The Unexpected Salami Read online

  A limousine that EMI ordered was waiting to take us to our suites at the Hyatt Regency Buffalo. Even Angus looked surprised, like it was sinking in that we were really in the big swim, that this was a huge gig even for a hot-shot manager. The highway was backed up due to a collision; our driver took his chances on side streets. Buffalo houses lacked the front lawns Melbourne houses have. Most of them were double-storied with a chimney, houses an Australian kid reared on American picture books would draw. Several homes had an American flag hanging from the front. If an Australian family was so shamelessly patriotic, they’d be laughed out of town.

  At the check-in desk, I offered to share a room with Mick-O. Angus wanted to spend more time prepping Phillip, his ‘lead attorney’ for the interviews the New York EMI office had arranged. On the writing table was a basket filled with grapes, bananas, apples, two small boxes of American cereal, and two red kazoos. “G’day Tall Poppies!” the note attached read. “On behalf of the Hyatt Regency staff, welcome to Erie County, home of Niagara Falls, the Buffalo Bills, and the birthplace of Cheerios and the kazoo. Break a leg!”

  Phillip munched on a red apple with little knobs on the bottom. It looked like the ones in the Time-Life books we used for references in my illustration class. My class partner, true-blue Peter who doctored Stuart’s papers, had smiled when I said the apple didn’t look right, that it hadn’t developed fully yet. Peter had spent a month in San Francisco and knew they were U. S. apples, delicious apples. I had a song in my head I’d plugged into on one of the legs of our flight, by the Cowsills. I hadn’t heard it in years: “The Rain, the Park, and Other Things.” The Skychannel host had said the Cowsills were the band they based the Partridge Family on, which I had to be sure to tell Rachel on the odd chance she didn’t know that already. I sang out the backing vocals. “And I knew (I knew, I knew, I knew, I knew) / She could make me happy (happy, happy).”

  “Are you listening?”

  “Huh?” I said, looking up at Phillip’s face, which needed a wash. “Sorry, I had a song in my head.”

  “You always have a song in your head, Colin.”

  “Mate, you still got sleep in your right eye.”

  “Me and Angus are going to work on my delivery,” he said, shutting one lid and flicking something crusty towards me. “Then I’m going to go over to Kerri’s for a bit.” Kerri was staying a few blocks away at the Best Western. After she’d surprised Phillip on the plane, Angus had insisted that during the tour she had to stay, at her expense, in a separate hotel. “A coupled man is a liability when you’re trying to build a fan base,” Angus had determined. A bastard thing to do, considering Kerri was on an aerobics instructor’s wage.

  Mick-O was alive and kicking, no small wonder after sleeping for most of twenty-five hours. I wasn’t as hyper as him, but I agreed to go down to the lobby to have a look around.

  Mick-O ordered two Foster’s and brought them back to our table. I gave him a quizzical look. Back home he despised Foster’s, he was a Toohey Red man.

  “They’re our sponsor,” he said, “did you forget? Our meal ticket.”

  The Foster’s tasted like piss. Rachel once told me that there was a much lower legal alcohol limit in the States, even for imported beer.

  Behind the lobby was an actual pub, with a piano man noodling around on the keys. Mick-O talked me into going inside. I was reluctant because I was still passing air, and there were women inside. Over by the windows, there was a table of five girls with big hair and awful make-up—giggling in our direction.

  “American girls look like they’re from bloody Broadmeadows,” Mick-O said, referring to a suburb of Melbourne not known for its fashion sense. But he wanted to go over. A man without standards.

  “Nah,” I said, “I’ll pass.” But he went over anyway and asked the prettiest of the lot for a light.

  “Are you with the INXS tour?” I heard the girl ask in a loud whiny voice. Mick-O floored the table when he said yes. He bought the girls a round with one of the bills Angus had given him. He waved me over.

  “Are your parents convicts?” one of the girls said.

  “No, but I’m a relative of Dame Nellie Melba,” Mick-O replied.

  “Is she royalty?”

  “Nah. The greatest opera singer in the world. She has a perfectly curved palate. My whole family does. That’s why I can sing perfect pitch, right, Colin?”

  So perfect we stuck him back in the drum section, where all great opera singers thrive. Nellie Melba died when? World War II?

  “You girls want tickets for tomorrow’s show?”

  They squealed. Angus was going to kill him for this. He went to the bar to get matches, and I followed.

  “Aren’t you ready to call it a night yet?”

  “Colin, I’m kicking goals here. We have our pick.”

  “Happy choosing. I’m going upstairs.”

  I practically collapsed from exhaustion.

  Moans and groans from the other bed woke me up. I peeked at the alarm clock: four A.M. I saw Mick-O sucking on a breast. I pretended I was still asleep.

  We had to perform three days in Buffalo instead of one. Originally it was going to be at Rich Stadium, which held 80,000, and not Memorial Auditorium, capacity 16,000. Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton were rained out the week before. Since they were still touring in New York, the mayor of Buffalo, their devoted fan, had personally promised Kenny the date verbally committed by the city’s cultural commissioner to INXS.

  The tour promoter’s representative went ballistic at every stadium and city official he could keep within earshot. “There are thousands of refunds! Even with three days we lose that revenue. INXS is exhausted. It’s the tail end of the tour—they have one day to rest for Syracuse.”

  The Mayor’s official of business development was apologetic. “We goofed,” he said.

  “Your goof,” the tour representative said, “is fucking costing millions of dollars. We’re going to sue this ugly fucking smelly city’s ass off.”

  Angus and INXS’s manager joined in on the screaming. Off on the side, Mick-O, Phillip, and I were quietly relieved. To go from 500 people at Lounge to 16,000 was enough of a jump. Syracuse’s Carrier Dome was next with 90,000 people reported to have bought tickets! The extra performances in Buffalo would give me time to get used to that gut-wrenching notion. Eventually, after hours more of King Kong chest beating, the promoter’s rep gave in to the city’s take-it-or-leave-it offer of three concerts or no concert. He agreed to let us do the gigs at Memorial.

  From nine to eleven, the three of us did an interview with a newspaper arts section and two local rock stations. Mick-O was so jet-lagged and/or sexed out that he fell asleep on one of the station couches. Phillip was animated, I’ll give him that. Angus said maybe we should rethink strategy and have Phillip do the interviews solo—with me as the backup for college stations. This didn’t worry me. Phillip loved being the center of attention, and Angus was probably right. Mick-O’s punctuality was not to be trusted, and I do have a somewhat monotone voice.

  Our first soundcheck at Memorial would be ready at four o’clock; we had five hours to kill. To get us out of his hair, Angus arranged for a limo to take us over to Niagara Falls while he sorted everything through. “Don’t go to the Canadian side of the Falls. I’m not sure about your visa situation.”

  We waited in the Hyatt lobby. Mick-O copped a stare from the doorman because he was blasting “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” on the gift-basket kazoo. An old-time driver with a gray face, like a dying fish, held up a sign for Phillip Harvey. Mick-O hopped in the front, like he was in a taxi in Melbourne. Ted, the driver, talked mostly to Mick-O, but his words boomed off corners and hit you in the face.

  “What do you think of Buffalo, Mr. Mick-O? She’s a pretty Victorian city, don’t you think?”

  Mick-O made the mistake of telling Ted that Melbourne’s in the State of Victoria, and Windbag was off on a new topic.

  “That’s right, it is, too. Been to S
ydney. I had a pretty fair night there when I was on leave. They make the girls big there. Couple of hookers I couldn’t get my arms around.” He had a husky cigarette laugh like my Uncle Jack.

  “Could be the sun or the Vegemite,” Mick-O said. “That’ll make ’em grow.”

  “You think Prince or Springsteen would press a button to shut them out?” Phillip leaned over and whispered.

  “Yeah,” I grinned. “But we can’t. Not yet.”

  As we neared the Falls, I asked Ted which section has the best view.

  “Pity I can’t drive you to the Canuck side. Orders from my boss. It’s nicer. I’ll tell you though, right here in the U.S. of A. there’s a perfect spot which is practically under the Falls.”

  “Bewdy,” Mick-O said.

  You could hear the water roar as soon as we got out of the car. At the edge, my balls ached from the sheer drop.

  Aunty Grace used to call an open drain near my house Niagara Falls. She didn’t want me and Liam playing near it because she’d heard it was contaminated. She thought we might drink from it. When it was dark, Aunty Grace would call us inside for tea, make us swear on our grandmother’s bible we hadn’t disobeyed her. Aunty Grace knew I loved her meatloaf, which she made with a hard-boiled egg in the middle. Mum’s specialties were veal and mushrooms, and chicken grilled with orange rind. Occasionally, Mum made rabbit stew, which was my Dad’s favorite. Aunty Grace, the two families agreed, made the better afters—homemade vanilla ice cream from Carnation milk, to be served with hot baked apricot slices. Most more-ish of all were Aunty Grace’s lamingtons—chocolate and raspberry layers with coconut topping.

  Phillip hated our sidetrip. He felt like a school kid sent out for recess. He wanted to go back and rehearse in his room. But Mick-O insisted that we buy tickets for the boat ride. Before boarding the Maid of the Mist, a tour girl showed the passengers how to snap on our “pond-chose.”

  As the boat ride began, Mick-O blew his kazoo again. You couldn’t hear a thing, but Phillip took advantage of this vulnerable moment to snatch it and throw it into the water.

  “Hey!” Mick-O said.

  “March 29, 1848,” the loudspeaker said, “was the one night the town of Niagara was strangely silent. Ice had formed a dam, leaving the Falls dry. Two days later the dam broke.”

  8

  Rachel: THE HUMP

  After the final reel of Shoah, Sy Cooper had decided to drive me and the other five surviving students of his “Cinema in the Age of Television” class off-campus for drinks. The gesture was against the rules, the university’s academic guidelines as well as state law. That year, 1986, the drinking age in New York was raised from eighteen to twenty-one. Unfortunately for my classmates, all of whom had tasted the splendor of a legal beer, a grandfather clause didn’t exist in New York. Lester’s, the well-off-campus bar Sy Cooper drove us to, was seedy and depressed, a place the novelist William Kennedy might have immortalized for his readers if he wasn’t so fascinated by hometown Albany two hours southeast. A vintage Budweiser sign, a barmaid with a tooth missing—Lester’s was the kind of drinking establishment that location scouts immediately beep their producers about.

  The six of us stood out like a brownie troop at a Hell’s Angels’ rally—a fifty-year-old professor, four mod underage film buffs, and one preppy underage buff, Janet, in her cardigan and brown and black houndstooth jumpsuit. Sy ordered a scotch, straight, Janet asked for a vodka tonic, and I got myself a Harvey Wallbanger, a drink I liked because overly dramatic film stars ordered it in vintage flicks. The barmaid said “Hiya, Sy” and didn’t ask us for IDs.

  Holding court over the weathered wooden table near the radiator, Sy gave his final instruction: “It’s imperative to reinvent your origins.” He removed his black wire-rimmed glasses to further emphasize his point: “The great actors and filmmakers did. The Kennedys did.”

  In careful analysis afterward, seven years afterward, as Janet and I waited for Stuart to finish a convalescent bowl of oatmeal, I guessed that this had been our lovable alcoholic professor’s way of admitting to his reluctant disciples that he was less than a minor Beat. He was in fact a pop-culture asterisk, like Colin used to call Australian bands that topped their careers with a number thirty-two single on the local charts.

  “Asterisk, that’s good used like that,” Janet said, picking the sausage off her pizza slice. We used newspaper for plates because the sink was full of dirty dishes.

  “Colin’s word, actually.” I was sad at the memory of what had become, and my voice cracked a bit.

  “It’s terrible that Colin turned out to be such a conniver.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “Hey! I’ll eat that.” I leaned over to salvage the meat from the cardboard box.

  Stuart let go of a long, mucousy shocker of a cough. Janet thought it was disturbing enough that we should check for blood.

  “Stuart? It’s Janet. Let me take that bowl from you.” He’d fallen backward when we weren’t looking; a tablespoon of chalk-colored cereal had landed on the bed—a bed long devoid of sheets or even a mattress cover.

  Stuart wailed, as loud as he could from a prone position. “Mum, you going to kill me? I’ll be good, don’t kill me …” His eyes were red, and his long brown hair was greasy again even after the shower Frank had supervised the day before. He yawned uncontrollably as he yelled, as if he had an odd Tourette’s symptom. How could he have lapsed back? Frank had thought the worst was over and so had gone for his overdue dim sum break at Triple Eight; he’d wanted to try the duck web he’d overheard a fellow foodie talking about at the bank.

  “No,” I said, joining Janet at the edge of the mattress. “It’s Rachel, and Janet. We’re right here—Rachel, Janet, Frank. We’re your friends. You’re in New York? You hear me? It’s the withdrawal again. You’re okay? Stuart, raise your hand if you understand me—”

  This is not so bad, I tried to tell myself, but my nerves told me otherwise. I cannot feel sorry for myself. Stuart will live. Janet and I will teach him how to read. My parents are alive and love me. I could get a decent job if I tried. I’ll meet someone one day. Maybe I’ll write a screenplay. I was jealous of what I imagined Janet was unselfishly thinking: Poor Stuart, he’s never had an honest chance. Or, Rachel is having such a hard time.

  The conversation about Sy never resumed. Stuart didn’t raise his hand, but instead he lapsed into a temperate hell, rocking and moaning at a level I thought I could handle alone for a short while until Frank returned. Janet went home again for her nap.

  Meanwhile my parents were on the first leg of their France trip—in a cab on their way to the airport in Miami. The radio station in New York played “Gnome.” Mom heard a DJ say this new hot Australian band was touring America. In the right weather conditions, as the chief engineer that first day of my radio internship had bragged, you can pick up a strong-signaled blue-chip New York station many states south. Mom and Dad were supposed to switch to Air France at Kennedy Airport. At the Miami International, Mom changed the stopover in New York to eight hours instead of two. Then they could get a cab back to the apartment and make sure I wasn’t going to be embroiled once more by the mishegoss, the craziness, of the Tall Poppies’ universe.

  When they got to the family apartment, the afternoon of Janet’s and my conversation on Sy Cooper, there was no one there because I was over at my brother’s loft. Mom left a note on the kitchen table that I was not to hook up with the band and what I should and shouldn’t do in an emergency. Then, because Frank’s phone was busy (it was accidentally off the hook), they concluded he was home. They got a cab to the loft and rang the buzzer.

  I ran down the five flights of stairs in a state of shock. I had counted on withdrawal surprises. In my head they fused with the plagues God foisted upon the Egyptians: need for the Man, frogs, shakes, vermin, vomit, loss of bowels, slaying of the first born. But my parents! I argued with my mother in front of Bowery Bulbs, the store on the first floor of Frank’s building.

  “We’
ve come from the airport to check on you,” Mom said. “We haven’t physically seen you for two years, and you act like we’re an imposition. What is going on, Rachel? I smell a rat. You two are ‘hanging out’ a hell of a lot. I heard on the radio that the Tall Poppies are hitting town—Frank’s not housing the band, is he?”

  “I heard that, too, but no, I haven’t told anyone. And I wasn’t planning on seeing them.”

  “I want you to swear to me that you won’t see them.”

  “I won’t see them for me, not for you.”

  She stared me down like she didn’t buy this. “As long as you stay away. Let’s go upstairs and talk about this more. Can you help us with the suitcases?”

  “This is not my place. Frank should be the one inviting you over.”

  Dad was losing his patience. “You’re not making sense! This is farcical. We’re your parents. Why can’t we go upstairs?”

  “Frank isn’t around,” I said. “I’m thrilled to see you. You guys look so tanned! Why don’t we go to the Vietnamese place across the street?—they have great French coffee—”

  “I’m having trouble with my bladder,” Mom insisted. “I’ll have to make number one on the street if you don’t let me upstairs.”

  “You can pee in the Vietnamese place.”

  Dad rolled his eyes. “Rachel, stop this piffling—we’re going up.” He pushed past me.

  “Sh’ma Yisroel, Adenoi Elohanu Adenoi Echad,” I whispered to myself. “Hail Mary, full of grace,” I added, hedging my bets.

  Frank was a half-hour late. Just me and my folks, and oh yeah, Stuart, the corkscrew of pain on the bare mattress. The coverless addict had glazed eyes and a full erection. Since bumping into Stuart at Eisenberg’s, I’d seen his penis a bit too frequently.

  “And who’s that?” Mom breathed heavily, after a quick now-I’ve-seen-it-all turnaround.