Thank You, Goodnight (28 page)

“All I want is to go out on my own terms, to not see a chump every morning in the mirror. You may think that our band’s legacy doesn’t matter, but it’s different for me. I was the one up there, front and center.”

“So, the bass player doesn’t get a legacy.”

“The band bore my name, Mack.”

“You’re breaking my heart.”

“The point is, nobody took a picture of you drooling over Doritos.”

Dizzy and mellow from the smoky haze and soapy aromas wafting together, I let my head drop backward onto the womb of the carpet.

“I’ve got to do this now. If I don’t, this thing will follow me into old age and I’ll spend the next forty years pining for something that will continue to move further and further out of reach. Time flies, Mack, and the next thing you know, you’re eighty-two and you don’t have much more of it left. We get old in a hurry, and pretty soon the music is too loud, the winter too cold, and we’re using words like ‘gorgeous’ to describe a salad instead of a woman. I need to act before the whole thing moves beyond my grasp.”

Mackenzie groaned. “Well done—pretentious
and
corny. But good luck organizing the world the way you want it. Stories tend to tell themselves.”

“Come on, Mack. How much fun would it be to play again?”

“Fun? This is the first I’m hearing of fun. This whole thing sounds like a grudge match. Teddy Tremble getting back at the world for premature neglect.”

I sat up and studied her, searching for traces of longing behind the scaffold of her features, for empty spaces in need of filling. “It’d be fun if you were there. That would be fun for me.”

I watched her tilt her head to the ceiling, her eyes fluttering closed.

“Don’t you miss it?” I asked.

“Clearly not as much as you have.”

“There are things I miss, but that’s not why I’m doing this. If this were just about reliving fond memories, I could probably move on. I certainly wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of scaring up Jumbo. I’m doing this because there are some things I want to change, things I want to make right.”

“I think what we did the first time around was right enough.”

I shifted on the rug like a drunken snow angel, and for a time, I may have drifted off. When I opened my eyes, she was standing over me, holding out her hand. “Let me show you something.”

She led me up the stairs, past a museum of bathing products on display, our stoned legs teetering beneath the unfamiliar weight of our sluggish bodies. Stopping at a dark room, she gave a tug at the string of another dragonfly lamp, which cast a warm orange halo over what soon revealed itself to be the music room. This was the space in which the Mackenzie of old dwelled: bass guitars upright in stands, an old Peavey amplifier in the center of the room, six-strings (electrics and acoustics) against the wall, an electric piano off to the side. It had the retro charm of a Haight/Ashbury recording studio circa 1967. I stood at the threshold and marveled.

Mack flipped a switch and the amp buzzed to life, its tubes shimmying at the fresh current of electricity. She grabbed a bass, sat down on the amp, turned the volume knob, and allowed her fingers to wade over the frets. The low notes glided up into the rafters, graceful yet commanding, smoothly rupturing the night.

She looked up at me. “Plug in. Let’s see what we remember.”

*       *       *

There are some of us who never had a choice. It was always going to be this way. Whether graced with talent or not, we were going to spend our lives in this often turbulent but always embracing sea. If we can make music, we make it and there’s no hope of turning off the spigot. And if we can’t, we listen and obsess. It becomes the Dewey decimal system by which our world is organized. We see a cheerleader in pigtails and think, Isn’t that skirt a little too Oh-Mickey-you’re-so-fine? We see a guy in a blazer with his sleeves rolled up and realize we’ve been neglecting that Mike + the Mechanics cassette boxed up in the attic all these years. Every unheard song out there is like the last page of a book: it has the answer. We know that this new album we just shelled out ten bucks for will somehow make us more complete, that it will plant one more post in the architecture of our selves.

People like us become someone different for a while when we fall in love with new music. The transformative qualities are real, even if they are imagined. In my Simon & Garfunkel mode, I was a little more cerebral and poetic in a Carl Sandburgian way; I cut back on the cursing in favor of actual words. When I was into Bob Marley’s
Exodus
, I was a more laid-back me. When listening to
Misfits
by the Kinks, I spoke with a bit of a sneer. I felt a little tougher during my enchantment with Public Enemy. I channeled a haughty impenetrability during the weeks when I thought
OK Computer
was God’s gift. I was a jittery little fuck in my Police phase, what with all that nervous reggae crammed into those albums, and in my Jackson Browne period I grew a beard. (I don’t know why. He didn’t have one.) It’s a junkie’s hunger and it springs forth from your subcellular components—organelles, I think they called them in biology class; maybe nuclei, mitochondria, Golgi apparatus. Occasionally, it feels like a prisoner’s existence because we don’t always choose the object of our obsession. An intense interest in the Muzak of Sven Libaek and the Carpenters has never landed panties on any guy’s floor. But in certain very limited circumstances, being yourself has.

The point is, we are happy to be powerless to resist the thrill of a
new sound. You can leave the cell door unlocked. Nobody’s making a run for it.

That’s some of us.

Others aren’t nearly so afflicted. There is no pain, no suffering, no Sandburg, no sneering. There is just the angelic simplicity of being absorbed in your song. That was Mackenzie. And what a thing to hear. What a thing to watch. The way that the bass roots a song, gives it its steady footing and its ability to move—that’s what Mackenzie always lent to the Tremble machinery. As we strummed and plucked in the meek orange light of her upstairs room, the years melted away. I watched her falling into herself, into that unshakable peace, mellow and confident, following herself out of somewhere and into somewhere else.

When we finished playing and set down our instruments, she dropped her hands into her lap. “I don’t mean to bring the discussion back to my body, but I should probably tell you that I have breast cancer.” She winced apologetically. “I hate saying it that way, but there really are so few euphemisms.”

I looked at her, thunderstruck. “What?”

“I’m not sure why I just told you that,” she said. “Because really, I’m totally fine. They got it early. Nobody’s telling me not to buy green bananas or to stay away from the collected works of Dumas.”

“Holy shit. Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?”

“When was earlier?”

Four months ago, while applying deodorant after a shower, she noticed a lump in her armpit. She would’ve ignored it, constitutionally hardwired as she was with an inability to panic, but having lost her mother six years ago to Hodgkin’s, she read the genetic writing on the wall. Within ten days, she’d undergone a mastectomy. Her most recent round of chemo had been earlier that week.

“I just assumed you had access to my medical records, showing up here with a stash of antinausea,” she said with a coy twinkle.

“Jesus, Mack.” I felt ashamed, prattling on all night about the need
to be taken seriously as an artist, bitching about bad photographs of me eating Mexican food. “You must’ve wanted to slap me all night.”

She didn’t speak up to say otherwise.

“Are you okay? Who’s taking care of you?”

“I’m no recluse, Teddy. I’ve got friends. Really good ones, it turns out.”

There was, she assured me, no shortage of people populating her fridge with Tupperwared meals she was too nauseated to eat, soothing her with six-packs of Canada Dry ginger ale. For the time being, she was still tethered to the treatments every few weeks, but the end of that vicious battery was approaching, and her doctors were optimistic that she would soon have her forehead stamped with the words In Remission, that sought-after designation that somehow still sounded ominous.

For a long moment, the only sound was the high constant hum of the amp.

“I also have an ex-husband checking in on me,” she volunteered.

I flinched in surprise.

“Remember Colin Stone?”

“The Sony rep? Sure. The Dire Wolf. What about him?”

“He’s at MCA now, but . . .”

My jaw went slack. “You married Colin fucking Stone?”

And who wouldn’t? Colin was a lifer in the music business, a gregarious, distinguished-looking record exec with dense hedges of gray hair and an enveloping grin. He had a really enthusiastic handshake—he swung you a bit, he was so damn happy to see you, he might just pull you right into his suit jacket—and was always either on his way to a leisurely, lubricated meal or just returning from one. He was our main point of contact when Sony signed us, and he brimmed with encouragement at every meeting, even later on when we couldn’t catch a cold. Colin was a good bit older than us, so it often felt as though someone had brought a dad to our Mirabelle Plum marathons, but a dad who went out more nights a week than we did and who drank all of us under the table in passing.

As a member of the band, Mack had never viewed him in a romantic light. But a few years later, she told me, when she was in her graduate program in New York, they ran into each other on an elevator and realized they lived in the same building. Right then and there, he invited her to tag along at a dinner with the Flaming Lips (regular people have dinner; Colin always had
a
dinner), and in an aberrant move, she accepted. Another invitation followed, and soon she was accompanying him to record release parties and on visits to his ailing mother (an impossibly ancient Czech woman who made a mean mushroom soup). They even got into a rather delightful minor car accident together.

The marriage lasted just over two years, and it didn’t take nearly that long for Mack to realize she’d made a mistake. She wanted to be done with the music business, and that included not being the child bride of one of its most enduring characters. The inevitable end brought relief and friendship. She decided to start over in a new city, and Pittsburgh had felt like home ever since.

“Colin and I were never right for each other,” Mack concluded. “I think we both knew that all along. He’s a sweet guy and the life of every party, but I’m not really one for parties.”

“I thought I was going to be the one with all the surprises,” I said. “But you’ve got me beat. You married Colin Stone, you got breast cancer, you dined with the Flaming Lips. I’m dealing with a lot of stuff here.”

She playfully knocked my shoulder with hers. “I find this proposition of yours rather fascinating. Outlandish, fraught with the potential to backfire and visit upon you even more embarrassment than you’ve already been through. That’s just irresistible. Besides, if you’re really willing to risk your reputation and dive back into the fray, these new songs of yours must be pretty damn good.”

“You overestimate me.”

“A mistake we’ve all made before.”

She buried her head in her hands and made weird little noises
while kneading the flesh of her face. Then she popped up. “Screw it. I’m in.”

I eyed her like I hadn’t quite heard correctly.

“It was the bridge of ‘New Morning Azalea’ that sold me,” she said. “I always loved that song.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Just now, when we were playing ‘Azalea,’ it hit me. This is fun. I miss this.”

“Are you fucking with me? Are you just really high?”

“My practice can wait. There will always be sex and there will always be people all twisted up about it.”

“You’re coming to this too quickly.” No pun was intended. “Just to be clear, you have cancer.”

“But the goal is to not have it for very long. You kick it out or it kicks you out.”

Assuming things progressed as expected, she had to endure only a handful more chemo treatments. She’d managed to keep her office open throughout this ordeal, although she admitted that there were occasional midsession sprints to the bathroom that she hoped didn’t leave her patients with the impression that their sexual messiness made her sick. So, except for the days when she had to be available for the IV, and the few days thereafter when she had to be available to puke at a moment’s notice, she could probably swing a stint in a band.

“Let’s be honest—in any given week, Jumbo barfs more times than I do anyway,” she posited.

I stared at her, floored. “Mackenzie Highsider, how is it that, as long as I’ve known you, your next move is always a mystery to me?”

“You know my deal,” she cautioned. “You know who I am now, what I’m going through. You know my reasons; they’re not the same as yours. If you still want me, I’m in.”

In the end, that was the root of it for her. Mackenzie’s bass line. She didn’t care about any of the untidy complexity. She just wanted to play music like it didn’t matter what came next. So what if we all
needed to dab on some antiwrinkle cream before bedtime? So what if we should all go a little easier on the carbs? So what? Fuck the label and the agent. Fuck the street team and the tour manager. Fuck the Nielsen SoundScan numbers and the whores at the radio stations and the creatively bankrupt sellouts in A&R. Fuck them all. This wasn’t a space shuttle launch. Let’s just play the damn thing.

I curled her hand beneath mine. “For the record, we both know you’ve already read the collected works of Dumas.”

*       *       *

We strolled across her dew-drizzled lawn toward my car. The cool night air felt good against my face, reviving me with the desire to move. I knew that sleep would remain at bay for hours, so I decided I’d drive home now and arrive before morning.

Mack offered to speak with Colin and get him high on these mad plans of ours. Colin was not only still an A&R muckety-muck at MCA, but he was still tight with Sonny Rivers and, like everyone else on the planet, accepted Sonny’s word as gospel. With Sonny and Alaina having boarded the Tremble train, Colin didn’t stand a chance. This beat-up old gaggle of has-beens just might get a hard look from a major record company. We hadn’t even all been in the same room yet.