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eBook Category: Dark Fantasy
eBook Description: A Bronx kid singing a last round of doo-wop with his buddies under the IRT train station at Allerton Avenue and White Plains Road is told about a place on Simpson Street, a few stations down the line, where the songs never end, and the harmony is the sweetest ever made. The temptation to stay and sing is powerful, but is the price worth it?

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: Xanadu 3, ed. Jane Yolen, 1995
Fictionwise Release Date: October 2002

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [29 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [34 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [14 KB] , Portable Document Format (PDF) [67 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [15 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [67 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [85 KB] , hiebook (KML) [66 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [45 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [13 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [16 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [44 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [25 KB]
Words: 4852
Reading time: 13-19 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Portable Document Format (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

The old IRT train lurched out of the elevated station on the corner of Allerton Avenue and White Plains Road in the Bronx. Window panes on the Hebrew National deli rattled like a drum-roll fade-away intro to the three-way harmony we were weaving. Our singing was all encompassing, our voices our only instruments, absorbing the dust and the shudders of the train station and everything else on that late April street corner like some vortex out in space, like the hole in the center of a 45 record spinning round and around on a black turntable...

It was 1966--JFK was dead less than three years--and Lenny, Dave, and I sucked in and breathed out the new world through our music. We were remnants of a last-gasp doo-wop group from the early 60s, much the rage at Bronx House and the Y's on the Concourse a few years earlier. But now we had taken up Peter, Paul, and Mary for the Five Satins. We even dared a Dylan or Phil Ochs song once in a while.

This evening, though, we labored on a old folk standard--

"The Banks of the Ohio"--and Len and I were close to despairing that Dave, our second tenor, would ever get his part right. Still we pressed on, train station shaking and rattling and rolling, until a voice stopped us cold.

"Is that a folk song you're singing, or what?"

We turned around to see a cop. He had crept up to us on some kind of silent shoes.

"Uhm, that's right," I answered, ready for the inevitable time to break it up and take-it-home-boys lecture.

"Good harmony parts there," the cop commented. "But you were a little off on that suspended fifth." He looked at Dave.

I was too flabbergasted to speak.

"Yeah," Lenny chimed in. "We picked it up from the Mamas and Papas."

The cop shrugged. "Never heard of them. But if you like that kind of barber shop, I can show you some good parts."

"Sure," I said, by no means ready to give up my distrust of cops--hell, I'm not too hot about them even now--but by no means ready to say no to such an offer either. "Officer, ah..."

"Jimmy, just call me Jimmy." He extended a big hand, and I shook it. He had jet black rock 'n' roll hair and Newcastle coal in his eyes.