Buried on Avenue B

 

DEDICATION

For my mother

 

EPIGRAPH

You don't want to see these guys without their masks on

—the Mountain Goats

Contents

Cover

 

PART I

 

CHAPTER 1

DARLENE O'HARA SITS
on her rug and gazes at her twenty-one-year-old son stretched out on her couch, his red beard tilted up at one end, his pale feet hanging off the other. Two hours earlier, Axl Rose O'Hara showed up unexpectedly at the door of her Bronx apartment. He put down his overstuffed messenger bag and Fender Stratocaster, announced he had momentous news, and promptly nodded off, and as the quiet Sunday afternoon fades into a quieter evening, O'Hara steals glances across the room, stunned by the pleasure it gives her to watch her long, beautiful kid sleep.

Due to the cost of airfare, Axl, a senior at the University of Washington, hasn't been back in New York for five months, and to see that he feels so comfortable in his old home that he is snoring in minutes is gratifying in itself. Knowing that he's safe and sound and out of danger is even better, and when can a mother of a six-foot-three-inch manchild know with certainty that that's the case, except when he is sleeping six feet away on her own living room couch? There's a third advantage to their modest interaction. With Axl asleep, she can actually enjoy his company. She doesn't have to worry about saying the wrong thing, or the right thing in the wrong way, or the approximately right thing at precisely the wrong time, and see him grimace as if he's just taken a mouthful of rancid food. No, son asleep/mother watching is about as good as it gets, and she knows it.

Axl twitches and readjusts his limbs, and as her terrier mutt Bruno finds another niche on his flank, O'Hara marvels at how well her son has turned out. A minor miracle, considering she was fifteen when he was born, then stacked the deck even further by giving him the name of her favorite sinewy front man. O'Hara isn't fooling herself. She knows her mother deserves most of the credit, and at five-foot-four, she certainly didn't give Axl her height, which came courtesy of the neighborhood lothario who knocked her up. But still. She must have done something right.

Six hours later, Axl shows no signs of waking. O'Hara covers him in a light blanket and pries off Bruno for his walk. O'Hara's apartment is on the top floor of a three-family house in Riverdale, less than a mile from the Hudson, and as she and Bruno stroll past an empty playground, the dog's rubbery nose is alive to every emission of the summer night. She lets him walk nearly to the water's edge before she reins him in and points him back toward home. Although O'Hara is curious about Axl's impending announcement, she isn't overly concerned. What seems epic to a twenty-one-year-old usually isn't, and based on the guitar, she figures it has to do with his music. A couple weeks earlier, Axl e-mailed her a file containing three songs recorded in a bathroom in his dorm, and he has talked about starting a band. Maybe they've landed a gig. If so, she'll call her old partner Krekorian, who just got transferred to the robbery squad, and some old friends from the 7, and try to rustle up a crowd.

When O'Hara and Bruno reach the top of the hill and climb the three flights of stairs, Axl hasn't moved, and the next morning, he still hasn't. That's pushing fifteen hours straight, but who knows how long the kid had been up, and she takes Bruno for another walk. This time when they return, Axl is not only off the couch, he's made coffee. Not only that, he pours her a cup.

“Darlene, I've started a band.” Because of their relatively minor age difference, Axl has always been more comfortable calling his mother by her first name.

“That's great. I really liked those songs. No bullshit.”

“We're called the Flat Screens.”

“I like it.”

“Good,” says Axl. “The name's important.”

O'Hara wonders if that's true. Or if every band name sounds slightly ridiculous until you fall in love with the music.

“So you formed a band, and you're called the Flat Screens. That it?”

“Yeah . . . except that I'm moving to Bushwick.”

“Really? You're not going back to school? You only have one year left.”

“I've made up my mind. I'm going for it. Actually, there is one other thing.”

“What?”

“Can you lend me three thousand dollars?”

 

CHAPTER 2

AN HOUR LATER,
at 8:07 a.m., O'Hara restarts her day with a grapefruit juice and vodka at a downtown dive called Milano's. Six months ago, after the tabloids allotted O'Hara her fifteen minutes for making a collar in the murder of NYU student Francesca Pena, O'Hara was transferred to Homicide South. Homicide South, or as it is sometimes referred to, “Homicide Soft,” is housed in the 13 on East Twenty-First Street. Milano's is in a tenement on Houston between Mulberry and Mott, which means that in addition to being among the handful of bars open this early, it offers a workable ratio of discretion and convenience, neither too close nor too far from her new headquarters.

Although this is O'Hara's first visit, she'd heard how narrow Milano's is. When she leans back on her stool, her shoulders brush against the side wall. It's so tight, thinks O'Hara, a drunk couldn't fall down if he wanted to, at least not until he reached the street, where he became someone else's problem, i.e., a cop's problem. More than its cozy confines, O'Hara is taken by the delicacy of the light and the lovely sense of remove, both from the pedestrians hustling by on Houston and from time. Instead of the news, the TV is tuned to an old black-and-white on Turner Classic Movies, and from overhead come disembodied snippets of sixty-year-old dialogue. Leaning against the register is a twenty-pound dictionary, a hernia-inducing relic from an age when every dispute of spelling or geography wasn't settled on some dipshit's iPhone.

As her eyes take in more of the space, she sees that every square inch is covered with old crap, and every square inch of old crap, including the pretzels and chips, is covered with layers of grime. Although O'Hara could take or leave the photos of JFK, Sinatra, and old Yankees in pinstripes, and could certainly do without the toy fire engine on the register, one more ode to the heroics of FDNY on 9/11, she appreciates the quiet efficiency of the pretty brown-haired barkeep and takes it as a good omen that she's wearing an AC/DC T-shirt. In O'Hara's considered opinion, AC/DC is not only the rockingest band in history but also one of the best T-shirts.

There are two other patrons in the bar, and both were in front of O'Hara in line when the doors opened. On her left is an attractive overweight woman, her bag, suit, hair, and makeup immaculate. In fact, everything about her, except for the fact that she is at a bar at eight in the morning, is in perfect order. To her right, just beyond where a
Times
,
Post
, and
News
lie untouched in a neat stack, is a flamboyantly dressed middle-aged man, his Louis Vuitton man purse on the bar beside his Jack and Coke. O'Hara makes the woman as midlevel corporate, the man as a rather successful drug dealer, and although she would insist that her observations are based on more than racial profiling, she also notes that, of the three of them, he's the only one drinking after rather than before work.

O'Hara takes another sip and reminds herself that someone who names her kid Axl Rose O'Hara shouldn't be shocked when he drops out of school and forms a rock band. Particularly when his mother's idea of a bedtime lullaby was “Sweet Child of Mine” or down-tempo Stones like “Wild Horses” and “Angie.” One reason she feels so undone may be that picking up the tab for her son's tuition was her way to make up for the other things she couldn't or didn't do. O'Hara toted him back and forth from high school for nine months, concealing the growing bulge beneath ever looser hippie blouses, and suffered the eye-opening indignities of childbirth, but from then on her own mother pretty much took over. And on those dark Irish days when she turned on herself and her deficiencies as a mother, she at least had those canceled checks to the University of Washington to hold up in her defense. It's almost funny, she thinks. They say education is something no one can take from you, but Axl just took it from her.

Mostly, though, O'Hara is scared for her son. She wants Axl to have a comfortable life. She wants it to be a stroll in the park, a piece of cake, and what are the chances of that as a musician? O'Hara wanted a professional job for her son—lawyer, accountant, teacher, etc.—because with those, being competent is generally good enough. Everything else, you've got to be brilliant or lucky or both, just to slip through a crack into the middle class. Of course to your kid, that kind of hedging comes off as an insult: “So you don't think I'm that good after all. You didn't really like those songs. That was just more of your condescending bullshit.” In fact, that's not the case. She thinks the songs are wonderful. She just doesn't like the odds.

A couple more sips, and O'Hara is reminded of another point in favor of an unabashed dive. They don't stint, and however fleeting, a generous pour on an empty stomach provides a measure of perspective. O'Hara concedes that as a name, the Flat Screens is growing on her, and as she slides her $7 Ray-Ban rip-offs over her freckled nose and steps into the glare of an August morning, she reminds herself it could have been a lot worse.

He could have told her he was becoming a fireman, or a singer-songwriter.