LITMIR.BIZ

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      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 woman 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

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