The Unexpected Salami: A Novel (20 page)

“Can I have your marbles?” I asked. “Daddy says you still have your marbles, and when you go away, I’ll remember you, too.”

My parents were shocked by this statement, and later on I understood why, but my Grandpa Ganelli laughed, albeit with difficulty.
“Joe! Make sure you give her my marbles. Children, I want to tell you a story. See the pretty snow outside, isn’t it pretty?”

“Yes,” I agreed.

“When I first came to America, it snowed like that. I was the same age as Frank.”

“You were?” Frank asked, forgetting about his G. I. Joe for once.

“Come here, too.” Frank went closer to the bed. “Yes. It snowed like that except it was even bigger, greater. We were on a boat headed for Castle Clinton, the place where little boys from Italy got to first step in America.”

“You were in a castle?” I gasped.

“Yes. I stared out a window: the famous new Statue of Liberty had snow piled high on her open palm.”

“Really?” Frank asked.

“The greatest blizzard in New York ever, and they still talk about it today in the history books. I never saw a day with so much snow in Italy. The most perfect snow in the world. My first snow in America and it was the most famous snowstorm of the century! What do you think of that? Do you like that story, children?”

Frank wasn’t convinced. “How can the Statue of Liberty have snow on her palm?—she’s holding a book in one hand and has a torch in the other! I know, Grandpa, ’cause I went there with my class. And how can you go on a boat in the middle of a blizzard?”

“I like the story,” I said, a sentiment echoed years later by Stuart from our hallway, the day I was forced on to the infamous De Meglio murder trial. “It’s funny.”

“You mustn’t forget that story, children. I’ve waited my entire life to tell it to you.”

A few weeks later, after my grandfather died, my father bought me a bag of colored marbles in a red velvet pouch. It had traveled with me to Syracuse, to Australia, and now to an under-wraps motel in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

The top suit of
EMI wanted to wish us luck. “I have to tell you,” he said with a disposable smile, “I have a good feeling about you guys. Phillip is a quirky good-looking fellow. We’re going to pump the violet eyes on the cover. If you kick ass out there tonight, I think we’re going to sell some records, boys.” He and Angus were two peas in a pod with that “boys” crap. The guy was about four years older than Phillip.

“Thank you,” I said.

Michael Hutchence came over to shake our hands. I was off the executive’s radar again, if I had ever been on it. I took the extra few minutes before stage call to read the note Mrs. Ganelli had given me. I had to read it twice. Rachel has God-awful handwriting—she wouldn’t have made it a week around the nuns in my school. She was holed up on that weird grandmother trial Mick-O and I had seen on TV back in the hotel; she wanted me to come see her under the guise of an authorized sex visit. That made me laugh, as much as you can laugh when you have to perform in front of twenty thousand New Yorkers in twenty minutes. Was she serious?

Phillip pulled me at the elbow. “You should’ve talked to him more, he’s the one who calls the shots.”

“What didja do, suck him off? He wasn’t interested in anything
I
had to say.”

“Oh c’mon, Colin, you’re overreacting.”

“Yeah, easy for you to say, you’re so
good-looking
.”

“Jealous, mate?” Phillip asked.

I raised my fists like I wanted the discussion to come to blows. “Yeah, Pretty Boy. See that woman I was talking to before you came over?”

He smiled. “Yeah, that was nutty—what happened there?”

“Rachel’s mum.”

“Her mum? Where the hell’s Rachel?”

“She didn’t talk much—she handed me an envelope from Rachel and ran like I had the black death. Rachel says she’s stuck as a juror on this crazy trial I heard about a few days ago. She’s not allowed to leave her motel room except to go to the courtroom.”

“Give us a squizz!” He grabbed the note from me and gave it a read. He kept squinting at her indecipherable words. I translated them: congrats, conjugal, famous. “This is odd,” Phillip said. “She could’ve phoned the hotel before. She had to send her mum?”

“Rachel likes to put on a show, Phillip. You know what she’s like.”

“Least she’s not mad at you.”

“Yeah.” I figured I’d track down the court first thing in the morning. We had another two weeks to spare in New York after the wrap-up party, for post-publicity.

“Poppies get ready,” the pretty Asian backstage coordinator named Beth announced. During soundcheck, Mick-O had chatted her up. He said he was after “a bit of wonton love.” Mick-O was from a working-class family, not as rough around the edges as Stuart’s, but compared to him my family were regular intellectuals. At least we were brought up without prejudices, and one Saturday a month my grandmum used to take me and Liam on “cultural outings,” as she put it, to places like the Museum of Victoria, where there were dinosaurs—or to the Old Melbourne Gaol to see the death masks of the convicts who couldn’t mend their ways. Mick-O’s use of wonton was in no fucking way clever wordplay on wanton. I long ago came to terms with his existence—he was good for a beer at the pub and he liked people.

Beth escorted us past electrical pipes, a Coke machine, pointed out the New York Knicks’ dressing room with the nine-foot doorways, and led us to the edge of the stage. Waiting behind the curtain, I wasn’t even thinking about Rachel anymore. This was it. A gig in New York City. Madison Square Garden. Talk about a change in fortune. The audience took their seats to Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” And then Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” I plucked a nervous note on my fret. During soundcheck, when we’d had problems with the speakers, the supercilious arse of a production manager had assured us that everything would be working when we got on stage. My bass did sound good.

“Sounds good, huh?” Mick-O asked, testing his babies, his tom-toms, and his snare.

“This is the big time, I guess. On this level even arseholes do things right.”

Then, like in a dream: “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. MADISON SQUARE GARDEN AND FOSTER’S WELCOMES YOU TO THE DOWN UNDER TOUR WITH INXS. PLEASE WELCOME THEIR SPECIAL GUESTS, FROM MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA—THE TALL POPPIES.”

I had a stiffie from my nerves. And the eye tic was at it again. For our first song, “Red Rope Principle,” I crossed the stage a few times the way I’d been shown by the choreographer. Angus had hired her the day after we’d arrived in Manhattan. She’d gone over a few steps in her studio, and for an hour in the empty Garden. Phillip ate the charm-school stuff up, and I went along with him even though we were supposed to be a fucking rock and roll band: half the fun is standing around like a wooden board and looking like you hate the world. But Angus, without consulting us, had paid a cool thousand of our performance fee for this happy woman who’d made me walk across the rehearsal room eleven times until I was passable. “Colin! You’re not strutting,” she’d smiled. “Look like you want to rape each little girl in the audience.”

“You put up the velvet rope,” Phillip now sang—“Wouldn’t let me inside—And like all your men, I’m waiting in line—So obvious, girl—But it works every time.”

“It works every time,” I sang in harmony with Mick-O.

After crossing the stage once more from left to right, I tried to focus on a woman in the first row of the audience. There was a video crew because it was the final show of INXS’s four-month tour. We’d been told that an edited version of the night was going to be released on video cassette. I wondered how the members of
Yothu Yindi would feel. They did a grueling eighty percent of the tour, and one of our four shows got to be immortalized. Between the cameras and the lighting system, I couldn’t see a bloody thing.

When our set was through, Beth whisked us back past the pipes to our dressing room.

“That was great, just great,” Kerri said, slipping her hand rather directly on Phillip’s arse.

I collapsed on an armchair. I sure wasn’t twenty-one anymore.

Phillip slapped me on the back. “A night for you to remember, mate,” he said.

“And you, too,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, kind of somber.

It would have been rude to leave until INXS was through. Their manager had arranged an hour-long piss-up after the show, after which they would go their way with models and charge cards.

“Take a seat, boys,” Angus said. “And Colin, I have a surprise for you. You have a visitor in the audience! She’ll come back stage after INXS is done.”

Rachel’s mother. Yeah. I knew about her already. Maybe she’d give me more information about going to the motel.

“Maybe Rachel talked her judge into letting her see the show,” Phillip offered.

On that slight chance I took a quick shower. Brushed my teeth. Toweled my hair.

“Colin!” Mick-O called. “Come out of the toilet!”

I opened the door.

“Surprised to see me?”

“Yeah,” I said, shocked.

“Yes,” Hannah corrected. She was wearing a teal blue dress that looked insanely great with her red hair. “You haven’t picked up a new American girlfriend, have you?”

“Not when I’ve been mesmerized by Hannah Leser,” I said. I kissed her on the lips. She tasted like she’d eaten olives before coming backstage. “I thought you had a ceramics conference.”

“The event planner had a heart attack on the second day, so it got canceled. You said you wanted me in the front row of Madison Square Garden.”

“Did you know her?’

“No. Just from the phone.”

“Oh, well, it’s too bad, I guess. What did you think of the show?”

“Good. I couldn’t figure out why you were running around the stage so much, but you sang on key throughout.”

“Thanks,” I said, taking what I could get.

“INXS was driving them crazy out there.”

“Yeah,” I said. “How’s Hector?”

“My cats are full vegans now, and they were getting tempted by those tins of tuna and chicken you left for Hector. I thought it best if I separated them. So I hope you don’t mind, I brought Hector over to your mother’s. I left Marjoram and Smudgeface with a friend of mine from the food co-op.”

“You met my mother?”

“You left her number for an emergency, remember?”

“I guess that’s okay.”

“Miss Hannah,” Phillip said loudly from the couch. “How’s the press coverage for us back in Australia?”

“Haven’t paid much notice to tell the truth. I heard something on the radio once.”

“See,” Phillip said to Mick-O, “this
is
big news.”

One of INXS’s roadies knocked on our door. “They have some beer for you, but you better come right away. They have to go to a nightclub later.”

I thought I saw Hannah smirk.

We went into the other dressing room as casually as possible. We got a round of “Good jobs.” Everyone eyed Hannah; she shrewdly kept her somewhat whiny voice silent, so she’d seem more mysterious. Kerri had no such insight. Phillip squirmed while she held his hand tightly, as if he was on a leash.

I couldn’t get an accurate reading on Hannah. She’d spent her own money to come out, and yet she kept wavering from being my devoted girlfriend to someone I needed to pick up all over again. One of the record executives wanted to know if we wanted to sniff some heroin, and she said, “No, no, Colin doesn’t do that.”

“It’s a test,” she whispered seconds later. “They want to see if you’re a serious musician.”

I wasn’t so sure he wasn’t simply a drug abuser, but I didn’t mind that Hannah declined for me. Stuart’s sorry life was enough to keep anyone clean.

“Who are you sharing a room with?” Hannah said.

“Mick-O.”

She squeezed my wrist suggestively. “Think he’s going back to the hotel right now?”

“I’ll find out.”

He was making his own suggestive comments to Beth in the corner. “Mick-O,” I interrupted, “Can you stay out tonight?”

“No problem,” Mick-O smiled. “Beth, would you deny Colin a surprise reunion with his girlfriend?”

“I guess not,” Beth giggled.

We hailed a taxi back to the hotel.

“I’m on the pill now,” Hannah whispered. “And my AIDS test came back negative.” Hannah had once told me that she’d had a test every six months since she heard about AIDS. She’d been slipped a mickey once by a surfer from Geelong, and was never sure what happened.

“Well, if you’re game, I am,” I said. “I had an AIDS test two months ago when Phillip panicked over a heroin-abusing bedmate he’d boffed after too many beers. He wanted a mate to go through the test with him.” The taxi driver was too preoccupied with a baseball game on the radio to hear us.

I whistled as Hannah
came out in a new satin teddy. She did look unbelievable. She peeled back the bottom of the sheet and caressed my legs. “I’ve missed your exquisite toes, darling.”

The sex was good for a change, a state punctured only by Hannah immediately leaping out of bed to remove her smeared mascara.

“Condomless sex—one of the benefits of a real relationship. You could have come in me,” Hannah chided.

I almost drifted off to sleep when I remembered I had to go to Rachel’s hotel the next day, or forever piss her off.

“This is so nice,” Hannah said, gripping my elbow.

Angus knocked on the door. The alarm clock said one
A.M.

“Come next door. I got some raw footage from the video tape crew. I have to give it back tomorrow morning before INXS’s people find out about it.”

“I’m busy, Angus,” I said.

“That’s okay,” Hannah said. “Let’s go watch.”

It was just the three of us in Angus and Phillip’s room. Angus handed me a beer. Hannah passed. “I only drink champagne or mineral water,” she said. I glanced at the mirror over the sideboard and caught Angus mocking her words as he rewound the video. About ten minutes into the tape, we could see that I’d mistakenly thrown a sexy stare at a big puffy man with a mustache in the front row.

“I couldn’t see much with those lights,” I tried to protest, but Angus and Hannah were too busy laughing. I felt very small.