Thank You, Goodnight

by Andy Abramowitz

  “Julie, I’m going to give you the same advice I gave you yester—” He stopped dead. Then he turned and looked at me. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  I stepped out of the darkness. “Hello, Mr. Warren.”

  “Teddy Tremble, in the flesh,” Warren marveled. “What are you doing here?”

  I smiled. “My dog ate my homework.”

  We hugged. A sinewy network of muscles under his button-down shirt brushed up against my middle-age spread. Bastard was still in shape, even if the avuncular chin-curtain beard put a few years on him.

  Warren turned to Julie. “Can we continue this tomorrow? Seems I have an unexpected visitor.”

  “I guess so,” she chirped tentatively, her features bucking in distress.

  Warren and I stared at each other, grins advancing across our faces as Julie strode out of the auditorium, the anxious echo of her footsteps trailing behind.

  “So let me guess,” Warren said. “You think I’m the one who hung that picture in the Tate, and you’ve come to kick my ass.”

  “I’ve recently learned that my ass-kicking days might be behind me. It’s really good to see you, even under all that facial hair.”

  He caressed the tightly coiled curls on his chin. “Had it for years, but every day there seems to be more salt and less pepper.”

  Warren was a kid during the band years, a spasmodic axis of pep and punch riding bareback on a constant beat. He’d aged, but not in the weathered, deteriorating, line-carving sense. His was the seasoned, fortifying type of growing older.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he asked.

  “Can we go somewhere and talk?”

  “Look, if this has something to do with that stupid photo, I’m telling you, I didn’t snap it and I didn’t hang it up.”

  I looked around the auditorium and felt the energy of a stage rising up before expectantly positioned seats. My eyes lifted to the row of intense spotlights hovering above us like an alien spacecraft.

  “I can assure you this visit is not about retribution,” I told him. “It’s about the opposite of retribution.”

  “Hmm,” he mused. “The opposite of retribution is forgiveness, Teddy. What have you done that begs my pardon?”

  * * *

  We strolled through the abandoned hallways, past the regiments of lockers. Scruffy kids sloped by slinging backpacks, each of them lurking beneath a hapless misfire of a haircut. A brunette with phosphorescent green mascara and an outfit conducive to stuffing small dollar bills flashed Warren a wave of twittering fingers.

  “Do the people here know who you are?” I asked as Warren fumbled for keys outside an office door.

  “Who am I?” he replied, chuckling.

  “Someone who used to be someone else.”

  “Some of the teachers know, the older ones, but nobody cares.” He pushed open the door to what was little more than a closet with a desk and a chair. “Lauren and I have lived over the bridge in Lambertville pretty much since the band split, and, trust me, there’s no royal treatment. I’m just the guy who teaches band and art appreciation. Every now and again, the owner of the coffee shop near my house will talk music with me, ask me if I ever met so-and-so, ever jammed with such-and-such. They don’t realize how far removed I am from that world. I don’t know jack about the music scene now. Somebody asked me the other day what I think of Ray LaMontagne. I was like, Ray LaMontagne? Sounds like someone who sang with Sinatra. But hey, I’m happy to shoot the shit. It’s not like I went all Eddie and the Cruisers.” His bag of papers landed with an exhausted thud on the floor, and Warren sat down at his desk. “I’m just living my life.”

  If Jumbo’s basement home was a dismal shrine to a ship that had long ago sailed over the horizon, Warren’s office was the witness protection program. The walls were lined with bookshelves packed with scholarly texts—The Elements of Music, The Annotated El Greco, Botticelli Explored, An Integrated Approach to Harmonic Progression—as opposed to self-aggrandizing memorabilia.

  A single picture frame angled toward Warren’s chair. I picked it up and took in the family photo. Lauren still looked magnetic, standing on the front step of a row house in a purple Lycra cat suit, two feline ears protruding from her hair. She had her arm around a young boy dressed in a Phillies uniform.

  I turned the photo toward Warren. “I thought women stopped slutting themselves up for Halloween after they had kids.”

  “Not the right woman.”

  “And this gentleman?”

  “That’s Patrick. He’s seven.” He smiled at the picture he’d seen a million times.

  I listened to my old friend wax tranquil about his blissful domesticity, which I’d come to upend. Warren, unlike Jumbo, had something to be stolen away from.

  He slid open a desk drawer and took out a sandwich mummified in plastic wrap. “PB and J,” he said. “I’ll split it with you.”

  I shook my head, and he proceeded to unwind the layers of plastic and bite off at least a quarter of the sandwich. Warren had always subscribed to the view that physical health was maximized by having not three meals a days but five. The guy ate constantly. To have a conversation with him, you had to factor in time for him to chew.

  I leaned forward. “Look, I need your help.”

  “What’s up?”

  I let out a breath on which my last shred of dignity escaped. “I want you to play music with me.”

  He stopped chewing. “What do you mean?”

  “I want you to make an album with me, a Tremble album.”

  The words dropped like an anvil onto the desk between us. “Get out of here.”

  I stared seriously at him.

  He stared back. “You want to regroup the band?”

  “I’m doing it and I want you to be part of it.”

  He laughed heartily, then reached out and patted my knee. “Teddy, my old, dear friend, don’t you have anyone in your life to tell you what a ridiculous idea that is?”

  “I add two or three every day.”

  “Well, let me say from the bottom of my heart, I thank you for inviting me to join your band, but unfortunately, I am an adult now, so I’m going to have to say no.”

  “You need some time to warm up to the idea.”

  Laughter. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Are you joking?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, then can I ask you something else?”

  “Sure.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “That’s not a question I can answer.”

  He looked at me sadly. “Teddy, I don’t even want to know the whys and wherefores, the sorry circumstances that made you wake up one morning and think, Doggone it, it’s time to play rock star again. Count me out. Good luck.”

  “You’ll give it some thought.”

  “I will not. This may be hard for you to comprehend, but I’m a member of a community. I teach kids about the wonders of music and art. I coach Patrick’s Little League team. I’m on the board of my neighborhood association. Do you think I’d give all of that up for the privilege of sweating like a beast behind a drum kit in some empty bar well past my bedtime? I did that before. I’m glad I did it, but I won’t be doing it again.”

  “Stop being practical and hear me out. This isn’t a whim. It’s been in the works for months. I’ve written a bunch of new songs—”

  “I’ll bet they’re very good. You are a talented songwriter, but—and please don’t take this the wrong way—I don’t really care all that much.”

  I sat back and folded my arms.

  “Come on, man,” he went on. “You’re out of your mind. What chance does a guy like you have? It’s overcrowded out there now. I have no idea how the game is played these days, but I do know the rules are a lot different. You know that Int
ernet thing, something they didn’t have in our day? It’s an enormously effective tool for forcing you to confront your own mediocrity. We have access to music now like never before, and there’s an awful lot of it out there, most of it better than ours ever was. You’re a middle-aged lawyer, Teddy. Look in the mirror and that’s what you’ll see.”

  “There’s no reason to be cruel.”

  “Have you been sitting in your basement all these years with a guitar in your lap, weeping over old photo albums, mumbling to yourself about getting back on top?”

  I snickered; his description of Jumbo was uncanny.

  Warren began to fatten his leather satchel with various papers. “What about your law partners? They must think you’ve had a break with reality.” He paused and stared at me hard. “Have you had a break with reality?”

  “I’ve had a break with my firm.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I took a leave of absence.”

  “What does that mean? I’m not coming in for a while? Don’t give me any work to do? Don’t order me anything off the lunch cart?”

  “I don’t know.” I hadn’t thought that far. “Maybe it means I quit.”

  “You want my advice? Go and unquit. You’ve lost your crackers.”

  “I need you, Square,” I told him. “I’d really rather not take the stage with musicians so young they look like I fathered them.”

  Warren flicked out the lights and we started down the hall.

  “Why now?” he asked. “What’s so special about right now? So somebody hung a bad picture of you in an art gallery. Big deal. Live with it. We put ourselves out there to be ridiculed if people so choose, to say we sucked, to laugh at us years after the fact. But we got paid a lot of money for that. Put on your big-boy pants and shake it off.”

  “I admit that seeing that photo pissed me off. But there’s more to it.” Somehow, a retelling of my escapades in Switzerland seemed unlikely to convince him I was of sound mind. “If it makes any difference, I happen to know we’re still popular in Europe. Small, grotesque parts of Europe.”

  He grunted. “My royalty checks don’t reflect that. Maybe you and the rest of the gang negotiated better deals. Speaking of which, what’s up with the other misfit toys? You talk to them?”

  “I haven’t spoken to Mackenzie in years.”

  “Well, that stands to reason.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He laid a knowing gaze on me. “Teddy. Come on, man.”

  “So I slept with her. Big deal. People in bands sleep with each other all the time. I’m surprised you and I never hooked up.”

  “You’re talking about sex, and that’s a convenient oversimplification,” Warren said.

  “Give me a break.”

  “Teddy, please. When you’re in a band with the same people for many years, you get to know them. You see how they interact with one another, whether they like or hate or are annoyed by one another. Like right now. Can’t you tell that I’m annoyed with you? You can tell whether they have private feelings that they keep under wraps because maybe they’re married or they’re chickenshit or some other reason.”

  “I loved Mack, but not like that. She was like a little sister to me.”

  “The little sister you slept with.”

  I huffed with vast exasperation.

  “Listen, man, I don’t care,” he said. “You can remember it however you choose. I’m not going to argue with you.”

  “Thank you. As for Jumbo, yes, I’ve been in touch with him.”

  Warren was offended. “You didn’t come to me first?”

  “No, but I did come to you second.”

  “That hurts. What did he say?”

  “He’s in. I knew he would be, and that’s why I started with him.”

  “Well, that seals it. You know I’ve had way more than my share of Dumbo for one lifetime.”

  “And so have we all, but—”

  “Let me guess. He’s changed, he’s reformed, he’s a disciplined guy now. Spin it for me. Jumbo’s a totally different person.”

  “Jumbo is exactly the same.”

  “Of course he is. You go play rock star with that clown. Leave me out of your midlife crisis.”

  Silently we twisted down the dark, empty corridors toward the lobby. I hadn’t been inside a high school since I graduated from one, and I felt the unsteady teenager I used to be urging toward the surface, fighting for breath. I’d worked hard to bury him under layers of artificiality that, over time, cemented; I’d become what I pretended to be, as the saying goes. I didn’t want to be that seventeen-year-old kid anymore, just as lost and lonely as everyone else, though perhaps a little more deft at concealing it. I’d had a group of friends I spent a lot of time with but never felt truly a part of. I’d pile into the car with them in search of a party on a Saturday night, but I was the one secretly hoping we wouldn’t find it.

  They don’t tell you that about high school. How a place can leave you just as suddenly as you leave it. Just when that itch on your skin finally gives, when the mud hardens, that’s when it kicks you out. The place that made you who you are closes its doors to you forever, and the rest of your life is lived in exile.

  “When’s the big performance?” I asked, as Warren and I passed the auditorium double doors.

  “Two weeks from yesterday.”

  “You’re fucked.”

  “Oh, I’m fucked all right. But it doesn’t matter. That Julie girl will make her fiddle sound like a dying animal, and her mommy and daddy will still give her a standing O like she’s Itzhak Perlman. But here’s the thing. I guarantee you that in every class there’s one kid who gets jazzed about what we’re doing. A circuit breaker flips in that kid’s head and—boom!—that’s it. He or she is one of us for life.”

  “Listen to yourself. One of us. For life. That’s why you can’t say no. That’s why you have to accept my proposition.”

  “Wrong,” he sighed. “That’s why I’m here, Teddy, and it’s why I’m not going to leave.”

  We pushed open the doors and ambled out into the chilled evening air, our heels tapping out an echo under the high canopy of the front walkway.

  When we reached the flagpole, I pointed to the student lot and said, “Well, I’m over there.”

  He dipped his head toward the teachers’ lot. “And I’m over there.”

  The symbolism was not lost on me.

  “I’m sorry you came all this way for nothing.”

  “It wasn’t nothing to me.”

  He started to walk away, then stopped. “I’m glad you sought me out. Look, maybe you’re going through something strange in your life or maybe you’re still trying to find your way. I don’t know. We’ve all been there. Whatever it is, we’re still buddies. You know that.”

  Through the darkness, I watched his form blend into the dim shadows. Goddamn you, Square. Goddamn you for pitying me.

  Soon, I was rolling swiftly down 95. The lanes of the highway were thick with cars, each one driven by some poor son of a bitch doing very little other than growing older. I jacked up the stereo and sought cover in a college radio station. It was playing a song I’d never heard before, a melody high, earthy, and sad. There was something about the night, the air, the music, the high-speed forward motion, the recent reconnections with lost things and lost people. Tonight it hung around my neck like a judge’s decree.

  CHAPTER 9

  “I want to talk to you.” It was my dad on the phone.

  “You do, huh. What about?”

  “Meet me at the gym. We’ll talk there.” The gym was shorthand for the posh Sporting Club, an aristocratic spa where the well-bred of Philadelphia overpaid to perspire—certainly not sweat—in their Lululemon and Under Armour.

  “What do you want to talk to me about?” I hate surpri
ses. After college, there are very few good surprises.

  “We’ll talk there.”

  I didn’t relish being summoned like a lapdog, but my day was rather open and a little exercise wouldn’t kill me. On top of that, it is an axiom of magical thinking that the one day a son declines his father’s invitation is the day the old man up and dies. Like I needed that.

  With the tart taste of passive obedience in my mouth and the dread of an impending lecture, I tossed on my most threadbare T-shirt and walked across town.

  At the club’s front desk, a synthetically buff guy with feathered hair and spandex shorts told me to sign the guest book. Behind him, stacks of vitamin-enriched bottled water, Gatorade of all hues, amino shakes, and powdered whey towered over us. He handed me a towel and said, “Enjoy your workout.” An oxymoronic benediction, if ever there was one.

  Through the glistening crowd of midday workout fanatics, I saw Lou Tremble climbing off a treadmill. He spotted me and pulled the earphones out of his ears, winding the little wire as he walked in my direction. I wondered what type of music got my father pumped up for a workout. Growing up, I would comb through his record collection and imagine a hipper past for the man. I’d finger through the cardboard sleeves with the psychedelic designs of Stevie Wonder, Cream, Spyro Gyra, and think, When exactly was this man cool? Somewhere along the line he must’ve gotten lost, his eight-tracks and cassettes sprouting overnight the names Manilow, Sedaka, Anne fucking Murray. Old, edgeless music seemed to pursue people throughout their lives, finally catching up with them when they were too slow and tired to outrun it. You grew up on Smokey Robinson and Dizzy Gillespie. Through your daughter’s bedroom door you overheard Springsteen, his voice filling you with a forgotten wildness. Somewhere in the nineties you hummed “Unskinny Bop” on your way to the office. And then you woke up at age sixty-five and found yourself singing “Ding ding ding goes the trolley.” The house always wins.

  My father approached me in a shiny blue tank top. He regarded my shirt, which bore the Chicago Cubs logo.

  “You still have that?” he said, smiling. “I bought that for you when I was out there for a meeting with the Wrigley Company. You must’ve been in high school.”