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talking.”
    “You know what I would like?” said Cosgrove, mildly brightening. “A chicken breast and some nice baked beans. And then seven-layer cake. And I would like a little blue car of my own sizeto ride in. I wouldn’t have to park it, because it would come inside with me. And I would like the Ring, to rule the world. Everyone who was mean to me dies horribly. They’re screaming as they die, and I would laugh.”
    “Don’t say that,” said Carlo, stroking his hair. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    Then his voice caught, too.
    “Why is Mr. Smith crying?” Cosgrove asked me.
    I said, “He is very desperately threatened. See, we’re the Lost Boys,” I said. “The anonymous Greeks, a hill of unknown dead. We have been abandoned,” I said. “But you know what? I still believe.”
    Wonderingly, Cosgrove touched Carlo’s moistened cheeks.
    “You don’t have to be a vampire,” he told Carlo. “See, how I break the spell, and your eyes are now clear?”
    “Exorcis,”
I said.
    Carlo shook his head; the tears kept flowing. “Can I please stay with you tonight?” he said.

THE MUSIC OF
THE NIGHT

 

    H
ave I ever mentioned that I play the banjo?
    Quite some years ago, in my days as an off-Broadway music director, I coached the teenage son of a producer and an actress I worked with, in preparation for some music exam that he had to pass to get into Dublin University. In return, he gave me banjo lessons and helped me find an ax of my own—a Fender, no less, secondhand, in splendid condition.
    The producer was wealthy, with a gigantic apartment on Central Park West; each of his kids had not only his own room but his own terrace, and the boy and I would sit outside of an afternoon and trade jokes as I mastered “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” and “The Groundhog Hunt.”
    I’m rusty now, but every so often I haul out the banjo and take it for a spin. Cosgrove, who found it fascinating from day one, kept trying to sing along, improvising lyrics when the folklore failed him. He hit some sort of apex with “Camptown Races”:
Cosgrove’s tired ‘cause he slept too late.
Doo-dah, doo-dah.
Chicks with dicks are a heavy date—
     
    and I immediately put the banjo in his lap and taught him some chords. If he’s busy playing, maybe he won’t sing.
    (When neither Virgil nor I am around to stop him, Cosgrove parks himself in front of the erotic cable channel, where he incubates an obsession for “chicks with dicks”—preoperative transsexuals—waiting hours, if necessary, for a glimpse of this ultra-contemporary phenomenon.)
    Oddly, Cosgrove, who usually can’t find anything he can do without fumbling, is a decent rudimentary banjo artist. With the instrument tuned to G Major, Cosgrove can muster a worthy D 7 and a quite competent “bar 5” (for which one places the finger flat across the fretwork at the fifth bar, lining the strings up in C Major), all togethergiving him the wherewithal for at times quite lengthy concerts.
    Of course, Virgil will not be left at the hitching post when the latest Pony Express is mounting up, so I had to show
him
some chords, too. Then you get the Bremen Town Musicians in residence on your sofa.
    Virgil and Cosgrove were down here all the time, because Dennis Savage was trying to become a writer and he needed a silence, a room of his own, to create in. I didn’t mind; I wasn’t working much. After publishing twenty-one books in fourteen years, I was discovering the joys of CD liner notes and magazine work: You write a few pages, announce, This is finished, and take the rest of the month off.
    Anyway, the kids had also taken up the pleasures of the CD, especially my portable Sony D-10, a tiny box that hums with Beethoven, Wagner, and show tunes. You juice up the machine in the wall, plug in two headsets, plant Virgil and Cosgrove with the player between them, and enjoy the peace—broken, at intervals, when they suddenly join in on a line they like, such as