The November sun set behind the Jersey Palisades and flashed a feeble ray off a West Village window. The wavering reflection stalked the Christopher Street pier to a lone youth tuning a battered guitar. The blonde twenty year-old appeared unaware of the approaching glow, then he broke into a smile shy of surprise, as the sapphire shimmer transformed the leather boy into a fallen angel regaining his halo.
Nearly every parent in America would have ordered their children to avoid this heresy to the 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 mothers and fathers, but not all of them and the guitarist disintegrated the heavenly mirage with a windmill slash of his fingers against the steel strings of his Les Paul. The chords sizzled in his ears and Johnny Darling shut his eyes to envision a small stage.
Overhead lighting enveloped a drummer, bassist, and keyboard player whose music meshed the Kingsmen with the MC5. 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 and 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 docks. The guitarist waited for the last coda to disappear beneath the subsonic range and turned to address the intruder.
The Puerto Rican teenager in a distressed leather jacket was two inches shorter than Johnny and his slanted eyes hinted the taint of Chinese blood. Some Times Square johns found Frankie Domingo pretty, despite the multitude of scars crisscrossing his seventeen year-old wrists, front and back. Most of those wounds hadn’t not come from fights.
“Thanks for at least letting me finish?”
“I been waiting thirty minutes.” A gust off the river blew a shank of greased hair across the young latino's eyes. “That a new song?”
“Just three chords strung together.” Johnny rubbed his calloused fingertips. The mirrored incandescence waded into Manhattan.
“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 for a date with a customer. Business had to come before pleasure for hustlers.
“Great and the crowd loved them.” Frankie shivered with hunched shoulders. It was getting colder. “I saw them get paid $100 each. When we gonna have a band?”
“Now I got my guitar back, we can audition for the other members.”
“Great.” Frankie stepped from side to side, as the damp seeped through his sneakers’ paper-thin soles, and then stammered, “Johnny, you got ten dollars?”
“The pawnshop took my last fifty.” Johnny slapped his guitar. It had been out of his hands for two weeks.
“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, but frankie had no one at home in the Bronx.
“And go where?”
“What about Florida?” Frankie glanced south, as if the Sunshine State lay beyond the New Jersey docks. “It got beaches and sunshine and palm trees. How far away is it? Five hours?”
“More like twenty–four, if you drive without stopping.”
“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?” Johnny was down to his last$5.
“We could hijack a plane. Tell them to give us a million dollars like in DOG DAY AFTERNOON?” Frankie had seen that film five times on 42nd Street and each time pumped his fist in the air to Pacino's cry, “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 is based on a real bank robbery.”
“It was?” The drummer shook in his sneakers.
“Yeah, it didn’t have a happy ending either.” The guitarist grabbed the young boy’s arm, which was almost as thin as his own.
“Your parents live in Florida.” That was a fairy tale ‘happy ever after' to him after livign on the street for years.
”So what?” Johnny’s mother and father were Frankie’s answer to everything.
”You called them, then they wire you money to come home?” Frankie lifted his eyebrows in hope of hearing Johnny say ‘yes’.
“Yes, they wire the money and tomorrow night we eat my Mom’s home-made apple pie.” Teasing the young boy with this dream of warm weather and a full belly was cruel, but Johnny couldn’t help himself.
“I love apple pie.” Frankie licked his lips.
“Only one problem.” Johnny gestured toward Manhattan to reel the young drummer back to reality.
“Don’t say what I think you’re going to say.”
“I’m not leaving this behind.” The Drifters' lyrics floated in his ears. He could make it here just Rudy Lewis sang on ON BROADWAY.
“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.”
“That’s true.” Johnny slipped the guitar into its case and walked toward the elevated highway. ”But I ran away from 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? It’s true. The first day I arrived here, a gypsy lady in the Village read my palm for free. She liked my eyes and said my name was destined to be up in lights and I’m going to make it here. It was her who gave me the name Johnny Darling.” Johnny stopped on the curb of West Street. “Me and you are going to make it here as rock stars.”
“But not tonight.” Frankie kicked an empty beer can into the Hudson.
“No, not tonight.” Johnny couldn’t lie to Frankie. “What were you doing the night I met you?”
“I was at the hot dog stand across the bus terminal talking to these guys from Jersey.”
“Two chicken hawks wanting to rape you was none of my business.” Minding your own business was one of the first rules in New York.
“And you’ve never explained why you helped me.” Frankie blew on his hands, warming the tips.
“Yeah, and I’m not going to now, but since that day you and me have been a team and that’s more than what most people got in this city. Tomorrow Max’s will serve up a turkey dinner for us orphans and we’ll be okay tomorrow, right?”
“And what about tonight?” Frankie could handle anything as long as he was with Johnny.
“Tonight it’s time to go to work.” The uptown light on West Street changed to green. Cars accelerated to catch up with the synchronization of the signals.
“53rd and 3rd?” Frankie had had his fill of the sissies at those piano bars.
“We’re not competing with the midnight cowboys tonight.”
Across the street the bars filled with men in search of nameless sex. A few lurked between the trucks underneath the elevated highway. It was no mystery how they planned on celebrating the night before Thanksgiving.
“Times Square then?” Frankie sighed with resignation.
“Times Square is all about luck.”
“Luck being when head I win, tails you lose and never give a sucker a break.”
“You’re learning fast.” Not all of Johnny’s lessons were good advice for a young boy, but they had kept him alive for now.
“I try.” Frankie regarded the snow-skinned guitarist as a veteran of the streets.
“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 stuck his frozen hands in his leather jacket.
“Where anyone from Jerome Avenue meet a prince?” Johnny was two inches taller, ten pounds lighter, blonde and white than the teenager. Johns cruised him and ignored Frankie, unless they were after young meat.
“My grandmother read me fairy tales.” The old lady had only read Frankie the ones with happy endings asked, “They really have princes and princesses?”
“Real as you and me, except they were born in a palace, instead of a dumpy apartment.” The chilled air scrapped over Johnny’s right lung like a boat striking a reef. He spat out an unpleasant taste and touched his chest wishing his fingers cure whatever festered beneath his ribs.
“You meet one?” Frankie was oblivious to his friend’s discomfort.
“Not this side of the silver screen.” Johnny fought off the shakes, figuring his ‘jones’ was 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. Family might more suitably define their relationship, except they were more comfortable with never saying what they were to each other. “Just one more thing.”
“I know what you’re going to say.” Their conversation were 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 people, who broke that rule and he turned to Frankie. “And that means me too.”
“I’m a big boy.” Frankie accepted the warning with stubborn resignation, for his childhood had revealed the worst of what the New York had to offer the young.
“Then let’s head to Times Square.” Johnny dashed across West Street between two taxis. Both vehicles swerved to avoid hitting the guitarist and he arrived on the other side without a scratch.
“I’m going to live forever,” Johnny told himself. Believing in anything other than his immortality would have been 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 only twenty.
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