Thank You, Goodnight (13 page)

As for why he was doing all of this in Baltimore, he told me he’d relocated for Sandy, a social worker he met on a plane and to whom he gave permission to eat him should they happen to crash in the Andes. (Unlikely, as the flight was Philly to Atlanta.) “I fell head over heels, man,” he said wistfully. “She scratched me right where I itched.” But the love affair had clearly turned sour at some point, seeing as how Sandy was now scratching some other guy where he itched.

“As passionate as I am about my music, the band is actually more of a sideline at this point,” he explained bravely.

“Oh?”

“I went back to school, Mingus. Got my degree. I’m a midwife.”

“A midwife? But you’re a man.”

“It’s a same-sex term.”

“You mean unisex?”

“Yeah, that one.”

It didn’t sound unisex.

“All practitioners of midwifery are known as midwives,” he informed
me with the inflection of someone who’d memorized the manual. “We’re respected independent contractors in the health care profession.”

“Huh.”

“We help women have healthy pregnancies and then, when it’s showtime, we guide them through a natural childbirth.”

Jumbo’s presence at an actual baby delivery seemed as discordant an image as there could be. “You don’t have to go to med school or something for that?”

“Nope,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

“Well. Good for you, James.”

“Yeah. Just don’t eat lunch before a childbirth.” Then he fake retched.

That seemed as good a time as any to cut to the chase. “So Jumbo, there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I’m not just passing through.”

We were then interrupted by the sound of the door opening at the top of the stairs. “Jim? You down there?” a man’s voice called.

“Yes indeedy.”

Plodding footsteps advanced down the stairs, and soon a severely thin man, midforties and balding, stood at the base of the steps, a red rugby shirt hanging off his scrawny frame. He was carrying a little girl who instantly leapt out of his arms and bolted for a Fender acoustic propped up against an amp. Jumbo looked on with a smile as the toddler started scraping her fingers across the strings, chiming out an open chord over and over.

“Sounds great, Ingrid. Your practice is really paying off,” Jumbo said. “Israel, meet Teddy. Teddy, Israel.”

I shook his bony hand. The man was fucking emaciated.

“Tremble, right?” Israel said with a point and a squint.

I nodded.

“Great to meet you. We’re obviously all big fans in this house.”

There was nothing obvious about it, considering that the band’s
guitarist used to be married to this man’s wife and had taken up residence under his stairs.

“And this little princess,” Jumbo said, scooping up the girl and tickling her tummy, “is Ingrid. Ingrid, can you say hi to Teddy?”

I said, “Hi, Ingrid.”

The kid said nothing.

Then Israel turned serious. “So, Jim, I just got a call and it looks like I’ve got to run into the office for a couple of hours. Sandy took Zed to the movies and I don’t know if you guys are busy or were just going to be hanging out here . . . You know I hate to ask.”

“We don’t mind, right, Mingus? Ingrid can tag along.” Jumbo had now inverted the two-year-old so that she was dangling upside down and squealing with laughter.

“You sure? I can always take her with me,” Israel said, staring uneasily at his kid, whose head was swinging mere inches above the concrete floor. Jumbo was now shaking her like a can of spray paint. This Israel fellow must have been completely out of options to leave his toddler with a repeat offender of his “no dope in the house” policy.

“No biggie, man,” Jumbo said.

“I really appreciate it, Jim. And please, just be extra careful and—”

“Don’t worry, Is. We’ll be fine. Teddy and I were just going to catch up a little. Maybe we’ll take her down to the Inner Harbor. What do you think, Mingus? It’s a nice day out there. We’ll pack sandwiches.”

“Sure.” I smiled tight as a lash. “I love boats.”

*       *       *

“He looks like he’s being treated for something, that’s all I meant,” I said, as I buckled myself into the passenger seat of the great sandstone minivan. The sticky garage air smelled of mulch, motor oil, and bicycle tires.

“I suppose he is thin,” Jumbo allowed.

“He’s rickety.”

“I know he’s a big cabbage guy,” Jumbo said thoughtfully. “That might have something to do with it.” He was leaning through the
open door, struggling with the straps of Ingrid’s car seat. “Sorry about having to take the whaler. My Chevelle isn’t great for kids.”

It may have, at one point, been charmingly quirky that Jumbo drove a Chevelle, a car out of print since the seventies. But now, it couldn’t have been more than a rusty, protective covering for a disgruntled muffler.

Jumbo slid behind the wheel and started rifling through a disorganized flock of keys. As he coiled his burly frame toward the rear and started backing the van down the driveway, wild giggling erupted from the backseat. “She cracks up every time I do that,” he said bemusedly. “All I have to do is turn my head around to back up and she thinks it’s hysterical.”

“Well, reverse is the funniest of all gears,” I said.

We’d barely reached the bottom of the driveway when Jumbo slammed on the brake.

“Christ!” he yelled, squinting into the rearview mirror. “I almost killed him!”

He checked on Ingrid, but the abrupt stop had barely registered, so engaged was she with a frayed picture book illustrated with golden-locked princesses.

Jumbo opened his door and began ambling down the driveway. “I didn’t even see you, Dad,” I heard him say.

Dad? I unlatched my door and stuck out my head. At the foot of the driveway, standing next to an antediluvian Oldsmobile, was a senior citizen in a drab-green jacket.

“It’s not your weekend, Dad,” I thought I heard Jumbo explain. “Did you forget?”

The man at the end of the driveway was stooped over with his arms wrist-deep in the pockets of his trousers—there’s no other word for that variety of pants; it’s just trousers—periodically lifting his expectant eyes toward his son. Jumbo laid a gentle hand on his back as the old man contemplated the curb. A miscommunication was being sorted out.

Then Jumbo pointed at me. “Hey, Dad, look. There’s Teddy Tremble. Mingus, you remember my old man.”

A brittle smile raised the edges of Elmer Jett’s unkempt gray mustache, and we exchanged waves.

Jumbo’s parents were divorced by the time we’d reached our early teens, but his father refused to be a stranger. Aside from sharing a roof with his son every other weekend and for two months over the summer, the old man attended all school events, including the close call that was Jumbo’s graduation. He showed up at his son’s Little League games to watch him sway dreamily in right field with his glove on the wrong hand. And for the entire month of July, they rented a Winnebago and embarked on a road trip dotted with Americana’s greatest hits—Mount Rushmore, the Grand Canyon, Route 66. July was the only time I ever felt envious of Jumbo.

When the father-son confab reached its natural conclusion, Jumbo gave his dad an affectionate pat on the shoulder, and the geezer sloped back toward his beat-up ride.

“What was that all about?” I asked once Jumbo was back in the van, slinging the seat belt across his drooped chest.

“Oh, he’s just a little confused, that’s all. He thought it was his weekend.”

“His weekend for what?”

“To hang out,” he replied, pulling out of the driveway and waving one final toodle-oo at his father. “He still honors the custody arrangement. You gotta give him credit. It’s been, like, thirty years and still, every other weekend.”

I combed Jumbo’s face for even a speck of irony.

“Hasn’t anyone told him his obligations ended about twenty years ago?”

“Don’t go all lawyer on me, Mingus.”

“No one has custody of a thirty-eight-year-old, Jumbo. You have custody of yourself. I’m not saying a little parental guidance would hurt in your case, but you no longer need a court order. You can sleep over at your dad’s any time you want. Concepts of custody don’t apply anymore.”

Jumbo flashed me a tolerant grin. “They do to him.”

He then jerked some knobs on the dash and the AC roared to life like the afterburners on an F-14 Tomcat. Arctic wind huffed into the Monster Truck Show–vehicle. Within seconds I was shivering, positioning my body to avoid the streams of frigid air.

“What are we doing here, transporting a liver?”

“I’m kind of a worrier when it comes to temperature and kids,” said the father of none. “You can suffocate on hot air much quicker than on cold air. Bet you didn’t know that.”

I didn’t. Because it’s ridiculous.

*       *       *

In the fish-tanged air of the Baltimore harbor, I watched Ingrid spin about on a merry-go-round, clutching the reins of a plastic horse as my once and future guitar player held her steady. I didn’t imagine that any band had ever been launched under these conditions, and in that respect, I suppose we’d already made rock history.

As far as I was concerned, small children were pretty useless unless you wanted to preboard a plane. Parents always looked so miserable. I pitied them when I ran headlong into the interminable drudgery of their weekend grocery outings. They all looked like if you offered them immediate legal dissolution of the family, each member being handed a hobo stick and fifty bucks—“Good luck to you, son.” “Same to you, Dad.”—they’d go for it without a second thought. Young mothers seem to find catastrophe everywhere, even in the lunch tray that their husbands dared to bring over.
You got Connor a hot dog? Connor doesn’t eat hot dogs!
And the husband stares back at her with a mountain of desolation, thinking, I took this girl to one fraternity formal twenty years ago. How did things go so horribly wrong?

“So, about that thing I wanted to discuss,” I said when my companions had disembarked the ride. Jumbo had begun to tear off easily digestible quantities of turkey and bread and was handing them to Ingrid.

“Yeah, man, talk to me.”

“Well.” I searched for the right words; they didn’t exist. “There’s no other way to put this. I’m considering reviving the band.”

He stopped cold. “No shit?” His eyes shot to Ingrid. “I mean, no shoot?”

“I’ve written some new songs. I want to record an album. Sonny Rivers may produce, schedule permitting.”

“Sonny Rivers! Holy shit, man! That’s awesome! I mean, holy shoot!”

Fortunately, the little girl was too preoccupied for the naughty word to register. Some fur-suited characters were gathering at a makeshift stage, and Ingrid was trying to decide if they were terrifying or the most wonderful things she’d ever seen.

“I never thought I’d be doing this again, but some things have happened to me over the past few months. I’ll explain everything when we sit down and talk, but for the first time in a long time—”

Jumbo interrupted my backstory with unequivocal support. “Dude, I’m in. Definitely. Count me in.”

“Hold on. I want you to think about it.”

“Don’t need to.”

“Yes, you do. I’m talking about a commitment here. Taking risks, possibly leaving jobs. I’m not asking if you want an oatmeal cookie.”

“Mingus, you don’t have to tell me what’s what. I was in the biz, remember?”

All too well. “I don’t want issues, James. I’ve had enough of your issues.”

“I’m a lot more responsible than I used to be. Hello? Exhibit A?” He gestured proudly to Ingrid. As if keeping a toddler alive for a few hours erased decades of waywardness and debauchery.

“You’re a great musician, Jumbo. I wish you weren’t, but you are, and that’s why I’m here. But we’re not twenty-three anymore. I want to do this the right way, like adults. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

“Of course.”

“Well, just in case you don’t, I’m saying that I need to be able to count on you.”

“You can, dude.”

Just as it dawned on me that I was being told what I wanted to hear and that it was unfair to extract a promise that Jumbo was ill-equipped to deliver, our two-year-old companion suddenly shrieked and bolted in the direction of the costumed furballs. A bargain brand Big Bird had begun to juggle bowling pins before a mass of bewitched kids, and Ingrid would be damned if she was going to miss it.

“Ingrid!” Jumbo yelled. “Stay! Shit!”

As he pulled up anchor and gave chase, I almost had to look away. I don’t think I’d ever seen Jumbo run before, and there was something jarringly unnatural about it. It was like when they showed Kermit the Frog on a bike. It just didn’t look right. Who knew he had legs?

I followed my companions, shaking my head, my steps heavy with ambivalence.

Minutes later, we were all seated on abrasive concrete while a collection of teamless mascots and characters without a network—not-quite-Eeyore, Smokey the Bear’s inbred cousin—danced, cartwheeled, and wobbled on unicycles before captivated children and their wrist-checking parents.

I stared out into the harbor, watching sailboats make for the bay in slow motion. I had to do this, I reassured myself. This was necessary. Without Jumbo, more than anyone else, we were a different band, a lesser band. I needed him. I hated that I did, but I did.

I’d filled Sara in on this sorry road trip the night before. Armed with a bottle of Chianti, we’d walked three blocks to the Mediterranean BYO owned by clients of hers, expats from Cairo whose restaurant had been around forever despite never hosting more than a smattering of diners at any given time. The hostess led us to a table by the window, uncorked our wine, and allowed a stream of deep burgundy to tumble into our glasses, all the while recounting the chorus of compliments she and her husband had received about Sara’s deco
rating handiwork in their home. Soon afterward, a complimentary mezze platter of hummus, tzatziki, kalamata olives, and little cheese cubes surrounded by fallen dominos of grilled pita arrived at our table via a lovely olive-skinned young woman, the owners’ daughter. As we smiled her away from the table, I said to Sara, “So, I’m going down to Baltimore tomorrow to see Jumbo.” The night of my webcast with Sonny a week earlier had been the last we’d spoken of my musical fits and starts.