Thank You, Goodnight (23 page)

Jumbo emerged from the mini-mart, a stack of dripping coffees three stories high balanced in one hand, a bag of Funyuns and a Chipwich in the other. “Some kind of world we’re living in when they put the Nicorette gum right next to the Newports,” he complained, placing the coffees on the roof of the car. “That’s just not playing fair.”

“Alaina just called,” I told him.

When I relayed her meows of optimism, Jumbo reacted with a spastic pump of his fist—a newly acquired tic, I’d noticed. “I knew it! I goddamn knew it! I got news for you, Mingus, these demos are going to change the course of music history.” He celebrated with more fist pumps, goofy dancing, and even possibly a jumping jack. By the time he calmed down and distributed the coffees into the various cup holders, he’d accidentally taken a sip from all of them.

Once I pulled us back onto the road, Jumbo shared the good news with his father, and though Elmer uttered not a single word, his many wrinkles, spots, and yellowish discolorations did curve upward in what I presumed was a smile. Then he went back to mute contemplation of the scenery.

“Is he okay back there?” I whispered.

“Of course. He’s psyched.”

He didn’t look psyched. He looked cadaverous.

“He’s one of our biggest fans, always has been. Check this out.” Jumbo twisted his fleshy self around. “Hey, Dad, which one do you have on today?”

I watched in the rearview mirror as the old man unzipped his jacket and revealed an aged rust-red concert T-shirt with the Tremble logo.

“How much does my dad rule?” Jumbo said, grinning beatifically. With that, he flipped down the sun visor and examined his ungovernable locks in the mirror.

(A word or two about Jumbo’s hair. While it generally defied description, it was an unruly mess of curls and frizzes that incorporated the worst elements of nearly every hairstyle of the past quarter century, though it was not technically a hairstyle in and of itself. It was the color of a particularly viscous motor oil or a brown sauce served at a Chinese restaurant, something they put broccoli and water chestnuts in. It looked better uncombed, which was fortunate because he so rarely subjected it to the rectitude of a brush. On the rare instances when he did comb it, he looked like a harmless mental patient out for the day with an uncle. Sometimes his hair wanted to be a perm, other times a mullet, and occasionally it smacked of a bob.)

Equipped now with fuel and sustenance, we could get down to the business of listening to the music. Through the magic of a simple software program that any eight-year-old could master but I’d assumed to be well beyond Jumbo’s technological grasp, he’d recorded guitar parts on top of my demos so that it sounded like we’d played them in the same room. Foaming with excitement, his cheeks and chin already glistening from an inorganic pie whose flavor was cautiously described on the wrapper as “fruit,” he slid the disc into the stereo.

Instantaneously, I suffered the forgotten thrill of hearing the sound of a new Tremble song. I was amazed. It was all still there. In some places, Jumbo’s guitar was restrained and textural, adorning the song with subtle flourishes. In others, the playing was caustic and volatile, chewing up the scenery. But through and through, it was Jumbo’s guitar in all its masterful dramatic voicing. Sure, the words that came out of his mouth filled you with the urge to stuff a pack of gauze into his windpipe, but put a six-string in his hands and he was somehow . . . exquisite. Before I worked with Jumbo, I thought a banjo had no
place in rock music. Before I worked with Jumbo, I didn’t think a pink double-neck guitar could be applied with class. Before I worked with Jumbo, I didn’t think you could tastefully use stompbox effects pedals without fetishizing Joy Division. But Jumbo, damn him, understood what worked and he understood how to get there. Filtered through him, the music undeniably sounded better. It was the only reason anybody put up with him. To witness his talents was to wonder why he never latched onto another band after Tremble; to witness his decision making was to understand why he ended up a cellar-dwelling midwife.

“This is good stuff, Jumbo. Very good stuff.”

“See, Mingus? I know what I’m doing. We play this for Mack, there’s no way she can refuse us.”

I muttered to myself, imagining the many ways she was likely to refuse us.

“You got a game plan?” he asked. “How are we going to break this to her?”

“Who’s we? I said you could come to Pittsburgh with me. I didn’t say you could join me in Mackenzie’s office.”

He looked mortally wounded.

“James, don’t even argue. I’m not talking about this anymore.”

“Dude, be honest with yourself. Someone like me is far more likely to walk into a sex therapist’s office than you. Maybe you’re not remembering the glory days, my friend, but it was with me that things got messy. It was in my hotel room that someone got defiled or maybe drizzled with—”

“So, I’m going to say this again, more slowly this time. Our visit has nothing to do with sex therapy. If you think you should write that down, by all means do so. I’m not going in there for sex therapy. I’m not going to pretend to have a sexual problem. Sex is not going to come up at all. She could be a goddamn auto mechanic for all I care. Is what I’m saying beginning to make any sense at all to you?”

Suddenly a maelstrom of coughing and gagging erupted in the
backseat. Elmer lurched forward in a fit of hacking so intense and relentless that his face instantaneously went from its resting shade of ashen gray to ketchup red, and I was sure that the old man was going to die right there in my car. Either that or some dark, gelatinous organ—a lung, a liver, a segment of small intestine—would be disgorged from his gullet and sail clear over the seat back.

As this violent whooping went on for a truly alarming length of time, I pulled over onto the shoulder and shot Jumbo a worried look.

“He just needs some air, is all,” my passenger said.

Jumbo got out, opened the rear door, and extracted his father, who was still convulsing in barks and gags. With the calm facility of a health care professional, which he claimed he was but could not possibly have been, Jumbo slowly guided his old man toward the edge of the trees lining the turnpike.

I watched them standing together beyond the shoulder of the road, the father hunched over, hands on his knees like a marathon runner at the finish line, struggling to regain the normal patterns of inhaling and exhaling, and the son hovering over him, patting his back and cool-headedly coaching him to relax and wait it out, telling him he was going to be fine. Sure enough, the seizure subsided and the horrendous noises coming from Elmer’s lungs gave way to the gentle wind of passing cars. For someone who could rightly claim to be the root cause of so many crises, Jumbo could responsibly quell this one, and it was fascinating to witness.

“Does he need medical attention?” I asked once Jumbo had deposited his father back into the car.

He waved dismissively—don’t be silly—and reached for his coffee. If it had been up to me, I would’ve driven straight to a hospital or at least a frickin’ Rite Aid. At a minimum, the guy needed a cough drop.

“Is he sick?” I whispered.

“No more so than the rest of us, Mingus. Don’t you have any older relatives with ailments?”

I had a grandmother who’d lost it—she sent me birthday checks four times a year—but I wasn’t exactly trotting her out on road trips.

“So, he doesn’t have, like, tuberculosis or anything?” I asked.

Jumbo shook his head. “I doubt it.”

Feeling somewhat like an ambulance driver now, I merged us back into traffic.

At some point, I needed to check in with Sara. She couldn’t have been terribly high on the idea of my coming out here, now that my recruitment efforts had shifted to Mackenzie, and I probably should have offered her some reassurance. I should have told her that whatever had gone on between Mack and me way back when, it was a dead issue. Mack didn’t like me anymore; she couldn’t have. I’d made her an accessory to adultery. Most people could shake off such a thing—me, for example, who didn’t give it a second thought—but not the honest and true soul that Mack was. In all likelihood, the years had allowed all those bad feelings to calcify into something stronger, a bitterness unlikely to taper off. I suppose Sara sensed how much I hoped Mack didn’t loathe me. I felt it in the way she looked at me, a world of unspoken words behind her eyes.

But other things were pulling Sara away too. This husband of hers had returned, compelling Sara to face her past, to look it in the eye, to speak to it, to bid it goodbye. Changes had come for Sara, changes that no one but Billy had the power to exact. But Sara couldn’t change without my life changing in either minor or possibly monstrously major ways. Things were happening for me—finally. I had plans. I wanted my changes, not hers.

As I gazed out through the windshield, I knew I had to live with wherever this galloping highway was leading me. Just as I had to live with wherever Sara’s highway was leading her.

Both of my passengers were now silent. Jumbo was squinting out at the scenery. Elmer was reclining in the backseat, his jacket zipper at half-mast, his head turned to the side. He looked small and tired.

“So what is all this about?” I said to Jumbo. “Is your old man trying to make up for lost time after he and your mother split?”

“Not at all. It was me who went missing, Mingus. Dad was always around. The band kept me away a lot. He missed the hell out of me.”

I wondered what that was like. My old man never missed me for a second. I’d come back from a tour and he wouldn’t even know I’d been gone. He’d occasionally ask about a trip, but only as a springboard for tales of his own travels. You played Hong Kong, did you, Ted? The last time I was there, I was taken to the most outstanding French restaurant. It was over on the Kowloon side . . . And never in a million years would Lou Tremble tag along on an excursion such as this just to spend time with me, what with all those clients to service and associates to terrorize. Perish the fucking thought. If he were in the car today, he’d be leaning over the seat, chinking the shit out of my armor with all the reasons why this whole trip was a joke. And he would’ve had zero patience for the likes of Elmer and his roadside display of infirmity. For him, all sickness was in your head, conquerable merely by attitude adjustment. Unless you had
cancer the size of a Big Mac
or something that required
extended hospitalization
, chances were it didn’t exist. That’s how I was raised. If you took the day off to lie around in bed and moan, you were either faking or not trying hard enough to ignore it. I heard the mantra countless times growing up: “You just say to yourself”—there was a lot of saying stuff to yourself in my father’s code of health maintenance—“You just say to yourself, ‘I’m not going to let this get me down.’ It’s usually just as simple as that, Ted. If you want to let it beat you, well, I guess that’s up to you.” In other words, the world could present no problem for which there wasn’t some overly simplistic and absurdly useless solution. Yeah, sure, I’ll get up and walk it off. Can I have my fucking antibiotic first?

I stabbed the stereo knob and twisted up the volume, the music giving me the fortitude to barrel through. Outside, the farms had given way to a steep barricade of mountains to the right.

A few songs in, Jumbo piped up. “I got news for you: When do you want to stop for lunch?”

“You need to work on your usage of that phrase. If you say you’ve got news for me, news should follow.”

Jumbo sat there, unruffled.

“Do you understand? Don’t tell me you have news for me and then ask a question.”

“Tomato, tomahto, my friend.”

“No. It isn’t like that at all. It’s like when you say
irregardless
. That’s not a word. It’s just
regardless
.”

“Both are accepted.”

“But one is wrong.”

I felt him staring at me, studying the person he’d known in some form or other his entire life. “How does it feel to be right all the time?” he asked.

“It’s an enormous responsibility.”

He laughed tolerantly. “I love you to pieces, Mingus, but you’re a little mean. You were never like that before.”

“Yes, I was.”

“Well, it’s okay. Music will cure you.” He patted my knee.

“Get off,” I said, swatting his hand away.

Jumbo twisted his fleshy neck toward the backseat. “Hey Daddy-O, you hungry?”

In the rearview, I watched the old man muster up a nod.

“We’ll stop at the next exit,” I muttered.

As we proceeded to tunnel through the Alleghenies, I was treated to another vicious ball scratching by my front-seat passenger, the sixth or seventh of the day.

“Fuck.” Jumbo was growing concerned. “Do you think you can get lice in your pubic hair?”

I rolled down the window and took shelter in a wallop of fresh air. “You can do anything you want, Jumbo.”

CHAPTER 14

I
t’s easier than you might imagine to ruin everything.

We were in New York for the sessions that would become our second record,
Atomic Somersault
. Expectations were hefty. Our hit had propelled our debut album to platinum status, and within the past year we’d stood on a stage in LA and been handed a little gold statue before the eyes of the world.

The strange thing was, I actually believed these new songs were stronger. They say you spend your whole life writing your first album and only a year writing your second, but I didn’t think I needed a second quarter century to pen a follow-up. Maybe we didn’t have a chart-topping single this time around, but I didn’t care. I actually preferred it that way. There was more to these songs, more places to lead the listener. This album would earn us fans who cared about music, not just kids who needed an anthem to belt out the window at their horrible, autocratic parents.

At the end of a long day of recording, my bandmates and I were clustered at the hotel bar, nursing drinks almost like civilized human beings, when a blustery voice slashed the tranquility.