I had a grandmother who’d lost it—she sent me birthday checks four times a year—but I wasn’t exactly trotting her out on road trips.
“So, he doesn’t have, like, tuberculosis or anything?” I asked.
Jumbo shook his head. “I doubt it.”
Feeling somewhat like an ambulance driver now, I merged us back into traffic.
At some point, I needed to check in with Sara. She couldn’t have been terribly high on the idea of my coming out here, now that my recruitment efforts had shifted to Mackenzie, and I probably should have offered her some reassurance. I should have told her that whatever had gone on between Mack and me way back when, it was a dead issue. Mack didn’t like me anymore; she couldn’t have. I’d made her an accessory to adultery. Most people could shake off such a thing—me, for example, who didn’t give it a second thought—but not the honest and true soul that Mack was. In all likelihood, the years had allowed all those bad feelings to calcify into something stronger, a bitterness unlikely to taper off. I suppose Sara sensed how much I hoped Mack didn’t loathe me. I felt it in the way she looked at me, a world of unspoken words behind her eyes.
But other things were pulling Sara away too. This husband of hers had returned, compelling Sara to face her past, to look it in the eye, to speak to it, to bid it goodbye. Changes had come for Sara, changes that no one but Billy had the power to exact. But Sara couldn’t change without my life changing in either minor or possibly monstrously major ways. Things were happening for me—finally. I had plans. I wanted my changes, not hers.
As I gazed out through the windshield, I knew I had to live with wherever this galloping highway was leading me. Just as I had to live with wherever Sara’s highway was leading her.
Both of my passengers were now silent. Jumbo was squinting out at the scenery. Elmer was reclining in the backseat, his jacket zipper at half-mast, his head turned to the side. He looked small and tired.
“So what is all this about?” I said to Jumbo. “Is your old man trying to make up for lost time after he and your mother split?”
“Not at all. It was me who went missing, Mingus. Dad was always around. The band kept me away a lot. He missed the hell out of me.”
I wondered what that was like. My old man never missed me for a second. I’d come back from a tour and he wouldn’t even know I’d been gone. He’d occasionally ask about a trip, but only as a springboard for tales of his own travels. You played Hong Kong, did you, Ted? The last time I was there, I was taken to the most outstanding French restaurant. It was over on the Kowloon side . . . And never in a million years would Lou Tremble tag along on an excursion such as this just to spend time with me, what with all those clients to service and associates to terrorize. Perish the fucking thought. If he were in the car today, he’d be leaning over the seat, chinking the shit out of my armor with all the reasons why this whole trip was a joke. And he would’ve had zero patience for the likes of Elmer and his roadside display of infirmity. For him, all sickness was in your head, conquerable merely by attitude adjustment. Unless you had cancer the size of a Big Mac or something that required extended hospitalization, chances were it didn’t exist. That’s how I was raised. If you took the day off to lie around in bed and moan, you were either faking or not trying hard enough to ignore it. I heard the mantra countless times growing up: “You just say to yourself”—there was a lot of saying stuff to yourself in my father’s code of health maintenance—“You just say to yourself, ‘I’m not going to let this get me down.’ It’s usually just as simple as that, Ted. If you want to let it beat you, well, I guess that’s up to you.” In other words, the world could present no problem for which there wasn’t some overly simplistic and absurdly useless solution. Yeah, sure, I’ll get up and walk it off. Can I have my fucking antibiotic first?
I stabbed the stereo knob and twisted up the volume, the music giving me the fortitude to barrel through. Outside, the farms had given way to a steep barricade of mountains to the right.
A few songs in, Jumbo piped up. “I got news for you: When do you want to stop for lunch?”
“You need to work on your usage of that phrase. If you say you’ve got news for me, news should follow.”
Jumbo sat there, unruffled.
“Do you understand? Don’t tell me you have news for me and then ask a question.”
“Tomato, tomahto, my friend.”
“No. It isn’t like that at all. It’s like when you say irregardless. That’s not a word. It’s just regardless.”
“Both are accepted.”
“But one is wrong.”
I felt him staring at me, studying the person he’d known in some form or other his entire life. “How does it feel to be right all the time?” he asked.
“It’s an enormous responsibility.”
He laughed tolerantly. “I love you to pieces, Mingus, but you’re a little mean. You were never like that before.”
“Yes, I was.”
“Well, it’s okay. Music will cure you.” He patted my knee.
“Get off,” I said, swatting his hand away.
Jumbo twisted his fleshy neck toward the backseat. “Hey Daddy-O, you hungry?”
In the rearview, I watched the old man muster up a nod.
“We’ll stop at the next exit,” I muttered.
As we proceeded to tunnel through the Alleghenies, I was treated to another vicious ball scratching by my front-seat passenger, the sixth or seventh of the day.
“Fuck.” Jumbo was growing concerned. “Do you think you can get lice in your pubic hair?”
I rolled down the window and took shelter in a wallop of fresh air. “You can do anything you want, Jumbo.”
CHAPTER 14
It’s easier than you might imagine to ruin everything.
We were in New York for the sessions that would become our second record, Atomic Somersault. Expectations were hefty. Our hit had propelled our debut album to platinum status, and within the past year we’d stood on a stage in LA and been handed a little gold statue before the eyes of the world.
The strange thing was, I actually believed these new songs were stronger. They say you spend your whole life writing your first album and only a year writing your second, but I didn’t think I needed a second quarter century to pen a follow-up. Maybe we didn’t have a chart-topping single this time around, but I didn’t care. I actually preferred it that way. There was more to these songs, more places to lead the listener. This album would earn us fans who cared about music, not just kids who needed an anthem to belt out the window at their horrible, autocratic parents.
At the end of a long day of recording, my bandmates and I were clustered at the hotel bar, nursing drinks almost like civilized human beings, when a blustery voice slashed the tranquility.
“Teddy fucking Tremble!”
I turned and saw Simon Weathers, lead singer of the Junction, sauntering over. His hair was cut in jagged spikes, and he was clad in a black leather jacket with black leather pants and black leather shoes, as the world had seen him countless times on the cover of People, and in a mug shot or two for some drunk and disorderlies.
Simon strode up to us and pumped my hand. “What in the fuck are you guys doing here?”
“Hey, Simon.” I’d met God’s gift once or twice before, having shared the stage at a music festival. We also shared a record label at the time. “We’re just in town finishing our new record.”
“Good for you, man, good for you.”
I reacquainted him with my cohorts, and he nodded at each of them, sizing them up one at a time.
“What brings you here?” I asked.
He scratched his head with practiced weariness. “We’re doing a couple shows at the Garden starting tomorrow night.” The Junction purveyed a sixties-inflected form of brash Brit rock, despite being a quartet of Ohioans.
“Nice,” I
said.
“You like playing MSG?” Jumbo jumped in with a critical lean. “See, I’m not a big fan. I get this weird vibration on the stage there. Wah! Wah! Wah! It’s very distracting. I’ve complained. You ever get that? Wah! Wah! ”
“Anyway,” Simon said, turning to Mackenzie, “what are you playing these days? I remember seeing you with a Fender jazz bass at South by Southwest. Do I have that right?”
“The sunburst one,” Mack said, smiling coquettishly.
Simon nodded in approval. “A Geddy Lee special. Rocked my world, baby. I remember wondering what in the fuck the bassist for Tremble was doing with an instrument like that. You know what I mean? You don’t do jazz, you don’t do prog—like, what do you need that for? But you made it work, baby. You dug a deep-ass groove with that thing.”
“Thank you.” Mack blushed. For all her glorious ascension in the world, the woman still blushed.
“Next round’s on me,” Simon declared with a wink.
“I have to pass,” Mack said. “I’m wiped. I’m going to call it a night.”
“Boo!” Simon heckled. “Really? The night is so young.”
“Not for some of us,” Mack said, and with a wave, she bid us all goodnight. “Nice seeing you, Simon.”
“Likewise. Likewise indeed.”
Simon summoned the bartender with an open-handed smack on the bar. “Ketel One, rocks for me”—he drew circles in the air with his index finger, a cowboy closing in on a steer—“and another round of whatever my friends are drinking.”
Simon then proceeded to ponder the vacant doorway through which Mack had just exited. “What is it about her?”
I shrugged. “What do you mean?”
“She’s fantastic.”
“Mack? Yeah, she’s great.”
“There’s something about her. Every time I run into her, she lingers in my mind for days. I can’t explain it. There’s something very real, very tangible about her.” He was impressed with himself for using the word tangible. He turned his head to me. “You ever hit that?”
“No, Simon, I have not hit that.” I raised the finger with my wedding band (though I wanted to raise the one next to it).
He grinned. “Ah. Gotcha.”
Could it be that Simon Weathers was tiring of the dull parade of starlets and Victoria’s Secret models? That as he lay awake in bed, a Brazilian goddess in angelic repose six inches to his left, he pined for something more, something meaningful, for someone with whom he could trade erudite barbs, with whom he could pass a slow Sunday morning on the veranda with coffee and the New York Times? Please.
He suddenly gave my shoulder an epiphanic pounding. “Here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to bring Tremble on tour with us.”
“What?”
“It’s perfect! We’ve both got new music on the way. We’ll hit the road together. It’ll be huge. Six months ought to be enough time for Mackenzie to develop, shall we say, an appreciation for me, right?” He snickered in a way that everyone else in the world must have thought was magnetic.
I stared at him. “You want to do a Junction/Tremble tour so that you can seduce my bass player?”
“Isn’t that the whole point of everything, man? Seduction. It’s the reason we write songs and the reason we sing them out loud. Disagree with me. I dare you.”
“I disagree with you.”
“You’re full of shit,” he said, laughing. “And anyway, who fucking cares? Do you have any idea the kind of scratch you make playing to sold-out stadiums?”
“I have some idea,” I said tightly. “We did eighteen months of them.”
He took three gulps of his vodka in rapid succession while I glared at him, a lean fury flaring up inside me. Did this lout actually think we needed his charity? Did he really expect that we’d allow ourselves to get hauled from one city to the next as his opening act, diluting our brand, warming up the stage for him?
And did he really think Mack was up for grabs?
“Maybe you should come open for us,” I suggested, grinning without joy.
“You never know. Stranger things have happened.” Then he emptied the glass down his craned gullet.
I was confident his proposal would be forgotten in the brine of Ketel Ones. Oh, but I was wrong. A few months later, Alaina called and relayed what she considered the best news in the history of news.
“I’m not going on tour with the Junction,” I told her, indignant and a little whiny.
“I’m sorry—what did you just say?”
“It’s a terrible idea, Alaina.”
“Theodore. Are you baked?”
“Weathers is insufferable. They break up twice a year. It’s fucking toxic.”
“Maybe I’m not being clear. They don’t want you to join their band. They’re just going to let you play in front of their infinite crowds.”
“We can’t go from headliner to opening act just like that. Don’t you think it cheapens us?”
“It would cheapen you to open for Scritti Politti. It would cheapen you to open for Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam.”
“It doesn’t sit well with me,” I said. “It’s not what we’re all about.”
“Let me break this down for you. You’ve had one hit. A strong, well-received album, but one hit. One hit doth not a career make. Do you want a career? Do you want lifelong fans? Because that’s what you build on tour, the kind of fans who keep coming back, who wet themselves when you release a new album because they know that it means you’re coming to town. The kind of fans who will pay a babysitter fifteen bucks an hour for the privilege of paying a hundred bucks a ticket, who will see you play twenty years from now when you look like shit, sound like shit, and can’t write for shit.”
“I’m not worried,” I countered to her Allen Ginsbergesque parataxis. “We may never hit the jackpot like we did with ‘Lie,’ but I think we’ll stick around. You’ve heard the new album.”
Alaina laughed like an ice-covered sidewalk. “I thought you were different, Teddy. I really did. I knew you had an ego, but to turn down an opportunity to share billing with the Junction—to benefit from that vast promotional machine—all because you think you deserve more? That is a rare level of ego indeed.”
It wasn’t a concert tour; it was a charade in the name of bagging Mackenzie.
“Call it what you want, Alaina. I’m not hitting the road with Simon Weathers. That’s not who we are.”
“Fine,” Alaina said. “You can explain that to your bandmates when they’re ringing up your fries at the truck stop two years from now.”
All these years later, it still shamed me to think about the selfishness, the myopia, the dictatorial disregard for the livelihoods of people who counted on me. The possessiveness over things that didn’t belong to me. As Simon Weathers might’ve said, Who in the fuck did I think I was?
CHAPTER 15
The receptionist was fussy, dumpy, and bumbershooted in a floral muumuu, and I almost laughed in her face when she asked if I had insurance, never imagining that the unseemly afflictions that sent one to a sex therapist could be covered by a health plan.
She smiled me over to the lobby, which was a sea of royal blue from the upholstery on the chairs down to the carpeting. I stood under the constellation of floodlights and peered out the windows into the parking lot. Mack’s office was located in a squat three-story building set back a ways from a busily commercial avenue outside the city. I’d turned the car over to my traveling companions and dispatched them to a bookstore, coffee shop, pet mart, anywhere, to get them out of sight. I would’ve tasked Jumbo with finding us a hotel but he and I held widely differing views on what constituted acceptable lodging.
Here I stood, ablaze with nerves, even more so than on the night I played for Sonny in my apartment living room. Right here was where I would make it right again. This was where Mack accepte
d my apology, so long in the making, and we moved into the future together, which is to say that we could go back. We could stand next to each other again, night after night, our instruments alive in our hands, doing what we were meant to do with our time on earth. We had no business sequestering ourselves away in offices, disguising ourselves as professionals, going through the motions of ordinary relationships when our significant others knew, had always known, we belonged somewhere else. Mackenzie knew this; she just needed to be reminded. Then everything would be right, my sin of pride and greed with the Junction finally wiped clean.
“Teddy.” I turned my head and there she was.
“Mackenzie.” Seeing her after all these years sent volts of electricity down my suddenly unsteady legs.
We stepped toward each other with a measure of cautiousness. I crossed my arms over her back, pulling her into me. It was a sensation of wonderful familiarity. She’d had the decency to stay the same height, to inhabit the same proportions, to keep her hair and skin an ambrosia of Arcadian scents, as if all for the benefit of my homesickness.
She wasn’t really hugging me back. She administered a few obligatory pats on my shoulder blade as if I were an unpleasant distant cousin she’d run into at a wedding.
“You look great, Mack. You really do.”
She issued a half smile. “I don’t know about that.”
Then she led me down the hall in this familiar ritual where I played the role of intruder into the lives of people I used to know. I was the corruptive Sunday school troublemaker inciting my assiduous classmates to abscond through the bathroom window.
Her office was spacious and airy. It had a seating area with a sofa and love seat of reddish-brown leather and an espresso-finished trunk coffee table between them. The room seemed to be draped in a muted autumn of soft greens, yellows, and browns, all of it coaxing comfort, assuring you that this environment could do you no harm. Even the fresh soapy scent in the air—was that bubble bath?—conveyed the message that this was a place where you could divulge your dirtiest secrets free of threat and judgment. Be calm, said the arrangement of the furniture. Be at ease, said the air.
Thank You, Goodnight Page 19