My father nodded, turned to me. “Hear that?”
“I sure did.”
“A can costs less than a cup. Crazy.”
Having exhausted the coffee topic, we sat and looked at each other. Something was different about my father, really different, and at last it hit me. This was the longest I’d ever seen him without a cigarette in his mouth.
“You quit smoking, Dad?”
He laughed out loud, not in a happy way. Then he lifted a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket, just long enough for me to get a peek at it before shoving it back.
“I quit smoking indoors. Your mother doesn’t allow it in the house anymore.”
“Why should I breathe your smoke?”
“No reason I can think of.”
She turned to me. “It’s good for him. He smokes a lot less this way.”
“Yeah. Nineteen a day instead of twenty. That oughta keep the tumors away.”
He stood, shook a butt into his mouth, and turned to go outside.
“Welcome home, Mick,” he said before leaving.
Home. It’s supposed to be a comforting word, isn’t it? Everybody wants to go home. Home is where they can’t get you. Home is safety.
So why did the very sound of the word make me knock over my coffee?
In a flash my mother was there, mopping up the mess as if she’d expected it to happen. She was so quick on the scene that not a drop of coffee made it off the table to the floor.
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
“It’s all right, you’re jet-lagged.”
“I’m not jet-lagged.”
She tossed the wad of paper towels into the trash and reached for my empty mug. “I’ll give you a refill.”
“No, no. I think I’ll just take my stuff upstairs.”
“Your room’s made up!” my mother called after me as I climbed the stairs.
The air in my room was tart with the smell of Lemon Pledge. My mother had obviously run up here and given it the once-over right after I called from the airport.
Here was my bed, narrow as a monk’s, with the same pebbly-patterned red bedspread that left an imprint on your cheek if you fell asleep with your face against it. My Hardy Boys books were still lined up in a row on the windowsill, and beyond them was the little desk where I’d done my homework by the light of a black twist-neck lamp…still there, of course. There were clean towels at the foot of my bed, hotel-ready for my needs.
I closed the door to my room and wished it had a lock. Then I made sure they were both downstairs before opening my duffel bag.
Nestled among my clothes was an old coffee can with a taped-on lid. I peeled off the tape and dumped the contents of the can on my bedspread.
It was piles and piles of cash, neatly rolled up and rubber-banded, an absolutely obscene sight. I didn’t even know how much it was.
Hoping and praying that my parents would stay downstairs, I took off the rubber bands and counted the money. The grand total came to $5,740.
This was funny money. I hadn’t exactly stolen it, but at the same time, it wasn’t exactly mine. I was going to have to think long and hard before I decided what to do with it.
I realized how stupid I was. My duffel bag had gone through the X-ray machine at LAX. What if the security guards had been alarmed by the bomb-like outline of the can? I was lucky I’d gotten through. I was also lucky that nobody had robbed me at that shitty airport hotel where I’d spent the night.
But then, people have always said I was a lucky guy.
Now I faced the biggest hurdle of all—figuring out a place to stash the cash.
I didn’t know what my mother’s housecleaning habits were like these days but she used to fine-tooth the place once or twice a week, and how was I going to explain a coffee-can fortune? She’d think her only begotten son had become a drug dealer, and who could blame her, the way I’d landed on them out of the blue in need of a roof, a shave, and a soul, not necessarily in that order?
And then I remembered something, and I knew what I had to do.
I stuffed the cash back into the coffee can, taped the lid in place, and dragged the desk chair to my closet.
Way up inside the closet, higher than its highest shelf, was a kind of a hole in the wall, a deep gap in the bricks where I used to hide Playboy magazines. I had to climb up on a chair and stand on tiptoe to reach it, which meant it was completely out of my mother’s radar range.
I got up on tiptoe, set the can into the hole, and told myself she’d never find it. Then I unpacked my duffel bag, putting my clothes neatly in the bureau drawers.
And then a funny thing happened. I was suddenly completely exhausted, as if I hadn’t slept in weeks.
It was a warm night. I opened the window, stripped down to my skivvies and got into bed. Then I noticed something I hadn’t noticed earlier, hanging on the wall over the foot of my bed.
It was the jacket from my one and only hit record, hung in a gold frame, as if it were some kind of religious icon. My hair had been barbered into a sort of punkish buzz cut, with slanted sideburns and a glaze of gel. My head seemed almost to be ablaze, as the photo was taken with the sun setting behind me. I stood on a beach with my arms folded across my chest, the top two buttons of a snug black silk shirt undone (“Let the chest hair peek out!” the photographer had shouted).
I stared at myself on that wall, twenty years younger and twenty pounds lighter. Young Me stared back just as hard, grinning as if God had just whispered in his ear that the rest of his life was going to be a toboggan ride down Whipped Cream Mountain.
“The fuck you lookin’ at?” I asked the record jacket, but I got no answer.
I was just about asleep when a coughing sound jolted me. I got up, went to the window and looked out at the backyard, where my father was lighting up a fresh cigarette. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, like a man waiting for a bus that was never coming.
I got back in bed and shut my eyes. I could smell cigarette smoke and hear the clatter of pots being scrubbed by my mother down in the kitchen.
Smoke and clatter. I was home, all right.
CHAPTER THREE
I guess we never know how or when the key moments of our lives are happening. Musically speaking, my inspirational life had just one big day. More like an hour, really.
I wrote “Sweet Days” one dreamy afternoon in September of 1987 on the inside flap of my American History notebook, right above the printed chart they give you to lay out your class schedule. While Mr. Malecki droned on about the Civil War, I jotted down the first few words of the song that would change my life.
Sweet days…
Feel like a haze…
A summertime craze…
But it ain’t just a phase…
That afternoon when I got home I went straight to the piano my mother had insisted we have for the lessons I’d taken with Dot Molloy, a kooky neighborhood character whose pedigree included a claim that she’d once played at Carnegie Hall. Mrs. Molloy was a longtime widow, and a lot of Little Neck mothers made their sons take piano lessons with her because, as my mother used to say, “She’s on a fixed income.” She was past sixty but she had wild bleached blond hair and wore bright red lipstick that smeared beyond the boundaries of her lips. She may have looked like a clown, but she was dead serious about music.
I