MAYBE TOMORROW - A novel by Peter Nolan Smith Chapter 1

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.

MAYBE TOMORROW - A novel by Peter Nolan Smith Chapter 21

Light pierced a chink in the drawn curtains and traversed the hotel room to the bed. A slash of silver struck Sean’s face and he groggily open his eyes. They were filmed with night dust and he rubbed them clear, then blinked upon seeing Tammi by the door in her second-hand school uniform and white shirt. She was a tantalizing vision of corrupted innocence and he said, "I stopped believing in God, but I always believed in angels."

"You must believe in miracles too.” Tammi pressed her thumb and index finger together. “Because last night you were this close to dead."

“It feels even closer this morning.” The left side of his head ached from the beating and twin spikes pulsated in his temples. There were too many blanks in last night to form a vague recollection of the evening's end and he asked, "How did I get here?"

"I don’t know. I found you in the hallway." Tammi's allure dissipated with the stark strobe of disapproval aimed at him.

Sean spotted a plastic bag by her feet. "Where are you going?"

"I'm leaving." Tammi picked up the bag.

“Back home?” His swift rise from bed revealed the extent of his injuries and he slumped against the wall.

“Not a chance of that.” Tammi wasn’t leaving New York. “I’m leaving this place and leaving you.” “I can explain last night.”

"Why bother? I told you from the beginning that if you did drugs, I was gone." She was strict on rules as anyone could be who hadn’t had any rules.

"Doing drugs was an accident____" Sean fought his way back to the bed, on which he sat in a near puddle of flesh and bones, suggesting that Man had evolved from the non-vertebrates, instead of the apes.

“I can’t live with excuses.” Tammi opened the door, bag clenched in hand.

“Tammi, listen.” He had to tell her something, but nothing came to his lips.

“No.” Words were a trap to make her care about someone who didn't care about their self.

“Why no?” He didn't deserve an answer.

“One summer my father took me to the amusement park at Salisbury Beach. I went on the rides. The shills gave me candy. I was so happy, then I found him with a needle in his arm. He had been dealing drugs on the beach and doing his profits. His partners gave him a hot shot. His dying hurt and so would finding you dead in bed.”

“I'm not like that.” He had never done heroin before, but couldn't tell her that he wouldn't again.

"You don't know that and I don't know that either." Last night had killed him in her heart. “Sean, I can't be with you under these conditions."

"I'm sorry I screwed up.” His life was a mess and she had to understand why. “Tammi, I have a temper. I fight.”

“I’ve seen that temper.” She had been frightened the night that he almost dropped the record producer down the elevator shaft,

”I know.” Sean stared at Tammi, hoping that she might recognize the honesty in his eyes.

“In 7th grade I was beaten by two older boys. I guess they plain hated me. They never said why. Whenever I tried to avoid them, they found me. Worst was the other students watched me these beatings. Not one helped me. A bum, Red Halley taught how to fight. Only if you’re scared, you can’t win a fight with bullies.” Sean clenched his fists, wanting to hurt the two boys’ faces as they had hurt him. “One day the biggest one, Mark Tully, threw a punch and I ducked. He broke his hand. The beatings stopped and I won a scholarship to a private school. I never saw them again.”

“But the violence never disappeared?” Tammi had experienced the same persecution in Kittery. She hated those girls for calling her names and despised the boys for believing those lies, but also herself for caring what they thought.

“No, it stuck around. I don’t want you to leave.”

"I don't want to leave either, but it's too late to not leave.” She wished that it was yesterday and she could stop last night.

Where are you going?” He was losing her.

"I don’t know, but I can’t stay here.” She turned her head and reached for the door knob.

"And the band?" He was grasping for burning straws.

"I'm staying in the band, so we will see each other." She couldn't look at him without changing her mind and told herself to be strong without knowing why. Her voice wavered with a brand-new sadness, which felt too much like all the old ones.

"Oh." Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick had shamelessly bounced through the band members in the Summer of Love and sung about a love triangle in TRIAD from CROWN OF CREATION. In GTH Tammi’s choices were down to Charles, although Tammi hadn’t demonstrated any visible reciprocation of the organist’s interest, then again her leaving might be a subterfuge, because dating a millionaire almost every American girls’ fantasy.

“Will that be a problem?” She wanted to hear yes.

“I won’t make it one.” Sean had dropped acid, worn bell-bottoms and long hair, and slept under the redwoods in Big Sur. He was no hippie and worried that his temper was a danger to the three of them.

“Good.” And good felt like bad.

"Johnny tell you that I'm singing back-up." He vowed to control any future outburst for her sake alone.

"I can use the extra help." Tammi turned around to Sean.

His left eye was nearly shut, his face was swollen, and his body was marked with black-and-blues. He had saved her on the highway. Sean needed her help, but she fled the room with tears in her eyes.

Her steps faded from the corridor and Sean sagged into the bed. His success with women in this room was terrible. He got up and shut the door, then tried to sleep, but couldn’t find a comfortable position and the nagging discomfort was not a result of his beating, but the heroin gnawing at his bone marrow.

He hadn’t thought it possible, but honor students at his high school had graduated overnight from pot smokers to junkie fiends. No one was smarter or stronger than this drug and Sean repressed a shiver. He couldn’t even remember if last night’s experience was good or not. All that remained was the drug’s siren call and Sean respected its power, for he could never promise that Tammi he wouldn’t do it again. Still he had too much on the line to become another statistic and Sean intended on showing Tammi that he was not her father.

No addiction was ruining her Christmas. Least of all not his.