid attention she could hear the voice of Dan Ingram, one of WABC’s longtime jockeys, the guy with the leer in his voice, reviewing the golden age of Top 40, year by year. When he got to 1962 he speculated that “The Loco-Motion” wasn’t really by the singer listed on the record label, Little Eva, a supposed baby-sitting singing sensation, but rather one of the songwriters, Carole King, in disguise. She thought of how she was still listening to Carole King’s mammoth-selling Tapestry album way after it was out of fashion, after the punks and the disco queens had kicked the singer-songwriters out of the pop penthouse.
In the early ’70s, when King and James Taylor and Joni Mitchell and the rest ruled, there hadn’t been any music in Sib’s ears.
From the end of the driveway, she saw her father emerge from down the block, as if on a wave out from the chiaroscuro of traffic and sleepy buildings. His shoulders, still quietly broad and thick from all those years carrying a letter sack, came into focus first, then the fluid stride of his long, unarthritic legs and, as he reached the corner, his wedding ring, meat-and-potatoes gold shooting off a laser of sun. She wondered again how long he was going to keep wearing it. The fingers of his left hand clasped a neatly creased white bakery bag, and The Daily News was comfortably tucked un- der his right arm.
It was her father’s day off, but still he had risen early — it was his habit, after years of being one of the first out on his route; no one ever called to complain that Roy Kelly’s mail was late being delivered. In an hour he’d managed to go to the stationery store to get the newspaper and to the bakery and almost be home. Daily Mass was usually express, but Sib hoped that maybe just once he’d spend a few extra minutes in the bakery to talk to Mrs. Donovan, whose husband had died five years before and who always threw an extra kaiser roll in his bag, an extra crumb bun on Sundays. His prompt return suggested to Sib that he’d had little more use for flirting with Mrs. Donovan than he would have with the extra roll, which he usually saved until the end of the day and, having not eaten it, wound up breaking apart and throwing to the birds.
“Short homily at the I-Mac, Pop?” Sib said as her father drew near. He was wearing a variation on a theme: navy Windbreaker, light blue button-down shirt, navy- blue T, black knit trousers, Thom McAn oxfords with thick soles, bifocals with black frames. Put a few postal insignias on and he could have been on his route again. All those years of walking had kept him not only fit but well oxygenated. His hair was still a thick, swarthy salt-and-pepper cushion between his scalp and old age. No wonder Mrs. Donovan had the hots for him.
“No homily,” he said. “Maybe Father Felix had an 8 a.m. tee time.” Roy knew that Father Felix probably couldn’t tell a 9-iron from a mashie niblick, probably couldn’t pronounce either in his heavy South Asian accent. This was her father’s way of being inclusive, of protecting himself from the grumblings among the parish elders about foreign priests, the “Indian incursion” or the “curry suckers” who were taking over South Queens, from the churches to the 7-Elevens. Roy also knew that Father Felix was Sri Lankan, not Indian, but when he listened to neighbors and parishioners rant he had stopped trying to correct them, instead just nodded quietly, partly out of his nonconfrontational nature and partly because, after all the help he got from the neighborhood during the rough patches after the accident, he owed them some tolerance of their bigotry.
Sib considered her father considering her, basketball under her arm, hair drooling rivulets of sweat and secondhand smoke from Whelan’s, the pub on North Conduit Avenue — “a bar for young plumbers and electricians,” as she once described it to him (to which Roy once replied, “Do they bring their tools?”) — where she and her friends had been out the night before. In his eyes she saw her own sagging from lack of sleep. In her mind she wandered the precincts of his that belonged to her, a 21-year-old daughter who had no idea what kind of job she wanted, not that there were many jobs anyway, now that Reagan’s honeymoon was over and money was drying up everywhere, and what was her field, anyway — “communications”? And why at her age did she have only male friends? In her-his final disappointing summation, she would probably never get any further in life than the “high twelves” of her SAT scores, which meant she’d be smart enough to survive but never sharp enough to accomplish anything great — or dumb enough to develop some unintellectual talent that would make her rich or save her from some ranch-house fate on Long Island reserved for girls who at her age still lived with their fathers and were virgins and had bodies like coat boxes.
She played this game all the time, just to give her imagination a workout. In reality, as they stood in the shade of the maple at the bottom of the half-sloped driveway and her father wiped the bead of sweat from his own forehead, she was seeing a man looking at an old picture and registering the same reassurance every time. He found that reassurance in her eyes, the same sunset glisten of his mother, or the spaldeen bounce at the back of her tied auburn hair, the same as his wife’s, even in its drip-dry condition, or the shy, slowly cracking smile that seemed to reach only halfway then lingered, like her brother’s — the smile that was never in a hurry to come or go. It was the look, with only seasonal variations for clothes, setting, temperateness, that she’d seen every day since she’d woken up after the accident, the look that said, “I’m glad you made it.”
“Wanna shoot a few, Pop?” she said, firing the ball toward him, knocking The Daily News out from under his arm. He caught it with his right hand and, bakery bag still curled in his left, hooked it back to her.
“Sorry, that was your mother’s game,” he said. Her father had never hesitated to talk about her mother and brother, even during the time when Sib could only read his lips, sort of throwing her into the deep end of grief right away. And now Sib was never knocked off balance by the mention or memory of them.
Her father heard the last few bars of “The Loco-Motion.” “That’s the one by the baby-sitter, right?” Roy said.
“Yeah, Pop, you big showoff.” Her father always did know his history, even musical. And 1962, the year the song came out, was the kind of cakes-and-ale year that was easy on his memory. He was 33. He had a wife and two young kids and a good job and a new home. There was a Catholic in the White House, and the National League had returned to New York. What was there not to remember?
“Come in for breakfast when you’re ready,” he said, then sup- pressed a smile. “I think I’ve got an extra roll.”
“One day, Roy Kelly, Mrs. Donovan is going to collect for all the extras,” Sib shot back.
“Siobhan,” he said in mock sternness, “she’s a churchgoing woman.” He was playing the prude because he knew she expected it.
“So, maybe she’ll ask for a biblical exchange. You know, a roll for a roll.”
Roy’s back was to her now and she couldn’t see him blush, the same blush he gave her mother when she first saw him playing baseball in the money leagues on a field of cement and weeds, just back from Korea and a solid .280 first baseman, and complimented his swing. They were married two years later, after a courtship spent in the city’s sports arenas, and 11 months after that her brother, Kieran, was born.
Sib headed back up the driveway behind her father and watched him go in the detached garage behind the hoop. She never followed him into the garage; it was a place she could only explore alone, because the grief, which was diffuse enough now most everywhere else, still grew like ivy behind her father’s neat rows of tools and drawers of nails and nuts and bolts and stacks of grass seed and fertilizer. The nails where the bicycles had hung had receded into the wall, and you could still see the rusting heads, like little pimples that couldn’t be expunged no matter how you pulled and picked and scrubbed.
She heard her father put down the bakery bag and the paper and rattle something from its resting place.
“What are you doing, Pop?” she called from the side door of the house.
“Just pulling out the trowel. Maybe I’ll get to those cracks today.”
Sib rolled the basketball back into the garage, grabbed the radio and headed up to shower. By the time she got into the bathroom, the WABC recap was up to 1970, and when Sib heard the song the D.J.s were playing to represent that year, she shuddered and flipped the radio off. All these years later, she still couldn’t stand to hear it. She turned on the shower and hoped that the noise and hard stream of water from the showerhead would wash away those first few sickening bars of the song. By the time she was finished and turned the radio back on, WABC was safely into the mid-’70s.
3. Queens, N.Y., Late Spring 1982
It was
Andy Logan’s first day off in weeks, and as he lay in his boxers and stretched his calves, long, solid, husklike ovals he had developed from years of running on soccer pitches, under the top sheet, he remembered that early Saturday morning at the seminary — where he went several years ago for a weekend “exploratory” retreat — when, with no meetings or prayer groups and time to run across the open fields, losing himself in the endless space in front, behind, on either side of him, the space to spare, it felt like the devil’s naptime. Birdsong was trilling softly now, nudging him out of slumber, and he felt a lazy breeze floating through his garage apartment in Bellerose, in the kind of neighborhood where things happened, it seemed, on an alternate soundstage. Bellerose was part of Queens but just a Frisbee toss and a tailwind away from the Long Island suburbs. Lawns were mowed, sidewalks repaved, Little League games played, Christmas trees decorated or menorahs lit, everything in tidy squares and the occasional relaxed curves, with a minimum of noise or mess. Andy rented from a middle-aged couple whose kids, two boys and a girl, or maybe two girls and a boy, like the town itself, were a bit phantom, now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t, the bikes in the driveway sometimes there, sometimes not, their kid noise coming through on a damper pedal. This apartment, this neighborhood, were a good fit for an undercover cop or a single guy or a 360-days-a-year librarian or recovering somebody or anybody really who didn’t want too many questions asked.
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