One Hit Wonder Read online

  RAVES FOR CHARLIE CARILLO

  Raising Jake

  The best kind of story because it is about the best kind of journey, one you don’t want to end…written in a smart, funny, moving way in the special language of fathers and sons. I want my own three sons to read it, as well.

  —Mike Lupica, New York Times–bestselling author of Travel Team and Heat

  Charlie Carillo has long been a superb comic novelist but in Raising Jake he hits a perfect page-turning stride. It’s scathingly hilarious, vengeful, and truthful, and should come with a warning: Beware: this book is potentially life-altering.

  —Sally Jenkins, Washington Post sports columnist and New York Times–bestselling author of It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life with Lance Armstrong

  In the tradition of Tom Perrotta, Carillo explores the strength of the family bond, the power of forgiveness, and the hope that comes from embracing second chances…truthful, and hilarious.

  —Alison Grambs, author of The Smart Girl’s Guide to Getting Even

  I don’t like funny, touching novels because they make me wish I’d written them myself. I enjoyed Charlie Carillo’s book from beginning to end and now I’m miserable.

  —Sherwood Kiraly, author of Diminished Capacity

  Raising Jake is a literary romp through the minefields of a totally normal, and totally abnormal, family…. I actually laughed out loud and kept turning the pages to make absolutely sure that all worked out at the end.

  —Cathy Lamb, author of Henry’s Sisters

  I read Raising Jake with a smile on my face the whole way through. Sometimes I laughed aloud; always I enjoyed the turnabouts and back-to-front quality of the relationships in this story of a father’s coming of age with the help of his son. It’s never too late to grow up and no one is ever too old to be young.

  —Drusilla Campbell, author of Blood Orange

  Former New York Post reporter Carillo (My Ride with Gus) nails the language, the bluster, the rhythm, and the pulse of New York and its denizens. Fans of Jonathan Tropper will go for this one in a big way.

  —Library Journal

  In this coming-of-age tale, there’s often a question of who is parenting whom. Carillo, a former reporter for the New York Post, has an easy way with breezy prose and likable characters.

  —Publishers Weekly

  Raising Jake was funny, poignant and insightful. Carillo’s smooth and steady style brought his characters to life, allowing the reader to experience every moment. Sammy’s stories were riveting and heartbreaking; at times I felt I should look away to give him some privacy.

  —BookFetish.org

  You can take the boy out of the city but you can’t take the city out of the boy.

  —New York Post

  If you’re not too embarrassed to LOL at the beach, read Charlie Carillo’s Raising Jake.

  —New York Daily News

  My Ride with Gus

  What starts out as a wild ride to get rid of a corpse ends up as a touching and believable story of family love and survival, a testament to Carillo’s storytelling abilities.

  —Publishers Weekly

  This nightmarish picaresque novel mixes elements of slapstick, the surreal, and the absurd, all delivered in rambunctious, wildly profane Brooklynese…Carillo generates more than enough wacky energy.

  —Booklist

  My Ride with Gus makes Charles Carillo a writer to watch.

  —New York Daily News

  Outrageously funny…Charles Carillo’s writing is light, fast-paced and yet thought-provoking…a fulfilling ride.

  —The Post and Courier (Charleston, South Carolina)

  A plot which hinges on the disposal of an inconvenient corpse is not a new idea, but Charles Carillo manages to make it fresh…as well as extremely funny…Carillo sustains his deliberately improbable narrative with élan, piling up the jokes in the best comic thriller tradition.

  —The Times of London

  If laughter is good medicine, Charles Carillo’s novel is a treatment as well as a treat…the best part of the story is the witty contrast between Gus the gangster and Jimmy the Citizen…Carillo’s book is an inspired marriage of the picaresque narrative and the road movie in which Gus, worldly wise and world weary, and Jimmy, his paranoid straight man, move through a series of hilarious near-disasters.

  —Daily Press Inc. (Newport News, Virginia)

  one hit wonder

  Also by Charlie Carillo

  Raising Jake

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corp.

  one hit wonder

  CHARLIE CARILLO

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  Once again to Kim

  Acknowledgments

  Every laugh you laugh is an illness you don’t get. My special thanks go to these guys, whose humor cheated innumerable doctors out of my money.

  Roll Call:

  Pat Cook, Dennis O’Brien, Paul Patrick, Bill Hoffmann, Charles Lachman, Bill Barrett, Phil Tangel, Kimmy Gorden, Matt Meagher, Matt DeNinno, Rob Nieto, Chris Dukas, Jimmy Malhame, Mike Pearl, Michael Shain, David Ng, Leo Standora, Arty Pomerantz, Don Halasy, Sean Delonas, Phil Spellane, Gordon Mitchell, Phil Parrish, Brian (“Dog”) Kramer, James Bohrsmann, Frank O’Mahony, Kevin O’Mahony, John Chigounis, Anthony Chigounis, Al Canaletich, Bill Kelly, Randy Glick, Gary Goldstein, Malcolm Pink, Simon (“Dr. Fellenstein”) Fell, Derek DeBowski and Darren Stewart.

  Also: Tony Carillo, my father; Sal Carillo, my uncle; and Rafael Richardson-Carillo, my son. I guess it’s in the blood.

  And a farewell salute to Brian Walls and Michael Norcia, both gone long before their time, both so damn funny they made me double over with laughter. By the time I straightened up, my troubles didn’t seem nearly as bad.

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER ONE

  The woman sitting beside me on the red-eye recognized me. She had the window seat and I was on the aisle, trying to sleep, but I never could sleep on planes, not even in those long-gone days when I flew first class.

  She was just the right age for someone that might know who I was, a slightly overweight thirty-something woman with crinkly brown hair and deep dark eyes, obviously a serious professional of some kind. She stared at me half convinced that it was me, and half afraid of making a fool of herself by asking.

  This is what being a has-been celebrity is like—you get stared at, wide-eyed and then narrow-eyed. They wonder if you could be who they’re thinking you could be. They wonder if you might have died. They look at you as if you’re a ghost.

  Then they hesitate, debating with themselves over whether it’s actually worth the trouble to find out. This wom
an decided to give it a shot.

  “Excuse me. Are you Mickey DeFalco?”

  Picture what it must be like to be ashamed to admit who you are, to know that whoever recognizes you is going to want to know about all the wasted years that have passed since you burst onto the scene.

  I didn’t answer immediately. The woman continued staring at me, willing herself to be right. I sighed, nodded, shrugged.

  “Yes, ma’am, that’s me.”

  She covered her mouth with her hands, as if to stifle a scream of excitement. The hands fell away, the mouth was agape. For a few magical moments, she was no longer a serious professional hurtling toward middle age. She was a groupie.

  “Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m meeting you!”

  “Nice meeting you, too.”

  “God, I loved ‘Sweet Days’!”

  “Well, thanks.”

  “I was sixteen when it came out. I played it so many times that the tape finally broke! That’s how long ago it was—the song was on a cassette! Remember cassettes?”

  “Yes, I remember cassettes.”

  “Oh, God, Mickey DeFalco!!”

  She was getting loud. I was starting to panic. I had to calm her down. The last thing I needed was for everybody on the plane to know who I was.

  And when I say “was,” I mean “was.”

  “Sweet Days” is the name of the bubblegum love song I wrote and recorded in 1988. You’ll remember it if you were anywhere near an A.M. radio that year. For two straight weeks, I was number one on the charts.

  However, things have not gone nearly as well for me in the ensuing thousand or so weeks, give or take a few.

  At age eighteen I was a hot ticket. Riding on the crest of my hit song, I moved from my parents’ home in Little Neck, Queens, to Los Angeles to star in a TV pilot called Sweet Days. It was dropped after three episodes.

  Which would have been all right, except that my follow-up record, Sweeter Days, went right into the toilet.

  Even that would have been okay, except I got married at twenty, divorced at twenty and a half, and lost half my assets to my ex, L.A. style.

  Then I got talked into investing in a chain of drive-in ice cream parlors called Sweet Days, a venture that lasted six months and took the other half of my assets.

  After that, things got a little frantic.

  I tried to stick with the music, but with the passing years it was clear that I was the very definition of a one hit wonder. Once in a while I played the piano and sang my song at country fairs, birthday parties, and bar mitzvahs. (I usually announced the winner of the raffle at such events, and sometimes I called the bingo numbers.)

  For a while I sold cars, trading on my fading name often enough to make the sale that made my commission.

  When the car dealership went belly-up I became a pool maintenance man. (Yes, ladies and gentlemen, step right up and have Mickey DeFalco check your pH levels and skim those dead dragonflies off the surface!)

  Hardly anybody knew who I was out there in my white overalls, which means the horny housewives who lured me inside—in three years on the job, maybe half a dozen—were simply lonely, and not starfuckers. (Fuckers of faded stars? Whatever.)

  Anyway, that particular gig came to an abrupt halt after I put too much chlorine in a pool that happened to belong to a vice president at Warner Brothers. His much younger wife dove in brunette, climbed out blond, and demanded the head of the idiot responsible for this atrocity.

  Would you believe I only took the pool man job because I thought I would have access to show-biz people whose pools needed cleaning?

  This is what it had come to. It was my only way in. Nobody in the music world would even take my calls.

  Of course I was fired, and that ended the last of my regular-paying jobs in the City of Angels.

  After that, I scrounged any kind of work I could find. I had nothing—no woman, no prospects, no hope. My California dream was a total nightmare.

  When I boarded the red-eye from Los Angeles to JFK I was thirty-eight years old, and I was moving back home with Mom and Dad. They didn’t even know it yet. I hadn’t known it myself, until about two hours before takeoff.

  You can move pretty fast when you’re desperate.

  Of course, I told none of this to the woman on the plane. All I said was that I’d been doing a lot of different things, and now I was relocating to the East Coast to be close to my family.

  Luckily for me she wanted to talk about herself. She was a corporate lawyer, and she looked as if she should have been sitting up in business class—good shoes, a smart black pantsuit, a brown leather briefcase that probably cost more than my one-way plane ticket.

  I wore jeans and a gray T-shirt. Her brow furrowed as she noticed something on my elbow.

  “Hey, what’s that?”

  I looked. It was a splotch of white. My heart jumped.

  “It’s paint,” I said.

  “Paint?”

  I hesitated. The less I said about it, the better. On the other hand, I didn’t want to seem as if I were hiding something.

  “I was painting a house earlier today,” I finally said.

  She couldn’t believe it. She didn’t want to believe it.

  “Mickey DeFalco, a house painter?”

  “I was doing a favor for a friend.”

  She was stunned. She began shaking her head, a sad grin on her face.

  “Man, if anybody had told me I’d be flying home with Mickey DeFalco, and he turned out to be a housepainter—”

  “Hey! I said it was a favor for a friend!”

  The woman was stunned by my tone, but I couldn’t help it. Pride dies hard. I was tired of strangers being disappointed by my life. Who the fuck were they to feel this way about me?

  “Hey, man,” she said, “don’t get defensive.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m just tired.”

  “All right, then.”

  She called for the flight attendant. I figured she wanted to change her seat, and that would have been fine with me, but what she did instead was to order a bottle of champagne, as if it were the kind of thing she did every time she flew. The flight attendant went to get it and the woman turned to me.

  “I’d like to apologize and I hope you’ll join me in a toast,” she said. “Your song meant a lot to me, back in the day. Will you clink glasses with me?”

  I clinked glasses with her. The champagne tasted as good as airline champagne can taste at thirty thousand feet. We polished off the bottle as she talked about her business trip, how well it had gone, how impressed the L.A. office was with her work, how badly they wanted her to relocate to the West Coast. Ah, to be wanted…

  It was the middle of the night, and we were somewhere over Kansas. Everybody else on the plane seemed to be asleep. She leaned close, not for a kiss but to whisper. Her breath was hot in my ear. It was the perfect time and place for a tightly wound person like her to become somebody else, a person she could forget all about when the plane landed.

  “I’ll bet,” she began, and then she broke down giggling and had to begin again: “I’ll bet you’re in the Mile-High Club.”

  Oh boy. This. I could almost see it coming. Once a groupie, always a groupie.

  “Yeah, I’m a member.” I sighed. “But it’s been a long time,” I added truthfully. “A very long time.”

  “Do you remember how it works?”

  “There’s not much to remember.”

  She stared at me seriously. “I’m not a member, Mickey, but I’d like to join.”

  There was a crinkling sound from her hand. She was clutching a condom, a Trojan, the brand I’d always sworn by. Jesus Christ. Did she carry them around all the time, like breath mints?

  I shut my eyes, thought about fame. Even faded fame counts for something, I realized. My name hadn’t meant a damn thing for twenty years, but here I was, being offered sex in the sky by a not-bad-looking woman who’d treated me to a bottle of champagne.

  “Mickey?”

&nbs
p; I opened my eyes. She was staring at me all doe-eyed, waiting for my reply. I was either going to make her a member of the Mile-High Club, or I wasn’t. She’d done her part, gotten herself drunk to have an excuse for such behavior, and now it was up to me.

  I gestured toward the front of the plane. “Go to that bathroom up on the left,” I said. “Close the door, but don’t lock it. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  She did as she was told, drunkenly bumping seat backs as she walked. There were a few drops left in the champagne bottle. I brought it to my lips and downed them. Then I got up from my seat to make a thirty-something lawyer’s pop-star fantasy come true.

  I didn’t even know her name. It was the eighties all over again.

  The term “Mile-High Club” implies something merry and giddy, but the truth of it is, you’ve got your bare ass planted atop a chemical toilet with very little straddle room for the woman on your lap, especially if you’re flying coach.

  She’d taken off her slacks and was reluctant to drop them on the floor, wet with the splashings of those who’d preceded us. I rolled up her slacks protectively inside my jeans and set the bundle down in the tiny bathroom’s driest corner. I set our shoes neatly beside the bundle, side by side. It was an oddly sad sight. You should never set your shoes beside those of anybody you don’t love.