Thank You, Goodnight (41 page)

“I’ll do it,” Jumbo blurted out. “I’m feeling so much right now—pain, confusion, a broken heart. Why him? Why now? It’s all so unfair! And we all know emotions are best expressed when you’re a little out of whack.”

“No, they aren’t,” I interrupted. “I’ll do it.”

The room went quiet. Nobody spoke up to object.

“Good, get on it,” Alaina finally directed. “You stay here. The rest of us will go down to the lounge.” She looked at Mackenzie, whose edgy eyes were pointed out the window, her fingernail tapping against her front tooth. “But we’re not going anywhere without Mack.”

Mack turned to Alaina and sighed. “I’m here.”

“Just give me something to write with,” I said. “A notepad, a pen, and a half hour on that brown sofa right there. It won’t be the unified theory of everything, but . . .” I shrugged. “I’ll try to do the man justice.”

The fact was, Sonny wouldn’t have given a rat’s ass about any kind of tribute. A tribute was all about what other people thought. That was never his concern. He made music the way he thought it
should sound, music that was true to his own ears, his own soul. That’s why he carried himself like he owned the world. Because if you really were true to yourself and to your soul, then you did own the world.

Everyone filed out of the room, absently tipping the coffee pitcher into their cups as they passed. Only Alaina remained, stuck in the doorway, unable to leave.

“For once in your life, Theodore, try to be nice,” she said.

I grunted. Look who was talking.

She remained fixed under the door frame, smiling an oddly fragile smile.

“You okay?” I asked.

“No.” She pointed at the couch. “That sofa doesn’t like being called brown, because it’s purple.”

I regarded it. “Then why does it look brown?”

“Who the fuck knows?” she replied with a weary flip of her bangs. “Maybe it’s exhausted.”

I then noticed a new photo on the wall, a recent shot, the frame unmarred by dust. Sonny’s arm was slung around Alaina as they posed in front of the mixing board in East Side Studios during the
Trans Am
sessions. It was somewhat underexposed—there was no flash, and the shaft of light beaming down from the ceiling fan just missed them, as if they’d dodged a lightning strike. But as I looked hard at the picture, I could see Sonny’s eyes. I felt him staring back at me, holding me in his all-knowing countenance with those eyes that had seen everything. At that, I seized up in panic.

“Alaina,” I called out.

She reappeared at the door.

“You know what? I take it back. I don’t know if I can do this. I’ve never written a tribute in my life. Who am I to speak for Sonny Rivers anyway?” I stood there in my agent’s office, my head shaking under a stampede of insecurity. “No, I change my mind. I can’t do it.”

“Teddy,” she said matter-of-factly, “it’s the artist’s job to find
beauty, and in beauty, there’s hope and optimism, no matter how tragic that beauty. So, for the sake of all of us, do your job. Be the artist you claim to be.”

I stared at her hard. “I don’t think I know what that means.”

“Well.” She let out a dark laugh. “You’d better start pretending you do.”

And she was gone.

I started adjusting to the aloneness of the room when Jumbo poked his head back in, a warrior’s thirst all over his face. “Mingus, I’m right here if you need me, bro!” He was holding up his fist in a show of brotherly solidarity.

I expressed my appreciation by telling him to get out and shut the door.

*       *       *

I sat on the brownish-purple sofa and thought. I put myself in the records Sonny made as a young man. I put myself in his house with his wife and kids as a man full-on in his prime. I set myself on fire. Nothing came that seemed worth saying.

What happens to a man when he dies? Does the physical world take note? What happens to the things he loved when he’s no longer in the world to love them? Do his favorite songs play with slightly less radiance because the adoration quotient has diminished? Do the places he always wanted to visit brim with less joy for his never having gotten there? Does his house miss him, the quiet that hangs over its rooms in the afternoon a more somber silence? Do the secrets only he knew find another head in which to conceal themselves?

I gazed up at the photos on Alaina’s wall and tried to unbend in the exalted company—the once famous, the overrated, the roadkill. I sent myself into the tunnels of memories I had of Sonny but only found myself becoming more lost.

Sonny was dead. It didn’t matter what we did or what we said now. Sonny was gone. Gone forever. Every single person up in those
frames, no matter how celebrated or disgraced, was going to die. No matter who heard them sing. No matter what legacy they left behind, or to whom. That’s where this was all headed. That’s what happens next. That, I decided, was Sonny’s unfinished thought.

I reached for my phone and dialed. It went to voice mail. I called back. Again and again—it was the only thing that mattered—until at last Sara picked up.

“It’s me,” I said, my voice breaking with relief.

Everybody should have someone to whom they’re simply
It’s me
.

CHAPTER 26

S
he was typing an e-mail at the desk in our office when I blew into the condo. She spun her chair around and looked at me.

“It’s such a horrible thing,” she said. “Are you okay?”

I felt my jaw go taut. I wasn’t sure I could say it. “Sara. How come you never talk to me about Drew?”

She recoiled.

“All these years together and you’ve never spoken to me about him. And then Billy comes back and . . . I know Drew is with you, Sara. I know he’s with you all the time.”

She looked splintered by my bluntness, my crime of violating our long-standing accord to leave this alone. I watched her readying a nimble deflection. She’d tell me that this had nothing to do with him, that I was just thrown by what had happened to Sonny. It would be a thoroughly rehearsed act of self-defense.

But something was different this time. Her expression was changing, going somewhere I’d never been. Her mouth relaxed into a sad, honest smile.

“You’re not me,” she said. “You could never have known what I was going through. It’s not your fault. You’ve always just been someone else who didn’t have an answer.”

I lowered myself in front of her. “But I could’ve been someone you could lean on. And I wasn’t.”

She reached out and rested her hands on my shoulders. “I’ve leaned on you, Teddy. But let’s face it—you’re a person who’s constantly caught up in the business of being you.”

I looked down. The marine-blue carpet suddenly seemed like an unforgiving ocean that could keep you adrift forever.

“It’s okay,” she said.

“No. It’s not. It’s really not. I don’t know how you’ve dealt with it.”

“You do know. You were there the whole time. You saw it. I took shelter in you. I attached myself to someone who, even when sharing my bed and sitting at the dinner table, was usually miles away.” She heaved a fearless sigh. “I think about him every day, Teddy. Every single day. I hear him calling to me in the park. I see him in those wide shafts of sunlight out the windows of airplanes. Sometimes I could swear he’s just up ahead on a crowded block, not even looking for me anymore. I see him everywhere.”

Water pooled into the whites of her eyes.

“I used to wander from room to room, praying that for once, just this once, the rules would bend and I’d get him back. Back from where, I didn’t know. I just had to believe that my little boy was somewhere. The thought that he was nowhere was much worse. Even if I could never find him again, I had to believe he was out there somewhere. The clouds, the stars, somewhere . . .”

I couldn’t even look her in the eye now. For her, all I’d ever been was a branch arching over quicksand. This ramshackle life we’d fused together, each of us clinging to something else, each of us caught up in some squall we hoped might set us down in a better place, a place that was long gone—it was a fiction. A sad clawing for the past was perhaps the thing we had most in common. And hers put mine to shame.

Shame on me. Everything I’d ever done, I’d done for myself. This woman had been cooped up all these years with me, watching as I lugged around this ugly chip on my shoulder all because the world had gypped me out of something I didn’t deserve in the first place. Why had she stayed? Why didn’t Sara hate me? How can you stomach the folly of melodrama once you’ve been forced to reckon with actual drama?

Kneeling in a crumpled pile on the floor, I knew there was no apology that wouldn’t trivialize everything.

I said, “Do you want to know what I think?”

She waited, as if it had never occurred to her that I thought anything.

“I think wherever he is, he’s not in pain. I don’t think he’s scared and I don’t think he’s sad.”

With a faint look of surprise, she started to nod.

“And,” I said carefully, moving closer to her, “I’d really like to go with you next year. On his birthday, to see him.”

She rested her face onto the top of my head, her chin burrowed into my hair.

When she sat back up, the tears had been wiped clean. “It’s okay, Teddy. I love you almost just the way you are.”

I was in no position to ask for more than that.

“But we’ve got more to talk about,” she said, straightening herself. There was something unshakable in her now. It scared me. “All these changes you’ve made, all these big decisions.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve made some decisions too.”

“Okay.”

“I’ve made some decisions about us,” she said.

Down on the floor, I slid as close to her as I could get. Whatever she wanted to tell me, I’d be right there, hearing her. My heart galloped. I was afraid, but I was ready. I owed her that.

“It’s okay, Sara.” I held tightly to the bended reeds of her legs. I looked her square in the eye.

She released one last breath, purging herself of any air of doubt caged up inside her.

“It’s okay,” I assured her. “I want you to tell me these decisions you’ve made. Whatever they are, I want to hear them. I’m ready.”

PART FOUR

EL FAROLITO

CHAPTER 27

I
t took a long time to get here and the road was, to say the least, circuitous. It’s not the Hollywood Bowl, but it’s not the Whole Foods parking lot either. Everybody here is happy.

Happy all the fucking time. The first rum cocktail goes down no later than noon, and they chase it with a parade of lime-stuffed Coronas that perspire down the side of the bottle. There are no pissed-off drunks here. And they dress down. The fanciest thing you’d pack for the El Farolito is something you’d wear to the pool.

They set us up nicely. Instead of a room in the main hotel, which would’ve done just fine, they put us in one of the casitas, soothingly tan villas tucked away under an umbrella of palm trees at the end of a long path. Nestled at the edge of the villas is a forever pool, an amenity that, if you ask me, has never quite gotten its due in the pantheon of opulence. It feels like the edge of the world, like our own private overlook into tranquility.

In the evening, fresh from a shower, I carry my guitar case down the path toward the Flamingo Wing and I actually pass a flamingo.

A man seated at a tall cocktail table calls to me as I walk by, my hair buckling in the sea breeze. He yells out “Goodbye to Myself” and “Well, I’m This Way,” titles from the new record, then adds “Free
Bird” just to be a wiseass. He’s making requests for the show later. He’s no more than thirty and is wearing sunglasses, a yellow tank top, and a wet grin. The grin is due, in no small part, to the gorgeous blonde at his table, whose shorts ride high on the thigh. Honeymooners are untouchable. I smile and wave at them. Look at me—I’m Captain Stubing now.

It’s still a bit of an undue thrill that people know the names of the songs on
Trans Am
, which, for a succinct but utterly satisfying spell, put Tremble back on the map. The American youth that bought our music at the mall decades ago apparently tuned in again, this time as they heated up chicken fingers and fries for their kids. “Goodbye to Myself” even broke the top twenty-five and “Well, I’m This Way” made it onto the soundtrack of a popular Showtime series. The album was the most unlikely critics’ darling you ever saw, making the year’s “best of” list at
Rolling Stone
, Pitchfork, Drowned in Sound, and even the cranky BBC.

Our popularity spiked such that I was interviewed by
Vogue
. They sent a young hipster writer to our condo one afternoon, a hipster photographer in tow, and a month later, there I was in a two-page fluff piece looking intrepid and durable. I signed two copies of the magazine and mailed them to a certain hamlet in Unterseen, enclosing with them autographed copies of the new record. On the one to Heinz-Peter, I wrote, “Isn’t this a nice picture of me? Would that really have been so hard?” On the one to Tereza, I wrote, “You were right—I wasn’t okay with being someone else, and I did want to play. Thank you.”

And because I’m not good at letting things go, I mailed the
Rolling Stone
review to my father. I highlighted the line that read: “Halfway through this vibrant, poignant record from a band wrongly dismissed as time-capsule material, one can’t help but wonder why Tremble didn’t attempt a comeback years ago.” It could very easily be lost on my old man.

Maybe the second coming of our success was just homesickness,
a familiar voice stoking pleasant remembrances, blind wistfulness for the past (people even pine for the midnineties now). Or maybe pity: we might have been the dumpy old frau that the bartender cards just to make her night. But who would choose to dwell on that? I was humbled by it all, and proud of myself for feeling that way.

Sonny helped us from the grave. It’d be foolish to deny that he was the reason the spotlight landed on us for a while. But I’ve given it a lot of thought and have decided I feel no guilt. Even if Alaina and Colin were only taken in by the allure of Tremble redux because of Sonny’s involvement, and even if the world took note of our record because our famous producer thefted more than a few headlines in his departure, the truth is that Sonny genuinely dug the way
Trans Am
turned out. He listened to those coarse demos and told us motherfuckers to go make a record. And he showed up at the Plum that night to tell us that we’d accomplished what we’d set out to do. We earned him, so maybe we earned everything that came after. If that’s anywhere near the truth, then our royalty checks are not blood money.