“Jumbo?”
“Mingus.”
“Jesus.”
There were good reasons underlying my policy of never answering unexpected calls, and there were consequences for violating it. Soon Jumbo was standing in my living room in a Members Only windbreaker, nodding approvingly at my apartment and scratching his balls.
“Nice digs,” he said.
“Thanks. Say, James, what exactly the fuck are you doing here?”
He pulled a CD from his jacket pocket and held it out to me as if it were a million-dollar bill. “Some seriously cool shit on here, man. You’ve got to hear it.”
Partially due to his monomania, but mostly due to a really open calendar, Jumbo had crawled out of his meth lab of a living arrangement to share with me in person the fruits of his creative energies. He’d overdubbed some guitar parts on the demos I’d given him, and evidently didn’t think twice about hopping in the car for two hours to show up at my house unannounced to deliver them.
“Put it on,” he bade me. “Tell me what you think. I got some guitars in my trunk. We can jam out a bit. You want a beer?”
My jaw tightened. “Did you just offer me a beer in my own house? At nine thirty in the morning?”
He checked his Walgreens digital watch and frowned. “It feels later.”
At least he hadn’t come all this way to retrieve his pot stash, which, it just then occurred to me, was still buried beneath an Oasis disc in my glove compartment.
“Is your chickie around?” he asked.
“No, she’s at work. People work on Fridays. Everybody but us, apparently. Listen, Jumbo, it’s not a good day. I’ve got an appointment.”
“Oh yeah? Who with?”
“That really isn’t any of your business, is it?”
Distracted momentarily by our mint dish, he sloped over to the coffee table and began to unwrap a Life Saver. He then plopped himself down on the couch and unzipped his jacket, thereby revealing a Cheech and Chong Up in Smoke tee that cradled his spare tire. Then, to my horror but not to my surprise, he started clawing fiercely at his scrotum, gritting his teeth and squeezing his eyes shut in frantic pursuit of some blistering itch. When the attack subsided, he looked up at me as if nothing had happened.
“You can’t just show up here, Jumbo. You should’ve called, like a normal person.”
“This appointment you’ve got today, is it medical?”
“It’s none of your goddamn—” There was no point in trying to wear each other down. He would hound me all day. “I’m going to see Mackenzie,” I blurted out.
“Well, that’s perfect! I’ll join you. We can talk to her together.”
“We could, except that you’re not coming, so we’ll have to talk to her separately.”
“How awesome is my timing?” he mused, unwrapping another mint. “So, where is Mack these days?”
I sighed. “Pittsburgh.”
“What’s she doing there?”
“She’s a sex therapist.”
His face lit up. “Get out!”
“No, you get out. Seriously. I’d like you to get out.”
Jumbo pitched backward into the sofa cushion. “So Mackenzie Highsider became a sex therapist. How about that.”
“We can’t all be midwives.”
Hands bulked into the pockets of his Wham!-era windbreaker, Jumbo hoisted himself off the sofa and pursued me as I dug an overnight bag out of the hall closet and stuffed it with a pair of jeans, a couple of shirts, underwear, and socks.
The sound of a grown man whining drifted over my shoulder. “Come on, man, let me come with you.”
“Absolutely not.”
“We’ll double-team her.” He winked. “Get it? That’s a sex therapy joke.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“I know what’s going on here, Mingus. You’re embarrassed to be seen with me.”
“Isn’t everybody? You never say the right thing, you look like Ronald McDonald . . .”
“I got news for you: How can you be ashamed of me if you asked me to join your band? We’re partners.”
“We’re not partners. We’re loosely affiliated. That’s how I like to think of it.”
I combed around the bathroom for toiletries amid Sara’s bathing products and facial creams. When I emerged, Jumbo was standing there looking pitiful and arguably homeless. “I came all this way.”
“Uninvited.”
“I’ve worked really hard on the songs, man. Really hard. Don’t you want to hear them?”
“Isn’t that what the disc is for?”
“But there’s a ton of shit I want to talk to you about. You know how I work. We need to listen to these songs together. My process is important.”
I heaved another grievous sigh. “Christ, Jumbo.”
The very thought of being caged up in a car with this man for five hours was reason enough to bag the whole thing and beg Marty Kushman for my job back. But Jumbo did have a point. There was a benefit to gliding across the state together, our music flooding out of the stereo. Insights could be shared. Ideas exchanged. Would a new Tremble album have an acoustic feel? Would there be the pounding piano or the swell of a Doorsy organ? Did a certain song cry out for a cello?
And while the very sight of Jumbo sent my blood pressure into the stroke zone, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of pity for the man. I’d be sending him home to his troll-like existence beneath his ex-wife’s stairs. No wonder this bonehead was up for anything—a road trip across Pennsylvania, a career change.
The other truth was that the prospect of being in the same room with Mackenzie was eating me alive. If Jumbo was nothing else, he was a distraction. (He was often nothing else.) His presence in the car would keep my head occupied—with musical banter, with his boundless inventory of inanities and things in need of fixing. Was I really so far gone that I was considering Jumbo Jett to be a source of moral support as I ground away on that endless treadmill of the Pennsylvania Turnpike?
I marched back to the closet, retrieved a frayed duffel bag, and threw it at him. “You can borrow a T-shirt and sweatshirt or something, but you’re on your own for a toothbrush.”
He pumped his fist. “Awesome! I love you, Mingus. I really do love you.”
“Please don’t ever say that to me again. Especially alone in my condo.”
“You’re making the right call here, man. I think we’re going to look back on this little trip as a defining moment for this band!”
“That’s wonderful. Just meet me downstairs.”
“You got it.” He bolted out of the room. Over his shoulder, he yelled, “Just gotta get my dad out of the car.”
“Fine, whatever. Wait! What?” I charged into the foyer. He was already halfway out the door. “What did you just say?”
He stood there, blinking at me, lacking the wherewithal even to look sheepish.
“James. Is your father here?”
“Sorry, dude,” he said with a shrug. “It’s his weekend.”
CHAPTER 13
Jumbo stuffed himself into the passenger seat, cranked the volume on the stereo up to deaf, and announced that he’d be on the lookout for a Waffle House. His father, by karmic contrast, seemed perfectly content to sit in the back and stare mildly out the window like an eroding stone.
At the first rest stop outside Philly, I got out to fill the tank while Jumbo bounded into the convenience store in search of whatever it was he considered breakfast. Before I had the chance to drive away and leave him there—had his old man objected, I doubt I would’ve heard him anyway—Alaina called. The sight of her name on the caller ID only added to my mounting collection of anxieties, as I assumed she was calling about the demos.
“Hello?” I said.
There was silence on the other end.
“Hello?” I repeated, loud
er this time. “Alaina?”
After another moment of dead air, she finally spoke. “That was me being speechless.”
“Ah,” I said.
“I admit, when you wandered into my office the other day with a CD in your hand, I thought early senility. I didn’t want to represent you; I wanted to make sure you got home without getting hit by a car. I would’ve let you down easy, I really would’ve. I would’ve suggested the senior tour, told you to pack your guitar and pointed you in the direction of a nice friendly resort in the Caribbean. Nobody enjoys a washed-up musician like island tourists with faces full of shrimp and pineapple. I was already picturing you in your Tommy Bahamas and khaki shorts, strumming ‘Margaritaville’ in a tiki lounge.”
“Those places aren’t me. The drinks are all watered down.”
“But Teddy, my little macaroon, we don’t need the tropics just yet. These songs knocked me out cold. I don’t know where you found this material. I’ve never considered you particularly poetic or deep or even terribly deft with a melody. But this is some serious booty here. You treat these songs right in the studio and I’ll get people interested in this—and that’s without my having to remove a single article of clothing.”
“I’m glad you like it,” I said.
“What’s the one where you sing ‘hiding in plain sight’ over and over?”
“ ‘Hiding in Plain Sight.’ ”
“Interesting. I’ve been humming that one so much, I thought it was a real song.”
“It’s not.”
“You’ll do a record, we’ll explore some licensing opportunities with the networks, maybe get you on an HBO soundtrack or something. I’m going to make shit happen. In the meantime, a gym membership wouldn’t kill you.”
“You don’t think you’re jumping the gun here?” I asked. “You’ve got a lot of ideas for having heard only a couple of tunes.”
“That’s kind of my job, Fruity Pebble, and I’ve kind of been doing it awhile. I didn’t take time off to ravage the justice system like someone else I know.”
She would send over a contract. She took more points than she used to, she warned me, but she was worth it. Then she’d get on the phone with Sonny to ink him up for producing. In the meantime, I was to go get my little band together.
It couldn’t have been as easy as my agent was making it sound. “Alaina, you really think this has potential?”
“Other than the potential for self-embarrassment? Yes, though it’s almost a medical miracle at your age. Seriously—it’s really strong work, Teddy. I’ll just go ahead and say it because I know it turns you on: I’m a whole mess of proud of you.”
I laughed. “Okay, but just in case, I’ll keep that Caribbean resort idea in mind. I still know all the chords to Buffett. All two of them.”
Jumbo emerged from the mini-mart, a stack of dripping coffees three stories high balanced in one hand, a bag of Funyuns and a Chipwich in the other. “Some kind of world we’re living in when they put the Nicorette gum right next to the Newports,” he complained, placing the coffees on the roof of the car. “That’s just not playing fair.”
“Alaina just called,” I told him.
When I relayed her meows of optimism, Jumbo reacted with a spastic pump of his fist—a newly acquired tic, I’d noticed. “I knew it! I goddamn knew it! I got news for you, Mingus, these demos are going to change the course of music history.” He celebrated with more fist pumps, goofy dancing, and even possibly a jumping jack. By the time he calmed down and distributed the coffees into the various cup holders, he’d accidentally taken a sip from all of them.
Once I pulled us back onto the road, Jumbo shared the good news with his father, and though Elmer uttered not a single word, his many wrinkles, spots, and yellowish discolorations did curve upward in what I presumed was a smile. Then he went back to mute contemplation of the scenery.
“Is he okay back there?” I whispered.
“Of course. He’s psyched.”
He didn’t look psyched. He looked cadaverous.
“He’s one of our biggest fans, always has been. Check this out.” Jumbo twisted his fleshy self around. “Hey, Dad, which one do you have on today?”
I watched in the rearview mirror as the old man unzipped his jacket and revealed an aged rust-red concert T-shirt with the Tremble logo.
“How much does my dad rule?” Jumbo said, grinning beatifically. With that, he flipped down the sun visor and examined his ungovernable locks in the mirror.
(A word or two about Jumbo’s hair. While it generally defied description, it was an unruly mess of curls and frizzes that incorporated the worst elements of nearly every hairstyle of the past quarter century, though it was not technically a hairstyle in and of itself. It was the color of a particularly viscous motor oil or a brown sauce served at a Chinese restaurant, something they put broccoli and water chestnuts in. It looked better uncombed, which was fortunate because he so rarely subjected it to the rectitude of a brush. On the rare instances when he did comb it, he looked like a harmless mental patient out for the day with an uncle. Sometimes his hair wanted to be a perm, other times a mullet, and occasionally it smacked of a bob.)
Equipped now with fuel and sustenance, we could get down to the business of listening to the music. Through the magic of a simple software program that any eight-year-old could master but I’d assumed to be well beyond Jumbo’s technological grasp, he’d recorded guitar parts on top of my demos so that it sounded like we’d played them in the same room. Foaming with excitement, his cheeks and chin already glistening from an inorganic pie whose flavor was cautiously described on the wrapper as “fruit,” he slid the disc into the stereo.
Instantaneously, I suffered the forgotten thrill of hearing the sound of a new Tremble song. I was amazed. It was all still there. In some places, Jumbo’s guitar was restrained and textural, adorning the song with subtle flourishes. In others, the playing was caustic and volatile, chewing up the scenery. But through and through, it was Jumbo’s guitar in all its masterful dramatic voicing. Sure, the words that came out of his mouth filled you with the urge to stuff a pack of gauze into his windpipe, but put a six-string in his hands and he was somehow . . . exquisite. Before I worked with Jumbo, I thought a banjo had no place in rock music. Before I worked with Jumbo, I didn’t think a pink double-neck guitar could be applied with class. Before I worked with Jumbo, I didn’t think you could tastefully use stompbox effects pedals without fetishizing Joy Division. But Jumbo, damn him, understood what worked and he understood how to get there. Filtered through him, the music undeniably sounded better. It was the only reason anybody put up with him. To witness his talents was to wonder why he never latched onto another band after Tremble; to witness his decision making was to understand why he ended up a cellar-dwelling midwife.
“This is good stuff, Jumbo. Very good stuff.”
“See, Mingus? I know what I’m doing. We play this for Mack, there’s no way she can refuse us.”
I muttered to myself, imagining the many ways she was likely to refuse us.
“You got a game plan?” he asked. “How are we going to break this to her?”
“Who’s we? I said you could come to Pittsburgh with me. I didn’t say you could join me in Mackenzie’s office.”
He looked mortally wounded.
“James, don’t even argue. I’m not talking about this anymore.”
“Dude, be honest with yourself. Someone like me is far more likely to walk into a sex therapist’s office than you. Maybe you’re not remembering the glory days, my friend, but it was with me that things got messy. It was in my hotel room that someone got defiled or maybe drizzled with—”
“So, I’m going to say this again, more slowly this time. Our visit has nothing to do with sex therapy. If you think you should write that down, by all means do so. I’m not going in there for sex therapy. I’m not going to pre
tend to have a sexual problem. Sex is not going to come up at all. She could be a goddamn auto mechanic for all I care. Is what I’m saying beginning to make any sense at all to you?”
Suddenly a maelstrom of coughing and gagging erupted in the backseat. Elmer lurched forward in a fit of hacking so intense and relentless that his face instantaneously went from its resting shade of ashen gray to ketchup red, and I was sure that the old man was going to die right there in my car. Either that or some dark, gelatinous organ—a lung, a liver, a segment of small intestine—would be disgorged from his gullet and sail clear over the seat back.
As this violent whooping went on for a truly alarming length of time, I pulled over onto the shoulder and shot Jumbo a worried look.
“He just needs some air, is all,” my passenger said.
Jumbo got out, opened the rear door, and extracted his father, who was still convulsing in barks and gags. With the calm facility of a health care professional, which he claimed he was but could not possibly have been, Jumbo slowly guided his old man toward the edge of the trees lining the turnpike.
I watched them standing together beyond the shoulder of the road, the father hunched over, hands on his knees like a marathon runner at the finish line, struggling to regain the normal patterns of inhaling and exhaling, and the son hovering over him, patting his back and cool-headedly coaching him to relax and wait it out, telling him he was going to be fine. Sure enough, the seizure subsided and the horrendous noises coming from Elmer’s lungs gave way to the gentle wind of passing cars. For someone who could rightly claim to be the root cause of so many crises, Jumbo could responsibly quell this one, and it was fascinating to witness.
“Does he need medical attention?” I asked once Jumbo had deposited his father back into the car.
He waved dismissively—don’t be silly—and reached for his coffee. If it had been up to me, I would’ve driven straight to a hospital or at least a frickin’ Rite Aid. At a minimum, the guy needed a cough drop.
“Is he sick?” I whispered.
“No more so than the rest of us, Mingus. Don’t you have any older relatives with ailments?”
Thank You, Goodnight Page 18