Thank You, Goodnight (32 page)

I said, “I don’t have the faintest clue what my element is.”

“Well, would you mind putting off looking for it until you’ve found your legacy?” Alaina teased. “One bullshit existential crisis at a time.”

I sucked in a hollow of air and said, “If I’m no longer needed at this clambake, I’ll be off.”

“Off ? Off where? I wasn’t done chewing you out for being a whiny little schizo and pulling the plug on the reunion that nobody wants to see happen.”

“Well, can we finish that little chat some other time? I need to go.” I cleared my throat and unearthed the closest thing I had to grace. “I need to go cut a record.”

Alaina’s face registered horror movie stupor. “A record?” She stepped forward and depressed my toe under her overpriced footwear. “But wait—I’m confused. I thought you’d made a mistake. Music isn’t the answer. Those days are gone, they’re never coming back. You looked for them, all right; you looked in the pantry, in the garage, in your sock drawer—”

“You can go fuck yourself, you know that?”

“Oh, I know.” She tousled my hair, then made a face and wiped her hand on the grass. “Well, I’m glad to hear it, MoonPie. I don’t even want to know what nugget of inspiration that suicidal little puke leveled you with up there. Go tell your second-rate novelty acts to dust off their instruments. I’m booking you guys a studio before you throw another hissy fit and change your mind again.”

“Probably a good idea. And we’ll do our best to come up with some music you can sell.”

“Don’t worry your pretty little head about it. Whatever you come up with, I’ll get you your record contract. I’ll get you a tour, concert halls packed with girls in heat, and dressing rooms with craft beer and candy dishes.”

“I want M&M’s in those dishes.”

“Of course you do.”

“But just the green ones.”

“You shall have only green M&M’s, Mr. Tremble.”

“Good. But I might change my mind. I might want only the pink ones.”

“They don’t make those, pumpkin, but we’ll get them for you anyway.”

“Indeed you will. It is, after all, the little things that matter.”

“That’s not true, Theodore,” she said. “It is very much the big things.”

We stared at each other, each of us fighting back a grin as the seconds passed in this one frozen frame of our lives.

One day I’ll die, I thought to myself, and this will be one of the things I did with my time.

Just then, the scene was ruptured by a fire truck raising Cain, men with ladders and bullhorns bursting forth with gallant commotion. Alaina chomped her gum with a casual insolence as a hulking man in suspenders and fire-retardant pants strode toward us. Alaina greeted him with an exaggerated glance at her watch.

“You’re just in time,” she quipped.

CHAPTER 19

I
’ve lost track of how long I’ve been out here when a lamp in the living room flicks on behind me and the balcony door slides open. Sara, enrobed in a Race for the Cure T-shirt that hangs down over her knees, steps out into the predawn and asks what time I got in. I find myself unable to speak, so she leads me inside into the pale glow of the lamplight. She is staring into my eyes with deep, profound worry.

And then it all comes out. I tell her I’m done, I’m punching out of my useless fantasies for good. The search for lost things has brought me nothing but emptiness. They’ll just have to stay lost. I have an almost panicky need to be with Sara, to be safe in our home. I want never to leave again, I tell her. I want to be with her every single day, raise children together, take vacations in SUVs crammed with toys, crumbs, and snack wrappers. I want to pick out Halloween costumes together. I want to do all that and only that and come home every night and close the door behind me. This is what I want for the rest of my life. Nothing else matters.

I say this and then I drop onto the couch. When I look up, I’m startled to the bone at what I see. Sara is an old woman, eighty-five, older even, her features encroached upon by a latticework of wrinkles and wilting skin, her hair shorter and gray. The old woman—it is Sara, I am sure of it—unfurls a tolerant smile at me, my mind
having once again gone adrift, and says, “But honey, we’ve done all that.”

I don’t understand. And then I catch my own reflection in the glass balcony door and see that I too am old. I’ve aged a half century in a minute. I am dizzy with the dawning horror that, addled with an old man’s dementia, I’ve forgotten who I am, I’ve forgotten the life I’ve lived. Everything I think I’ve been experiencing these weeks and months already happened long, long ago.

I shake my head, disbelieving, forcing it all away.

I look around our living room and see photographs of our children. They are adults now, surrounded by families of their own—cherubic boys and girls, our grandchildren, distant reverberations of Sara and me in their cheerful faces.

This can happen. It must happen. You live decades upon decades, and the tired and declining mind erases it all and convinces you that you’re forty-five or twenty-five or twelve. That your life is still in bloom, still an engine rumbling with promise under the wing of an airplane.

Sara sits down beside me and drapes her hand over mine. “We’ve had a wonderful life together.” She glances up at one particular frame on the wall, and a familiar shadow returns. “Mostly wonderful.”

I follow her eyes. The two-year-old boy on a sand dune squints at us from under the glass rectangle.

“We can’t be like this now,” I plead. “He needs us.”

Sara allows her eyes to see the photograph, and for a moment she is with him on the dune in that blue and windy day that we’ve held on to our entire lives.

She pats my hand tenderly, our purple veins and bony fingers interwoven. The years have slipped away from me like a weightless astronaut on the blue ring of the world. “That was a long time ago, Teddy. Don’t think about such things now.”

“We can’t be old,” I insist. “We have to stay. Someone has to stay and remember.”

And then I can’t breathe. A sheet is being draped over my face and my last breath is a gravelly snore. I claw helplessly at the sheet but only grow more entangled. Time has sped forward again and it is now the end. I am dead; they are burying me. Struggling for breath, I lash against the airless vault into which I’m being caged forever. The end is here. Soon I will feel nothing.

The sheet is yanked back. My lungs swell with air, the room with daylight. I’m lying in my bed, panting.

Sara’s hand touches my shoulder and I spin toward her. She is resting on her elbows, jet-black tresses covering the side of her face. “Are you okay?” she asks, then drops back onto her pillow. I edge over onto her side of the bed and fold my face into the hot, moist smell of sleep.

A few moments later, my heart is still throbbing furiously against my ribs. It wants out.

PART THREE

THE MIX

CHAPTER 20

T
he lead guitar was a little too prominent in the mix, and Warren was pounding the kick drum so hard that my dead Scottish ancestors had a headache. I raised my hand and the disorganized brew of sound stuttered to a halt.

Warren leaned into the microphone that slanted over his kit like a fondue fork. “Sibilance,” he enunciated. “Sssssibilance. Check, check one. My mic is doing something funky. Too much hiss.” He frowned and proceeded to tap on the fuzzy black spit guard that cloaked the mic’s rounded grill. “And my
p
s are popping. Pop. Pop. Popping.”

Jumbo spoke up. “I can’t hear me.” He cranked up his amp and played a grating blues riff so loud it sent our index fingers into our ears.

“Down! Down!” I howled. “Way too loud!”

Mack seized the chance to suck down a bottle of Evian, then said, “I’m playing a B flat right before we go into the chorus, but I feel as though I’m the only one.”

“You are,” Jumbo confirmed. “It’s an F. But that doesn’t mean the bass can’t hit B flat there.”

Mack contemplated the implications of accenting the fourth note in the F major chord. “I think it does,” she decided.

“Anybody think we’re playing it too fast?” I queried the group.

As keeper of the time, Warren took the question personally. “I
guess I gave it a little bit more giddyup this time through,” he allowed, mopping his glistening forehead with a white hand towel. “It felt like it wanted to be played faster.”

We were working through “Goodbye to Myself,” a straightforward midtempo slice of rock, a species of song that, despite its conventionality, often proved, at least to me, stubborn and tricky. Even nestled in the reliably uninventive verse-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus composition structure, such songs worked only when the exact pacing was struck, the precise speed that kept the song both from dragging into sluggishness and from hurrying away into some anxious scramble.

“I’m good with playing it a little up-tempo,” Jumbo volunteered. “Kind of swings a bit when it’s faster.” He was holding his ’52 Telecaster Reissue away from his body and fanning the front of his shirt, trying to ventilate the drenched black tee that bore the words “This Girl’s Got Bieber Fever!” in hot-pink bubble letters—an accidental purchase, he would have us believe.

This was Tremble, a reinstituted band of aging, ailing, sagging, and limping hopefuls grittily readying itself for the world.

Sonny Rivers had called in a favor to Bic, an old friend with a shabby studio in the semigentrified town of Manayunk, a short drive from downtown Philly. Nobody had booked his East Side Studios for the summer months (although I doubt its lack of appeal was seasonal), so Bic turned it over to us for the dog days of July and August. He greeted us on day one in a tank top and white knee-high socks, handed over the keys, and never made an appearance again. And it wasn’t that the rotting wood paneling, the mildewing carpet, the murky lighting, the prehistoric stench of drummer sweat, the dusty sound board, and the Weavers-era recording equipment made you feel unwelcome. It just explained why Bic didn’t seem terribly overprotective of the place.

The state of the facility was hardly our most daunting obstacle.

Conveniently, the season afforded greater flexibility for those
among us who still clung to their day jobs. As for me, I’d crossed the Rubicon with Morris & Roberts. I had emptied my office of my diplomas, my photo of Sara, and my Ron Jaworski autographed football, thereby inking a permanent hiatus.

When Jumbo arrived at the studio, honking his horn with cheery oafishness, Warren looked up from the trunkful of drums he and I were unloading and appeared dispirited, as if up until that point it hadn’t dawned on him that he’d actually be working with Jumbo again. When Warren saw Mackenzie, they both slid into laughter—perhaps at the folly of the universe, perhaps out of mutual embarrassment for having shown up. They exchanged tidy digests of the years, Mack scrolling through Warren’s phone and gushing over photos of his wife and son. Jumbo swept Mack up in a bear hug and swung her around until Mack nicked her ankle on a table and needed a Band-Aid. While these reunions unfolded, I busied myself plugging cables into the sound board and transferring guitars from cases to stands. But out of the corner of my eye, I witnessed old friends sizing each other up, noticing the changes lurking beneath the familiar faces as they doled out loose compliments and claimed to have missed each other.

Eventually, we got around to what we came there for and started filling the dingy space with music. In the interest of artistic integrity, and to prevent that unseemly college-band-regrouping-at-the-cookout vibe, we spent the first few weeks in rehearsal with no parental supervision. Sonny would show up later to impose discipline and vision. As a foursome, we rediscovered the places where our contours met, and through both harmony and discord, over hot afternoons, we got to know each other again.

Jumbo, instinctively attuned to the flavor of a song, splashed textural seasonings and exhilarating flourishes all over the music, just as he’d done with the demos. The rhythm section locked in tight almost immediately, and Mackenzie and Warren, true professionals, winked and grinned at each other when the groove was just right. I’d forgotten how easy it was to fall in love with the crisp sound of an open
chord on a telecaster, or how a rich harmony vocal, kicked up in the mix and riding shotgun on a soaring melody, could make you shake your head and marvel, I didn’t know music could sound like that.

I did my best to step out of the way and allow old dynamics to resurrect themselves. I behaved toward Mackenzie in precisely the way I would have had there not been multiple White House occupants and a Von Dutch trucker cap craze since the last time we’d recorded together. Everyone had shown up; the least I could do was not make things weird.

One particularly sweltering day, we flung open the door to take a water break in the parking lot. As we stood there with stains on our shirts that would’ve made us look like triathletes had we not looked so unlike triathletes, an old woman came ambling down from the porch of her row house. She was moving toward us snail-like but determined, her rigid osteoporotic hunch suggesting peeve, and we prepared ourselves to catch hell for noising up the neighborhood. There was no telling how long this prune had lived across the street from a quasi-professional rehearsal space, how many bands she’d bawled out for disrupting her midmorning siesta. She labored onto the sidewalk and jutted out her wrinkled face to get a good look at the hoodlums who were making such a racket, at which point it crossed my mind that we were a little old to be getting yelled at for being loud. For the longest of moments, she stared at us, and just as I was poised to jump in and preempt her reprimand with an apology and an empty promise to keep it down, the old hag bleated, “You people are pretty fucking good.”

We took it as a good omen—Lord knows we were looking for them—and gifted our first new fan with a bottle of water for her long trek home.

We blew through the old songs as if sliding into a loose pair of corduroys, and stumbled through the new stuff like the amateurs we’d allowed ourselves to become. The technical aspects of playing required some modulating on our part. The mix was often hideously out of whack and sometimes a microphone would suddenly emit an
explosive shock, nearly searing off my lips. Even standing together in band formation took some adjusting to. For one thing, I found myself squinting down at the frets of my guitar, growing more convinced by the minute that we now needed a band optometrist. For another, I had to reacclimate to Jumbo’s bulk. We were roughly the same height, but he just felt bigger. Being Jumbo required more space. There was, I’d learned, a relativity to acceptable workplace girth. For years, I’d been sequestered away at a law firm where, almost as a rule, people kind of let themselves go. (If the folks down the hall were going for a slice of sausage and pepperoni and you declined, it had better be because you were having a colonoscopy in an hour.) Whereas I was a waify little thing among the lawyers, in the bony world of rock, where people didn’t eat any healthier but still managed to appear gaunt and strung out, I was Dom DeLuise. Jumbo, however, still made the rest of us look like action figures.