CHAPTER 1
The November sun flashed off a West Village window and the wavering reflection stalked the Christopher Street pier to a lone youth tuning a battered guitar. The bleached blonde twenty year-old broke into a sly smile and the sapphire shimmer transformed the leather boy into a fallen angel regaining his halo. Nearly every mother and father in America would have ordered their children to avoid him as the complete opposite of America's Bicentennial Spirit. His skin pallor rivaled the paleness of the rising moon and no suburban mall stocked his black leather jacket, torn T-shirt, or heavy engineer boots. Most teenagers would have obeyed their parents' command, but not all of them.
The heavenly mirage disappeared with a windmill slash against the steel strings of the Les Paul. Johnny Darling shut his eyes and envisioned a small stage. Overhead lighting enveloped a drummer, bassist, and keyboard player. A teenage Lolita rasped words of love and no tomorrows in imitation of the Velvet Underground's Nico. The imagined feedback of Marshall Amps buzzed in his ears. The audience might have materialized within his eyelids, if a young boy's voice hadn't shattered Johnny's trance.
"Hey, man."
This time of night only gay bashers and leather freaks frequented the derelict Christoper Street piers and the guitarist waited for the last chords to fade beneath the subsonic range before turning to address the intruder. The Puerto Rican teenager in a distressed leather jacket was two inches shorter than Johnny and his slanted eyes hinted at a drop of Han blood in his Taino veins. Times Square johns found Frankie Domingo pretty, despite the scars crisscrossing his seventeen year- old body. Johnny thought the same.
"Thanks for letting me finish?"
"I been waiting thirty minutes." A gust blew a shank of greased hair across
Frankie's olive eyes. "That a new song?"
"Just three chords strung together." Johnny's thumb rubbed his calloused fingertips.
"Doesn't get more basic than that." Frankie rattled off a drum roll with frayed sticks.
"Got these from Jerry Nolan at Max's Kansas City last night."
"How were the Heartbreakers?" Johnny had skipped the last night's show to entertain a customer.
"Straight and the crowd loved them." Frankie hunched his shoulders with a shiver. "They got paid a $100 each. When we gonna get a band together?"
"Now I have my guitar back, we can audition for the other members."
"Great." Frankie stepped from side to side to relieve the damp seeping through his sneakers' paper-thin soles and stammered, "Johnny, you got ten dollars?"
"The pawnshop took my last fifty." Johnny slapped his guitar.
"Damn, I wish we could get out of here." Frankie moaned like a runaway in need of a dime to phone Mom for a bus ticket home. He blew on his fingers. He hated the cold.
"To go where?"
"What about Florida?" Frankie pointed to the cars on the Westside Highway overhead and glanced south, as if the Sunshine State lay beyond the New Jersey docks. "How far away is it? Five hours?"
"More like twenty-four, if you drive straight through the night."
"What about by plane?" The young Puerto Rican's teeth chattered at a 10/10 beat.
"Where we getting the money for two plane tickets?"
"We hijack a plane. Tell them to give us a million dollars like in DOG DAY AFTERNOON?" Frankie had seen that bank robbery movie five times on 42nd Street and pumped his fist in the air. "Attica, Attica."
"Aren't you forgetting how the cops shoot Pacino's friend in the head?" "Movies aren't real." Frankie had seen enough of films on 42nd Street. "DOG DAY AFTERNOON was based on a real bank robbery."
"It was?"
"Yeah, but it ended the same way. With his friend dead." The guitarist grabbed the young boy's thin arm.
"Your parents live in Florida. That sounds like a ‘happy ever' after to me. If you called them, would they wire you money to come home?"
"Yes, and tomorrow night we'll be eating my Mom's homemade apple pie." "I love apple pie." Frankie licked his lips.
"Only one problem." Johnny gestured toward Manhattan.
"Don't say what I think you're going to say."
"I'm not leaving this behind."
"Fuck this city?" Frankie spun on his heels and chucked the battered drumsticks into the river. "All I got here are hustles, an empty stomach and the smell of old man's hands on my skin, and you don't have it much better."
Johnny slipped the guitar into its case and walked toward the elevated highway. "I left Florida for the same reason you want to run away from New York."
"I hope this isn't an intro to the gypsy lady story."
"Why not? The first day I arrived here, this fortune teller in the Village read my palms. LEft for the past. Right for the future. She said my name was destined to be up in lights." Johnny stopped on the curb of West Street and turned to Frankie. "Me and you are going to make it here as rock stars."
"But not tonight." Frankie kicked an empty beer can into the gutter.
"No, not tonight." Johnny couldn't lie to his protege. "Tomorrow Max's will put on a turkey feast for us orphans."
"So tonight?" Frankie could handle anything as long as he was with Johnny.
"Tonight we go to work." The uptown light on West Street changed to green and suburb-bound cars accelerated to catch up with the synchronized signals.
"53rd and 3rd?" Frankie had had his fill of the sissies at those piano bars.
Across the street men prowled the sidewalks in search of nameless sex. There was success for all in the shadows. A few lurked between the trucks parked underneath the elevated highway. How they were celebrating the night before Thanksgiving was no mystery.
"No, tonight we're competing with midnight cowboy crowd."
"Times Square?" Frankie sighed with resignation.
"Times Square is about luck."
"Heads I win, tails you lose and never give a sucker a break."
"Exactly."
"How I look?" Johnny slung the case's strap over his shoulder and pulled up the collar of his torn leather jacket.
"Like a prince." Frankie once more blew on his numb hands. He was cold. "Where anyone from Jerome Avenue meet a prince?"
"My grandmother read fairy tales. They really have princes and princesses?"
"Real as you and me, except they were born in a palace. Not a Barrio in the Bronx or Queens." The chilled air scrapped over Johnny's right lung like a boat striking a reef and he touched his chest. His cough wasn't a cold.
"You meet one?" Frankie was oblivious to his friend's discomfort.
"Not this side of the silver screen." Johnny fought off the shakes, feeling his ‘jones' knocking on the door. "Princes and princesses are like any suckers. We meet one and what we do?"
"We take them for everything." Frankie snapped his fingers.
"And leave them begging for more." The ache faded from Johnny's chest and he draped his arm over the younger boy. "Just one more thing."
"I know what you're going to say." Their conversation tended to be scripted rituals on these occasions.
"You're going to tell me not to trust anyone."
"Trust no one is survival rule # 1 in New York." Times Square killed lots of people who broke that rule. "That means me too."
"I'm a big boy." Frankie accepted the warning, since his childhood had revealed the worst New York had to offer the young.
"Then let's head to Times Square." Johnny dashed onto West Street.
"Watch out, Johnny."
Two taxis swerved to avoid the guitarist.
"For what? I'm going to live forever," Johnny shouted from the other side of the street. Believing in anything other than his immortality was a sacrilege, at least until he reached twenty-one and that birthday was more than a year away and a year was an eternity when you were twenty.
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Much more to come.
