Thank You, Goodnight (38 page)

“I doubt it’ll matter,” I muttered. “It won’t be the title that keeps it out of the top ten.”

She turned and faced me. “You really are amazing. Can’t you just enjoy the moment?”

“I am,” I insisted. “Seriously. This is me enjoying the moment. This is how I enjoy moments.”

“And yet you still look a little bit like someone peed in your Wheaties. Even on the night you get a fucking record deal. These things happen every day in my world, but this is you. Haggard, old, thirty-six-inch-waist, in-bed-by-eleven-after-
Laverne & Shirley
-reruns you.”

“I’m a thirty-four, and during the week I can sometimes make it down to thirty-three.” I stared at her, waiting for the innuendo. Something suggestive, vulgar, taboo even. “Nothing? We’re talking about my pants here. This is where you insert some seedy proposition that goes way over the line and makes me uncomfortable.”

She flipped her bangs and crossed her legs. “Isn’t it time you grew up? You’ve got a girlfriend, for the love of Pete. Go get your dirty talk from her.”

The about-face leveled me. Battling her perfunctory come-ons
had been a staple of any conversation with Alaina for as long as there’d been an Alaina. She couldn’t be going soft. The universe wouldn’t stand for it.

Then I realized she wasn’t going soft at all. She was looking out for us—for me, for Sara, Mack, the whole ragged lot. Now that I thought about it, there’d never been a time when Alaina Farber wasn’t looking out for us.

The respite of fresh air beckoned. I leaned into my agent’s ear and whispered, “I’m a whole mess of proud of you.”

“Eat me,” she said through a schoolyard sneer.

*       *       *

Although it felt like dawn should’ve been upon us by now, it was somehow still night. Outside the Plum, I kicked gray pebbles off the sidewalk and out into the street, contemplating the aspects of my life that were now going to change, assuming everything went according to Alaina’s design—which it usually did. I’d had less to account for and less to lose the first time around. Since then, I’d evolved, or at least changed in ways that now felt immutable. I had no desire to live the wild and turbulent life of Colin Stone; I was too old for that. (So was he.) Nor would I indulge that empty need to be on top. I’d been up there before, and the thin air can mess with your judgment as sure as a bluegrass band can hold off winter.

I called Sara. She didn’t pick up, so I left a message. “Hey. Some good news. Give me a call, or I’ll see you at home later tonight.”

When I looked up, I saw that Mackenzie had joined me. Folding her arms tightly over her breath-mint-green sweater, she complained about one of Colin’s young oily-headed cronies who kept overusing her first name. “When somebody says your name too often, you become hyperaware of how it sounds, of what a silly and random combination of syllables it is. Especially a name like mine. Mackenzie, Mackenzie, Mackenzie. Sounds like a hiccup.”

Side by side on the curb, our eyes drifted across the medley of apartment windows looming across the street, taking in the lights and silhouettes within. I thought of the beginning.

“Do you remember the first time we played together?” I asked her. “I mean, the first time ever.”

A faraway smile bloomed. “You posted a flyer in the campus record store. I was there with a friend. We were each going to buy a different Replacements album and share them. I ripped the number off the flyer and called.”

“I remember.”

“First of all, can I just say how pretentious it was to make me audition? Who did you think you were?”

“I’ve never had a convincing answer to that question.”

“You had me run through a bunch of Steve Miller Band and Tom Petty tunes. And you had your baseball hat on backwards.”

“You were smooth with the Petty, but you absolutely killed it on ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again.’ I do remember being concerned that Jumbo would scare you off. That’s why I offered you a Rolling Rock.”

“Jumbo did scare me. That’s why I drank four of them.”

I kicked another rock; it skipped across the dark pavement.

“My parents were pretty pissed that I’d joined a band,” Mack said.

“And they were heartened when you moved on to sex therapy?”

“They were both jocks. A musician’s life couldn’t have been more foreign to them.”

“Someday, on a distant shore, all of our parents will go fishing together and bitch about how we let them down. Of course, my dad will say something obnoxious and they’ll beat him overboard with an oar.”

“You know, my mom found you arrogant. She said you thought too much of yourself.”

“Oh yeah? And what did you think?”

“I thought you had the opposite problem.”

I chuckled. “Ever the therapist. How do you think your mother would feel about all this now? Our second act?”

Mack raised her eyes and combed the vast black sky for a clue. “I think she’d be okay with it. It was rebellion back then, self-preservation now.”

“I like that. I’ve come to preserve you.”

She turned her head halfway in my direction, as if not quite committing to eye contact. “Teddy. It hasn’t always been smooth sailing between us, but I know that you’ve always been my friend.”

The remark simultaneously filled me with words and robbed me of them. I wanted to confess. I wanted to tell her that I hadn’t always been such a good friend, that my hot mess of feelings about her had long ago caused me to single-handedly bring down the curtain on this band. But that was before I learned the lesson revealed to me in Bic’s studio all summer.
Before I realized that if our first two albums were about the youthful disturbances of desire, claiming what the universe owed me through the simple act of showing my God-given entitlement to it by slinging a guitar strap around my neck, this third album was about finding my way back, reclaiming myself. It was about looking into familiar faces and being worthy of them. Yes, I’d had feelings for Mack—destructive, consuming feelings, as feelings often are. Feelings that had pitched the band into a ravine on music’s highway. But that was before I realized that I loved Mackenzie Highsider the way everybody loves the sight of an old friend—and that that hardly tasted like a letdown.

The door opened behind us and Colin’s head of confused gray hair peeked out.

“So this is where the party is,” he boomed.

I’d confess to Mack later. If I still needed to make amends.

“I’m going to refresh,” I told them, pointing to my only partially depleted beer bottle and yielding them the sidewalk.

The first thing I saw when I was back inside was Jumbo lumbering toward me, a cheeky grin smeared all across his face. He was swaying as if afflicted with some inner ear disorder.

I looked at the fool. Yes, he was a cheese-doodle party yutz who always had some unseemly indiscretion up his sleeve, but he was my cheese-doodle party yutz. Sooner or later, I had to accept that.

He had something important to tell me. He just had that look. It was going to be something irksomely corny, a hackneyed gush about the odds we’d overcome to make history. Perhaps a strained comparison to some monumental rock act (We’re basically the Velvet Underground!) or an incoherent military contextualization (It’s like the War of 1812 all over again! Wait—who’d we play in that war? The Mexicans?). Whatever it was, it would deftly illustrate how Jumbo always completely missed the point of everything.

He got right up into my face, bearing down on me with a nose packed unevenly with cartilage and nostrils bursting with more hair than anyone could need.

“Mingus, I got news for you: I know how you struggle with me. You want to be repulsed by me, but you’re just not.”

“I got news for you: I think I am.”

“We go too far back. Our paths run deep. It’s almost as if we just can’t escape each other.”

“It sure does feel that way sometimes.”

He punched my biceps. “We’re the same. Just a couple of Philly boys who live and breathe music, both of us the product of broken homes.”

“My parents got divorced when I was in my midtwenties. I had a wife of my own at the time.”

“I like to think of it this way,” he continued; I noticed a dewy moisture dripping from the tangled undergrowth on his head. “If you and I were riding around in a car and I suddenly suspected that you were an impostor, not the real Teddy Tremble that I know and love, there would be literally hundreds of questions I could ask you to scope out if you were you or not. I could ask you the color of the front door of the house I grew up in. Or the name of the hotel in Madrid where I got food poisoning—the first time, not when we went back and I got gout. Or about the time I got off a plane in Houston and immediately
called you to remind me why I’d flown there. And if you didn’t know any of those things, I’d know you were a fake.” He paused for a slurp of his drink. “That’s the kind of history we have, bro.”

“Is this something you spend time worrying about? Being stuck in a car with an impostor?”

He nodded resolutely. “Shit, yeah! Ever since I was a kid. I was always afraid that the people in the front seat weren’t my real parents, that they were pods or carbon copies of my real parents, and they were kidnapping me to a carbon copy of my home. They’d act like my real parents, but they were really impostors. It terrified me.”

“But James”—I don’t know why I played along; it was a night for playing along—“if some nice imposter parents brought you home to a nice impostor house and sent you to an impostor school with all your impostor friends, it wouldn’t really matter, would it?”

He placed a fatherly hand on my shoulder and massaged it with his beefy paw. “What’s real is real, Mingus. You know that better than anyone.”

*       *       *

I snagged a fresh Sierra Nevada from a cocktail waitress and took a seat next to Warren. The merriment at the Plum was now on the downswing, each of us detectably wearying of the crowd. Warren was locking horns with the obnoxious little dope from the label, the one who’d annoyed Mackenzie by fetishizing her first name. The drummer making a sport out of disagreeing with him on just about every guitar hero was cliché: Clapton is God, Eddie Van Halen has the fastest fingers in rock, and so forth. Warren wanted to know why nobody ever mentioned Knopfler. Garcia. Prince. How come the best piano pounders were always Elton or Billy Joel, never Ray Charles or Bruce Hornsby?

Through the glass, I watched Mack and Colin out on the sidewalk. They’d melted into a familiar ease, like high school sweethearts who’d run into each other at the twentieth reunion. I could tell they were
taking comfort in the grip of each other’s eyes, relishing the sound of each other’s voices. I started looking forward to the train ride home so I could slide into the crisp sheets and fold into Sara.

My ears continued to bear witness to the puffy-egoed buffoon kicking up a name-dropping hailstorm on Warren: “. . . but that’s just Noel [Gallagher]. He’s actually an okay guy, just misunderstood. . . . Conor [Oberst] and I disagree on almost everything, but hey, he’s a fucking genius, so what are you gonna do? I told him years ago that he’d taken Bright Eyes as far as it could go, but would he listen to me? . . . So Ri [Rihanna] was out with us—we were at somebody’s place up in the Hills—and she’s a little drunk at this point, all over me, and I’m like, ‘Ri, babe, you know this can’t happen . . .’ ”

Warren was supposed to be impressed by all this, but Warren doesn’t do impressed very well. He was reclining with the palms of his hands on the back of his head, a POW on the march.

“. . . don’t get me started on Axl. He tried to fuck me over and nobody fucks me over. I threw him out of the building—literally threw his ass out. I was like, ‘You are done, man. You are fucking done! And if you ever pull that shit with me again, I will knock your dick in the dirt!’ ”

Warren shifted toward me in whispered sidebar. “ ‘Dick in the dirt’? Isn’t that what the principal says to Judd Nelson in
The Breakfast Club
?”

“I don’t think he was the principal,” I corrected. “He was just a teacher.”

“
Just
a teacher, huh?”

“. . . and I’ve always told Keith that ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ just doesn’t work on
Beggars Banquet
. It’s all wrong for that album. He’ll never admit it—you know Keith—but he knows I’m right . . .”

“I can’t listen to this shit anymore,” Warren mumbled, and he bolted up out of his chair to hunt down more flan.

That’s when Sonny Rivers smuggled himself into the party. He tried not to make a fuss about it, and the man dropped into the chair
next to me before I could diagnose the chorus of barks, whoops, and hollers that his arrival had wrought. He slapped my knee and said, “I can’t stay.”

That sentence was all it took for the din to die down. It was never Sonny’s intention to silence a room, but you just knew that he could be in twenty other places more happening than this, and damned if he wasn’t here.

A server attempted to take Sonny’s drink order, but he declined.

“I was hoping to tip a glass,” he said to me, every ear at the party tuning in. “Turns out I don’t have time.” He needed to make a flight back to LA that left in an hour. He had two meetings tomorrow, one about his possible involvement in the new Wilco record, the other about a long-delayed project with Mavis Staples that was finally getting off the ground.

Even Alaina, stroking the curved stem of her martini glass, fixed her eyes on the legend in the flesh.

“I’m done with this project,” he declared, leaning over the table in a gravelly broadcast. “Everybody else here gets to live with it, hopefully for a good long while, but there’s nothing left for me to do, so I move on to the next one. That’s the game.”

He started scratching the top of his head. “Let’s talk straight. Nobody in this band writes like Dylan, nobody sings like Otis Redding, and none of you got Jimi Hendrix chops. That’s not this band. You don’t look like Bon Jovi, you don’t move like Jagger, and God help us all if we ever see you in tight pants. In other words, Farber’s got her hands full.”

Chuckling filled the room, and even Alaina issued a catlike grin. I, however, was hoping Sonny might cut it short. No need to emphasize the deluge of marketing complications we posed to the poor folks saddled with the task of selling us.