One Hit Wonder Read online

  She climbed aboard and seemed to be enjoying herself. She clung tightly and buried her nose in my neck, rocking to the sound of music only she could hear. She kept repeating my name, which might have been all right, except it was my full name she repeated.

  “Mickey DeFalco…Mickey DeFalco…”

  She had to justify this wild, wanton deed by telling herself that at least it was happening with somebody who used to be famous.

  Unfortunately I was now old enough to think past the thrill of the hump. I looked into the future, to a girly night at this woman’s apartment six months, maybe a year from now. A room full of her female friends, sitting cross-legged and barefoot on her living room floor, getting silly on white wine and chowing down on Cheetos and potato chips, the kind of stuff women like that never eat—and if they do, they double the workout at the gym the next day to sweat out those poisons….

  But this isn’t the next day. This is tonight, a night for wild truths to be shared, things they’ve never told each other, and will she ever have a story to tell! Of course she’d let her friends go first—stories about one-night stands behind their boyfriends’ backs, the usual tennis pro or ski instructor boinks, and she’d wait until all these tales were told before casually dropping the bomb….

  Be quiet, everybody, be quiet and listen to me!!…Do you remember Mickey DeFalco, the guy who sang “Sweet Days”?

  Yeah, sure, I remember him! He was cute!

  Well…I did him on a flight from L.A. to New York!

  You did not!!!

  Bullshit!

  I swear to God it happened!

  Was he still cute?

  Sort of, I guess…we were both sooooo drunk….

  I could hear the squealing and the laughter…and there I’d be, the big punch line on hen night….

  I stood up. It’s not an easy thing to do in an airplane toilet with a woman wrapped around you, but fury gives you strength you never imagined you could have. She gasped with shocked pleasure, or maybe it was pleasured shock, and then I turned and completed this ridiculous deed up against the bathroom door, bumping her against it with as many thrusts as it took to finish myself off.

  By this time she’d stopped saying my name, switching instead to “They’ll hear us! They’ll hear us!”

  I knew it would bother her. That’s why I did it. Anything to get her to stop repeating my name.

  Her feet found the floor. She pushed herself away from me, shoved her hair back, and began to dress.

  “Mickey,” she hissed, “why did you do that?”

  “The angle on the toilet bowl wasn’t working for me.”

  “We were banging against the door!”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “What if somebody heard us?”

  “What could they do? Stop worrying.”

  She wanted to be mad at me but the whole thing had been her idea, so she probably didn’t feel entitled to her anger. Beyond that, I’m sure she felt lonely. I know I did. We were two semi-naked strangers in a chemical toilet high in the sky, and that’s as lonely as lonely gets.

  I peeled off the condom, knotted it, and dropped it in the receptacle for used paper towels.

  “Is that the best thing to do with that?”

  She was worried about evidence. Typical lawyer.

  “Nobody’s going to inspect the garbage,” I said. “Look, I’ll drop some paper towels over it. See? It’s buried.”

  There were tears in her eyes. I touched her cheek, forced a smile. “Listen. That was nice…. You come okay?”

  She blinked back the tears, blushed, nodded. “Several times, in fact.”

  “Good.”

  “How do we…get out of here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, who goes first?”

  “It really doesn’t matter.”

  “You came in here after me. If somebody saw you, it might look funny if I go out first.”

  “I’ll go first, then.”

  “What if somebody’s waiting right outside to use the toilet? I’ll be in here when they come in!”

  “So I guess we’ll just stay here for the rest of the flight, huh?”

  I was trying to loosen her up, but it wasn’t working. She was worried. The champagne buzz had faded, and the gleeful aspect of the experience had totally evaporated. Now she wanted her respectability back, as badly as she’d thought she wanted sex ten minutes earlier.

  “I’ll go first,” she decided. “I’ve got the window seat. I’d have to climb over you if you went first.”

  “That’s very logical of you.”

  She looked at herself in the mirror and took a deep breath before hopping out of the bathroom as if she had a parachute on her back.

  I locked the door after her, sat on the toilet seat and buried my face in my hands. I thought about spending the rest of the flight in here, but the chemical stink would have killed me.

  How many women had I tasted since “Sweet Days” hit the charts? The answer was a blur, like trying to count snowflakes in a blizzard. Unlike snowflakes, the women were all alike, except for one, the one who’d inspired the song. Sadly, she wasn’t the one I’d married.

  She was the one who ran away and broke my heart. Things were getting better, though. Twenty years on, I didn’t think about her more than once or twice an hour.

  A tap on the bathroom door—it was a flight attendant, asking that I please return to my seat and put my seat belt on, as the captain was anticipating turbulence.

  I put my jeans on and went back to my seat. When I got there she was fast asleep with her head against the window, the airline blindfold over her eyes, a blanket tucked up under her chin.

  Pretty smart. She was going to pretend it had all been a dream. She slept the rest of the way to JFK, greeting me cordially when she awoke.

  Fine with me. I wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened, too. It would be easier all around.

  We got off the plane and walked together down a long ramp toward the luggage carousel. She had baggage to pick up but I had nothing but my carry-on bag, so this was a perfect departure point. We stopped walking and shook hands, as if one of us had just sold life insurance to the other.

  “It was really nice meeting you,” I said, well aware that the verb in that statement was a lot milder than it could have been.

  She seemed to appreciate it, though. She hesitated before handing me a card.

  “If you ever want to get together,” she said, leaving the sentence incomplete as she turned and headed for the carousel.

  I watched her go, then looked at the card. Rosalind Pomer, Attorney at Law. Now I knew her name.

  It was well past midnight in New York. I was exhausted in every way a body and soul can be exhausted. I couldn’t just show up at my parents’ house, unannounced and reeking of a sky hump. I decided to check into one of those cheap airport motels, the ones you drive past and wonder who in their right mind would stay in dumps like those.

  It was only forty-eight bucks for the night, tax included. For the first time in ages I was rolling in money, plenty of money, so I paid in cash. They gave me a boxy room near the ice machine in the hallway, and between the clunking of the ice cubes and the roar of planes it wasn’t a particularly restful night.

  But there was a good strong shower, and I must have stood beneath its hot spray for twenty minutes, scrubbing away paint stains, Rosalind Pomer, and, I hoped, all the sins I’d committed in the City of Angels.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I slept late, almost late enough to be charged for another day. It was Sunday afternoon, just past two P.M. I got dressed, packed up, and went to the front desk to check out. The pathetic rubble of a complimentary breakfast was available if I wanted it, coffee in Styrofoam cups and one solitary Entenmann’s doughnut, alone in a pile of crumbs.

  I took a cup of black coffee, got some change from the desk clerk and went to the pay phone. The coffee was like battery acid but it packed the kick I needed. Two swallows and I
was wide awake, ready to do what I had to do. The phone number hadn’t changed since my childhood.

  “Hello?”

  “Mom, it’s Mickey.”

  “Oh my God, you sound so close!”

  I swallowed. “I’m in New York, Mom.”

  “Oh, my God! My God!!”

  “Mom—”

  “Are you all right? What happened? What’s wrong?”

  “Why do you ask if something’s wrong?”

  “You just show up out of the blue, and I’m not supposed to wonder?”

  “Listen, Mom, I’m coming home for a while, okay? Would that be all right?”

  She made a weird sound, the marriage of a cry and a laugh. “You don’t need permission to come home!”

  “Well…thanks.”

  “Where are you?”

  “The airport.”

  “Which one? Want your father to pick you up?”

  “I’ll take a cab.”

  “They’re so expensive!”

  “I’m on my way, Mom.”

  She had more to say but I hung up the phone, half sorry that I’d called. Now there was no turning back. My mother was waiting for me.

  I hailed a yellow cab and of course the Muslim driver wasn’t delighted to be taking me to an address on the edge of Queens, knowing he probably wouldn’t get a return fare. As we got rolling I thought he was muttering about it to himself, but then I saw that he had a small cell phone clamped onto his ear and was chattering away to someone in his native language. I asked him to please hang up until the end of the ride. He nodded and did as he was asked but his eyes flashed with anger. Maybe he was a terrorist, talking about plans for another attack on the city, and I’d interrupted him. Maybe I was a hero.

  I tipped him four bucks, and as he roared away I stood in front of my childhood home and stared in wonder at the little green asbestos-shingled house on Glenwood Street.

  I had not been home in twenty years.

  In the early days of my career I stayed at places like the Plaza Hotel whenever I came to New York (and sometimes wangled a room for my parents).

  But I’d avoided the old neighborhood until now, until I had no choice.

  The house seemed to have shrunk. Be it ever so humble, it was fully paid for, thanks to me. When the “Sweet Days” money rolled in I paid off the balance on my old man’s mortgage, $22,000. That was probably the only smart thing I did with my money.

  So I had a right to be here, if only for that. My knees trembled as I approached the front door, climbed the three cement steps to the stoop and froze.

  I didn’t know whether to walk right in, or knock on the door. How ridiculous was this? How many thousands of times had I barged in after school, dropped my books on the kitchen table, and headed straight for the chocolate milk in the refrigerator?

  But that was a long, long time ago. Things had changed. Everything had changed.

  Like a timid salesman I tapped on the door, almost inaudibly, but my mother heard it, all right. The door swung open and there she was, looking up at me as if I were a star in the night sky she was trying to recognize.

  I’d forgotten about how short she was, barely five feet when I was in my teens, maybe four-eleven now with the shrinkage of time. But her wide-set eyes were still as I remembered them, radiant beneath a wide brow. Her short hair had gone salt and peppery but she still combed it straight back, like a duchess of discipline in a British boarding school.

  “Michael,” she said, and then her arms were around me, briefly but tightly, as if she’d just pulled me in off the ledge of a skyscraper. She’s never once called me “Mickey,” hating it when the promoters decided my nickname would sell more records than my proper name.

  Her hair was rich with the smell of the meat loaf she’d been cooking, and when she let me go she said, “Is that it?”

  She was referring to my luggage. I nodded, setting down my green duffel bag.

  “Yeah, this is it.”

  “You’re shipping the rest of it?”

  “Mom, there is no rest of it. This is it.”

  Her nostrils widened with an insuck of breath, just as they used to when I was a child showing her a math test with a failing grade. After all this time it was nice to know I hadn’t lost my gift for disappointing her, and who wouldn’t be disappointed by a son who had nothing but socks, skivvies and T-shirts to show for himself after thirty-eight trips around the sun?

  “Well,” she said, “come in, come in. Dinner is ready.”

  My mother called the Sunday afternoon meal “dinner,” even though she always served it at four in the afternoon.

  I realized I was still standing on the stoop. I took a deep breath, picked up my bag and stepped inside the house.

  My father was standing by the tiny gas-jet fireplace they never used, hands hovering over the side pockets of his jeans, as if he were ready to reach for a pair of six-shooters.

  “Hello, Dad.”

  “Mick.”

  We approached each other but stopped a few feet apart. He seemed shorter, too, and beefier, but he still had Popeye forearms. He’s an auto mechanic, and he’s always had these amazingly powerful forearms. He never missed a day of work, and that’s why he was known around Little Neck as Steady Eddie DeFalco.

  His hair had gone totally gray but it was all there, and those brown eyes still burned out of his face with a weird kind of sorrow, the sorrow of a disappointed man who can’t even remember what it was he wanted and never got.

  “I could have picked you up, you know.”

  “The cab ride was fine.”

  “Yeah, but they rob you.”

  “Not so bad.”

  “How much?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “Fucking crooks.”

  “Eddie!”

  He ignored my mother’s outcry.

  “A twenty-minute ride, a dollar’s worth of gas. How do they hit you for twenty-eight bucks?”

  “You got me, Dad.”

  “That include the tip?”

  “No.”

  “Jeez, I hope you didn’t tip him more than three.”

  “Four.”

  “Big shot, eh?”

  “Used to be.”

  “Hug your son!” my mother commanded. “For heaven’s sake!”

  An embarrassed grin crossed his face. He came to me as if to embrace me, but instead he grabbed me by the elbows of my dangling arms, squeezing tightly enough to make me tingle. It was a welcome home, a real welcome home.

  “All right, come, let’s sit,” my mother said. “It’s on the table. Michael, you might want to wash your hands.”

  I was home. Good God in heaven, I was home, and it really hit me hardest as I washed my hands in the downstairs bathroom, where a blue-green mineral drip stain on the porcelain sink had grown like an obscene tongue beneath the hot water spout.

  I remembered when that sink was as white as snow. That’s how long I’d been away.

  We ate at the kitchen table, the only place meals were ever eaten in this house. Nothing much had changed. There was a new coat of linoleum on the floor, and my mother had discovered refrigerator magnets, but the refrigerator they clung to was the same one I’d raided after school, and instead of my spelling tests there were coupons up on display. Back then the refrigerator was silent, but now it ran with an ominous hum, as if to warn that it could be just days, hours, minutes before it broke down once and for all….

  “How was your flight?”

  My mother was trying to jump-start a conversation. The three of us had been sitting there eating meat loaf and mashed potatoes, silent foods, mushy foods that made no noise when you chewed them. The silent food made the other silence all the more excruciating.

  I swallowed the meat loaf, tangy with paprika. “It was all right.”

  “Do you feel jet-lagged?”

  “Mom. It’s three hours earlier in California.”

  “Well, you know what I mean. Tired. Do you feel tired?”

  I
f they knew I’d checked into a local motel for a night’s sleep they both would have had fits. Paying good money just to sleep! The waste!

  “Nahh, I’m all right.”

  I watched my father cut his meat loaf and bring his fork to his mouth. He has exquisite table manners, my old man. I never saw him gulp a drink or wolf a meal, and not until he’d chewed and swallowed did he speak.

  “The pool thing didn’t work out, huh?”

  In my sporadic communications with my parents about my working life I’d exaggerated what I’d been doing. I’d told them I’d been running a pool maintenance business that went bust. They had no idea I was just a hired bug-skimmer.

  I shrugged. “I got run out of business by a big outfit. They undercut everybody’s prices.”

  “Bastards!”

  “Eddie!”

  “Well, it’s rotten, that’s all. What’s the point? Why kill the little man?”

  “It’s business, Eddie.”

  “That’s not business, Donna. That’s murder, when you take away a man’s living.”

  “Business is business.”

  My old man let it go at that. He always let her get the last word, as long as his own words had been read into the record. I always admired him for that, even though I could never work that trick myself. I like getting the last word. I like getting the first word, too, and all the words in the middle. I’m like my mother that way.

  She turned to me. “You want coffee, Michael?”

  “No thanks, Mom.”

  “It’s made.”

  (Translation: I made it, don’t waste it, there are under-caffeinated children yawning away in Africa.)

  “All right, I’ll have a cup.”

  She cleared the plates away and set mugs of coffee, milked and sugared, in front of me and my father. That’s the way she did things. You got what you wanted all ready to eat or drink. Nobody ever asked anybody to pass the string beans or the mashed potatoes, because my mother loaded up the plates at the stove and carried them over.

  It was like a diner. When I was sixteen I once left her a tip under my plate, and she didn’t think it was one bit funny.

  While she did the dishes I sat back with the man who’d sired me and sipped coffee, coffee with absolutely no punch.

  “Is this decaf, Mom?”