Thank You, Goodnight (22 page)

“Sorry I’m not anorexic,” she quipped. She was light and taut, like carrying an empty bookcase.

With Mack’s small feet in my hands—sleek Pumas with pink stripes on the sides—I was eye level with the back of her immaculately toned legs, still deepened with the trace of a summer tan. I tried not to stare too long at the hovering hemline of her olive cargo shorts.

“Are you high enough?” I called out, shifting my head to the side. I thought it untoward to speak directly into the space between her legs.

“I’m at the ledge,” she replied. “If you can boost me a little higher, I think I can lift the window. Can you give me a few more inches?”

I chuckled.

“Okay, that was gross,” she allowed.

Simulating a barbell curl, I raised Mack higher until she said, “That should do it.”

At the sound of wood sliding in a frame, I hazarded a glance upward, just in time to watch her legs sail out of my hands and through the window.

I was already in the car when she came bounding out the front door, one strap of a backpack over her shoulder. Something clicked in me at that exact moment. I guess you could say I fell in love with her, although there was so much to love about what was happening in those days and the many tomorrows that followed that it would be hard to parse out the particulars. I would come to think of that time as the best days of my life, and, on more than one occasion, I have wondered if she was the reason.

There was a lot about being the bassist in a successful band that she had to look past. She didn’t luxuriate in the fatuous dissection of the songs, the laboring over macro aspects of music. (“Suppose we introduce a low pump organ to really bring out the angst in the second verse”; “You can’t have two thematically similar songs, both in E minor. Are you insane?”) Nor was she in it for the camaraderie. To her, Jumbo, Warren, and I were like irritating brothers with whom she was trapped in the family sedan for a summer road trip. On a good day, and when she was so inclined, we rose in the ranks and became two-bit drug dealers who could connect her to the occasional joint. Although she was the most articulate of all of us, she had little tolerance for verbalizing what was best left said by the music. At band meetings, she was typically silent, eyeing us secretively from under her short shag haircut, finally offering input that didn’t sound like
input at all: “If you guys are done talking, can we just play the damn thing?”

*       *       *

With a glance at the clock on my condo wall, I realized time was getting tight. It was a five-hour trip out to Pittsburgh and I’d reserved for myself the last appointment of the day at the sex therapy offices of Mackenzie Highsider. Under the stream of a nervous shower, I allowed the conversation—the one that I’d been preparing for for years and that was now going to happen this afternoon—to unfold in my head.

I knew that Mack felt some complicity in the destruction of my marriage, a detail she seemed to struggle with until Tremble went on permanent hiatus and she didn’t have to face me every day. I fully expected that she’d nurtured a keen bitterness and resentment toward me, perhaps made all the worse by the gradual realization that maybe we were each other’s missed opportunities. If we hadn’t been caught that evening under such cheap and trashy circumstances, if we hadn’t been busted, who knows? Maybe we would’ve had a chance.

Mack was the least likely to join us on this second adventure, the least likely to speak to me, but I owed it to all of them to try to lasso her back into the fold. I’d misled them and screwed them over by guiding the band off track in ways they didn’t even know about. It was time I faced the music.

I was still wet when a visitor buzzed up from the lobby. A towel wrapped around my waist, I led a trail of footprints into the foyer and pressed the intercom. “Hello?”

“Mingus?” came the voice through metal static.

“Jumbo?”

“Mingus.”

“Jesus.”

There were good reasons underlying my policy of never answering unexpected calls, and there were consequences for violating it.
Soon Jumbo was standing in my living room in a Members Only windbreaker, nodding approvingly at my apartment and scratching his balls.

“Nice digs,” he said.

“Thanks. Say, James, what exactly the fuck are you doing here?”

He pulled a CD from his jacket pocket and held it out to me as if it were a million-dollar bill. “Some seriously cool shit on here, man. You’ve got to hear it.”

Partially due to his monomania, but mostly due to a really open calendar, Jumbo had crawled out of his meth lab of a living arrangement to share with me in person the fruits of his creative energies. He’d overdubbed some guitar parts on the demos I’d given him, and evidently didn’t think twice about hopping in the car for two hours to show up at my house unannounced to deliver them.

“Put it on,” he bade me. “Tell me what you think. I got some guitars in my trunk. We can jam out a bit. You want a beer?”

My jaw tightened. “Did you just offer me a beer in my own house? At nine thirty in the morning?”

He checked his Walgreens digital watch and frowned. “It feels later.”

At least he hadn’t come all this way to retrieve his pot stash, which, it just then occurred to me, was still buried beneath an Oasis disc in my glove compartment.

“Is your chickie around?” he asked.

“No, she’s at work. People work on Fridays. Everybody but us, apparently. Listen, Jumbo, it’s not a good day. I’ve got an appointment.”

“Oh yeah? Who with?”

“That really isn’t any of your business, is it?”

Distracted momentarily by our mint dish, he sloped over to the coffee table and began to unwrap a Life Saver. He then plopped himself down on the couch and unzipped his jacket, thereby revealing a Cheech and Chong
Up in Smoke
tee that cradled his spare tire. Then, to my horror but not to my surprise, he started clawing fiercely at his scrotum, gritting his teeth and squeezing his eyes shut in frantic pur
suit of some blistering itch. When the attack subsided, he looked up at me as if nothing had happened.

“You can’t just show up here, Jumbo. You should’ve called, like a normal person.”

“This appointment you’ve got today, is it medical?”

“It’s none of your goddamn—” There was no point in trying to wear each other down. He would hound me all day. “I’m going to see Mackenzie,” I blurted out.

“Well, that’s perfect! I’ll join you. We can talk to her together.”

“We could, except that you’re not coming, so we’ll have to talk to her separately.”

“How awesome is my timing?” he mused, unwrapping another mint. “So, where is Mack these days?”

I sighed. “Pittsburgh.”

“What’s she doing there?”

“She’s a sex therapist.”

His face lit up. “Get out!”

“No, you get out. Seriously. I’d like you to get out.”

Jumbo pitched backward into the sofa cushion. “So Mackenzie Highsider became a sex therapist. How about that.”

“We can’t all be midwives.”

Hands bulked into the pockets of his Wham!-era windbreaker, Jumbo hoisted himself off the sofa and pursued me as I dug an overnight bag out of the hall closet and stuffed it with a pair of jeans, a couple of shirts, underwear, and socks.

The sound of a grown man whining drifted over my shoulder. “Come on, man, let me come with you.”

“Absolutely not.”

“We’ll double-team her.” He winked. “Get it? That’s a sex therapy joke.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“I know what’s going on here, Mingus. You’re embarrassed to be seen with me.”

“Isn’t everybody? You never say the right thing, you look like Ronald McDonald . . .”

“I got news for you: How can you be ashamed of me if you asked me to join your band? We’re partners.”

“We’re not partners. We’re loosely affiliated. That’s how I like to think of it.”

I combed around the bathroom for toiletries amid Sara’s bathing products and facial creams. When I emerged, Jumbo was standing there looking pitiful and arguably homeless. “I came all this way.”

“Uninvited.”

“I’ve worked really hard on the songs, man. Really hard. Don’t you want to hear them?”

“Isn’t that what the disc is for?”

“But there’s a ton of shit I want to talk to you about. You know how I work. We need to listen to these songs together. My process is important.”

I heaved another grievous sigh. “Christ, Jumbo.”

The very thought of being caged up in a car with this man for five hours was reason enough to bag the whole thing and beg Marty Kushman for my job back. But Jumbo did have a point. There was a benefit to gliding across the state together, our music flooding out of the stereo. Insights could be shared. Ideas exchanged. Would a new Tremble album have an acoustic feel? Would there be the pounding piano or the swell of a Doorsy organ? Did a certain song cry out for a cello?

And while the very sight of Jumbo sent my blood pressure into the stroke zone, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of pity for the man. I’d be sending him home to his troll-like existence beneath his ex-wife’s stairs. No wonder this bonehead was up for anything—a road trip across Pennsylvania, a career change.

The other truth was that the prospect of being in the same room with Mackenzie was eating me alive. If Jumbo was nothing else, he was a distraction. (He was often nothing else.) His presence in the car
would keep my head occupied—with musical banter, with his boundless inventory of inanities and things in need of fixing. Was I really so far gone that I was considering Jumbo Jett to be a source of moral support as I ground away on that endless treadmill of the Pennsylvania Turnpike?

I marched back to the closet, retrieved a frayed duffel bag, and threw it at him. “You can borrow a T-shirt and sweatshirt or something, but you’re on your own for a toothbrush.”

He pumped his fist. “Awesome! I love you, Mingus. I really do love you.”

“Please don’t ever say that to me again. Especially alone in my condo.”

“You’re making the right call here, man. I think we’re going to look back on this little trip as a defining moment for this band!”

“That’s wonderful. Just meet me downstairs.”

“You got it.” He bolted out of the room. Over his shoulder, he yelled, “Just gotta get my dad out of the car.”

“Fine, whatever. Wait! What?” I charged into the foyer. He was already halfway out the door. “What did you just say?”

He stood there, blinking at me, lacking the wherewithal even to look sheepish.

“James. Is your father here?”

“Sorry, dude,” he said with a shrug. “It’s his weekend.”

CHAPTER 13

J
umbo stuffed himself into the passenger seat, cranked the volume on the stereo up to deaf, and announced that he’d be on the lookout for a Waffle House. His father, by karmic contrast, seemed perfectly content to sit in the back and stare mildly out the window like an eroding stone.

At the first rest stop outside Philly, I got out to fill the tank while Jumbo bounded into the convenience store in search of whatever it was he considered breakfast. Before I had the chance to drive away and leave him there—had his old man objected, I doubt I would’ve heard him anyway—Alaina called. The sight of her name on the caller ID only added to my mounting collection of anxieties, as I assumed she was calling about the demos.

“Hello?” I said.

There was silence on the other end.

“Hello?” I repeated, louder this time. “Alaina?”

After another moment of dead air, she finally spoke. “That was me being speechless.”

“Ah,” I said.

“I admit, when you wandered into my office the other day with a CD in your hand, I thought early senility. I didn’t want to represent you; I wanted to make sure you got home without getting hit by a car.
I would’ve let you down easy, I really would’ve. I would’ve suggested the senior tour, told you to pack your guitar and pointed you in the direction of a nice friendly resort in the Caribbean. Nobody enjoys a washed-up musician like island tourists with faces full of shrimp and pineapple. I was already picturing you in your Tommy Bahamas and khaki shorts, strumming ‘Margaritaville’ in a tiki lounge.”

“Those places aren’t me. The drinks are all watered down.”

“But Teddy, my little macaroon, we don’t need the tropics just yet. These songs knocked me out cold. I don’t know where you found this material. I’ve never considered you particularly poetic or deep or even terribly deft with a melody. But this is some serious booty here. You treat these songs right in the studio and I’ll get people interested in this—and that’s without my having to remove a single article of clothing.”

“I’m glad you like it,” I said.

“What’s the one where you sing ‘hiding in plain sight’ over and over?”

“ ‘Hiding in Plain Sight.’ ”

“Interesting. I’ve been humming that one so much, I thought it was a real song.”

“It’s not.”

“You’ll do a record, we’ll explore some licensing opportunities with the networks, maybe get you on an HBO soundtrack or something. I’m going to make shit happen. In the meantime, a gym membership wouldn’t kill you.”

“You don’t think you’re jumping the gun here?” I asked. “You’ve got a lot of ideas for having heard only a couple of tunes.”

“That’s kind of my job, Fruity Pebble, and I’ve kind of been doing it awhile. I didn’t take time off to ravage the justice system like someone else I know.”

She would send over a contract. She took more points than she used to, she warned me, but she was worth it. Then she’d get on the phone with Sonny to ink him up for producing. In the meantime, I was to go get my little band together.

It couldn’t have been as easy as my agent was making it sound. “Alaina, you really think this has potential?”

“Other than the potential for self-embarrassment? Yes, though it’s almost a medical miracle at your age. Seriously—it’s really strong work, Teddy. I’ll just go ahead and say it because I know it turns you on: I’m a whole mess of proud of you.”

I laughed. “Okay, but just in case, I’ll keep that Caribbean resort idea in mind. I still know all the chords to Buffett. All two of them.”