which he figured was better. Mickey was the youngest of eight, the other seven all girls, and he was spoiled rotten in so many respects—clothes bought especially for him, his own room right from the start. Okay, it was about the size of a closet, but so what? The family’s house was large, as it needed to be, but modest, only three blocks from the beach, great in the summer when cool breezes came in off the water. When the wind changed direction, though, you felt like you were living under the nearby interstate, the traffic noise was so loud. Sunday dinners, you were home and no excuses. Spaghetti with sausage and meatballs and pork shoulder braising in tomato sauce. Michael Sr.’s mother’s recipe, handed down reluctantly to her Irish daughter-in-law, with one or two key ingredients left out for the sake of contrast. Family first, America second—or maybe vice versa these days, with so many grubby longhairs always flashing their imbecilic peace signs—everything else a distant third.
For Mickey, music came first. His first job was sweeping up the mall music store where he’d seen a Fender Stratocaster in the window and fallen in love. After the guitar came an amp. In a band at age thirteen. By sixteen, sneaking into raunchy New Haven bars and sitting in with older guys whose girlfriends didn’t wear bras and seemed to enjoy revealing this fact by bending over in front of Mickey, who would later joke with Lincoln and Teddy that he had a hard-on for all of 1965. “I catch you doing drugs with those guys,” his father warned, “you’re gonna be the first kid in America ever beaten to death with a Fenson guitar.”
“Fender,” Mickey corrected him.
“Bring it here then, smart-ass. We’ll do it right now. Save time.”
About the last thing in the world Mickey wanted to do was go to college. In school he’d always hovered between mediocre and piss-poor, but all his sisters had gone or were going, and college was what his mother wanted. Community college, live at home, was the plan. Mr. Easy, his mother called him. Always the path of least resistance. Mickey supposed she was right. He wasn’t terribly ambitious. But he failed to see what was so wrong with staying in West Haven. With his sisters gone, there was plenty of room, except on Sundays and holidays.
Unfortunately, even to go to the community college, you had to take the SAT, so one Saturday morning Mickey did. Not wanting to disappoint his mother by being the only kid ever rejected by a community college because of his SATs, he’d declined a gig the night before and actually gotten a good night’s sleep. He figured it wouldn’t kill him to try for once. Tuition was cheap, and if he did well enough to snag a few bucks to help with books and expenses, it’d put him in good with the old man.
When the results came back, his mother met his father at the door. “Have a look at this,” she said, pointing to their son’s score, which was in the top two percent. “The kid’s brilliant.”
Since Mickey was the only kid in the room, his father looked around to make sure another wasn’t hiding somewhere. “Which kid?”
“This one,” his mother said. “Your son.”
His father scratched his head. “This one right here?”
“Yes. Our Michael.”
His father studied the SAT results, then his wife, then Mickey, then his wife again. “Okay,” he said finally. “Who’s the father? I’ve always wondered.”
The next day, Michael Sr. was still trying to work it out. “Take a walk with me,” he said, grabbing Mickey’s shoulder with a meaty paw. When they were down the block and out of earshot, he said, “All right, come clean and I promise I won’t be mad. Who’d you get to take that test for you?”
Mickey felt his left eye twitch. “You know what, Pop?” he began.
“Don’t say it,” his father warned.
“Fuck you,” Mickey said, completing his thought.
Senior stopped walking and threw up his hands. “You said it.” Then he cuffed his son on the back of the head, hard enough to make his eyes water. “Help me out here, because I want to understand. You’re saying this test is on the up-and-up?”
Mickey nodded.
“You’re telling me you’re smart.”
“I’m not telling you anything,” Mickey said.
“You’re telling me that all this time you could’ve done good in school and made your mother proud?”
Mickey felt that seeing things in this light took some of the luster off