Thank You, Goodnight (18 page)

He started up the aisle toward the auditorium doors.

“What about me?” I said, trailing him. “You think I was sitting on my ass eating Ho Hos, looking for something to do, when you called and told me to go to London? Fucking London, man.”

“I didn’t think you’d go, fool.”

We paraded through the doors and entered the school lobby. It was deserted save for a nervous-looking boy, backpack straps over both shoulders, texting with his phone held up to his face. Warren asked him if he had a ride home, and with a pubescent fidget, he said he did.

Once we were alone in a dim corridor, I grabbed Warren’s arm and pulled him to a stop. “One drink, man. Just one drink.”

“Hell no. I am not going to sit down and get pestered for an hour about what has to be the most asinine, most juvenile, and the most downright stupid idea I’ve ever heard in my entire life. And take note of where I work. I hear stupid ideas all day.” He paused. “Teddy, listen to me. I’m not trying to step on your dreams. If you think playing music again will make you happy, you should go and do it, one hundred percent. I support your rebellious spirit and I promise I will be rooting for you. But because Teddy has always been all about Teddy, you’re confusing what you want with what I want. I don’t want to be a musician again.”

“That’s a big fat lie. You’re a goddamn music teacher.”

“Do you know what I do when a student is giving me grief and I just can’t take it anymore? I walk away.” Warren’s voice lowered, and his eyes drooped sorrowfully. “Teddy, please don’t make me walk away from you.”

“Just let me buy you a drink. One drink. We can go somewhere close.” A mischievous grin pushed its way through. “Real close.”

He looked on warily as my hand disappeared into my jacket pocket and extracted a long-necked bottle. His head swiveled left and right, film noir style, checking if there was anyone else to witness this atrocity. “Did you bring wine into my school?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

The bottle that emerged from my jacket contained a red-brown
liquid, the color that a desperate actress might dye her hair in a stab at self-reinvention.

“Bourbon.” He was aghast. “You brought bourbon into a high school.”

“Doesn’t it just sicken you as an educator?”

What I’d smuggled in was not your run-of-the-mill piss in a bottle where one sip makes you want to chug a homeless man’s vomit just to get the taste out of your mouth. My agent of seduction was Eagle Rare Kentucky bourbon, Warren’s favorite. Not the ten-year swill either; the Antique Collection. Ninety-proof, aged in charred oak barrels for seventeen years. You feel a little more hillbilly just taking its narcotic embers into your nostrils.

He gave a deep sigh, faltering in the presence of kryptonite. “You didn’t.”

“I did. And I didn’t even bring glasses.”

*       *       *

I used to inhabit a universe without rules. For an unhealthily long spell, speed limits, closing times, that thing about not going into the clubhouse to meet the players—none of that applied to me. The Super Bowl was never sold out. Restaurants were never booked. Even the concept of a clock had a looser application to me. I was encouraged to show up to places at specified times, but if I was ten, fifteen, ninety minutes late, people smiled and did their best not to look inconvenienced. Such echelons of deference will go to someone’s head, and despite all the humbling experiences I’ve had since, I couldn’t help but continue to carry some of that entitlement around with me. Still, it seemed well over the line to be dribbling a basketball and sipping whiskey in a high school gym long after dark. I felt under imminent threat of
getting in trouble
, even if I’d probably aged out of the jurisdiction of the principal. (Are we ever beyond the jurisdiction of the principal?)

“Aren’t we going to get busted?” I asked, as Warren sank a foul shot.

“Who’s we? You’re not a student and you’re not a teacher, so you’re not getting sent to the office and you’re not getting fired.”

“You’re not really a teacher though,” I posited, as he snatched the bottle from my hand. “You teach band and art. Aren’t you sort of expected to treat rules with contempt?”

Teachers are not one-size-fits-all. They’re pigeonholed, fairly or not but mostly fairly, depending on what they teach. You stared up at those dreary souls in class and pictured their weekends, trying not to feel sorry for them. On Saturday nights, science teachers sat at home and read magazines in an easy chair with public radio on in the background. English teachers had other English teachers over to play Boggle and trade salty barbs speckled with Joseph Conrad allusions. Gym teachers got shitfaced on Bud Light at a friend’s corner bar. Math teachers cooked for, and spoke to, their cats.

But the music teacher—he was a man of mojo. You and your friends would occasionally run into him out on the town. You’d catch him on the street with his groovy wife and hipper-than-thou friends, and they’d all have excellent names. Meet my wife, Ocean. And these are my friends, Silas and Boo. He wouldn’t say goodbye either. He’d say Onward! or Peace on you. Then you and your buddies would spend an hour debating whether or not he was stoned. Did you see his eyes, man?

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Warren said, wiping a wet slurp onto his rolled-up sleeve. “My band teacher was a five-foot tightass who wore bow ties. And my art teacher was a semisenile battle-ax who went to school with my grandmother.”

For quite some time, we alternated taking shots and doing shots, dribbling the ball in and around the paint, our jumpers getting wilder, our layups increasingly off the mark as the smooth Eagle Rare glided through our bloodstreams and did its thing.

“How did you find that Tate exhibit anyway?” I asked him.

It had been on the field trip he chaperoned each year, he explained. A family that owned art galleries in New Hope had started a founda
tion that annually sent five students who possessed a “highly developed appreciation for art” to visit museums out of the country, where the art is obviously better. Kids had jetted to Paris to appreciate the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, to Amsterdam for the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum, to Florence, Rome, Berlin. This year was London.

“Must be nice,” I said. “None of my field trips had ever required a passport.”

“Nor mine. If we couldn’t get there in twenty minutes on a yellow bus, we weren’t going. But I gotta admit, when I saw that picture of you in the Tate, I was sorry I hadn’t taken it myself.” Warren cackled with callous joy. “
Faded Glory
. Classic.”

“Like you could pull that off,” I said. Warren’s harmless and mostly good-natured pranks were rarely executed with the necessary deft.

He bristled at the affront. “Are you kidding? Candid photos of you looking like an idiot? That’s shooting fish in a barrel.”

“You mean like Clark, your identical twin? Was that shooting fish in a barrel?”

Warren laughed. The man had once decided, for reasons that eluded all of us, to pretend he was his own identical twin. Groupies, waitresses, autograph seekers—to each and every one he would deny that he was the drummer for Tremble. Nah, I’m his brother, Clark, he’d say with a smirk.

“That was an awfully complicated way to have fun,” he allowed.

“Or when you decided to change the pronunciation of your last name?” One day he decreed that, effective immediately, his last name should be said with the accent on the second syllable. War-
ren
.

“That was a French thing. I still think I might be a little bit French.”

“Like your name isn’t enough of a joke.”

“What it lacks in creativity, it makes up in emphasis,” he stated.

He gave the basketball a serious bounce. It thwacked off the hardwood, surged high up toward the banners, and sailed down through the net with a breathy swish.

“Damn, Square!” I exclaimed.

He affected nonchalance. “Why does everybody always forget I’m black?”

Joining me on the bleachers, Warren snatched the bottle from my grasp. “Can’t say I’m surprised that a photo like that sent you careening into a midlife crisis. It’s like a switchblade right across this legacy of yours. Right? It leaves you no choice but to get back out there and rewrite history.”

“So you understand then?”

“Sure I understand. I just think it’s stupid. What have you got to be ashamed of ? You went where just about every kid with a guitar dreams of going. You’re not allowed to get older? You’re not allowed to sit in a restaurant and eat a goddamn taco? You’re even part Tex-Mex, aren’t you?”

“That’s a cuisine, not a nationality.”

“Whatever. Leave me alone.”

We sat in the gymnasium, polished in sweat and hazy from the booze. It didn’t seem like twenty years since I’d banged around the walls of a high school gym. Memory does that sometimes, jumbles things up, messes with your sense of chronology. Some moments linger in sharp focus, reminding us that they happened, reluctant to drift away because they suspect we need them.

Warren asked, “How’s Sara?”

“She’s good.”

Even if that was true, I wasn’t in much of a position to know for sure. We’d both been rather preoccupied lately.

“She’s been hanging out with her ex-husband,” I said.

“Really?”

“Yeah. He came out of the woodwork and asked for a divorce.”

“Well, that’s probably a good thing, right? Closure for them, closure for you two.”

The fact was, it hadn’t felt like anything was closing. It was more of a rattling of hinges. “I don’t know. I haven’t been around much. And she tends toward tight lips anyway.”

“That’s gotta be hard for her though,” Warren said.

“Sometimes it feels like I live with a ghost,” I said. “She’s like this presence I observe through dishes in the sink or impressions on a pillow. I won’t see her, but I’ll know she was there because of a blouse slung over a chair.”

“Maybe she’d say the same about you. Except for the blouse. Or maybe not except for the blouse.”

“I hate to say it, but she may just be happy to have me out of the house.”

“Well, it sounds like you’re being the supportive fellow I would’ve expected,” he said, slapping my back.

I forced myself to my feet. The dizzying disconnect between my senses and my brain’s processing of them was now fully pronounced.

I staggered toward a red rubber dodge ball sitting in a far corner of the gym. It took forever to get there, what with the whiskey pushing the wall further and further away. When I’d finally retrieved it, I trudged back toward Warren and stood over him. Then I pulled the ball back behind my shoulder, poised to release it into his face.

“Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” he yelled, holding up his hands defensively.

“Join the band or you get it in the nose!”

“You throw that at me and I will kick your ass!”

“Warren War-
ren
!” I stood firm, ready to heave the ball at point-blank range. “I need you, damnit! We can do this!”

“Screw you, man! I have a goddamn life. Go get one yourself.”

My throwing arm quivered. “Don’t make me bring the heat.”

“I promise I will kill you. You will die.”

“Join me, young Skywalker. Together we can rule the galaxy!”

“You need therapy.”

“And that stupid strip of a beard makes your chin look like it’s swinging in a hammock. You have a fucking hammock on your face.”

In a sudden blast of motion, he sprang up from the bench and hurtled himself at me like a linebacker. With a wallop not dissimilar to the one delivered by Heinz-Peter back in Shangri-La, Warren tack
led the shit out of me. As I came down on my back under his weight, I learned why they call it hardwood. I didn’t come close to getting off a throw.

“Get the fuck off !” I yelled, struggling against his lean network of muscles. The tussle only ended when he finally rolled over and writhed in inebriated laughter. The alcohol did little to cushion the cracking of my spine against the floor, and for a few searing seconds I thought I might need a stretcher. But soon we were both lying there, catching our breath, staring up at the artificial incandescence of the ceiling.

And then Warren started singing. In a low register and an unrelenting operatic vibrato, he began to belt out “It Feels like a Lie.”

“Shut up,” I whispered, as his gratingly tremulous baritone boomed up to the pennants.

The sound of that song was pure mockery, a symbol of my years of creative bankruptcy, a sonic taunt that practically dared me back into the ring. But on he sang in this new and intolerable vibrato. He sounded like a goat.

As I gazed up into the fuzzy gymnasium lights, it was all starting to seem familiar. I was flat on my back, I was drunk, the room was spinning, and I’d had some sort of physical altercation.

“You know what I think?” I began, once the last echo of Warren’s voice had faded. “I think that on the day you die, you regret all the things you wanted to do but didn’t try hard enough at.” I sat up and looked at him. “Do you know what I mean?”

Warren grunted without so much as lifting his head. “I think on the day you die, you regret all the homeless people you walked past and didn’t buy a sandwich for.” He frowned at me sideways. “Self-centered dickhead.”

*       *       *

Moments or hours later, we were sitting in my car. We’d staggered out of the building to fill our lungs with fresh air, and I’d shepherded us
toward the visitors’ parking lot. My car was the only one around, yet it still seemed like a minor miracle that we found it.

Like zombies, we sat in the front seat with the windows down, the stereo casting my rough demos out into the sleeping world. Warren rubbed his beard and looked faintly troubled but substantially drunk. After three songs, I shut off the radio. Just when I thought Warren might’ve passed out, he up and spoke, his voice a slow, drained grumble. “You’re putting me in a difficult spot, Teddy.”

“Yeah? How so?”

“Well, for one thing, those might be the best three songs you’ve ever written. They blow everything else away, even the hit.”

“I never liked ‘It Feels like a Lie,’ ” I admitted. “The song itself felt like a lie. It wasn’t me at all. I would’ve flat-out refused to play it, but I had a band to feed.”