32
My Back Pages
I made it to California in three days. As the wise men say: sleep is for the weak.
Mom nearly had a heart attack when she opened the front door and saw me standing on the other side. She went from shocked to worried, and asked me why and how I was there, as I had not answered a single one of her many, many phone calls while on my drive. I collapsed into her and started bawling. She cried because I was crying, and then we went inside and sat on the couch, and I cried some more. Once I could catch a breath, I told her everything.
Mom broke down into a sobbing mess, and together, we were dragged back into the undertow of tears I thought California's shores would surface us from. Exhaustion flooded me and I cried until I blacked out.
I woke up some hours later; it was dark out. When I looked at the clock, it read 11:23PM. I collapsed into the couch and fell back asleep.
When I woke up again, it was light out. My head still felt groggy, so I forced myself back into more sleep.
When I woke up the third time, it was late in the morning and Mom was at the kitchen table making phone calls. Max's funeral was to be held on Saturday. Today was Friday.
For a second, I tried to comprehend the reality. But I was unable to. I was in a silent asylum of my own. I couldn't think or feel anything. There was just a hollow beating somewhere in my chest. Something that reminded me that I was alive, and somehow this must be real because everybody was playing along. Somehow—this became my life.
Mom and I took a red-eye back to New Jersey late that night. I pressed my forehead against the cold window of the airplane and temporarily enjoyed the child-like amusement of watching the world shrink into a play-set as the plane took off.
Not long after, we were above the clouds. The moon shone an otherworldly light onto the sea of rolling white mountains. I tried to think of all the poetry to describe the moonlight's glow—but all I could think about was how this was where I wanted to be for the rest of my life. Above the clouds in the otherworldly moonlight. I could lie down on the bed of clouds, sleep, and float away forever.
Max's funeral was painfully barren. No one except a few teachers and the principal from our high school, and some kids I didn't recognize, attended the service. For a second, I thought I would see Mary, but she wasn't there. Fucking Stephen Belanger didn't even show.
For obvious reasons, the casket was closed. Just beneath the sanded oak of the coffin lay the lifeless and pale, and now horribly disfigured, face of my best friend. Touching the surface of the casket discharged a twisted guilt from my heart. I felt like I sinned for trying to bridge the worlds of the living and the dead.
You are alive. They—or better yet in this case—Max, is the dead. The dead cannot feel your touch, Max cannot feel my touch, so do not mock the dead by touching Max's tomb like he'll be able to feel me apologize. But I dispelled my own feelings and placed my whole hand on the casket and let the acidic agony burn through me all over again.
I deserved to feel this. I could have charged up those steps and forcefully grabbed the gun. How could have I just sat there as he downed those drugs? I could have kept an eye on him that night.
"Hey, Max, man! Listen to me! Seriously, dude! Calm down. Okay? You're my brother, man. I've got your back. Stay with me, at my house, tonight."
But I never said anything like that.
I tried to think of some sort of eulogy. But the what if's and should have's ate away at my conscience like termites in my soul. I didn't deserve to speak at his funeral like I had been a good friend.
And so, my friend Max joined the rows of the dead. Such as we are all one day to join too. And the gravestones in those rows were of all different designs. Some were etched with a picture of the departed; a Cross or an angel guarded others. The Chinese had their own way of protecting the resting place of the dead. Most of the plaques declared the finest achievements of those who were buried: A loving grandfather. A beloved wife and daughter. A Dreamer, A Visionary, A Father.
Max never even got to fulfill one of those average achievements. He wasn't even granted the right to die with the most effortless legacy of them all, someone's beloved son. Yes, he was someone's child, but he had died as no one's son. And I hated his parents. That wherever they were, somewhere out there in the world, they were not aware that their son had died and that they were going to live a longer life than he had. Max would leave nothing but a slab of limestone behind.
Mom and I went out for dinner after the funeral and stayed the night at the house. It was weird being back because it didn't feel like our home anymore. It also made my final farewell to this place when I drove off feel anticlimactic. Maybe it had been too soon to say goodbye to Mary. Maybe if I had given it a week, or a couple of days, she wouldn't have just cut me off so cold.
Mom asked if I still planned on staying around for Mary. I told her I didn't know.
The following morning, I took the rental car and drove to the North End. Stopped at the Fisherman's Alley stop sign, turned right onto Seadrift Drop, and then drove down Bayview Avenue. Even though I was undercover in the rental, I still felt as though one of them would look out their window, right into the car, and see me. But even before I got to the house, I realized something was different.
I cranked the car into park and ran out and up the porch steps. Peering into the front window of their house, I saw that the living room was all cleared out, only a few lights were left on. Something had changed. Transformed. Then taking a step back from the window, I looked around at the house, thinking that the porch might have been repainted, but then I realized that the barbecue was gone. They were gone. Mary was gone.
I reached for my phone before remembering that Mary didn't have a phone—but, maybe she had gotten that old number reactivated? I clicked my screen open and scrolled through my contacts to M.
Mary, Max, Mom—all in a row.
Tapping Mary's name, I let it ring for a second until the automated woman's voice recited: "The number you have dialed is no longer in service. This is a recording."
My thumbs raced to search her up on all versions of social media, but then I remembered that Mary didn't have an account on anything.
When I got home later that day I began another search. It took me a while to find her, but I finally found Mary's blonde friend, Ashley, online.
At 1:47pm, I sent her a message:
Hey,
My names Danny. Mary was a friend of mine. I know this probably seems really random but I was wondering if you knew where she moved? As I'm sure you know she doesn't have a phone, or any form of social media, so she's making it pretty impossible to get a hold of her ahaha. Please let me know if you know how I can get in contact with her, thanks!
For a good solid minute, I stared at my page, waiting for the little inbox icon to light up and make a pop sound with a notification. At this point, I still didn't really know if anyone in Mary's life even knew who I was. Eventually deciding that sitting, waiting, looking at my phone all day was going to drive me mental, I took the afternoon off watch duty to spend time with Mom.
We drove to the Gagliardi's house; Mom was having coffee with the Mrs. My thumbs dwindled over my phone as I was forced to listen to another painful recount of why we were back home, spoken in hushed tones in the opposite room. I didn't think Mom realized I could hear every word.
Later, after leaving the Gagliardi's, Mom asked if I wanted to go out for dinner or stay in. I reminded her that everything sucked around Gilmore Park, so we agreed on staying in to eat. When driving down Ridgeway Avenue on the way home, we passed the boarded-up version of Superior Carwash. Next to it, Wright Bros looked lonely. It missed her too.
Later that evening, as Mom was preparing food she had picked up from the grocery store—telling me that we were going to make a second attempt at celebrating my birthday—I was in the living room, escaping myself through the piano, when I felt my pocket vibrate.
Ashley had finally replied.
Hey danny
yeah I sort of no who you are. Mary mentioned you. But no sorry I havent heard from Mary since I saw her 2 weeks ago. But she does this tho she disappears for a bit and then comes back. Ill messge you if I hear from her
Ashley's inbox did not make anything better. It only opened up another foggy chasm of questions.
If Ashley doesn't know where she is, then where the hell is she? Is she safe? Did she move by herself? Or with her dad? Is she dead?
I played through every scenario in my head, trying in vain to piece together what were only imaginary clues. Where was she? How, how? I had stood there with my open heart bleeding, pleading for her to believe in me. Had Mary already been planning on running away, even then?
Holding my phone above the white piano keys, staring into the bright screen, I searched my thoughts for the right questions to message Ashley back with. Anything that might evoke a simple detail to help unravel the mystery.
Then I heard Mom through the closed glass doors on a quiet phone call explaining to one of her California colleagues about the spontaneous departure.
"My son's friend—he died—we flew back to attend the funeral...."
My spirit had been hanging on to denial as a means of defending itself. On my drive out to California, I wasn't even myself. My identity had been forfeited into a car on the road. Without a past or a home, only a destination to go.
And up until that very instant of sitting in front of the piano, staring at my phone, all the tears I had cried had been welled from a deep and painful place of exhaustion. It was the delirium that had made me sensitive; just the word for word of the story was enough to make me sad. They were just sad words strung together. No different than reacting to a heavyhearted headline on the news. At the funeral, I had still been afloat in the esoteric world of the rolling sea of clouds. Denial had time-trapped my heart. My heart froze when the gun went off. And hadn't even so much flinched as it received each new wound.
But then, at that very moment, the time-trapped timer reached zero. The metal chain of the spell snapped—and I felt the entirety of the tragedy all at once.
I slammed my hands down into the piano.
Storming out of the living room, up the stairs, passing all the photographs of Dad, Connor, my family, my childhood. All that was, that wasn't anymore. All that was gone and never, ever coming back. I barged into my old bedroom and strode across the magic-marker etches on the hardwood floor. The plastic bag holding my Tiny Tigers tea-ball mitt was still where I'd left it all those weeks ago.
I took a seat on the corner of my messy and unmade bed. That bed, that very same bed where Mary had combed her fingers through my hair. That same bed I held her in as she cried late into the storm-ridden night after we had sex so tender and slow. That same bed Dad used to sing me to sleep in.
First my legs slipped, and then my butt crashed down to the floor. The pain riveted through my body. I slapped my hands down hard, clawing my fingers over the magic-marker strokes that had slipped off the paper in my shaky, five-year-old hands.
In the darkness behind my tightly closed eyes, I desperately brought forth the scene: me and Connor, making up stories, drawing characters; Dad walking in and telling us to go to bed.
"Danny!" Mom yelled as she pushed through the door and saw me on the floor. Hurrying over, she sat next to me and held me. "What's wrong—why are you crying?"
"I fucking miss them, Mom! I fucking miss everyone! Why'd they have to die? Why does everyone die! God—"
My voice cracked as I bawled into my hands. An amount of tears that I did know possible for the human body to possess leaked through the cracks in my fingers. Then removing my hands from my face, I started slapping the floor, repeating: "Why Why Why Why Why Why?"
I screamed and then bawled harder into my hands.
Mom rubbed circles against my back until I could catch a breath. The anger subdued into a steady stream of weak sadness. A corner of my heart was full of hate for myself. How could I have gone so far as to being completely alone and self-sufficient for three sleepless nights on the road, but then, yet, here I was, at eighteen years old, after having convinced the gentle hand on my back that I was emotionally secure enough to live on my own, on the ground of my childhood bedroom wailing like a baby.
"Mom," I finally said, croaking through the raw patch in my throat. "When we leave, when we're gone, who's going to remember them? Where will we be? Who's going to be here to look at the marker on the floor and remember them? That marker on the floor, that blue one, that was him! That's him, Mom! Connor! Who's going to guard him? I want to remember him and protect him. I can't leave him. This, this—it's the only physical thing left, like, his hand actually drew that! I can't leave him, Mom. I can't leave that mark."
Mom started crying. We sat on the floor holding hands and cried together for a long time.
But all things pass. And in the space of that passing, all things resume. The night picked up where we had left it. Mom and I attempted the Danny Birthday Dinner 2.0.
First, we were silent. The only sounds were the seconds ticking by on the clock, but then, one of us made a joke, and conversation resumed.
Mom had gotten another cake. Happy Birthday (again) My Handsome Son, the blue icing on the chocolate cake read. And from her many magic hiding spots, she gave me my presents. A new phone and a brand-new Mahogany, hollow-bodied, Fender Telecaster.
The high-quality wood felt amazing beneath my hands as I discovered quickly how I would hold it. My face must have been glowing with an embarrassing amount of joy, because when I looked up at Mom, there were tears above her smile.
Somehow, happiness still found its way through the cracks. Even though sitting in the kitchen felt like deja vu. Two actors, now much older, brought back for the anniversary episode. It was a slight reminder that life will go on. Although a grave shadow stretched over us, it was still possible to be happy. It occurred to me that it didn't need to be that kitchen table, or that particular dining room set; a family could relocate anywhere. You can make anywhere feel like Home.
Once the evening had settled, Mom asked: "Danny, has there ever been a single day where you haven't thought about Connor?"
I shook my head.
"Then has he really gone anywhere?"
But how about those who did not die? Such as that girl I used to know. The rest of Mary's story? I'll never know. No, really. I never saw or heard from her ever again. The questions I asked Ashley were hardly answered. Eventually I did follow her, only to see that her timeline was dedicated to promoting her upcoming baby.
Some further investigation, however, did get me a nudge closer.
22 Bayview Avenue was demolished in order to make room for another Jersey mansion. And speaking of demolishing, my old friend Max, that mystic he was, turned out to be correct about Gilmore Park's future. Pretty soon after moving, I learned that downtown Carraway Beach was flattened. The natural elevation of The Alley brought down to be level with the sea. The condo development that went over-budget, and then eventually bankrupt, shut down. Leaving a flat field of dug-up dirt and makeshift rocks in its place. The Alley and her endless summertime riots, the screaming guitar solos and the clashing drums that raised Rock 'n Roll Hell from the chambers of her bars, eventually became no more than another New Jersey Myth.
I don't need to fill the rest of these pages telling you about my broken heart. In the end, like always, time mended it. The agony indeed toppled me many days, and many more lonelier nights (the nighttime always made missing them worse). But there came a day, when, well, I realized that I didn't think of either them once the day before.
Max stayed with me for a very long time, but Mary was soon only remembered after having realized that she was forgotten. Although, the harshest of realizations came to me nearly four months after I'd seen her last:
I was established in my new life—if only so rudimentarily—out in California. I wasn't quite yet tearing through guitar solos at the Troubadour, but that's coming.
One afternoon a girl caught my attention. The first girl my eyes had allowed me to see since New Jersey. Believe it or not, I had begun practicing yoga with much heavy pushing from Mom, and from the woman she had arranged for me weekly to talk to. Other than the embarrassment, and the pain I experienced the following day after the first class, I liked it.
I was waiting in line at a smoothie bar in the plaza of the yoga studio, when I couldn't help but find myself very attracted to a strawberry blonde behind me.
Somewhere inside of me, my old naïve confidence sparked to life:
"Excuse me," I said, catching her attention. "Just so you're aware, I am going to take an incredibly long time to order."
Her smile spread across her face like wings. "If you can actually hold up the line longer than that guy," she gestured forward. "I'll submit you for a World Record."
"Will you, please? I'm looking for a quick shot to fame."
"Well, hold on a minute," she said urgently. Her lower lip then dipped, completely collapsing the serious face she was trying to make. "Will I get to make some sort of finders-fee off this? You know, since I'll be the one who discovered the guy who took the longest ever in smoothie-order line history?"
"Of course, I'm a team player. I'll need your name for the check, though."
The pink gemstone bracelet spun around her wrist as she presented her hand.
"Gabby."
"Danny."
We joked back and forth until my turn came to order. After I had placed my order as fast as possible, I said, "Oh, and I'm covering whatever she's getting too."
As we parted at the door, I reminded her that the Guinness World Records people would need a number to get in contact with her.
Two days later, we were to meet at Urth Caffé on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood for a dinner date. Arriving a little early (or perhaps Gabby a little late), I waited at one of the sidewalk tables watching all the soon-to-be Walk of Famer's passing by. When overhearing—listening in on—a conversation about a script that just couldn't be passed up, through the crowds on the sidewalk, I watched an immaculately looking Gabby arrive. Wearing a sand colored open-shouldered romper tied by the waist with a belt, heels with straps that ran up the shins, finished with a thin gold piece of jewelry strung across her collar, she was breathtaking.
"Danny! Hey!" She spotted me. Gabby had mastered a way of keeping the amorous strutting of her hips contained enough to preserve respect.
While talking over dinner, her ability to fluently communicate impressed me. She was working in LA as a model.
"Well, model slash actress," she said, needing to humble herself.
Gabby was shy to admit that her budding career was being funded by the bank of Mom and Dad back home in New York City. My neighbor on the opposite side of the Hudson.
"...And those were my main influences, but I'm totally a 1960s guy," I told her when the tide of conversation turned my way, asking me about what I do, getting us talking about music.
"You know, I find liking Bob Dylan has become a total cliché when anyone gets talking about folk," I continued. "Like, there are so many other greats from that era that are totally underappreciated, but Bobby's lyrics are still great. Um, I also dig anything British Invasion. But, I must say, The Beatles were the only band that had ever really mattered."
Gabby told me that she wholeheartedly agreed.
She then went on to say how she loved the unsuspecting bella figura of Europe's 1960s avant-garde artists. A genre that had been long deprived of authenticity, and was now a baseless drape for anything the modern LA art world declared abstract, she said, before shifting the conversation to her idols. Brigitte Bardot, she told me, was her spirit animal. And the tribulations of Serge Gainsbourg's numerous affairs were repulsive and inviting to her all at the same time.
"But I'm stupidly hopeless romantic, and am still waiting for my Marcello Mastroianni to come wading through the Trevi Fountain to kiss me. But my dreams of being Anita Ekberg will have to be put on hold because guys in LA are so not romantic."
It was also the films by director Vittorio Di Sica that inspired her to get into acting.
My whole understanding of what I'd thought had been an expansive knowledge of 1960s pop culture dwarfed into nothing. I was absolutely clueless.
Only later—when in the bathroom—did I have a chance to Google on my phone who and what the hell she was talking about.
I picked up the bill at the end of the evening, even though Gabby insisted that she pay for her half. Afterward informing me that once she got back from spending Christmas in New York, the next one was on her.
We parted with a kiss on the steps of her apartment on North Spaulding Avenue just off of Fairfax. The kiss felt more than good; it felt great. Gabby was a well-spoken, beautiful, ambitious, culturally and artistically sophisticated, high-class girl who made it worth your while to roll out the red carpet of chivalry for. Her personality had been left unaffected by her superficial surroundings. Things with Gabby were off to an amazing start, the way romantic connections between men and women are supposed to go.
As I left her front steps, from behind me, I heard the metal gate shut, and walked back to my Mustang parked on the street with the biggest smirk smacked across my face. The crisp California night prompted me, by force of habit, to flip up the collar on my jacket. It was mid-December, after all. But it was only when I felt the roughness of the material beneath my fingers, did I realize I was wearing my jean jacket. It hadn't even crossed my mind.
The ridges of the key vibrated through my hand as I slotted it in the ignition. But somewhere in the motion, my wrist lost the strength to push through the resistance to start the engine, only turning the battery on for the radio to play.
Sitting in my car with the roof down, resting my elbow on the door, I clenched my hand into a fist and leaned my head against it. The razor-thin wind cut across my face, blowing my hair down onto my forehead. I'd let it grown out since the summer.
Sitting there, shifting through the unfamiliar LA radio-stations, I got thinking and finally acknowledged the underlying truth: I wasn't talking to Gabby. I knew that. Who was I kidding? I wasn't in that restaurant once all night. I wasn't on her doorstep on North Spaulding Avenue; it was another's lips that I felt on mine. Hell, I wasn't even there in that smoothie line. And even then, sitting in silence with the radio as my only companion, I wasn't even in that car under the glowing-cone of the Los Angeles street light. I was sitting in that car, but on some early July night all the way back in Jersey.
That entire night, I was trying to talk to Mary.
As Gabby spoke, it was only under a near-invisible layer of my conscious that I knew I was sorting through what she said. Finding the pieces of her that reminded me of Mary. Trying to find a way to reintroduce myself, to reinvent the way she got to know me. Saying practically the same words and sharing the same ideas. Hoping that if Mary got to meet the new me—the mature me—things would have played out differently. Since she left me that day, so suddenly, so unceremoniously, without a proper goodbye, without a "Thank you, thank you for that summer. I'll never forget you", and with Max's death the pivotal point of all my sadness, I didn't even really get the chance to be heartbroken over Mary. The ranges of my heart were overloaded with too many other tragedies.
It was with the anger that roused when I realized Mary had been forgotten about, that I regained the strength to turn the key in the ignition. And like always, my engine had to rattle a bit, making me question its mechanical proficiency, before roaring to life with so much confidence it rocked the car left then right.
The streets of Los Angeles are suspiciously vacant at night. Where did all those millions of cars that delayed the day's traffic go? With the wide streets and the multiple lanes to crisscross aimlessly through, it was easy to get lost in thought and just drive.
The music on the radio seemed to push the car forward through the night. The tempo of the song—one I did not recognize—a perfect complement to my speed.
While driving, I lamented over the injustice of fate. The cruelty of the genetic lottery. Involuntarily, I compared the lives of those two girls. Growing up only fifty miles and the Hudson River apart, yet, completely unaware of one another, and with grossly disproportionate advantages in life. Gabby was a mirror to what Mary should have been had fate's dealing been kind.
Sixteen sweet years from booster-seat to driver's seat. First, I had to obtain that taunting beginner's license, and then, I had to ace parallel parking in my first shot on the exam, all for the greater safety of others on the road. Other than getting laid, what requirements does it take to make and raise a child? The irresponsibility happens far too often. The power lies with the parents to decide what irreversible effects they choose to impart on their children. Yes, it is inevitable. Everyone will screw their kid up. Even the best parent in the world will. And, Yes. It is up to the individual to sequester the damage and heal. God, that's what makes us individuals, after all. But, unfortunately, those with the odds stacked against them, don't always make it out on the winning side.
It doesn't matter what money or privilege you're born into. What matters is the love you're born into.
I'm getting sick of witnessing all of these families generationally bequeathing their dysfunction onto the next.
How in Hell was a girl like Mary supposed to get ahead in life while entrenched in the eye of her life's storm? Her impasse the spawn of her parent's selfishness. Mary never once, I believe, lived even one day reprieved from her hurricane.
Gabby, on the other hand, was born into a propitious pedigree. Cherished and liberated to think without restrain and have thoughts that were listened to and discussed. She was free to discover things like sixties actresses and bougie French words to articulate her opinion of art. Gabby probably—no, definitely, got to do all those little girl things Mary told me she never got to do. Other than maybe having shorter legs, Mary was unquestionably more beautiful. She could have been in Gabby's place, pursuing whatever her dreams called her to do out in LA, if that was what she wanted. But I don't even recall Mary having any real dreams. Mary was a victim of circumstance, and that's the worst kind of victim any of us can be.
On the drive back to Pasadena from LA, Ventura Highway (ironic for a guy like me) took you up and around a mountain ridge. The lanes of the highway were dark, and right out the passenger window, the lights on the endless hills sparkle like moonlit crystals on a black sea. It was a sight I always wished Mary could have seen. On the loneliest of nights, when I turned to catch a glimpse of the picturesque landscape scrolling out before my eyes, I would try to see her. How her head would lean back. How the wind would blow back her hair. But I had a hard time remembering how she would have sat.
Resolution is hard to achieve without closure. Letters with all my confessions and questions were penned without a mailing address. I'd have to live with my unanswered questions. Still, all I really wanted to know was if she, even for a second, in the deepest heart of our most soul-filled night, had loved me too.
And then there was the discarding of her memorabilia as well. Hardly a whisper of Beach Baby perfume still lingered on that Rolling Stones sleeping tee. When I held it up to my nose, it escaped out of my senses forever the second I could no longer differentiate the smell from any other. Another time, I was driving and discovered a woven thread of long brown hair, dyed blonde at the bottom in the sleeve of my sweater. I pulled it out and watched it wave in the wind. What was I going to do? Keep it? I let it go with the breeze.
I dreamt of her many times. How she would surprise me at the door of my Pasadena home, telling me in a beautifully worded confession that she was sorry and that she loved me. But nope. Unlike all of her vanishing acts before, that time she had disappeared for good.
So Mary, wherever you are, if someday you ever read the words of this book, I really hope one of those sly, one-sided smiles, sneaks onto your face when you remember who you were at seventeen.
And just know that I don't cry for you anymore. I've gotten over you, many times.
But I won't lie. Sometimes, when the radio plays those songs we listened to on those summer nights when our walls came down, I go back. I'm seventeen. And I remember you. And I miss you.
I can't write the rest of your story because I never knew. I did my best to remember. The rest, I had to fill-in with what I made up given what I knew of the circumstances surrounding your life. But the writing of the rest of your story is now up to you. I've spent a lot of time patching up and repairing the past. Reassembling the memories and their reasons to fit the story I need to believe. I hope you've done the same. Your life wasn't easy. And I'm sorry. If I could have done more to help, I would have. It was beyond my limits. But I should have known it was always beyond me.
So, I'll pass the pen on to your hands now—under one condition. Whatever your story is, make sure its ending is a goddamn happy one. Got it, Froo Froo?