Thank You, Goodnight

by Andy Abramowitz

  The remark simultaneously filled me with words and robbed me of them. I wanted to confess. I wanted to tell her that I hadn’t always been such a good friend, that my hot mess of feelings about her had long ago caused me to single-handedly bring down the curtain on this band. But that was before I learned the lesson revealed to me in Bic’s studio all summer. Before I realized that if our first two albums were about the youthful disturbances of desire, claiming what the universe owed me through the simple act of showing my God-given entitlement to it by slinging a guitar strap around my neck, this third album was about finding my way back, reclaiming myself. It was about looking into familiar faces and being worthy of them. Yes, I’d had feelings for Mack—destructive, consuming feelings, as feelings often are. Feelings that had pitched the band into a ravine on music’s highway. But that was before I realized that I loved Mackenzie Highsider the way everybody loves the sight of an old friend—and that that hardly tasted like a letdown.

  The door opened behind us and Colin’s head of confused gray hair peeked out.

  “So this is where the party is,” he boomed.

  I’d confess to Mack later. If I still needed to make amends.

  “I’m going to refresh,” I told them, pointing to my only partially depleted beer bottle and yielding them the sidewalk.

  The first thing I saw when I was back inside was Jumbo lumbering toward me, a cheeky grin smeared all across his face. He was swaying as if afflicted with some inner ear disorder.

  I looked at the fool. Yes, he was a cheese-doodle party yutz who always had some unseemly indiscretion up his sleeve, but he was my cheese-doodle party yutz. Sooner or later, I had to accept that.

  He had something important to tell me. He just had that look. It was going to be something irksomely corny, a hackneyed gush about the odds we’d overcome to make history. Perhaps a strained comparison to some monumental rock act (We’re basically the Velvet Underground!) or an incoherent military contextualization (It’s like the War of 1812 all over again! Wait—who’d we play in that war? The Mexicans?). Whatever it was, it would deftly illustrate how Jumbo always completely missed the point of everything.

  He got right up into my face, bearing down on me with a nose packed unevenly with cartilage and nostrils bursting with more hair than anyone could need.

  “Mingus, I got news for you: I know how you struggle with me. You want to be repulsed by me, but you’re just not.”

  “I got news for you: I think I am.”

  “We go too far back. Our paths run deep. It’s almost as if we just can’t escape each other.”

  “It sure does feel that way sometimes.”

  He punched my biceps. “We’re the same. Just a couple of Philly boys who live and breathe music, both of us the product of broken homes.”

  “My parents got divorced when I was in my midtwenties. I had a wife of my own at the time.”

  “I like to think of it this way,” he continued; I noticed a dewy moisture dripping from the tangled undergrowth on his head. “If you and I were riding around in a car and I suddenly suspected that you were an impostor, not the real Teddy Tremble that I know and love, there would be literally hundreds of questions I could ask you to scope out if you were you or not. I could ask you the color of the front door of the house I grew up in. Or the name of the hotel in Madrid where I got food poisoning—the first time, not when we went back and I got gout. Or about the time I got off a plane in Houston and immediately called you to remind me why I’d flown there. And if you didn’t know any of those things, I’d know you were a fake.” He paused for a slurp of his drink. “That’s the kind of history we have, bro.”

  “Is this something you spend time worrying about? Being stuck in a car with an impostor?”

  He nodded resolutely. “Shit, yeah! Ever since I was a kid. I was always afraid that the people in the front seat weren’t my real parents, that they were pods or carbon copies of my real parents, and they were kidnapping me to a carbon copy of my home. They’d act like my real parents, but they were really impostors. It terrified me.”

  “But James”—I don’t know why I played along; it was a night for playing along—“if some nice imposter parents brought you home to a nice impostor house and sent you to an impostor school with all your impostor friends, it wouldn’t really matter, would it?”

  He placed a fatherly hand on my shoulder and massaged it with his beefy paw. “What’s real is real, Mingus. You know that better than anyone.”

  * * *

  I snagged a fresh Sierra Nevada from a cocktail waitress and took a seat next to Warren. The merriment at the Plum was now on the downswing, each of us detectably wearying of the crowd. Warren was locking horns with the obnoxious little dope from the label, the one who’d annoyed Mackenzie by fetishizing her first name. The drummer making a sport out of disagreeing with him on just about every guitar hero was cliché: Clapton is God, Eddie Van Halen has the fastest fingers in rock, and so forth. Warren wanted to know why nobody ever mentioned Knopfler. Garcia. Prince. How come the best piano pounders were always Elton or Billy Joel, never Ray Charles or Bruce Hornsby?

  Through the glass, I watched Mack and Colin out on the sidewalk. They’d melted into a familiar ease, like high school sweethearts who’d run into each other at the twentieth reunion. I could tell they were taking comfort in the grip of each other’s eyes, relishing the sound of each other’s voices. I started looking forward to the train ride home so I could slide into the crisp sheets and fold into Sara.

  My ears continued to bear witness to the puffy-egoed buffoon kicking up a name-dropping hailstorm on Warren: “. . . but that’s just Noel [Gallagher]. He’s actually an okay guy, just misunderstood. . . . Conor [Oberst] and I disagree on almost everything, but hey, he’s a fucking genius, so what are you gonna do? I told him years ago that he’d taken Bright Eyes as far as it could go, but would he listen to me? . . . So Ri [Rihanna] was out with us—we were at somebody’s place up in the Hills—and she’s a little drunk at this point, all over me, and I’m like, ‘Ri, babe, you know this can’t happen . . .’ ”

  Warren was supposed to be impressed by all this, but Warren doesn’t do impressed very well. He was reclining with the palms of his hands on the back of his head, a POW on the march.

  “. . . don’t get me started on Axl. He tried to fuck me over and nobody fucks me over. I threw him out of the building—literally threw his ass out. I was like, ‘You are done, man. You are fucking done! And if you ever pull that shit with me again, I will knock your dick in the dirt!’ ”

  Warren shifted toward me in whispered sidebar. “ ‘Dick in the dirt’? Isn’t that what the principal says to Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club?”

  “I don’t think he was the principal,” I corrected. “He was just a teacher.”

  “Just a teacher, huh?”

  “. . . and I’ve always told Keith that ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ just doesn’t work on Beggars Banquet. It’s all wrong for that album. He’ll never admit it—you know Keith—but he knows I’m right . . .”

  “I can’t listen to this shit anymore,” Warren mumbled, and he bolted up out of his chair to hunt down more flan.

  That’s when Sonny Rivers smuggled himself into the party. He tried not to make a fuss about it, and the man dropped into the chair next to me before I could diagnose the chorus of barks, whoops, and hollers that his arrival had wrought. He slapped my knee and said, “I can’t stay.”

  That sentence was all it took for the din to die down. It was never Sonny’s intention to silence a room, but you just knew that he could be in twenty other places more happening than this, and damned if he wasn’t here.

  A server attempted to take Sonny’s drink order, but he declined.

  “I was hoping to tip a glass,” he said to me, every ear at the party tuning in. “Turns out I don’t have time.” He needed to make a flight back to LA that
left in an hour. He had two meetings tomorrow, one about his possible involvement in the new Wilco record, the other about a long-delayed project with Mavis Staples that was finally getting off the ground.

  Even Alaina, stroking the curved stem of her martini glass, fixed her eyes on the legend in the flesh.

  “I’m done with this project,” he declared, leaning over the table in a gravelly broadcast. “Everybody else here gets to live with it, hopefully for a good long while, but there’s nothing left for me to do, so I move on to the next one. That’s the game.”

  He started scratching the top of his head. “Let’s talk straight. Nobody in this band writes like Dylan, nobody sings like Otis Redding, and none of you got Jimi Hendrix chops. That’s not this band. You don’t look like Bon Jovi, you don’t move like Jagger, and God help us all if we ever see you in tight pants. In other words, Farber’s got her hands full.”

  Chuckling filled the room, and even Alaina issued a catlike grin. I, however, was hoping Sonny might cut it short. No need to emphasize the deluge of marketing complications we posed to the poor folks saddled with the task of selling us.

  “That’s why it took some serious balls to do what you did. Serious balls. I know you guys have wet your shorts every step of the way thinking you were going to get laughed at. Laughed at by music fans all over the world. Laughed at by the press. Laughed at by your families, your friends, your neighbors. And laughed at by that old gray-headed motherfucker right there”—his finger found Colin leaning against a mirrored wall—“who still thinks he knows best.” Colin adjusted his tie for show.

  “I’ve listened to this record many times,” Sonny intoned. “On airplanes, in my car, my living room. Every kick drum, every guitar lick, every harmony vocal. It’s not a perfect record, but I can tell you with a straight face that you are most definitely not going to get laughed at.” He delivered the palest wink in my direction. “There are people in this room who’ve heard me say this before, but I’m going to say it again: I’ve made many records that nobody loved, but I’ve never made a record that I didn’t love.”

  Sonny’s certification was as close to an opiate as I could ask for. My eyes drifted around the table, then around the room, and I experienced something resembling fulfillment.

  Sonny gave the table a spirited bang. “I think I know what happens next with this band, but it’s your rodeo now, so it doesn’t matter what I think.”

  With that, he stood and issued a clipped, economical nod to his driver, a tall man in a black suit standing stiffly by the door. As Sonny got to his feet, the gathering whirred back to life, chatter flaring up instantaneously as though Sonny had just unpoked the pause button on his stereo.

  As I sat there confused, I was darkened by Jumbo’s shadow. He was fingering whipped cream off the top of the pie slice he was holding. “Don’t listen to him, Mingus. You do write like Dylan and this body of mine was made for tight jeans.”

  Once breaking free of the herd of industry peeps who’d maneuvered in his path for a handshake, Sonny located me and lifted his chin—code for requesting a word. I negotiated the spasm of tables, chairs, and drunks until I reached him at the entrance.

  “Listen, I can’t miss this flight, but we need to talk.”

  I recoiled. “What about?”

  “Just something with the record. Something you should know.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “No time now. We’ll talk later.”

  “Sonny,” I began, my mood quickly calcifying. “Life is suspenseful enough.”

  He grinned. “Isn’t it though?”

  “Two seconds. Two seconds isn’t going to make a difference on the highway this time of night.”

  “It’s funny when you panic for no reason,” he said.

  “Is it for no reason? Just tell me—good or bad?” Good and bad seemed tidy enough concepts from which to choose.

  “Calm yourself. It’s not a bad thing, it’s not a good thing; it’s just a thing.” He signaled through the glass to his driver now in the limo. “Tell you what—I’ll send you an e-mail from the plane. All will be revealed by the time I land.”

  “Come on, man. You can’t walk out of here with that. You’re kicking me when I’m down.”

  “We’re all down and we’re all being kicked,” he said with a smile. He was looking at me with a blend of patience and tranquility, like a man who could always find peace in the harrowing walls of the tempest. He knew that my life hadn’t yet brought me to that place. Worlds of education lay before me.

  “You ever hear of a guy called Sidney Bechet?” he asked. “Jazz musician?”

  I sighed through my nose. “Aren’t you tired of always being the guy with the parable?”

  “It comes naturally. Now Sidney Bechet was one of the first jazz soloists, played a lot of instruments—sax, clarinet. He was from New Orleans, so he spent some time with Satchmo. The story goes that one time he was giving a student some advice about the tone and voicing of his instrument. Sidney wanted to push this guy, really see what he had. So he says to his student, ‘I’m going to give you one note today. See how many ways you can play that note—growl it, smear it, flat it, sharp it, do anything you want to it. That’s how you express your feelings in this music. It’s like talking.’ ”

  I nodded restlessly. “Okay.”

  “Are you hearing that?”

  “Yeah, one note,” I said, fluttering with impatience.

  “Flat it, sharp it, smear it,” he repeated.

  “I get it. Sounds like a jazz solo to me.”

  “Sounds like life to me,” he said. “One note. Do anything you want with it.”

  I stared into the vast sweep of his eyes. “You know you could’ve told me your little secret in the time it took you to tell me this fairy tale.”

  “Remember what I said to you when you first brought these new songs to me. Be careful of these cunning plans of yours.”

  Suddenly, and for the life of me I couldn’t say why, I was on the verge of tears. “I’ve been as careful as the game allows.”

  “I wasn’t talking about then. I was talking about now.” Then he flashed an easy smile. “Evolution, man, evolution.”

  Before I could even begin to translate, he draped me in a hug. “I love you, motherfucker.”

  Then he smuggled himself back out of the restaurant, taking with him a good chunk of the firm ground I’d traveled so far to stand on.

  CHAPTER 24

  It was after midnight when I slogged off the musty local and onto the platform at 30th Street Station. My leather jacket felt light against the chill that had settled in for the night, but I was too busy brooding over Sonny’s words.

  Sara surprised me, waiting at the top of the escalator as I ascended from the track. She saw me, both of us amid a smattering of late-night passengers, and smiled feebly.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  One hand clutched a cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee while the other bore into the pocket of her stylish navy windbreaker with the slightly off-center zipper. “I wasn’t sleeping and I saw your text about training home. I decided to take a walk.”

  “I don’t like you hanging out in an empty train station in the middle of the night.”

  She shrugged, as if having survived the adventure mooted my complaint. She hooked our arms together and we began to amble out of the desolate concourse.

  Then a voice came from behind. “Teddy? Is that you?”

  I turned and found myself looking at Marty Kushman, my former colleague at Morris & Roberts. “Marty.”

  “Hey, Teddy,” he said, giving my hand a friendly shake.

  Marty was a soft-spoken, perennially sixtyish duck of a man, well liked by peers, clients, and judges. The last conversation I’d had with him was when I gave notice.

  “So good to see you, Sara.” />
  Marty remembered people’s names. He and Sara had crossed paths at maybe a half-dozen firm events over the years.

  “What brings you here this time of night?” he asked me.

  “Oh, just coming back from New York,” I answered vaguely.

  “We must’ve been on the same train.” He held his briefcase down in front of him, gripping the handle with both hands, his pinstripe suit cloaked under a trench coat.

  “Late night for you too,” I commented.

  “A mediation ran over. Took a long time to get nowhere.”

  I grunted in a collegial, knowing sort of way that I knew one day soon would feel phony.

  “So, I’ve heard whisperings about a career change for you,” Marty said.

  When I quit, I hadn’t supplied a reason, instead offering cloudy mumblings about it being time to move on. I knew nobody would be heartbroken anyway.

  “How’d you hear?”

  “Oh, I see your old man around town.”

  “I’m sure Lou had nothing but nice things to say.”

  Marty dipped his head diplomatically. “I think it’s terrific. I wish you all the luck in the world. You think we kept you around because of your legal skills? We were the law firm with a rock star! Just ask my kids.”

  Sara and Marty shared a knowing wink.

  “How’s everything at the shop?” I asked.

  “Same place it’s always been. I imagine you miss it terribly.”

  I resisted a sarcastic quip. “I think the firm and I will do just fine without each other.”

  “I take it it’s going well then.”

  “It is. It’s going well.”

  “That’s terrific. I look forward to buying the CD.” CDs. How quaint.

  Suddenly, the cavernous hall vibrated with a voice over the PA system announcing the departure of a southbound train.

  “It’s late, guys, I’ll let you go,” Marty said. “But it was great to see both of you.” Then he reached out and touched my arm. “And Teddy, good luck with everything, but if you’re ever looking to get back into the law, I hope you’ll call me.” He smiled at Sara and shuffled off toward the taxi line.