“Actually, you got this on a trip to Vancouver. You had a layover at O’Hare on the return. Thanks for thinking of me.”
I have never been a Cubs fan.
Dad wiped a modest sheen of perspiration from his brow and flashed a frothy grin at a young woman on a shoulder press machine.
“So, what are we doing, Rocky?” I asked him.
“I just finished up with cardio, so let’s do some weights. Easier to talk that way.”
I didn’t mind that my old man still hit the gym with the optimistic verve of the skinny kid on the wrestling team. Nothing wrong with a guy raging against the dying of the light with forty-five minutes on the treadmill. But this business of weight lifting, of snarling at the mirror while urging his sun-spotted skin to rise up into biceps: just fucking inane. It was fueled not by the quest to stay alive or even by a healthy modicum of responsibility, but by this pathetic fantasy that he was hot, that he could inspire impure thoughts. You’re north of seventy, Lou. You’re only hot when you step out of the condo in Delray that you should be wintering in.
To be fair, my father was not the only member of the family clinging to an obsolete self-image.
He led me over to the free weights and slid a forty-five pounder onto each side of a bench press bar. Then he said, “I ran into Marty Kushman the other day.”
Fuck. The Philadelphia legal community was quaintly incestuous, and I should’ve anticipated that the news would reach my father in nanoseconds. Plus, my old man had known the managing partner of Morris & Roberts for centuries.
“Know what he said to me?” he went on.
“I can probably guess.”
He rested his foot on the bench and squinted like a cowboy. “You’re leaving the firm?”
“I left the firm.”
“And you didn’t think to mention this to me?”
“Did I hurt your feelings?”
“Why didn’t you tell me, Ted?”
“Go,” I said, nudging him toward the bench press.
He lay down and blew through a set of ten reps. He might have been the oldest guy in America who owned weight lifting gloves.
“You’re looking huge, man,” I said. “Huge.”
He leapt to his feet. “So, what’s all this about?”
“It’s not about anything. I’ve just decided to try something else for a while.”
I added a twenty-five pound plate to each side of the bar before sliding onto the bench. I do have my pride.
“Another firm? Why didn’t you come to me? You know I have very good relationships with all the major players in town.”
“I know,” I said, gripping the bar. “You’re adored throughout the community.”
With quick, shallow puffs, I bounced the bar off my chest, hoping to outpace the fatigue, to reach ten reps before my arms caught wind of what was going on. They grew wobbly after about four. The last time I did any hard-core weight lifting was college. Because I’m an adult.
As soon as I’d dropped the bar back onto the supports, he continued his cross-examination. “Where are you going?”
“I haven’t decided yet, but it’s not going to be a firm.”
Someone took a fishing wire and yanked up his eyebrows. “You’re going in-house?”
There was no good place to have this discussion with my father, but perhaps a gym was preferable to a dinner table, where Lou was liable to end up with a salad fork in his neck.
“All right, look—I’ve been talking to some people about cutting another record. I’m going to try to get back into the music business.”
“What in the hell are you talking about?”
I didn’t blink.
“You’re serious.”
“I am.”
“Did something happen at the firm?”
“People leave law firms all the time. There’s no need to get a booger up your nose about it.”
“So let me see if I’ve got this straight. At the age of—what are you now?—forty-one, you’re giving up the law to try to be a rock star again?”
“I’m thirty-eight, Dad, but don’t feel bad. It’s a pointless detail. I’ll just go ahead and refer to you as eightyish.”
“Ted,” he said darkly. “Why in the world would you do this? Why throw away all your hard work, your stellar reputation?”
“Save it, Lou.”
I lay down on the bench and labored through ten angry reps. Lactic acid was already swamping my arms. I would soon be bench-pressing a bar with no plates on it.
“If you’re feeling burned out, take some time off. Hell, we all feel burned out every now and then. Go to the Bahamas.”
A powerful-looking woman in yoga pants asked if we were still using the bench.
“Oh, we’re done here,” I said pointedly, scooping my towel off the floor and crossing the room to an array of intensely individualized weight machines. I leaned against an ab contraption and stared out the window.
All too soon, my dad was standing next to me again.
“Ted, am I not allowed to ask you about your major life decisions?”
“You can ask about them,” I said. “Politely.”
“Fair enough. I apologize for my tone. I’d just like to know why you’re doing this.”
I resisted a surge of fluster. That’s how you lose with my dad, by letting him get to you. The son of a bitch has an answer for everything.
“Can’t we just agree that you and I are very different people?” I asked.
“So?”
“So—we won’t always understand each other. I can make my own fucking decisions. I am, after all, forty-one or thereabouts.”
“Oh, cut the bullshit.” His arms were now crossed over his chest in civilized battle stance. “All I want to know is what makes you think you can go back to your teenage fantasy of being Elvis.”
Something about his invocation of the King triggered a loud guffaw from my throat. Suddenly I was fat and sideburned, combing the gaudy halls of Graceland in a jacket with an oversized collar.
“You know, it’s an interesting thing, getting schooled on age appropriateness by a granddad in a muscle shirt. How many protein bars did you chow before you came here? I mean, look at you. Haven’t you ever heard of golf ?”
“Don’t change the subject,” he lectured. “I’ve obviously struck a raw nerve, but I assure you that was not my intention. Look, Ted, if I had to sum up my spiel today in one word—”
“I really wish you would.”
“—it would be practicality. Judiciousness. Common sense.”
“That’s more than one.”
It had been a huge miscalculation to come here. Actually, it hadn’t—my calculations hadn’t yielded any other outcome than this. When all your uncertainties were swirling around in a windstorm, the last person who would understand was a man for whom there were no uncertainties. He didn’t tolerate them. For my father, confusion was like sickness, a light mist that you could barrel through with backbone and denial. He never understood what it meant to be in a band. To him, when you had a son who was a musician, you simply had to wait around for him to outgrow it. And yet here I was, groping for reasons that he might deem worthy. He made me feel foolish and small in a way that only a parent can.
Then my head drifted to the flurry of music I’d written over these past weeks, the spikes of inspiration charging through every avenue of my life. The most revered producer in the business telling this motherfucker not to ignore it. I couldn’t remember the last time the sky had seemed so high.
I made a show of checking the time, an expedient gesture for facilitating departure. Then I looked at my father. Why did I give a rat’s ass if this made any sense to him—or, for that matter, to anyone else? Facing him now, I realized that this would’ve been the perfect occasion to follow the advice he himself had recommen
ded so many years ago: Fuck off, old bastard, I’d say. It would’ve been healthy. Fuck off, you ridiculous geriatric Schwarzenegger wannabe. You gotta do it sometimes. It’s good for your blood pressure. I yanked one out of the quiver, brought it up to the bow, and tensed the string.
Then I made for the high road. It was out there somewhere, and the sooner I found it, the sooner I’d be free. I was going to be the bigger guy—if not the one with more defined delts.
“It’s been a pleasure as always, Dad, but I really must go. But listen, if you’re going to max out on squats, make sure you get one of those kids over there to spot you.”
CHAPTER 10
I wasn’t done with Warren Warren. Again I stalked him from the deep reaches of the auditorium. Again I hid in the cheap seats, waiting for rehearsal to end while the conductor did his best to cajole something akin to music out of his students. When I finally emerged like Nosferatu from the shadows, Warren shook his head and gathered up the leaves of sheet music from his music stand.
“Another ten years go by already?” he said grimly.
The novelty of having me back in his life had lasted precisely one day. Just about my lifetime average.
“Relax. I just came back to buy you a drink,” I told him.
“Bullshit.”
“No, I felt bad for blindsiding you with the band thing. And it was good to see you. I just wanted to hang.”
“You want to have a beer with me, you call me up and ask me proper. Then we’ll pick a mutually convenient date. That’s how it’s done. You don’t just show up at somebody’s job. What, you think I’m stupid? You didn’t like the answer you got the other day, so you’re back here asking again.” He made a show of looking weary. “I’ve got a life, man. A wife, a kid, papers to grade. I don’t have time to sit in a bar and get badgered. Go sell crazy somewhere else.”
He started up the aisle toward the auditorium doors.
“What about me?” I said, trailing him. “You think I was sitting on my ass eating Ho Hos, looking for something to do, when you called and told me to go to London? Fucking London, man.”
“I didn’t think you’d go, fool.”
We paraded through the doors and entered the school lobby. It was deserted save for a nervous-looking boy, backpack straps over both shoulders, texting with his phone held up to his face. Warren asked him if he had a ride home, and with a pubescent fidget, he said he did.
Once we were alone in a dim corridor, I grabbed Warren’s arm and pulled him to a stop. “One drink, man. Just one drink.”
“Hell no. I am not going to sit down and get pestered for an hour about what has to be the most asinine, most juvenile, and the most downright stupid idea I’ve ever heard in my entire life. And take note of where I work. I hear stupid ideas all day.” He paused. “Teddy, listen to me. I’m not trying to step on your dreams. If you think playing music again will make you happy, you should go and do it, one hundred percent. I support your rebellious spirit and I promise I will be rooting for you. But because Teddy has always been all about Teddy, you’re confusing what you want with what I want. I don’t want to be a musician again.”
“That’s a big fat lie. You’re a goddamn music teacher.”
“Do you know what I do when a student is giving me grief and I just can’t take it anymore? I walk away.” Warren’s voice lowered, and his eyes drooped sorrowfully. “Teddy, please don’t make me walk away from you.”
“Just let me buy you a drink. One drink. We can go somewhere close.” A mischievous grin pushed its way through. “Real close.”
He looked on warily as my hand disappeared into my jacket pocket and extracted a long-necked bottle. His head swiveled left and right, film noir style, checking if there was anyone else to witness this atrocity. “Did you bring wine into my school?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
The bottle that emerged from my jacket contained a red-brown liquid, the color that a desperate actress might dye her hair in a stab at self-reinvention.
“Bourbon.” He was aghast. “You brought bourbon into a high school.”
“Doesn’t it just sicken you as an educator?”
What I’d smuggled in was not your run-of-the-mill piss in a bottle where one sip makes you want to chug a homeless man’s vomit just to get the taste out of your mouth. My agent of seduction was Eagle Rare Kentucky bourbon, Warren’s favorite. Not the ten-year swill either; the Antique Collection. Ninety-proof, aged in charred oak barrels for seventeen years. You feel a little more hillbilly just taking its narcotic embers into your nostrils.
He gave a deep sigh, faltering in the presence of kryptonite. “You didn’t.”
“I did. And I didn’t even bring glasses.”
* * *
I used to inhabit a universe without rules. For an unhealthily long spell, speed limits, closing times, that thing about not going into the clubhouse to meet the players—none of that applied to me. The Super Bowl was never sold out. Restaurants were never booked. Even the concept of a clock had a looser application to me. I was encouraged to show up to places at specified times, but if I was ten, fifteen, ninety minutes late, people smiled and did their best not to look inconvenienced. Such echelons of deference will go to someone’s head, and despite all the humbling experiences I’ve had since, I couldn’t help but continue to carry some of that entitlement around with me. Still, it seemed well over the line to be dribbling a basketball and sipping whiskey in a high school gym long after dark. I felt under imminent threat of getting in trouble, even if I’d probably aged out of the jurisdiction of the principal. (Are we ever beyond the jurisdiction of the principal?)
“Aren’t we going to get busted?” I asked, as Warren sank a foul shot.
“Who’s we? You’re not a student and you’re not a teacher, so you’re not getting sent to the office and you’re not getting fired.”
“You’re not really a teacher though,” I posited, as he snatched the bottle from my hand. “You teach band and art. Aren’t you sort of expected to treat rules with contempt?”
Teachers are not one-size-fits-all. They’re pigeonholed, fairly or not but mostly fairly, depending on what they teach. You stared up at those dreary souls in class and pictured their weekends, trying not to feel sorry for them. On Saturday nights, science teachers sat at home and read magazines in an easy chair with public radio on in the background. English teachers had other English teachers over to play Boggle and trade salty barbs speckled with Joseph Conrad allusions. Gym teachers got shitfaced on Bud Light at a friend’s corner bar. Math teachers cooked for, and spoke to, their cats.
But the music teacher—he was a man of mojo. You and your friends would occasionally run into him out on the town. You’d catch him on the street with his groovy wife and hipper-than-thou friends, and they’d all have excellent names. Meet my wife, Ocean. And these are my friends, Silas and Boo. He wouldn’t say goodbye either. He’d say Onward! or Peace on you. Then you and your buddies would spend an hour debating whether or not he was stoned. Did you see his eyes, man?
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Warren said, wiping a wet slurp onto his rolled-up sleeve. “My band teacher was a five-foot tightass who wore bow ties. And my art teacher was a semisenile battle-ax who went to school with my grandmother.”
For quite some time, we alternated taking shots and doing shots, dribbling the ball in and around the paint, our jumpers getting wilder, our layups increasingly off the mark as the smooth Eagle Rare glided through our bloodstreams and did its thing.
“How did you find that Tate exhibit anyway?” I asked him.
It had been on the field trip he chaperoned each year, he explained. A family that owned art galleries in New Hope had started a foundation that annually sent five students who possessed a “highly developed appreciation for art” to visit museums out of the country, where the art is obviously better. Kid
s had jetted to Paris to appreciate the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, to Amsterdam for the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum, to Florence, Rome, Berlin. This year was London.
“Must be nice,” I said. “None of my field trips had ever required a passport.”
“Nor mine. If we couldn’t get there in twenty minutes on a yellow bus, we weren’t going. But I gotta admit, when I saw that picture of you in the Tate, I was sorry I hadn’t taken it myself.” Warren cackled with callous joy. “Faded Glory. Classic.”
“Like you could pull that off,” I said. Warren’s harmless and mostly good-natured pranks were rarely executed with the necessary deft.
He bristled at the affront. “Are you kidding? Candid photos of you looking like an idiot? That’s shooting fish in a barrel.”
“You mean like Clark, your identical twin? Was that shooting fish in a barrel?”
Warren laughed. The man had once decided, for reasons that eluded all of us, to pretend he was his own identical twin. Groupies, waitresses, autograph seekers—to each and every one he would deny that he was the drummer for Tremble. Nah, I’m his brother, Clark, he’d say with a smirk.
“That was an awfully complicated way to have fun,” he allowed.
“Or when you decided to change the pronunciation of your last name?” One day he decreed that, effective immediately, his last name should be said with the accent on the second syllable. War-ren.
“That was a French thing. I still think I might be a little bit French.”
“Like your name isn’t enough of a joke.”
“What it lacks in creativity, it makes up in emphasis,” he stated.
He gave the basketball a serious bounce. It thwacked off the hardwood, surged high up toward the banners, and sailed down through the net with a breathy swish.
“Damn, Square!” I exclaimed.
He affected nonchalance. “Why does everybody always forget I’m black?”
Joining me on the bleachers, Warren snatched the bottle from my grasp. “Can’t say I’m surprised that a photo like that sent you careening into a midlife crisis. It’s like a switchblade right across this legacy of yours. Right? It leaves you no choice but to get back out there and rewrite history.”
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