Thank You, Goodnight (33 page)

One morning, Warren and I were sipping coffee outside when we overheard acoustic music kicking to life through the studio walls. At first, there was just the sound of Jumbo’s easy strumming, killing time during a caffeine interlude. Then Mack’s bass glided in, and soon, after a few steady measures, there was singing. An earnest, naked voice: Mack’s. The song was “Glad and Sorry” by Faces, a melancholic ballad with a steady, insistent beat that seemed to welcome the unadorned vocals of someone who’d heretofore only sung lead in her shower. I stood mesmerized—at the very sound of her, at the unassuming comfort with which she’d taken the mic. And when the chorus crept around and Jumbo chimed in with effortless harmony—as if this wasn’t an impromptu jam, as if they’d actually played this song together at any point before this spare moment had presented itself—I realized I never wanted to hear anyone else sing “Glad and Sorry” ever again.

Warren and I waited until the song ended before stepping through the door. Mack looked over at me with a shy grin, then retreated to the flimsy barstool that she’d positioned next to her amp. I swallowed a sigh and thought to myself, This is how it starts.

A few weeks darted by. One day, a summer shower beating upon the sizzling streets, the door flung open and in strode Sonny. With his hands in the pockets of his charcoal slacks, he nodded around the room at each of us, not necessarily with approval. He eyed the studio, taking in the booth, the upright piano, the vintage control board, and the stained yellow sofa propped up on three legs behind it.

“Bic has really let this place fall to shit,” he said by way of greeting. “I’ve recorded in a lot places, but never in the middle of a rain forest. No matter. Towering genius disdains a beaten path.”

Warren winked at him. “Lincoln, right?”

“Our emancipator, motherfucker.”

And so it began. I happily readjusted to the creative process as piloted by Sonny Rivers. Although given to occasional fits of speech making, he was generally not a gushy guy. “Let’s move on” was high praise. The pursuit of his vision rarely entailed telling you how to play. Instead, he told you what to feel. He spoke up only to motivate. If he was struck ill by a lyric or even an entire verse, he’d merely repeat the offending words, his slow delivery revealing their shittiness: “So, at this point in the song, you want to sing ‘I slipped on a banana peel and ended up beside the one I love.’ Do I have that right?” That was usually enough to get you redrafting. In the end, you wanted to do it his way because his way worked. Careers were born and reborn under Sonny’s sonic guidance.

Considerable pressure for a lawyer, a high school teacher, a sex therapist, and well, whatever the hell Jumbo was.

A studio track is essentially a big lie, an illusion of musicians grabbing their instruments and cruising through a song, each player hitting all the proper notes at all the proper times at all the proper levels. A recording begins as a series of isolated performances extracted from musicians standing tired and alone in a booth over the course of repeated laborious takes—lasting hours, sometimes days—after which they’re all slung together and mixed into a seamless, contrived blend. When you hear some hot dish singing her sweaty ass off, utterly de
pleting herself by song’s end, she probably had a kale smoothie and a sushi roll, possibly even a marriage, between the opening line and the final chorus. Your favorite piano track likely took weeks to get right and was put down in fragments. It wasn’t even a real piano. Because of the long stretches of tedium, recording an album can often feel like a spectator sport. People take up addictions simply for something to do.

Sonny also happened to be tremoring his way through a smoking cessation program, so he was not looking for a minute of downtime, lest his fingers start fidgeting in the direction of a pack of Newports. He occupied himself by occupying the hell out of us with long hours in the studio. Warren commuted back and forth from Lambertville to maintain a sense of normalcy with Lauren and Patrick; Jumbo crashed with an unnamed childhood friend (I was just happy it wasn’t me); Mackenzie sublet an apartment in Old City, taking the opportunity to live in an area of town that had always struck her fancy; and I got to sleep in my own bed every night, which helped me remain somewhat connected to Sara—who seemed somewhat involved in divorcing her husband and somewhat involved in rediscovering him.

One Friday night, as I walked in from a long week in the studio, she greeted me at the door wearing dark jeans, a red silk shirt, and a freshly paved path of lipstick. “Are you up for a movie?” she asked.

Soon, we were sitting at a bar table in a rollicking saloon across the street from the theater, sipping cold lager and eating turkey burgers with sweet potato fries. At the last minute, we sprung over the curb, bought tickets and candy, and dropped into our seats just as the house lights dimmed and a commercial for Stella Artois burst upon the screen with a deafening flash.

Sara had selected a film by an Iranian director with a string of critically lauded dramas. During a heavy scene in which a man forced to leave Tehran during the 1979 revolution is reunited with his family many years later, Sara, without looking at me, placed a Junior Mint into my mouth. As I chewed it, I looked over at her, but she remained
fixed on the movie, her eyes flickering with the light that danced off the screen.

When the credits were over, we walked down the block to a coffee shop that served the best vanilla latte in the city, according to Sara. The barista, a young man with hoops in his earlobes and a beard that reached his sternum, smiled with familiarity at Sara and said, “No whipped cream, right?”

Up against the window, on barstools for the second time that night, the soothing tones of Miles Davis’s trumpet separating us from the brigades of bar hoppers outside, we sat together and praised the movie. Sara then asked how the record was coming along. I started to tell her how the music was really starting to take flight, what a thrill it was to hear these naked compositions being forged into actual songs. I stopped myself and looked into my cappuccino.

“You don’t want to hear about this,” I said. “It’s boring if you’re not actually there.”

I also didn’t think it fair or wise to amplify the joy I was getting from a venture that didn’t involve her but did involve Mackenzie. Mack was still something of an unknown quantity to her. And to me, for that matter.

“It’s not boring to me,” Sara replied, resting her cheek in her palm. “I’ve been living with a lawyer all this time. Talk about boring.”

So I talked a bit. Sara listened with apparent interest, and stirred another half pack of sweetener into her cup.

The conversation shifted to more mundane topics, and she reminded me that we were low on coffee beans. “They have that Colombian blend you like here,” she said, glancing over at the display table that was neatly lined with brown vacuum-sealed bags.

I turned my head. “Nice. I can never find that.”

“I know. Let’s grab one.”

As I stood in line, the beans crunching together in the bag, I looked over at Sara and felt a rush of warmth. She and I really were more than roommates. We had a life together with routines that gave each of us
solace. We curled up under blankets in front of movies, she invariably turning to me with some dubious theory about an actor. (“That guy’s really British. You can totally tell.”) Sometimes under the blanket my hand would slide over her thigh and we’d pause the movie and lead each other into the bedroom. Much later she’d slip out to the bathroom, her long spindly legs unsteady, needing a few steps to reacquaint themselves with the symmetry of walking. On her way back, she’d lift the shade and peer out at the night, checking to see if the snow had started to fall. She’d stand there for a moment too long and I’d wonder what she was looking at, or looking for. Then she’d dive back under the covers into my folded arm, and the next thing I knew, it would be 2:09 a.m., the hall light still on, the movie still paused.

She was nursing the last of her latte now and watching as a gathering of college boys outside the window shoved each other playfully for the benefit of girls standing in poses of affected disengagement. Sara seemed a visitor in a museum, witnessing from the safety of a glass barrier the unfolding of some evolutionarily dictated mating ritual. So this is how the humans behave, her bemused gaze seemed to say.

How many times had I felt that same isolating sense of wonder that I was now reading on her face? That aloneness in the thick of everything.

Having Sara had kept me from drifting off into the shadows, from truly disappearing into myself. Just maybe I’d done the same for her.

*       *       *

Everything came together on the day Jumbo wore a bandana. It appeared out of nowhere, plucked out of his arsenal of inexplicable accessories. It was black and accented with undersea-green paisley swirls that put one in an astrological frame of mind. The way it was draped over his head would have, on anyone else, connoted menace—urban gang, seventeenth-century pirate—but on him looked like a boxed Halloween costume from Walmart.

“What’s with the kerchief ?” Sonny frowned as Jumbo took a seat in the booth, rested his red Gretsch on his knee, and adjusted the large-banded headphones over his ears. He was preparing to lay down an arpeggio guitar line on “The Warmth of Disease,” a song that had awakened me in the middle of the night, demanding to be written, one that I’d managed to quietly cage with a Dictaphone and a nylon-string acoustic.

Once all the fussing over tuning and sound levels had been sorted out, Sonny leaned over the board, pressed the button that allowed communication between the control room and the isolation booth, and spoke: “Don’t think of this track as merely texture. This is going to be a part. When somebody describes this song to his friends, he’s going to say, ‘You know the one with that guitar line? Ba ba ba, ba ba ba, ba ba ba.’ You are helping to define this song.”

Warren and I were watching from the yellow couch behind Sonny. Warren kept holding his bag of dried mango in front of my face; I kept shaking him off.

“When you play this line,” Sonny continued, “I want you to picture your guitar leading the listener through the song, being there for them, something for them to trust when the singer drops out or when the drums get moody or the bass goes a little peripatetic.”

I looked at Warren and mouthed “peripatetic.” With a resolute nod, he mouthed it right back.

“Dude, I’m all over it,” Jumbo declared.

“Let’s see,” Sonny grumbled. “Ready now. Here it comes.”

Then, at the very last second before Sonny hit the record button, Jumbo magically produced a pair of cheap surf-shop sunglasses and slid them on. Warren groaned. Between the headphones, the bandana, and the plastic Ray-Ban knockoffs, the guitar player looked a little like a petty dope hustler and a little like Hulk Hogan. Sonny glanced back at us but decided there were no words. Then he pressed the button.

At first, all that came through the speakers was the pregnant click
of Warren’s sticks counting off four measures in three-four time. Then the studio flooded with music. The rich tone of Jumbo’s broken chords seemed to run like syrup over the crisp hi-hat strikes and rim shots supplied by the drum track. It drifted over Mackenzie’s wandering bass and weaved the whole thing into a slow sonic freight car rolling across an open plain. Each one of us was transfixed. It was for moments like this that I put up with everything else that came with that meandering mess of humanity, that avalanche in a china shop.

When the song was finished, Sonny looked up and stated simply, “You’re done.”

Jumbo grinned with pride at what was often Sonny’s most effusive tribute. Consumed with self-congratulation, he forgot that sunglasses tended to impair one’s vision when one wore them in a dark recording studio, and standing up, he suddenly found himself tangled in a snake pit of cables. He rocked clumsily, then finally tripped and crashed into the termite-weakened, asbestos-riddled wall.

“Please, man!” Sonny yelled in anguish. “Get out of my booth!”

Lead vocals were next, so I got up.

Mack was smirking at me. “You really want to follow that act?”

I shook my head.

“Listen, Tremble, I love this song,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. So don’t blow it.”

I paused. “I’ll try not to, but just so I understand, what’s the
it
in that sentence?”

“The
it
is the noise that your throat is about to make in that little room right there. You’ll only make it for a few minutes, but it will be captured and listened to for all eternity.”

“And by eternity, you mean the next six months. A year tops.”

“So maybe not eternity, but long after we’re all dead, that’s for sure,” she said, crossing her legs and nestling herself into one of the beanbagesque sofa cushions.

“Thanks. That was kind of you.”

“What?” She giggled. “Just trying to help you maintain perspective, to appreciate the weight of the moment. But hey—no pressure.”

“Christ, Mackenzie. Whatever happened to ‘let’s just play the damn thing’?”

She smiled. “Okay. Just play the damn thing.”

I started for the recording room.

“But don’t blow it,” she called after me.

Inside the booth, I cleared my throat while sliding on the headphones and smoothing out the crumpled lyric sheet on the stand. Sonny came in to toy with the microphone boom. “You stand right there,” he ordered. “Don’t move. And don’t touch my mic.”

As I ran through a couple of takes, I could feel myself shrinking. The lyrics were the weak link in this song. The imagery was hokey, the metaphors mixed. Pouring cold bottled water down my stupid, thirty-eight-year-old throat, I tried not to notice my bandmates staring at me team-photo-like from the couch.

“Hold up a sec,” Sonny commanded from behind the sound board, detaining me in the grip of his stare. “This song, ‘The Warmth of Disease’—what’s going on here? What do you think about these words you’re singing?”

I heaved a sigh. I hated these inquisitions. It was his way of leading me to criticism.