She returned to the room cupping two stemless glasses, and held one out to me.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” I asked her.
“I’m fine.” She looked battered. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“Okay.” I reached out to tap my wineglass to hers.
“We’re drinking to you tonight, Teddy,” she said.
I wasn’t so sure. “I think we’re just drinking.”
CHAPTER 6
I stood outside the house and pondered the consequences. There would be many. A blizzard of them, most of them unwelcome. Suddenly, a simple knock seemed a dire, drastic step. I’d come this far, I told myself, though really it hadn’t been very far at all.
Screw it.
I rapped twice on the door and a symphony of muted noises erupted behind it. Kitchen chairs skidded, skirmishing children trampled down carpeted steps. Finally, the door blew open and there I was, staring at Jumbo Jett.
We looked at each other, and his face, puffier than I’d remembered it, ballooned into a bulky smile. “Mingus.”
“Hello, Jumbo.”
He glanced over his shoulder, then scooted furtively out onto the porch, pulling the door closed behind him. Throwing an arm over my shoulder, he began guiding me back down the walk toward the street.
“Man, it’s so great to see you,” he said, even as he seemed to be escorting me off the property. Then he produced a white envelope out of the front pocket of his jeans. “Dude, would you mind keeping this in your car for a little while?”
“What?” I looked at the little package. “What is that?”
“It’s nothing.”
“What sort of nothing?”
“It’s just some pot. No big deal. Sandy and Israel caught me smoking again. Personally, I don’t see the problem. The kids were at school. They know I’d never do it with them around. But they can be real tightasses—you know how it is. And it is their basement, after all. So, if you could just hang on to it for a little bit until this all blows over.”
I stopped walking. “Hold on a second. What the hell are you talking about?”
He looked at me as if everything that had just come pouring out of his mouth made perfect sense. Like this was an eminently reasonable way to greet each other after ten years.
“Start over,” I demanded. “Sandy and . . .”
“Israel.”
“Sandy and Israel. And who the fuck are these people?”
“Sandy’s my ex.”
“Ex what?”
“Ex-wife. Israel’s her husband. They’re not real big into the whole marijuana scene, even for medicinal needs—and I’ve got plenty of those—and moving out of the house isn’t really the best move for me right now, you know, financially. So, I gotta bite the bullet on this one. Their way or the highway. You know how it is.”
He stole a peek back at the house and continued ushering me down the driveway.
“I have a lot of questions,” I said. “But let’s start with this one: You live with your ex-wife and her husband?”
“And their two kids.”
“I see.”
“They’re good kids.” Somehow that was relevant. “They really like me.”
I was already sorry I’d come. “Jumbo, I don’t mean to be rude, but what the fuck?”
“I recognize it’s not all that common of an arrangement.”
We’d reached the end of the driveway and were standing next to my aging Lexus coupe. “Dude, unlock it. Nice car, by the way. Gray totally works for you. Mysterious.”
“It’s silver,” I said, clicking the doors unlocked.
I watched uncomfortably as Jumbo slid into the passenger seat and began rifling through my glove compartment. He removed a stack of CDs to make room for his envelope, which he concealed like a master spy inside the vehicle owner’s manual. We’d been together thirty seconds and Jumbo had already made me an accessory to a felony.
Slamming the glove box shut, he started flipping through the discs. “The new Oasis. Nice.” He turned it over and studied the track listing. “How is it?”
“Come out of there.”
He shimmied his ungainly frame out of the car and closed the door behind him. “Thanks, Mingus,” he said through an exhale of relief. “I owe you.”
“Don’t forget that that’s in there,” I said. Lecturing Jumbo was like riding a bike. “I’m not driving home with that in my car.” We were not off to a good start, Jumbo Jett and I.
Then, for the first time, I had a moment to take him in—the faded daddy jeans, the doughy physique, the lawless hair one frizz away from electric socket bedlam. There was something strangely heartening about Jumbo in chaos. He was just as I’d left him.
“It’s been a long time,” he said. “I’m super glad you called.”
Then, with an abrupt lurch forward, he locked a suffocating hug around my torso. It was like being absorbed into one of Maurice Sendak’s wild things. He held on for a while, too long actually, and when I detected a subtle rocking, I patted him twice on the back to indicate it was time for the hug to be over.
“I’ve missed you, man,” he said.
“Yeah. Listen, I was hoping there’d be somewhere we could talk, but I guess it’s not going to be the house.”
Jumbo frowned at the Pepsi-blue split-level perched atop the driveway in all its aluminum siding glory.
“Screw that,” Jumbo said defiantly. “I pay rent.”
* * *
The way Jumbo smuggled me into the basement made me feel like a truant twelve-year-old sneaking over for an afternoon of PlayStation. Unfinished and gloomy, the cellar was a dank, low-lit space with exposed cinder block everywhere except for the places where Jumbo had seen fit to hang a tapestry, a photograph, or a Tremble album jacket. There was a bed, in a way—two mattresses stacked on the cement floor. An ancient tan sofa with decomposing upholstery lined one of the walls, a generic wooden chair sat stranded in the middle of the room, and that about did it for furniture. Clothes hung like battle corpses over the sides of plastic college dorm crates, and a few cardboard boxes were put to work as nightstands. It smelled like basement down there, a mix of new car and wet dog. The most uplifting aspect of the place was the pounding of footsteps overhead, which signaled life of a mainstream variety somewhere close by.
“What do you think of my pad?”
How does one sugarcoat cinder block and cement? “It’s fine. Maybe a little too ‘It puts the lotion in the basket.’ ”
After warning me that the sofa was missing a leg, Jumbo lit a stick of incense on one of the highly flammable cardboard night tables and offered me a beer. I declined, it being ten o’clock on a Saturday morning.
Jumbo settled onto the bed and fixed me with an outsized smile. “Jeez, Mingus, look at us, together again.”
Jumbo always called me Mingus. I guess at one point I knew why.
“You and I were buddies, man,” he went on. “Since we were little kids. I never thought we’d go ten years without talking.”
It was the raw truth that, with the exception of the last decade—a respite I’d earned many times over—I’d been along for the whole bumpy ride that was Jumbo Jett’s life. I’d witnessed the good stuff: his ascent to revered yet volatile guitar god, the affable ruffian who chewed up the scenery onstage and who made for an entertaining if not always comprehensible interview. But I’d also had a front-row seat to a mélange of horrors I would’ve loved to unremember. The runny nose he sported K through 12. His unfortunate hobby of shaking people’s hands with a buzzer. His unbecoming sports illiteracy (the year the band was invited to the Super Bowl, he nagged me to leave at “intermission”).
“As you can see, I’m still playing.” He gestured proudly toward a squadron of guitars up against the wall.
That information was the first posi
tive thing about my visit.
Whereas Warren, Mack, and I opted not to outstay our welcome in an industry that didn’t seem to want us anymore, Jumbo had pressed on, instrument in hand, albeit on a slightly smaller scale. Scaring up a few weekend warriors from the neighborhood and a shaggy high school student or two, he formed Jumbo Jett and His Ragtag Honey-suckle Band, which had since endured countless Menudo-like personnel changes but still loitered around the Mid-Atlantic, looking for love. Recent venues included the parking lot of Whole Foods, a harvest festival at a pumpkin patch, and an eight-year-old’s birthday party.
As for why he was doing all of this in Baltimore, he told me he’d relocated for Sandy, a social worker he met on a plane and to whom he gave permission to eat him should they happen to crash in the Andes. (Unlikely, as the flight was Philly to Atlanta.) “I fell head over heels, man,” he said wistfully. “She scratched me right where I itched.” But the love affair had clearly turned sour at some point, seeing as how Sandy was now scratching some other guy where he itched.
“As passionate as I am about my music, the band is actually more of a sideline at this point,” he explained bravely.
“Oh?”
“I went back to school, Mingus. Got my degree. I’m a midwife.”
“A midwife? But you’re a man.”
“It’s a same-sex term.”
“You mean unisex?”
“Yeah, that one.”
It didn’t sound unisex.
“All practitioners of midwifery are known as midwives,” he informed me with the inflection of someone who’d memorized the manual. “We’re respected independent contractors in the health care profession.”
“Huh.”
“We help women have healthy pregnancies and then, when it’s showtime, we guide them through a natural childbirth.”
Jumbo’s presence at an actual baby delivery seemed as discordant an image as there could be. “You don’t have to go to med school or something for that?”
“Nope,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
“Well. Good for you, James.”
“Yeah. Just don’t eat lunch before a childbirth.” Then he fake retched.
That seemed as good a time as any to cut to the chase. “So Jumbo, there’s something I want to talk to you about.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I’m not just passing through.”
We were then interrupted by the sound of the door opening at the top of the stairs. “Jim? You down there?” a man’s voice called.
“Yes indeedy.”
Plodding footsteps advanced down the stairs, and soon a severely thin man, midforties and balding, stood at the base of the steps, a red rugby shirt hanging off his scrawny frame. He was carrying a little girl who instantly leapt out of his arms and bolted for a Fender acoustic propped up against an amp. Jumbo looked on with a smile as the toddler started scraping her fingers across the strings, chiming out an open chord over and over.
“Sounds great, Ingrid. Your practice is really paying off,” Jumbo said. “Israel, meet Teddy. Teddy, Israel.”
I shook his bony hand. The man was fucking emaciated.
“Tremble, right?” Israel said with a point and a squint.
I nodded.
“Great to meet you. We’re obviously all big fans in this house.”
There was nothing obvious about it, considering that the band’s guitarist used to be married to this man’s wife and had taken up residence under his stairs.
“And this little princess,” Jumbo said, scooping up the girl and tickling her tummy, “is Ingrid. Ingrid, can you say hi to Teddy?”
I said, “Hi, Ingrid.”
The kid said nothing.
Then Israel turned serious. “So, Jim, I just got a call and it looks like I’ve got to run into the office for a couple of hours. Sandy took Zed to the movies and I don’t know if you guys are busy or were just going to be hanging out here . . . You know I hate to ask.”
“We don’t mind, right, Mingus? Ingrid can tag along.” Jumbo had now inverted the two-year-old so that she was dangling upside down and squealing with laughter.
“You sure? I can always take her with me,” Israel said, staring uneasily at his kid, whose head was swinging mere inches above the concrete floor. Jumbo was now shaking her like a can of spray paint. This Israel fellow must have been completely out of options to leave his toddler with a repeat offender of his “no dope in the house” policy.
“No biggie, man,” Jumbo said.
“I really appreciate it, Jim. And please, just be extra careful and—”
“Don’t worry, Is. We’ll be fine. Teddy and I were just going to catch up a little. Maybe we’ll take her down to the Inner Harbor. What do you think, Mingus? It’s a nice day out there. We’ll pack sandwiches.”
“Sure.” I smiled tight as a lash. “I love boats.”
* * *
“He looks like he’s being treated for something, that’s all I meant,” I said, as I buckled myself into the passenger seat of the great sandstone minivan. The sticky garage air smelled of mulch, motor oil, and bicycle tires.
“I suppose he is thin,” Jumbo allowed.
“He’s rickety.”
“I know he’s a big cabbage guy,” Jumbo said thoughtfully. “That might have something to do with it.” He was leaning through the open door, struggling with the straps of Ingrid’s car seat. “Sorry about having to take the whaler. My Chevelle isn’t great for kids.”
It may have, at one point, been charmingly quirky that Jumbo drove a Chevelle, a car out of print since the seventies. But now, it couldn’t have been more than a rusty, protective covering for a disgruntled muffler.
Jumbo slid behind the wheel and started rifling through a disorganized flock of keys. As he coiled his burly frame toward the rear and started backing the van down the driveway, wild giggling erupted from the backseat. “She cracks up every time I do that,” he said bemusedly. “All I have to do is turn my head around to back up and she thinks it’s hysterical.”
“Well, reverse is the funniest of all gears,” I said.
We’d barely reached the bottom of the driveway when Jumbo slammed on the brake.
“Christ!” he yelled, squinting into the rearview mirror. “I almost killed him!”
He checked on Ingrid, but the abrupt stop had barely registered, so engaged was she with a frayed picture book illustrated with golden-locked princesses.
Jumbo opened his door and began ambling down the driveway. “I didn’t even see you, Dad,” I heard him say.
Dad? I unlatched my door and stuck out my head. At the foot of the driveway, standing next to an antediluvian Oldsmobile, was a senior citizen in a drab-green jacket.
“It’s not your weekend, Dad,” I thought I heard Jumbo explain. “Did you forget?”
The man at the end of the driveway was stooped over with his arms wrist-deep in the pockets of his trousers—there’s no other word for that variety of pants; it’s just trousers—periodically lifting his expectant eyes toward his son. Jumbo laid a gentle hand on his back as the old man contemplated the curb. A miscommunication was being sorted out.
Then Jumbo pointed at me. “Hey, Dad, look. There’s Teddy Tremble. Mingus, you remember my old man.”
A brittle smile raised the edges of Elmer Jett’s unkempt gray mustache, and we exchanged waves.
Jumbo’s parents were divorced by the time we’d reached our early teens, but his father refused to be a stranger. Aside from sharing a roof with his son every other weekend and for two months over the summer, the old man attended all school events, including the close call that was Jumbo’s graduation. He showed up at his son’s Little League games to watch him sway dreamily in right field with his glove on the wrong hand. And for the entire month of July, they rented a Winnebago and embarked on a road trip dotted wi
th Americana’s greatest hits—Mount Rushmore, the Grand Canyon, Route 66. July was the only time I ever felt envious of Jumbo.
When the father-son confab reached its natural conclusion, Jumbo gave his dad an affectionate pat on the shoulder, and the geezer sloped back toward his beat-up ride.
“What was that all about?” I asked once Jumbo was back in the van, slinging the seat belt across his drooped chest.
“Oh, he’s just a little confused, that’s all. He thought it was his weekend.”
“His weekend for what?”
“To hang out,” he replied, pulling out of the driveway and waving one final toodle-oo at his father. “He still honors the custody arrangement. You gotta give him credit. It’s been, like, thirty years and still, every other weekend.”
I combed Jumbo’s face for even a speck of irony.
“Hasn’t anyone told him his obligations ended about twenty years ago?”
“Don’t go all lawyer on me, Mingus.”
“No one has custody of a thirty-eight-year-old, Jumbo. You have custody of yourself. I’m not saying a little parental guidance would hurt in your case, but you no longer need a court order. You can sleep over at your dad’s any time you want. Concepts of custody don’t apply anymore.”
Jumbo flashed me a tolerant grin. “They do to him.”
He then jerked some knobs on the dash and the AC roared to life like the afterburners on an F-14 Tomcat. Arctic wind huffed into the Monster Truck Show–vehicle. Within seconds I was shivering, positioning my body to avoid the streams of frigid air.
“What are we doing here, transporting a liver?”
“I’m kind of a worrier when it comes to temperature and kids,” said the father of none. “You can suffocate on hot air much quicker than on cold air. Bet you didn’t know that.”
I didn’t. Because it’s ridiculous.
* * *
In the fish-tanged air of the Baltimore harbor, I watched Ingrid spin about on a merry-go-round, clutching the reins of a plastic horse as my once and future guitar player held her steady. I didn’t imagine that any band had ever been launched under these conditions, and in that respect, I suppose we’d already made rock history.
Thank You, Goodnight Page 10