“What are you doing?”
My mother stood there looking astonished, a dusty rag in one hand, a can of Pledge in the other. By this time my lessons from Mrs. Molloy were long over, and she was the only one in the house who ever played the piano. She’d had classical training when she was a child, and the sounds of Mozart she coaxed from the box weren’t half bad, in a stilted sort of way….
“Nothing, Mom.”
“What was that song you were playing?”
“It’s not a song. I’m just fooling around.”
“Well, my God. After all these years it’s a little bit of a shock to see you playing the piano of your own accord.”
“Mrs. Molloy was an influential woman. It just took time for me to become influenced.”
“Michael, you never do pass up an opportunity to be sarcastic, do you?”
“It’s an Irish thing. The smart-ass gene. I get it from you.”
She shook her head. “The way you speak to me.”
“Did you want to play the piano, Mom? Am I in your way?”
To which she leaned over the side of the piano, spritzed the keys with Pledge and gave them a musical wipe before turning on her heel and striding off to the dining room, where I heard the fizz of the Pledge and the snap of the rag.
Over the next hour I fooled around with the melody, singing softly under my breath. It wasn’t even as if I’d written it. It was more as if I’d stumbled upon it, an achy, melancholic sound of something precious lost forever.
That night, after we ate and my mother went off to help run a bingo game for the elderly at St. Anastasia’s Church, I played and sang the first stanza for my old man, who listened as he gripped a can of Budweiser. It was like he was waiting for some awful lyric accusing him of something horrible he’d done to me, and when I finished playing he was more relieved than impressed.
“You wrote that, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Get out of here!”
“I swear to God.”
“It’s very…uh…” He sipped his beer, swallowed, nodded. “Professional,” he finally decided.
“It’s just the first stanza.”
“It’s almost like…I don’t know…you’re mourning something, ain’t it?”
“How do you mean?”
He reddened, sipped more beer. “I don’t know. This sweet days stuff…it’s happy and sad at the same time. The words are about happy times, but the music sounds like they’re already gone. That make any sense to you?”
My skin tingled. Just like that I was filled with the terror that comes when a teenage boy feels he’s really connecting with his father, far from the comfort of the distant camps they usually inhabit under the same roof.
“Yeah, it makes sense,” I all but whispered.
He was scared, too—the fear was right there in his dark eyes, as if he were afraid of his own extraordinary perception. To break the mood he drained his beer, crushed the can in one powerful squeeze of his hand. “Anyway, the Yanks are at Cleveland.”
“Yeah?”
“Come watch with me when you’re through foolin’ around there, Mozart,” he said over his shoulder.
The next day at school I played the entire song on the warped, weather-beaten old piano they kept for no good reason outside the cafeteria at Holy Cross High School.
The guys didn’t believe I’d written it. A big mouth-breathing German kid named Hans Merkle insisted he’d heard Herman’s Hermits perform the very same song on American Bandstand years earlier. I swore up and down it was mine, until nobody was standing there but a toady student named Ronald Robinski, staring hard at me through the thickest eyeglasses in the entire junior class.
“Is that really your song, DeFalco?”
I shrugged. “What’s the difference whose it is?”
“It’s not bad.”
Robinski was a goofy, squeaky-voiced eccentric, the target of endless pranks played for the sheer thrill of hearing his terrified shriek echo off the walls. It wasn’t a good idea to get chummy with the guy. On the other hand, he was the only one being decent about the song.
“Well,” I finally said, “what would you know about it, Ronald?”
“Play it again.”
“I don’t do requests.”
“Come on. We only have a few minutes ’til the bell. They’re all gone.”
It was true. It was just the two of us, so I once again played and sang “Sweet Days,” a little slower this time, with more feeling.
Robinski was serious until I finished, and then a smile tickled his lips. “That’s it. It’ll be a hit.”
I laughed out loud. “You kill me, Ronald. What’re you talking about?”
He took off his glasses and wiped them with a snow-white handkerchief. “Boy oh boy,” he said, regarding me through sparkling-clean lenses, “you don’t even know who my father is, do you?”
Ronald Robinski’s father, it turned out, was Richard Robinski, a record company executive with an ear for the novelty song, the bubblegum pop tune, the kind of music that makes the hip cringe and the un-hip empty their pockets.
The next afternoon Ronald made me come home with him to play the song for his father, and I was astonished to learn that they lived in Manhattan. Nobody else at Holy Cross lived in the big town. Ronald rode the bus and subway back and forth from Central Park West and Seventy-second Street every day.
He actually lived at the Dakota, where John Lennon had been shot dead seven years earlier! As we approached the giant wrought-iron gates I began to feel a new respect for Ronald. The security guard gave him a friendly nod, and then I was tingling all over as we walked over the cobblestones where Lennon fell. We rode the elevator to the sixth floor and walked down a long, gloomy hall.
“Man,” I said, “this is too cool for words.”
Ronald shrugged, pushing his key into the door. “It’s all I’ve ever known. Hey, Pop! Pop!”
His shouting jolted me. We were in a home with a knock-you-on-your-ass view of Central Park, and for the first time in my seventeen years I felt my nose bump up against the barrier that separates the rich from the poor.
I understood that as much as anything else it was about light and air. The long, wide windows of the Robinski living room looked straight out onto the seemingly endless park.
“Mickey, this is my father.”
I was shocked to discover that my feet had taken me to the window—my breath was practically fogging the glass. I turned to see Ronald towering over a short, blunt man with a fringe of snow-white hair around a gleaming pink skull. He was coming toward me, hand extended, a diamond pinkie ring glittering.
We shook, and the power of his grip was almost enough to bruise my knuckles.
“You da boy wit’ da song.”
A rat-a-tat-tat statement, words like bullets. The man was a proud immigrant, doing nothing to hide his Polish roots.
I nodded. “I wrote a song, yeah.”
“So let’s hear it already,” he said, as if I’d kept him waiting for hours.
He gestured toward an enormous Steinway piano I somehow hadn’t noticed before. I slid onto the bench and flexed my