He mulled the point. “She’d make a good one.”
The girl slid two mini-envelopes across the counter, told us we were all set—a hellaciously off-the-mark summation of our position in the world—and pointed us toward the elevators. As I handed one of the envelopes to Jumbo, I heard a voice over my shoulder.
“Holy shit, it is them!”
The two guys sitting in the lobby chairs were no longer looking bored. They were looking at us.
“Tremble,” declared one of them. He was in his late twenties with an impotent beard, adorned in loose jeans and a sweatshirt that read Penn State. “Aren’t you the guys from that band from, like, forever ago?”
Jumbo grinned with false modesty. “That’s right, fellas. Guilty as charged.”
The bearded guy looked at his friend, whose sweatshirt bore the name Ursinus, which I assumed was a college but could’ve just as easily been a glandular problem. “You remember these guys?” Then, to us, “I didn’t know you were still together. I just saw a VH1 Behind the Music about you.”
“Well, gentlemen, it’s all true,” Jumbo boasted, impervious to the guy’s tone of mockery.
“What the hell are you doing in a Best Western?” asked Ursinus.
“What the hell are you doing in a Best Western?” I shot back. I was in no fucking mood for this.
At that point, Penn State jumped up and began belting out “It Feels like a Lie.” He made a real big deal of it, with flair and flamboyance, raising his voice, getting most of the words wrong, waving his arms grandly like this sad little lobby was a Broadway stage. The counter girl looked uncomfortable. It was becoming a memorable shift.
“All right, all right, well done,” Jumbo cut in. “Glad they’re still grooving out to us in Pittsburgh.”
“Yeah, right,” the guy cackled. “Just like they’re still grooving to Dishwalla and A-ha.”
I was going to let it go. Run-ins like this went with the territory. At a mediation in New York a few years ago, a smug piece-of-shit lawyer looked across the conference table at me and said, “I’ll bet you never expected to find yourself here.” In line at Nathan’s Hot Dogs in the Orlando airport, I heard someone mutter, “Oh, how the mighty have fallen.” People occasionally whispered and pointed. I can’t say I’ve never lost my temper in those situations (I “accidentally” jostled the Nathan’s guy’s soda arm), but it was best not to escalate. You suffered the negative attention, maybe shot back with a simple insult—hair was always a safe target, so were clothes and weight—and that usually shut them up. You moved on.
“Well, it was a real pleasure meeting you guys,” I said, tossing my bag over my shoulder.
“So, what—are you still together? Still sharing hotel rooms?” Penn State heckled.
“Let’s just say you haven’t heard the last of Tremble,” Jumbo announced, yet again misreading the room.
“How will I ever contain my excitement?” Ursinus piped up. “Where’s the show tonight, guys? The Days Inn?”
“That’s really fucking funny,” I said sharply. “How many gold records do you have, dipshit?”
The dipshit’s grin vanished. Both gentlemen glared at me, pocketknives in their eyes. “Mouthy for a fruity little singer, aren’t you?”
Jumbo stepped between me and our two fans. “Okay now, fellas.”
The dipshit gave me a slow, menacing smile, a common antecedent to violence, I have learned.
“Back off,” Jumbo said mildly. “Let’s not have an incident, shall we?”
Jumbo was moderately burly but about as intimidating as Fozzie Bear. These clowns weren’t exactly in top physical shape either, but they were thick and meaty, considerably younger and less removed from their brawling days. The good money was on them.
The one with the fragmentary goatee—the amateur vocalist out of Penn State—took a step toward Jumbo, getting nose to nose with him. “Why don’t you back off, you big fucking zero?” As his taunting intensified, he opened his eyes wider and wider, and I wondered if maybe one of us should hold an open palm under his chin to catch his eyeballs when they popped out of their sockets. “I’m hearing some tough talk, but you know what I think? I think you’ve got nothing to back it up. I think you’re just a couple of little girls.”
“Now, friend, there’s no reason to get sexist,” Jumbo said, placing a fatherly hand on the guy’s shoulder.
It was a miscalculation, if it was a calculation at all, to initiate physical contact. In a frightfully swift motion, Penn State shifted his weight onto his back leg, then exploded forward and clocked Jumbo in the cheek.
“Ow! That fucking hurt!” Jumbo shrieked, staggering backward. He smacked into the reception desk, knocked a stack of brochures to the floor, and somehow nicked the ring-for-service bell.
In a flash, I was on top of Jumbo’s assailant—nobody hits him but me—ready to plant my knuckles in the guy’s beard. Turns out though, what seemed like a flash to me was more than enough time for the guy to duck and allow my fist to sail lamely past his face. Before I could blink, a mighty blow was delivered to my gut from Ursinus, who, last I checked, was on the other side of the room. The wind was knocked clean out of me and I crumpled to the floor.
Down on the cold linoleum, I braced for further beating—a shoe to the head, a hard kick to the kidneys, additional gusts of violence to solidify my mortification and disgrace. One man’s cautionary tale is another man’s war story, and I knew these punks would go back home and tell all their sorry punk friends how they delivered a beat-down to a couple of aging rock stars. As for me, I was tiring of getting punched—by dirtballs in Central Pennsylvania, photographers in Switzerland, interior decorators who shared my bed.
Then it was as if a thick blanket was draped over the room. Nobody moved, nobody spoke, nobody screamed in agony. I raised my eyes and beheld our two fans up against the wall, an elderly man clutching their throats. Their eyes were wide with fright and they gasped for breath as old Elmer Jett secured their windpipes with his gnarled fingers.
“Which one of you took a swing at my boy?” The sound that came out of the asthmatic-cum-military-chokeholder’s mouth was as ominous a tone as I’d ever heard. Neither punk could summon the air to respond.
“I showed up late to this party,” Elmer went on, his voice somewhere between a murmur and a snarl. “But I think maybe someone here has forgotten his manners.” He looked at each of his captives with a threatening scowl. “Now, which one of you hit my boy?”
While Jumbo nursed his jaw by the reception counter and I struggled to my feet and tried not to vomit, Jumbo’s dad, who hadn’t so much as moved or spoken all day except to have a seizure, had finally piped up to animate the cliché of old-man strength and Eastwoodian menace.
He leaned in as close as he could, his Depression-era wrinkles mere inches from the faces of these distinguished graduates. “I am an exceedingly violent man and I hold a bitch of a grudge,” he growled, low and gritty. “You better hope to hell I never see either of you again. I won’t be nearly so amiable.”
With that, he released his grip on the two throats, and the castrated duo crumbled into sputters of panting and huffing. (Seems wherever Elmer went, someone was short of breath.) They grabbed their overnight bags and hightailed it out into the evening.
Jumbo rushed over to his father. “You okay, Dad?”
Elmer simply nodded, the crusty geezer apparently restored to his default setting of mute.
The gut thumping I had taken was beginning to wear off, so once again, the only lasting injury was to my pride. My gratitude toward Elmer for his timely intercession was somewhat diluted by the revelation that we now required the services of a seventy-nine-year-old tubercular bodyguard. Go us.
“I’m heading up to the room,” I muttered miserably. “I’ll call when I know what’s up.”
“We’ll be ready, Mingus,” Jumbo enthused.
He’d already shaken off the most recent disaster; every moment was lived in a vacuum. “We’ll conquer Mackenzie and then we’ll head back west!” He pumped his fist.
“We live east,” I grunted, starting for the elevator bank.
“Ha! True enough. Don’t know what’s with me today. Jet-lagged, I guess.”
We had driven—and hadn’t changed time zones.
Jumbo turned to the receptionist and rested both elbows on the counter. “I got news for you. Where would I find a vending machine?”
* * *
My room greeted me with a burned-out bulb. After some blind patting on the walls, I happened upon a light switch in the bathroom. Now I could see, but breathing was becoming a problem, as my lungs clenched from the fog-like stench of cigarettes. A nonsmoking room apparently meant that no one was smoking in it right now. I could practically hear myself getting emphysema. When a complaint to the front desk proved discouraging—“All the nonsmoking rooms smell the same, sir”—I cracked a window, took in the breathtaking view of a buckling roof, and set out on a stroll while the room ventilated. I don’t know what more I could’ve expected from a hotel whose most lavish amenity was that it accepted credit cards.
After visiting the soda machine on the first floor, I carried a Diet Coke down the long, underilluminated hall toward the side exit. The journey brought me past a set of glass double doors through which I viewed an indoor pool encircled by balconied rooms. That never made sense to me, those indoor balconies. This was not a resort. What breed of guest was going to plant himself in a plastic chair with a Sue Grafton mystery and bask in the chlorinated air to the echo-heavy sound of splashing? If you were staying in this hotel, it was because you were in town for a funeral or for a cheap affair, or you were hustling your brand of mayo to the TGI Fridays across the street.
I pushed through the door at the end of the corridor and found myself in a remote area of the parking lot with a Dumpster. The huge green bin was abuzz with insects—tiny, rancorous voices celebrating the dropping of the sun like a throng of spring breakers. The insects and I weren’t alone. A woman with stringy, copper-hued hair was standing by the Dumpster, clad in a brown-red shirt and black vest onto which a Best Western logo was stitched. The woman’s lips were curled in a frown of monumental gloom. At least you’re not me, her empty eyes seemed to be saying. She raised a cigarette to her lips, sucked the life out of it, and flicked it over her shoulder into the bayou of wet diapers and warm tuna. “It’s like fucking Maui here, no?” she said, and headed inside.
Tremble’s second tour had, in fact, brought us to Hawaii. We took the stage in Honolulu as the headliners I declared us to be, belting out the songs for which we were famous and the songs that would soon render us unfamous, while the Junction ravaged the mainland with a rambling cyclone of sold-out shows. If my cohorts harbored the same concerns I did, they hid it well. They seemed to be having a blast on the road, on the planes, and in the bars and bistros of America, and when the house lights went down, we actually sounded better than ever. It was just that not that many people were around to hear.
Before long, I realized I’d made a grievous miscalculation with our collective musical futures. I would return to my hotel room each night feeling as lost and adrift as a tiny island in the Pacific.
Sipping cocktails on a breezy beach one night on Oahu, Jumbo removed a joint from his breast pocket and got up to light it in the bamboo tiki torch next to us.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I demanded of him, looking nervously around our table.
“What? I thought it’s legal here.”
“In the United States? Put that away.”
He returned the blunt to his pocket and sat back down. “I just thought it would chill you out a little,” he explained. “You’ve got to be the most uptight guy in all of Hawaii.”
I’m certain that at that moment my mind formulated some nauseatingly pompous response, like “Heavy is the head that wears the crown.” Something that paid tribute to both my overtaxed leadership and my unappreciated intellect.
“We sound awesome!” the guitarist enthused. “So what if the crowds are a little thinner than we’re used to? Look where we are, man!” He waved grandly at the star-peppered sky, at the surf that slumbered just out past the beach lights. “Last week we rocked the Fillmore in San Francisco. The week before that, the Showbox in Seattle. We’re living the dream, Mingus.”
Perhaps, but the dream was slowly dying—and I’d sort of killed it.
“Look around you,” Jumbo went on. “Pick out the hottest girl in this whole bar. No—you know what? Pick out the hottest girl on this whole island! You can sleep with her just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “You could do anything you want to her, and so could I. You know why? Because you’re Teddy fucking Tremble and I’m Jumbo fucking Jett.”
“You’re getting carried away.”
“Am I? You want me to prove it? You want me to prove it with that little slice of Lord-have-mercy over there?” I didn’t even bother turning my head to whomever he was pointing at and now waving and pirouetting his eyebrows. “The point is that you, me, Mack, and the Square are all on the best paid vacation anyone could dream up, and you’re the only one who doesn’t seem to realize it.”
Our server materialized with a tray of cocktails. “Gentlemen,” he said. “A Kona brown ale for you, Mr. Tremble, and a Southern Comfort on the rocks for you, Mr. Jett.”
Jumbo beamed grandly at his refill and said, “Mauna Loa.”
“Is there anything else I can get for you gentlemen at the moment?”
“I think we’re good,” I said.
“Please don’t hesitate.”
“Mauna Loa,” Jumbo repeated to the waiter, who smiled back and moved on.
I looked at my bandmate. “James, the Hawaiian word for thank you is mahalo. We’ve only heard it five thousand times in the past two days. Is that what you’re trying to say, or have you decided to recite the name of the world’s largest volcano to every person who hands you a drink or opens the door for you?” I dipped my lips into my auburn beer. “You could also simply say thanks. They understand English here in the US.”
The stench of roadside hotel Dumpster jarred me out of my old mistakes and back into my new ones. I pulled my phone out of my back pocket and called Sara.
“How’s the trip?” she asked.
“Okay so far. Jumbo ended up coming with me.”
“God—why?”
“Because it would’ve been weird if it was just me and his dad.”
In explaining how it came to pass that I set out on a trans-Pennsylvania road trip with that father and son duo, it dawned on me that their reasons for driving out here were no less credible than my own.
Sara was still at the office, having just returned from the home of fabulously well-to-do clients on Delancey Street. A redecorating project was bleeding from one room to the next, as this genteel couple sought to address the discord of a house in which the Provençal lavenders of French country abutted the sleek blues and oranges of midcentury.
“It’s just as well you’re out of town,” Sara commented. “It’s probably going to be a late night for me too.”
“What’s going on?”
“It’s Michel’s last day, so there’s a dinner party.”
“Oh. That should be fun, right?”
“There’s been a lot of talk of sangria,” she said.
“Sure.”
“It seems to flow through Michel’s veins. But I guess that stands to reason.”
“Right,” I agreed vacantly.
There was a pause. “You don’t know who Michel is, do you?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Christ, Teddy, I’ve introduced you a dozen times.”
“Of course I know Michel. I just didn’t know she was Spanish.”
“He’s not,
” she said curtly.
I sighed in defeat.
“Is it nice being oblivious?” Sara asked, her tone dry.
“That’s kind of a loaded question, but no, I don’t think it’s terribly nice.”
She was chuckling on the other end; I had no idea at what, but it was usually me.
“You keep a lot of secrets.” I pled my case through her laughter. “I don’t get a ton of information from you.”
“Well, I can’t imagine you’d pay much attention if you did.”
“That’s not fair, Sara. I mean, come on, you get together with your ex-husband and you tell me about it after the fact.”
“He’s not my ex-husband—that’s the point.”
“No, that’s not the point.”
“Why does that bother you?” she asked.
“I’m not saying it bothers me.”
“Teddy.” She took a hefty breath. “There are things Billy understands about me that you just never will.”
Her words were perfectly valid and perfectly true, which probably explained why they stung so much. The sentiment had been framed in the present tense too. Billy understands. That ran contrary to my understanding of divorce, which I’d always viewed as a parting of the ways.
“I didn’t mean for that to sound so harsh,” she said.
“It’s okay.”
“Aren’t there things that Mackenzie understands about you that I never will?”
She was being deliberately provocative. Billy and Mackenzie were hardly equivalents and she knew it. I gave it fair reflection anyway.
“I’m not so sure. Maybe.”
I buttressed myself against the functional architecture of the Dumpster. “Look,” I said. “I don’t know how much longer I can go on arguing with you.”
“And what does that mean?”
“It means I’m standing next to the most foul Dumpster in all of Pennsylvania. I’m asphyxiating. I’m actually surprised you don’t smell it through the phone.”
“I do, actually. I just thought you hadn’t showered.”
Then she said, “Want to call me in the morning?”
Thank You, Goodnight Page 21