Thank You, Goodnight
Page 27
When the credits were over, we walked down the block to a coffee shop that served the best vanilla latte in the city, according to Sara. The barista, a young man with hoops in his earlobes and a beard that reached his sternum, smiled with familiarity at Sara and said, “No whipped cream, right?”
Up against the window, on barstools for the second time that night, the soothing tones of Miles Davis’s trumpet separating us from the brigades of bar hoppers outside, we sat together and praised the movie. Sara then asked how the record was coming along. I started to tell her how the music was really starting to take flight, what a thrill it was to hear these naked compositions being forged into actual songs. I stopped myself and looked into my cappuccino.
“You don’t want to hear about this,” I said. “It’s boring if you’re not actually there.”
I also didn’t think it fair or wise to amplify the joy I was getting from a venture that didn’t involve her but did involve Mackenzie. Mack was still something of an unknown quantity to her. And to me, for that matter.
“It’s not boring to me,” Sara replied, resting her cheek in her palm. “I’ve been living with a lawyer all this time. Talk about boring.”
So I talked a bit. Sara listened with apparent interest, and stirred another half pack of sweetener into her cup.
The conversation shifted to more mundane topics, and she reminded me that we were low on coffee beans. “They have that Colombian blend you like here,” she said, glancing over at the display table that was neatly lined with brown vacuum-sealed bags.
I turned my head. “Nice. I can never find that.”
“I know. Let’s grab one.”
As I stood in line, the beans crunching together in the bag, I looked over at Sara and felt a rush of warmth. She and I really were more than roommates. We had a life together with routines that gave each of us solace. We curled up under blankets in front of movies, she invariably turning to me with some dubious theory about an actor. (“That guy’s really British. You can totally tell.”) Sometimes under the blanket my hand would slide over her thigh and we’d pause the movie and lead each other into the bedroom. Much later she’d slip out to the bathroom, her long spindly legs unsteady, needing a few steps to reacquaint themselves with the symmetry of walking. On her way back, she’d lift the shade and peer out at the night, checking to see if the snow had started to fall. She’d stand there for a moment too long and I’d wonder what she was looking at, or looking for. Then she’d dive back under the covers into my folded arm, and the next thing I knew, it would be 2:09 a.m., the hall light still on, the movie still paused.
She was nursing the last of her latte now and watching as a gathering of college boys outside the window shoved each other playfully for the benefit of girls standing in poses of affected disengagement. Sara seemed a visitor in a museum, witnessing from the safety of a glass barrier the unfolding of some evolutionarily dictated mating ritual. So this is how the humans behave, her bemused gaze seemed to say.
How many times had I felt that same isolating sense of wonder that I was now reading on her face? That aloneness in the thick of everything.
Having Sara had kept me from drifting off into the shadows, from truly disappearing into myself. Just maybe I’d done the same for her.
* * *
Everything came together on the day Jumbo wore a bandana. It appeared out of nowhere, plucked out of his arsenal of inexplicable accessories. It was black and accented with undersea-green paisley swirls that put one in an astrological frame of mind. The way it was draped over his head would have, on anyone else, connoted menace—urban gang, seventeenth-century pirate—but on him looked like a boxed Halloween costume from Walmart.
“What’s with the kerchief ?” Sonny frowned as Jumbo took a seat in the booth, rested his red Gretsch on his knee, and adjusted the large-banded headphones over his ears. He was preparing to lay down an arpeggio guitar line on “The Warmth of Disease,” a song that had awakened me in the middle of the night, demanding to be written, one that I’d managed to quietly cage with a Dictaphone and a nylon-string acoustic.
Once all the fussing over tuning and sound levels had been sorted out, Sonny leaned over the board, pressed the button that allowed communication between the control room and the isolation booth, and spoke: “Don’t think of this track as merely texture. This is going to be a part. When somebody describes this song to his friends, he’s going to say, ‘You know the one with that guitar line? Ba ba ba, ba ba ba, ba ba ba.’ You are helping to define this song.”
Warren and I were watching from the yellow couch behind Sonny. Warren kept holding his bag of dried mango in front of my face; I kept shaking him off.
“When you play this line,” Sonny continued, “I want you to picture your guitar leading the listener through the song, being there for them, something for them to trust when the singer drops out or when the drums get moody or the bass goes a little peripatetic.”
I looked at Warren and mouthed “peripatetic.” With a resolute nod, he mouthed it right back.
“Dude, I’m all over it,” Jumbo declared.
“Let’s see,” Sonny grumbled. “Ready now. Here it comes.”
Then, at the very last second before Sonny hit the record button, Jumbo magically produced a pair of cheap surf-shop sunglasses and slid them on. Warren groaned. Between the headphones, the bandana, and the plastic Ray-Ban knockoffs, the guitar player looked a little like a petty dope hustler and a little like Hulk Hogan. Sonny glanced back at us but decided there were no words. Then he pressed the button.
At first, all that came through the speakers was the pregnant click of Warren’s sticks counting off four measures in three-four time. Then the studio flooded with music. The rich tone of Jumbo’s broken chords seemed to run like syrup over the crisp hi-hat strikes and rim shots supplied by the drum track. It drifted over Mackenzie’s wandering bass and weaved the whole thing into a slow sonic freight car rolling across an open plain. Each one of us was transfixed. It was for moments like this that I put up with everything else that came with that meandering mess of humanity, that avalanche in a china shop.
When the song was finished, Sonny looked up and stated simply, “You’re done.”
Jumbo grinned with pride at what was often Sonny’s most effusive tribute. Consumed with self-congratulation, he forgot that sunglasses tended to impair one’s vision when one wore them in a dark recording studio, and standing up, he suddenly found himself tangled in a snake pit of cables. He rocked clumsily, then finally tripped and crashed into the termite-weakened, asbestos-riddled wall.
“Please, man!” Sonny yelled in anguish. “Get out of my booth!”
Lead vocals were next, so I got up.
Mack was smirking at me. “You really want to follow that act?”
I shook my head.
“Listen, Tremble, I love this song,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. So don’t blow it.”
I paused. “I’ll try not to, but just so I understand, what’s the it in that sentence?”
“The it is the noise that your throat is about to make in that little room right there. You’ll only make it for a few minutes, but it will be captured and listened to for all eternity.”
“And by eternity, you mean the next six months. A year tops.”
“So maybe not eternity, but long after we’re all dead, that’s for sure,” she said, crossing her legs and nestling herself into one of the beanbagesque sofa cushions.
“Thanks. That was kind of you.”
“What?” She giggled. “Just trying to help you maintain perspective, to appreciate the weight of the moment. But hey—no pressure.”
“Christ, Mackenzie. Whatever happened to ‘let’s just play the damn thing’?”
She smiled. “Okay. Just play the damn thing.”
I started for the recording room.
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“But don’t blow it,” she called after me.
Inside the booth, I cleared my throat while sliding on the headphones and smoothing out the crumpled lyric sheet on the stand. Sonny came in to toy with the microphone boom. “You stand right there,” he ordered. “Don’t move. And don’t touch my mic.”
As I ran through a couple of takes, I could feel myself shrinking. The lyrics were the weak link in this song. The imagery was hokey, the metaphors mixed. Pouring cold bottled water down my stupid, thirty-eight-year-old throat, I tried not to notice my bandmates staring at me team-photo-like from the couch.
“Hold up a sec,” Sonny commanded from behind the sound board, detaining me in the grip of his stare. “This song, ‘The Warmth of Disease’—what’s going on here? What do you think about these words you’re singing?”
I heaved a sigh. I hated these inquisitions. It was his way of leading me to criticism.
“I don’t know. They’re a little out there. I guess I liked them originally, but now they’re sounding lame.” My eyes drifted to the lower half of the lyric sheet. “Now that I look at it, I don’t know what’s going on in the second verse. I was obviously shooting for a double entendre with the word infectious, but maybe that’s too clinical. Yeah, you’re right. The lyrics need work.”
“No, they don’t,” he said with monastic certitude. He took a sip of his coffee, which he’d been consuming in frightening quantities, having swapped a nicotine addiction for a caffeine one. “You’ve got some lyrics here that knock the goddamn wind out of me, man, and they’re carried upon one of the most natural melodies I’ve ever heard from you. I’ve awakened in the middle of the night and heard this song in my head. I feel like I’ve known this song my whole life. My mother could have rocked me to sleep with this song before I even knew what music was. But I swear on my empty grave, if you sing it the way you did on those practice takes, I’m going to cut it from this record and go to court to get you permanently barred from ever playing it again.”
He banged his fist on the table, startling me and sending a tiny brown splash over the brim of his cup. “If we’re going to make an awful album, it’s going to be boldly awful. We will not make one that limps into awfulness, that isn’t even sure if it’s awful.”
Then he pointed at me, a strong finger jutting out of an autocratic fist. “This song deserves better than what I’ve been hearing. You’re not going after it. Go after it! Deliver this song the way it wants to be delivered. Picture something in your head, something you want more than anything else in this life. Some person. Some dream. Some place. You decide, but think about it, hold it right before your eyes. Then sing as if you’re telling that thing how much you want it. You need to convince that thing that you want so bad to give itself to you. You know what that feels like, Teddy, I know you do. There isn’t a beating heart out there that doesn’t, and it’s your job to access that frequency, that cosmic longing that puts all of us in the same leaky goddamn canoe. For the rest of my life—the rest of my life!—I want that desire to drip out of the air every time I hear this song. I’ll hear that desire, I’ll know you speak my language, and I’ll feel a little less alone in this life because of it.”
After that, nothing moved but the ceiling fan, its wood-plastic blades clicking over the control room. At that moment, the isolation booth had never felt more isolating.
Then the music began to flow into the headphones. As I waited to sing, my eyes found Mackenzie sitting on the back of the sofa in brown capri pants and a light-blue shirt with a scoop neckline, her bare feet up on the cushion.
I closed my eyes and pondered Sonny’s words. What was my dream? No simple question for a man about to begin his fifth decade on the planet, an age by which most people had surrendered or at least downsized their ambitions.
When the faces of my bandmates swept through my head, I found myself wondering if this, right here, was it, if this was the thing I wanted more than anything else the world could offer. And I considered what it was that had brought each of my old friends here to sweat out the summer in this dilapidated room. Why had they allowed me to scare them up out of the afternoon of their lives?
With my eyes tightly shut, my neck craned toward the silver microphone, a look of twisted struggle on my face, a voice unknown to me sailed out of my mouth, and I realized that what I wanted more than anything was the wisdom to know what it was I wanted.
In a split second, the song was over. Red-cheeked and drenched, I hazarded a look out into the control room. Warren and Mack stared back at me inscrutably. Jumbo ruptured the stillness by pumping his fist, pointing a fat finger at me, and mouthing “You!”
Sonny was reclining in his chair, his browning coffee cup held to his mouth, his eyes closed. All at once, he wiped his upper lip and leaned into the mic. “You’re done.”
CHAPTER 21
Sonny couldn’t always sermonize competency out of us. When we took up our instruments and played him “Painless Days,” which we all thought was the song most likely to end up under a DJ’s needle, Sonny listened with a doubtful scowl and said, “I don’t see what all the fuss is about.” Decreeing the composition “undercooked,” he ordered me to write him a bridge. I took to the piano and attempted to cure it right then and there. I proceeded to improvise, and Sonny proceeded to shout out words of discouragement like “derivative,” “uninspired,” “beneath you,” and “cut that out,” until it became abundantly clear that my efforts would not soon produce anything that anyone should have to listen to. “It must not be a song yet,” our producer declared, and sent everyone home early.
“Except you,” he said, pointing at me. “Stay and fix it. Bic is gonna want this yeast infection of a studio back eventually.”
As the people I thought were my friends filed out and abandoned me, I cracked open a Snapple from the mini-fridge and started riffing. I tried everything. A twangy little bounce that got too cozy with Conway Twitty. Analog synths that gave sorry birth to a cheeseball “Uh-oh, it’s magic” outtake. Even a jaunty piano that was too much Elton circa ’88 and not enough Elton circa ’73.
A few futile hours later, I threw in the towel. “Must not be a song yet,” I grumbled in my best impression of our leader.
As I locked up, I remembered that Sara had planned on visiting Josie and Wynne’s house that night, as friends were gathering there to welcome their new baby. The couple had recently traveled to Ethiopia to claim their eleven-month-old son, and since they’d been back but a week, Sara had only met the kid through e-mailed photos from Addis Ababa. In all the pictures, the new mothers looked disheveled and thrilled, while the little tyke’s startlingly wide eyes conveyed how deeply confused, but not altogether uncharmed, he was by all this. I decided to meet Sara out there.
The profusion of cars buffering the house forced me to park down the block in the wooded Mount Airy neighborhood. It was a community where people settled and took up residence for generations, where the wishfully hippie or bohemian middle class could live affordably with a front porch and an undersized lawn and still deflect accusations of having moved to the suburbs.
Wynne opened the door and laid eyes upon the scuzzball of dried sweat that stood before her. “Well, holy fucking shit. Look who it is,” she exclaimed.
“Congratulations,” I said. “How’s motherhood?”
“Great so far,” Wynne replied, her flowing fountain of curly blond locks bouncing in step with her head. She was tall and big-boned and seemed to go out of her way to downplay her naturally pretty facial features, as if being conventionally beautiful was somehow sexist—and conventional. “It’s real exciting shit, Teddy.” She cuffed me on the shoulder and added, “You should try it some time.”
As she shuttled me through the house, I spotted decorating choices that betrayed Sara’s thumbprint, like the sconce that was a close cousin of the one in our condo, or the slender vase that had become her trademark.
Miguel. If there was a reason for that gratuitous conversation piece of a name, I didn’t want to hear it. Miguel fixed a serious look on me, the whites of his eyes hypnotically watchful.
I looked at the child. “Good luck, Miguel. You’re going to need it.”
A cursory scan of the room revealed no trace of Sara.
“He’s really cute, Josie,” I said. The remark felt hollow without a more human display, so I pinched the kid’s cheek.
“He is cute, isn’t he?” Josie gushed with a grin that wrapped all the way around her trendy maroon spectacles. “I guess Sara’s coming later?”
“I guess,” I said, pulling out my phone and thumbing a quick text.
“I’m so glad you’re here, Teddy,” Josie said, petting my chest to show me just how glad.
The trip, she told me, had been a blissfully exhausting ordeal. Initially, Miguel was less than overjoyed to be handed to this pair of ghosts, and he spent the first couple of days bawling his way from one nap to the next. But holed up in a hotel room for a week with these new mommies of his, he soon got to thinking they weren’t half bad, wooing him as they were with Elmo puppets, Cheerios, toy phones, and unreasonable quantities of love. The jet lag, sleep deprivation, and capsized routines could have taken a harsher toll on Josie and Wynne, who were in their late forties and thus somewhat less elastic than most new parents, but what they lacked in youth they made up for in zest. They were the happiest fucking mess you ever did see.
“Sara told me the big news,” Josie said. She was smiling at the baby, so much so that I thought maybe Miguel was the one with the news. “The band? The album?”