“Yeah. Have a good night.”
“I’ll send Michel your regards.”
“Yeah, tell her I wish her well.”
“He’ll appreciate that.”
* * *
The hotel side door had the clunky weight of the hatch of a sub. As I passed the game room—and I do not mean games room; the tiny space housed exactly one amusement, a seventies-era pinball machine featuring the image of a mustachioed race car driver grinning with seductive machismo—I became aware of two silhouettes shuffling down the hall. One of the silhouettes was slight and frail, the other large and oafish. The oafish one carried a duffel bag.
“Jumbo?” I called, walking toward them.
“There you are. I’ve been calling you.” He interrupted himself. “Where’d you get that soda?”
“From the soda machine.”
“Interesting.” Our voices sounded blunt and boxlike in the narrow corridor. “Listen, we have to leave.”
“Leave? What do you mean you have to leave?”
“One of my patients is having contractions. I have to get back to Baltimore. Pronto.”
“Are you kidding me? One of your patients?”
“She’s going earlier than I thought.”
“Jesus, Jumbo, you’re not an ob-gyn. Whatever it is you do at those births will happen just fine without you.”
“I’m sorry, Mingus. Nobody is more committed to this band than me, but today I’m still a midwife. People are counting on me.”
Hopefully, that wasn’t true.
“So, I’m supposed to just blow Mack off ?” I said. “We drove across the fucking state.”
“Calm down. I got the front desk to have a rental car dropped off. You stay and work Mack over.” He paused to snicker meaningfully. “Dad and I have to go and we have to go now. Mrs. Winchester can’t go into labor without me.”
Only Jumbo could manage to be practical and impractical simultaneously. It was a horrendously inconvenient time for him to develop a sense of responsibility.
“Besides, you and Mackenzie seem to do just fine on your own.” He winked and gave me a jocular elbow to the ribs. “Dad, I’m going to grab us a couple of Cokes and meet you in the lobby. We’ll jam the new Tremble tunes the whole way back! And Mingus, no more dustups. My old man won’t be there to save your sorry ass!”
CHAPTER 17
On the other side of the glass, a gathering of diners filled the bistro. Simple wooden tables stretched back in long, narrow lines under pendant lighting as stylish, well-groomed patrons sipped wine in happy profile.
Mackenzie materialized from the shadows. She had slid herself into a pair of jeans but had not abandoned those voguish glasses, which bridged the thick flows of blond hair cascading down both sides of her face.
“How’s your hotel?” she asked.
“No better place to stay if you’re a chain smoker.”
I couldn’t stop looking at her. I was utterly disarmed by the sight of the person who for so long had inhabited my dreams, who’d haunted me, guided me here without ever knowing it. When she reached for the restaurant’s door, I was suddenly overcome by the need to confess, an unexpected urge toward forthrightness. It would be unfair of me to conceal the reason for my visit and allow the charade of a dinner between old friends to unfold as I lay in wait for just the right moment to pounce.
“Look, Mack, before we go in, I need to be honest with you about something.”
She eyed me suspiciously. “Okay.”
“I’m not out here for work.”
“What do you mean?”
I tried to breathe normally. “I came out here to see you. I drove out here with Jumbo. Jumbo was going to be the surprise I mentioned earlier. So was his father, actually, but that’s a whole other fucked-up story.”
She looked instantly traumatized, like I was one of her freak patients. “Wait. Jumbo is here with you?”
“No. Not anymore. He left.”
That didn’t seem to help. “Teddy, you’re scaring me.”
“You’re going to think I’ve completely lost my mind.”
“What’s going on?” But the mortal astonishment in her eyes conveyed the beginnings of understanding, and I felt that familiar shamefaced look creep over me.
With a grimace, I said, “We won’t make you audition this time. Promise.”
“You’re kidding.”
I shrugged.
“You want to get the band back together.”
I nodded.
“Is this a joke?”
“Depends how you look at it.”
“You’re insane.”
“I keep hearing that.”
“You drove to Pittsburgh to show up at my office unannounced and ask me to walk out of my practice and play music again. You actually did that.”
“It wasn’t unannounced. I had an appointment.”
Her stunned silence afforded me the opportunity to relay the whole sorry saga, beginning with my public flogging courtesy of Heinz-Peter Zoot, right up through Sonny, then Alaina.
“It’s happening, Mack. We’ve got all the old players back. We need you.”
Mackenzie was shaking her head at this pitiful little horror movie. Faces and names were popping up out of the past like zombies undead and stammering, with designs on dragging her away.
A pack of young women, coworkers I would’ve guessed, breezed up and maneuvered around us to enter the restaurant, looking at us as if witnessing the genesis of a domestic dispute.
Mackenzie fumbled for words and fidgeted with the buttons on her overcoat. “Your timing is not ideal, I’ll say that much.”
“Come on, Mack. You were the one in the band that I could most relate to. You had to have known that.”
“And yet you came to me last.”
“You also happen to be the only one in the band who terrifies me. For obvious reasons.”
She started to laugh. “So, you’re going around foisting your midlife crisis on people you haven’t seen in years? That’s what Teddy Tremble has come to?”
“Why does everybody keep calling this a midlife crisis? I’m thirty-eight.”
“You know, it’s funny. Every day, people come into my office to deal with issues in their relationships. They come in, they sit down, and say things like ‘My wife isn’t interested anymore’ or ‘Once a week just isn’t doing it for me.’ That’s what the majority come to me for. Not sex addiction, not curing them of some shame-inducing practice that appalls their partner, but improving the connection with the man or woman in their lives. For most of these people, helping them involves little more than a recalibration of their expectations. ‘Your wife isn’t twenty-five anymore, she’s fifty, so no, the mere sight of her naked body may not bring you to your knees.’ Or ‘Wouldn’t once a week be okay if it knocked your socks off ?’ More often than not, I’m just slowly helping people accept reality.”
“So the key to happiness is low expectations?”
“No, but the key to unhappiness is definitely unreasonable expectations.”
“I’m not unhappy. That’s not why I’m doing this. And to be honest, my expectations feel more reasonable the deeper I go.”
“The hallmark of a delusional mind.” She rocked forward onto her toes. “I can’t help you, my friend. I’m a sex therapist, not an everything therapist. You need an everything therapist.”
“You’re a bass player, Mackenzie. That’s what you are.”
In a better world, that remark would’ve awakened something inside her and she would’ve started to nod slowly, the momentum building within, her thoughts racing, an inner voice thumping Fuck yeah! That’s exactly what I am! A bass player! and she’d be swept away into the current of the bold, burnished future. Instead, she was peering at me over her glasses with a look that rendered me utterly defense
less.
“Before you say no, do me a favor. Don’t say no,” I pleaded.
With hands stuffed into the pockets of her jacket and her mouth agape, she looked everywhere for help—the passing cars, the row of restaurants and closed shops up and down the block, the night sky circling above. Her toe tapped the asphalt.
Then I remembered my glove compartment. It was the path to a place where the memories could flood like the falls, where I could turn her mind’s camera back to the glory days and seduce her with the ecstatic shiver of those times returning.
I heard myself say, “Look, I have a bag of weed in my car. It’s not mine and I can’t vouch for the quality.”
She froze, horror flowering amid bewilderment. I’d just compounded all my other offenses by proposing we do some drugs. Music and pot. How old was I?
“Bad idea,” I said, retreating. It was my second in as many minutes. “Forget I mentioned it.”
She sighed, already wearying of me. Then she tilted her head down the block. “Come on. Let’s get your stash. I live around the corner.”
* * *
Mackenzie must’ve considered herself dirtier than most people, or maybe her profession inspired the desire to come home and get clean, for at every turn in her old red Victorian, which loomed munificently over the hushed street, a carefully arranged dish displayed some type of designer bathing product. Soap blocks, soap shells, soap bombs, soap flowers, even little containers of body butter lay about the place in every direction. Their names swept you away into a tranquil land of exotica: bonsai deodorant, buttermilk bath bomb, citrus sage shampoo bar, French chocolate bath melt.
Mack took genuine delight in my misadventures in Europe. The tale inspired convulsions of silent laughter, her torso swaying back and forth but never quite toppling as a densely packed joint was passed between our pinched fingers. We were sitting on the living room rug, our backs against the sofa in a room illuminated only by a Tiffany dragonfly lamp.
“We really have a lost legion of fans in Switzerland?” she asked, bemused and incredulous.
“And not even casual fans,” I said. “They wanted to know where your solo albums were. They asked where they could find bootlegs of our shows. I was signing ticket stubs!”
“That must have been a blast.”
“I was too busy trying to escape to enjoy it.”
“Why am I not surprised?” she said. “The rest of us would’ve eaten it up, you know.”
Mack placed the joint, now a shrunken stub, in a soap dish that she’d brought onto the floor, and remarked, “I have to say, I think it’s pretty cool that one little photograph could get you writing songs again.”
“I had no choice. That picture reduced me to a joke. I couldn’t go to my grave as an object of ridicule.”
“A photograph catches one moment, Teddy, and you have had plenty of good ones.”
“And yet when I die, people will think of me and laugh.”
“Who cares? You’ll be dead.”
“I wouldn’t have given my legacy a second thought were it not for Warren calling me about that exhibit. Ignorance would’ve been such bliss.”
Mack looked doubtful. “Other than Abe Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., and Hitler, I really don’t know what a legacy is or who has one. I’m just saying that if you’re really lucky, you get one miracle in this life. Seems awfully presumptuous to be asking for seconds.”
“All I want is to go out on my own terms, to not see a chump every morning in the mirror. You may think that our band’s legacy doesn’t matter, but it’s different for me. I was the one up there, front and center.”
“So, the bass player doesn’t get a legacy.”
“The band bore my name, Mack.”
“You’re breaking my heart.”
“The point is, nobody took a picture of you drooling over Doritos.”
Dizzy and mellow from the smoky haze and soapy aromas wafting together, I let my head drop backward onto the womb of the carpet.
“I’ve got to do this now. If I don’t, this thing will follow me into old age and I’ll spend the next forty years pining for something that will continue to move further and further out of reach. Time flies, Mack, and the next thing you know, you’re eighty-two and you don’t have much more of it left. We get old in a hurry, and pretty soon the music is too loud, the winter too cold, and we’re using words like ‘gorgeous’ to describe a salad instead of a woman. I need to act before the whole thing moves beyond my grasp.”
Mackenzie groaned. “Well done—pretentious and corny. But good luck organizing the world the way you want it. Stories tend to tell themselves.”
“Come on, Mack. How much fun would it be to play again?”
“Fun? This is the first I’m hearing of fun. This whole thing sounds like a grudge match. Teddy Tremble getting back at the world for premature neglect.”
I sat up and studied her, searching for traces of longing behind the scaffold of her features, for empty spaces in need of filling. “It’d be fun if you were there. That would be fun for me.”
I watched her tilt her head to the ceiling, her eyes fluttering closed.
“Don’t you miss it?” I asked.
“Clearly not as much as you have.”
“There are things I miss, but that’s not why I’m doing this. If this were just about reliving fond memories, I could probably move on. I certainly wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of scaring up Jumbo. I’m doing this because there are some things I want to change, things I want to make right.”
“I think what we did the first time around was right enough.”
I shifted on the rug like a drunken snow angel, and for a time, I may have drifted off. When I opened my eyes, she was standing over me, holding out her hand. “Let me show you something.”
She led me up the stairs, past a museum of bathing products on display, our stoned legs teetering beneath the unfamiliar weight of our sluggish bodies. Stopping at a dark room, she gave a tug at the string of another dragonfly lamp, which cast a warm orange halo over what soon revealed itself to be the music room. This was the space in which the Mackenzie of old dwelled: bass guitars upright in stands, an old Peavey amplifier in the center of the room, six-strings (electrics and acoustics) against the wall, an electric piano off to the side. It had the retro charm of a Haight/Ashbury recording studio circa 1967. I stood at the threshold and marveled.
Mack flipped a switch and the amp buzzed to life, its tubes shimmying at the fresh current of electricity. She grabbed a bass, sat down on the amp, turned the volume knob, and allowed her fingers to wade over the frets. The low notes glided up into the rafters, graceful yet commanding, smoothly rupturing the night.
She looked up at me. “Plug in. Let’s see what we remember.”
* * *
There are some of us who never had a choice. It was always going to be this way. Whether graced with talent or not, we were going to spend our lives in this often turbulent but always embracing sea. If we can make music, we make it and there’s no hope of turning off the spigot. And if we can’t, we listen and obsess. It becomes the Dewey decimal system by which our world is organized. We see a cheerleader in pigtails and think, Isn’t that skirt a little too Oh-Mickey-you’re-so-fine? We see a guy in a blazer with his sleeves rolled up and realize we’ve been neglecting that Mike + the Mechanics cassette boxed up in the attic all these years. Every unheard song out there is like the last page of a book: it has the answer. We know that this new album we just shelled out ten bucks for will somehow make us more complete, that it will plant one more post in the architecture of our selves.
People like us become someone different for a while when we fall in love with new music. The transformative qualities are real, even if they are imagined. In my Simon & Garfunkel mode, I was a little more cerebral and poetic in a Carl Sandburgian way; I cut back on the cursing i
n favor of actual words. When I was into Bob Marley’s Exodus, I was a more laid-back me. When listening to Misfits by the Kinks, I spoke with a bit of a sneer. I felt a little tougher during my enchantment with Public Enemy. I channeled a haughty impenetrability during the weeks when I thought OK Computer was God’s gift. I was a jittery little fuck in my Police phase, what with all that nervous reggae crammed into those albums, and in my Jackson Browne period I grew a beard. (I don’t know why. He didn’t have one.) It’s a junkie’s hunger and it springs forth from your subcellular components—organelles, I think they called them in biology class; maybe nuclei, mitochondria, Golgi apparatus. Occasionally, it feels like a prisoner’s existence because we don’t always choose the object of our obsession. An intense interest in the Muzak of Sven Libaek and the Carpenters has never landed panties on any guy’s floor. But in certain very limited circumstances, being yourself has.
The point is, we are happy to be powerless to resist the thrill of a new sound. You can leave the cell door unlocked. Nobody’s making a run for it.
That’s some of us.
Others aren’t nearly so afflicted. There is no pain, no suffering, no Sandburg, no sneering. There is just the angelic simplicity of being absorbed in your song. That was Mackenzie. And what a thing to hear. What a thing to watch. The way that the bass roots a song, gives it its steady footing and its ability to move—that’s what Mackenzie always lent to the Tremble machinery. As we strummed and plucked in the meek orange light of her upstairs room, the years melted away. I watched her falling into herself, into that unshakable peace, mellow and confident, following herself out of somewhere and into somewhere else.
When we finished playing and set down our instruments, she dropped her hands into her lap. “I don’t mean to bring the discussion back to my body, but I should probably tell you that I have breast cancer.” She winced apologetically. “I hate saying it that way, but there really are so few euphemisms.”
I looked at her, thunderstruck. “What?”
“I’m not sure why I just told you that,” she said. “Because really, I’m totally fine. They got it early. Nobody’s telling me not to buy green bananas or to stay away from the collected works of Dumas.”
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