Why Do Birds Read online

  Why

  Do Birds

  Rob Hoerburger

  71 SONGS LLC, NEW YORK, N.Y.

  71 Songs, New York, New York

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Why Do Birds

  1. New York City, Spring 1982

  2. Queens, N.Y., Spring 1982

  3. Queens, N.Y., Late Spring 1982

  4. Queens, N.Y., Summer 1982

  5. New York City, Summer 1982

  6. Queens, N.Y., Summer, 1982

  7. Brooklyn, N.Y., Early 1950s

  8. New York City, Summer 1982

  9. Queens, N.Y., Summer 1982

  10. New York City, Summer 1982

  11. Queens, N.Y., Spring 1965

  12. Queens, N.Y., Summer 1982

  13. Queens, N.Y., Late 1960s

  14. New York City, August 1982

  15. Queens, N.Y., July 1970

  16. Queens, N.Y., July 1970

  17. Queens, N.Y., July 1970

  18. Queens, N.Y., Fall 1970

  19. New York City, | September 1982

  20. Queens, N.Y., Summer 1982

  21. New York City, Summer 1982

  22. New York City, Summer 1982

  23. Queens, N.Y., Fall 1982

  24. New York City, Fall 1982

  25. Queens, N.Y., Fall 1982

  26. Queens, N.Y., September 1982

  27. New York City, Fall 1982

  28. New York City, Fall 1982

  29. New York City, Fall 1982

  30. Queens, N.Y., Fall 1982

  31. New York City, Fall 1982

  32. New York City, Fall 1982

  33. Queens, N.Y., February 1983

  34. Outside Los Angeles, February 1983

  35. Queens, N.Y., Summer 1988

  36. Chelsea, New York, January 1990

  This is a work of fiction, partly inspired by certain real people and true events. Some names have been changed and some events have been fictionalized for dramatic purposes. Except for public figures, all other characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any similarity to real people — living or dead — places or events is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018, 2019 by 71 Songs LLC

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or any portion of it whatsoever. For information, contact 71 Songs LLC, [email protected].

  Cover design by Rachel Willey

  Interior design by Ben Grandgenett

  Back-cover photograph by Colin Bridgham

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-5323-8152-2 (Paperback)

  ISBN 978-1-5323-8153-9 (E-Book)

  “(They Long to Be) Close to You,” lyrics by Hal David, music by Burt Bacharach. Copyright (c) 1963 BMG Rights Management (UK) Ltd. and New Hidden Valley Music Co. Copyright renewed. All rights administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

  ALSO BY ROB HOERBURGER

  My Name Is Love: The Darlene Love Story

  (with Darlene Love)

  For Casey and Rockboy

  No one sings like you anymore.

  SOUNDGARDEN, “BLACK HOLE SUN”

  1. New York City, Spring 1982

  She was down to her last five million. Most of it was tied up in stocks and bonds, and there were a couple of properties back in L.A., but she still had enough ready cash to last several months in New York. Enough, that is, to pay for the hotel suite and the doctors. They’d told her she might need as much as three years to recover, but she was determined to lick this thing by Thanksgiving. By then she’d be ready to record again. And by the end of next year, the money would start flowing back in the right direction, and the curtain on her second act would finally rise. She’d go back to L.A. and show them all.

  But it was still only May, and she had some work to do. The only figure she cared about today was 54 — which was the precise number of steps down to the subway platform, the number of steps that lay between her and the finale. For a second, just a second, she was tempted to race down. But before she could start to descend, she got caught in the spokes of memory. Suddenly in her mind she was brushing her hands along the cinder-block walls of her high- school stairwell, all big-boned and bounding, on the way down to the vinegary-smelling cafeteria. The phantom taste of the soggy grilled-cheese sandwiches and full-fat chocolate milk she used to inhale before band practice had barely left before the voices, more recent, kicked in, first in two-, then four-, then six-part harmony, finally overdubbed into a finger-wagging chorale of doctors and family members and friends and fans chiming and chiding, “Not in your condition.” O.K., then. She’d take her time.

  In high school the other girls had played flute, clarinet, the occasional bassoon or even tuba. She played drums. Why had she taken them up? The usual answer she gave, in countless interviews across more than a dozen years, was that she wanted to get out of gym class. Then, when she showed some facility for them, it was because she wanted to be close to him, to be a part of his destiny. And though she may have never become a heavy hitter like Ringo or Buddy Rich, even when it soon became abundantly clear that her primary talent was singing, she never lost her innate sense of rhythm. As her band teacher told her over and over again, she knew how to count.

  She wasn’t the first famous female drummer. There was that girl from the Velvet Underground with the funny first name — what was it? Mel? Moo? Mao? She could never remember. She wasn’t too familiar with their music. The brother was, though; he had all kinds of wacky records — Frank Zappa, the Grateful Dead, Zeppelin. She did actually meet Lou Reed, the Velvet Underground’s guitarist and lead singer, once, when they crossed paths in some recording studio or at some club. She knew that weirdo hit of his from 1973, something about the wild side. She knew everything that was in the Top 40 that year. How could she forget? It was their best year: three Top 3 hits and two platinum albums. “Your songs always make me happy,” Lou Reed said to her from behind his shades, “because they’re so . . . sad.” Well, she didn’t know about that, but she thought it was cool that they shared a birthday, or so Billboard said.

  1973. Almost a decade ago.

  Now she was in New York, alone. It was her second extended stay. The first one, during her and the brother’s hiatus at the end of the ’70s, she lived there on and off for six months to record a solo album and experienced the city as if through binoculars — she could see it up close but never really touch it, removed and refracted as it was by limos and doormen and producers and valets and flunkies and second engineers who ran interference for her and then sent her the bill. She never learned to hail a cab, never explored the broad streets or the back alleys, never really saw the unimaginable and so never imagined it. She never ordered for herself when they all went out for dinner, she and her new band and the production team.

  When she was young, eating out meant Howard Johnson’s or roadside joints with Formica counters and ripped banquettes, and she could have just about anything on the menu. Over the last few years, though, as the menus moved up a few rungs on the social ladder, along with her dinner companions, she cared nothing about the fine points of piccata or francese, beurre blanc or demi-glace or crème fraîche, because it all ended up in the same place. She let them order away, pushed around whatever was on her plate and then signed the credit-card slip. It was just like lip-syncing, this pretending to eat, lip-eating. She could be very convincing. Between recording costs, the suite at the Plaza, all the uneaten dinners, she spent something like half a million. And then the damn record never even came out.

  Now, three years later, she was standing by the subway entrance on 42nd and Seventh, at the city’s serrated e
dge. Shiny sprigs of her brown hair squeezed out from under her Yankees cap. As a kid she was a pretty decent softball player. When they lived back east, before they moved to California, she was usually picked first for the neighborhood games, and the brother usually last. Even though he was older, she often defended him from the neighborhood bullies who taunted the gawky, horn-rimmed piano prodigy that he was. One time she even slugged a greaser who was pushing him around, and after that they left him alone. But then, when she was about 13, the parents decided he would have a better chance at fame in California, and so the family moved. She gave up baseball for the drums, and then, once it became obvious that his voice wasn’t going to sell many records, she concentrated on singing. It was just another way of coming to his rescue.

  But those were the days of baggy sweatshirts and muddied Keds. Now her Nikes, a new pair for the new week, shone a bright, unscuffed white, broken only by their aqua swoosh. The 24K miniature gold records on her charm bracelet, pulled to its very farthest clasp and still loose on her wrist, clinked against the subway railing. Her tan merino sweater, size 0 and roomy, was layered over a white long-sleeve button-down, which was turned up at the cuffs but still covered her Rolex. (She remembered the first time she saw one, on the wrist of her best friend, F., and thought it was a man’s watch. Now her own Rolex was one of her most prized possessions.) Her Gucci rope belt wound halfway back around itself through the loops of her pressed jeans. It was a little warm for the day — May 10, a Monday, and more than a little warm for the sweater. But taking it off was not an option, not even to wrap around her waist. It gave her the illusion of bulk.

  She should have been an easy mark for the purse snatchers, palm readers and three-card-monte gamers who, taking one look at her, might have seen a month’s work done in minutes. Yet somehow she walked the city with impunity. Times Square, the subway, Central Park, all of New York and the accompanying boogeymen and pervs and crackheads she’d been warned about, were just funhouse attractions to her, like the spinning windmills and felt-banked baby moats of miniature golf, hazards that she had to concentrate and aim her way past. Her ears, as usual, were the first line of defense. She could instantly absorb the city’s polyphony, identify its movements and incorporate anybody’s foot pattern — the wigglers and the waddlers, the inchworms and the gallopers and the high-heel stompers, the stilt and crutch walkers, and immediately move a step ahead or fall a step behind as necessary. What her ears didn’t do, her eyes did, those two brown bulbs that, as the rest of her face turned in on itself over the years, became positively fierce. They were hidden behind her giant Ray-Bans, the same kind that became necessary when they were on tour, not that anyone recognized her anymore, really.

  There were plenty of obstacles for her to clear during that cross- town jaunt to the subway, most of them involving food. There were the lunchboxes streaming toward her like torpedoes from either direction, black half-domes tucked under the sweaty armpits of brawny plumbers, electricians, pipe layers, jackhammer riders, on the way home to their suburban split-levels. These forbidding shells would have been emptied hours ago during the morning lunch breaks, but she could still see the damage in the workers’ protruding guts: oozy, gooey sandwiches as big as shoes; half pies and guzzled Big Gulps; the caked residue on the work boots that was most likely neither Sheetrock nor plaster but rather errant confectioners’ sugar from jelly doughnuts. It was like looking in the mirror to her, encountering all those potbellies, even though she hadn’t eaten food like that for years.

  Now that the weather was getting warmer, there were more smells, more sights, more sounds for her to navigate: the hot-dog carts, the speared rotisserie chickens in the Korean delis turning up on every corner, the garlic-and-butter sauce at the upscale lunch haunts on Madison, the shattering sizzle of corner grills and their mini Vesuvii of sausage and peppers and onions, the clackety clack of the roach coaches crawling back for the day to wherever they lived and then reloading every night with muffins, croissants, danish, bagels, bialys, buns, bear claws, half-moons. The cheaper the food, she knew, the wider the hips. One reason she liked the subway so much was that it seemed about the only place in all of New York where she couldn’t smell anything cooking.

  She could have taken a cab to the subway station, of course. But she was trying to stay on a budget, more or less. And she had time to kill: She didn’t need to be on the platform until 3:20. Besides, walking across Manhattan proved — to her, at least — that she wasn’t weak. At the corner of Sixth and 44th, she ran into a character she’d seen before: He was usually under cardboard and newspapers and army blankets — like the kind her father used to have in the back of his station wagon — grease-stained mechanic’s pants and a moth-eaten Holy Cross sweatshirt hanging off his pole frame. He was guarding his shopping cart, festooned with punched-out stuffed animals and pinwheels and mops and brooms and American flags, like a going-out-of-business sale at an amusement-park kiosk. There was a plastic bag full of foul-smelling, empty beer cans. And, acting as license plates, there was a 45 record on each end of the cart. The back “plate” was always some Vietnam anthem like “Light My Fire” or “All Along the Watchtower.” The front “plate” changed weekly. Today it was Chris Montez’s “The More I See You,” a loungy hit back when she and the brother were starting out in the business and always one of their favorite records. When they signed their first big recording contract, with the very same label, she remembered thinking it would be great if they ever got to be as big as Chris Montez.

  Had there been such people on the street during her last stay in New York three years ago, wheeling their entire lives around with them? She couldn’t recall. In the slow-baking heat today, the man was topless when he stuck out his coffee can, and she couldn’t help staring at his torso, a patina of sweat trickling down the taut skin caked with soot and sun, hopping from one rib to the next. She gazed at him in wonder and awe. How did he get his body to look like that? She reached into her purse to pull out a five, and then the light changed; he snatched it from her hand and rolled the cart up Sixth Avenue, chanting, “Tit for Tet, tit for Tet,” spittle dribbling down his unshaven chin.

  Her own march resumed. She would ask about his diet another day.

  So caught up in this reverie was she that for once she didn’t no- tice someone else noticing her. Aside from the inconvenient lack of recent hits, the main reason she wasn’t recognized very much was the fact was that her appearance had changed so radically — a kind of natural plastic surgery whittling her down until she had become her own doppelgänger. Still, she caught the attention of a scruffy man in a hooded sweatshirt across Sixth Avenue — or the green from her purse did — making him lift his head from the racing form he was studying and follow her, just catching the light. Her snow-white Nikes kept her in sight amid the heavy foot traffic. The sun was starting to beat down now with some attitude. Yet as she did with her sweater, he kept his sweatshirt on.

  She pushed up her sleeve and checked her watch: 3:14, still plenty of time to make the platform. She planted her left heel, swathed in the micropillows of her new sneakers, on the first step of the dun-colored concrete and continued one by one, keeping a steady rhythm. Halfway down the stairs she realized that she had left her neat new bag of tokens on the nightstand at her hotel. Now there would be an unscheduled stop at the token booth. She couldn’t see buying another whole pack, so when she got to the front of the line, she asked for just one, only to realize she had given her last small bill to the cart man. She pulled a wad of 50s from her purse. And that’s when she heard a voice from behind her and felt a tap on her shoulder.

  “A word of advice, ma’am,” spoke the soft baritone of the man who had tracked her, who now flashed an NYPD badge and identified himself as an Officer Logan. He seemed surprised at how quickly she snapped around, her torso only barely stronger than dry kindling, beneath the broadish plank of her shoulders, as the two of them moved off to the side of the booth. His fingers were stung by bone. She seemed fam
iliar somehow. “Don’t flash a roll of bills like that, all right?” he said. “You might as well just dump them out your window.”

  After years of world travel, of meeting and performing for big shots in entertainment and government (twice at the White House), she had acquired the language of adulthood. Yet in this small crisis she reverted to the response she had when her first six-figure royalty check arrived, or when she saw Petula Clark (Petula Clark!) perform one of their own songs on TV: “Man. . . . ” What would the mother think if she knew her daughter had been stopped by a New York undercover cop?

  As she stuffed the change from the 50 back into her purse — 49 singles, a quarter and an eviscerating look from the token matron — the officer flipped his badge back into his sweatshirt and got ready to shift back down into his disguise. Then, catching a glint from inside her purse, he leaned in for a second look. She pulled out a small paring knife that he seemed to be fixated on.

  “You really think that little thing would protect you?”

  “Oh, that,” she said, in clipped dismissal, discreetly checking her watch; the longer she stayed there, she thought, the likelier it was he’d recognize her. 3:18. “It’s for this,” she said, and pulled a whole lemon from the bottom of her bag. She had been carrying around lemons for years, once she discovered their diuretic effect, their tart capacity to subtract calories. You never knew when someone might press a drink or a snack in your hand; the lemon helped keep it from catching.

  The officer passed the knife back to her just as his beeper began sounding, and by the time he picked his head up to issue her one more friendly warning, she was gone, having slid into the roll of the crowd headed toward the downtown platform. “Lemon,” he said out loud, catching a lingering trace of it in the air. “She’d have a better chance with that than with the knife.”

  ***

  The platform had just emptied, filling the train mostly with school kids in premature summer clothes, short shorts and tank tops, weather vanes in mesh and spandex. Every fourth or fifth one of them was plugged into one of those new portable tape players — Was that how they’d be listening to our next hit? she wondered — when she saw the keyboard, only 60 or so keys, small enough to fit in a duffel bag, the plastic microphone stand and behind it a one-man band with a three-ring body. As the train pulled away, exposing the grimy tiles and the graffiti balloons, she hid behind the newsstand — “Original Charlie’s Angels Nix Reunion” blared the pink shock of some gossip magazine. She remembered the times — two — she had been on the cover of People, one of them her wedding day.