Thank You, Goodnight (10 page)

And that’s when the third thing that had never happened before happened: Lucy showed up unannounced. She’d decided to surprise me on tour. And surprise me she did. She knocked on the door hours before the show, and upon seeing I wasn’t alone, she picked up her bag, fled the hotel, and didn’t speak to me until a week or two later when a break in the tour allowed me a few days at home.

Then she flipped. Fucking attacked me. And it wasn’t one of those chick-flick tantrums that starts with wild swatting and screaming and eventually collapses into a weepy embrace—I hate you! I hate you! I . . . love you!—and then there’s sex on the ottoman. No sir. Shit got thrown—plates, not pillows. We trashed the place. Rather, she trashed it; I deflected flying candy dishes and ducked behind furniture. In retrospect, that mad scene was probably the closest I’ve ever felt to being a true rock star.

She left me practically the next day, and I remember respecting her for it. Over the years, mutual friends have told me that she’s still bitter. You’d have thought she’d be over it by now. I’m nothing special. Ask anyone.

Something also shifted in Mackenzie after Phoenix, although less dramatically. No fights, tiffs, hostility, or even serious talks. She just became quietly inaccessible to me. Even when standing next to her on stage, I had the sensation of looking at her through a telescope, as if she were drifting farther and farther into the wings.

When Sara moved in with me, life couldn’t have been more different than life with Lucy. We acted the part of a couple in many ways. We ate, we argued, we shared a bed. We hiked the Canadian Rockies together. We had friends with whom we took in the new Asian fusion restaurant or the new Wes Anderson movie. She tolerated my hypersensitivity to the smell of trash—I made trips to the chute nightly, no matter how full the bag—and I put up with her insistence that we remain in the movie theater until the very last of the credits had drifted up the screen. I personally didn’t see any reason to hang around and catch the Dolby logo ten minutes after the movie had ended, but she enjoyed the dreamy blanket of the movie experience and was in no hurry for it to end. And apparently, assistants to the key grip are people too.

There was no imbalance of power in our home because she was neither impressed with nor affronted by my fleeting fame. As far as she was concerned, I was just an irritable, disagreeable lawyer, a little too arrogant for my station and possibly bitter about having thrown in the towel too soon. Her frighteningly precise memory prevented me from having to worry about her not remembering the correct name of a Beatles song. And while most days she was a Joni Mitchell kind of gal, she
brought her own copy of
Bitches Brew
to the relationship, and her number-one favorite song of all time was actually by Mötley Crüe, a lovable gem of a detail that suggests we don’t know everything we think we do about Sara Rome.

Our relationship did have more empty rooms than most, and
every so often, in the long quiet of a Sunday afternoon, they troubled me. We were not confidants. Sara was only sporadically curious about my previous life, and even then, only superficially. I got the sense that there was something about Mackenzie that made Sara uncomfortable. Maybe it was the fact that when I spoke of the band, I never spoke of Mack. That I seemed to keep her to myself like a secret of mixed quality. That unlike Jumbo and Warren, there was nothing to ridicule or deride about Mackenzie. That unlike Jumbo and Warren, I had slept with Mackenzie.

And we never talked about Drew. Not almost never; never. Sara had always acted as if the horrific experience was something she could just move away from, like a school district. It was as if she’d packed up all her stuff, moved it into my apartment, and closed the door on her past. Locked it out, simply and definitively, much like the returning GI who trembles in front of his house and forbids his nightmares from crossing over the doormat with him.

Though the time never seemed quite right to ask, I always wondered whether things like that were really capable of being left out on the lawn.

*       *       *

It is the lunch hour and once again I am shifting into my coat and moving hurriedly past the secretary station, past the confined cubbyholes where youthful lawyers are shelved away until they emerge old and rumpled three decades later.

Past conference room four, in which seven indistinguishable men (not a skirt among them today) sit and contort their faces into what they think true listening should look like, and at least two of them battle the undertow of bladder pressure because it is way too soon to get up and take yet another piss.

Past Barbara Mitnik (partner, late forties, stout) sipping water from that synagogue mug adorned with Hebrew lettering, smiling at her computer monitor, surely drafting another one of those insipid
parenting columns for some suburban magazine.
I was at my Rachel’s soccer game last weekend and found myself thinking, Cherish every moment, it really does go by so fast.
When she’s not busy composing tripe, Barbara enjoys a preoccupation with her gluten allergy.

Past Spencer Kipling, who winks at me in the hall and for once doesn’t mention Death Cab for Cutie. Eighteen months ago we shared an elevator ride during which I happened to have been listening to the one Death Cab song I have on my iPod. “Didn’t take you for a Death Cab guy,” he remarked. And I’m not—hence, only the one song—but since then, Spencer has been operating under the misimpression that we share a passion. Articles are forwarded to me, visits are made to my office. What do I think of the new album? How psyched am I that they’re back in the studio? If only I’d had the presence of mind that day to tell him I was listening to Olivia Newton-John.

Past the empty office of recently dismissed junior partner Chas Rooney. Nice guy. He’ll land somewhere that places a higher premium on his penchant for sharing his views on the best albums to “get busy” to.

Past Kelvin Kim, who is fidgeting with the miniature Stormtrooper on his desk and speaking in low tones into his cell phone. “But honey, I wasn’t being defensive.” At the moment, Kelvin is fit and reedy, but give him time. In a few short years, he’ll look like everyone else: a thirty-eight-inch waist, simian posture, and cheeks flushed from the sugar rush of a late-afternoon cupcake that someone (doesn’t matter who) abandoned in the kitchen.

The irony of law firms is that they’re stocked with hypereducated drones whom you hire for zealous advocacy but who are only there because they didn’t feel particularly strongly about doing anything else with their lives. They sit, they read, they argue with each other because they think that’s their job, they squander the prime of their lives, and incrementally, over the empty rainbow of each day, they invisibly lose contact with what they love about themselves. Then, some grim morning, they awaken and, upon looking in the mirror, realize
they’ve become a painting in the neo-Flemish style—all severe poses, intense expressions, hard lines.

Now I’m in a packed elevator, sharing the descent with a dozen men and women, all of whom have set out with the aim of grabbing something “reasonably healthy” for lunch, like a salad or a turkey sandwich with lite mayo, but will fuck the whole thing up with Thousand Island dressing or a bag of Fritos.

Then I’m out walking the city blocks among the legions of the despairing clock watchers, the pairs of lunching duos who exchange short, pointless utterances about last night’s
American Idol
or how the weather may be gorgeous now but the weekend is supposed to be rainy and cold and doesn’t that just figure.

And all these interactions are so vacuous that they are essentially transactional. They do no more than register receipt, like verbal invoices. I got your bland comment, here’s mine.

But I know what all these people really want to say, what they are dying to scream from the deepest pockets of their souls. It is this: How did I end up here in this tiny little infinite universe, and what do I do now?

The next thing I know, I’m standing in the lobby of my condo building, my patience dwindling as I await an elevator. I feel the strange yet familiar hot volts of creativity surging within me. There’s some self-loathing in there too; I’m on the doorstep of forty, for chrissakes. My eyes meet those of the doorman and I make an impatient gesture at the elevator. He shrugs. “It’s been slow all day,” he says. Like that helps me.

Finally, the door opens and I rush in. I feel like a sneakered secretary with a cigarette in one hand and a twitchy finger on the trigger of a lighter in the other: desperate. There’s a melody in my head that I’m barely holding on to. I need to commit it to tape. I stab the door-close button with my finger, but the doors don’t budge. The elevator wants to wait. I alone don’t justify the trip. If this tune flies out of my head, it’ll be gone forever. I viciously poke the door-close button
again and again. The button is purely cosmetic. I pound the wall in frustration.

The last time I churned out four albums’ worth of material with this kind of fever, I was a stupid kid with vast expanses of time to write but neither the experiences nor insights to guide my hand. I was nineteen, a busboy at a country club for the summer, vacuuming the lobby, parking guests’ BMWs and Audis, lugging coolers of Coke and Heineken out to the golf course. I lit Sternos and slid them under chafing dishes. I dunked curly fries into simmering vats of hideous liquid. Occasionally I got my ass pinched by a miniskirted MILF whose posttennis lunch consisted of three Bloody Marys and a cantaloupe wedge. Through all those summer days, I went blissfully unsupervised, as my boss, a mangy fellow named Brad, disappeared each morning into his office to get stoned. Brad spoke to each employee exactly once a day, usually during his early-afternoon rounds. The exchange was brief. He’d cast his bloodshot eyes in our direction, bid us “Get your shit together,” and then retreat to his office to change his bong water.

It was during that summer that I first learned to write a song. After checking in with Brad, I’d escape into the woods nearby and play the beat-up guitar that I’d stashed there just before my shift. I learned to find a melody in the groove of strummed chords. I learned to pair that melody with a stirring topography of words. It just came to me. I became so enamored with my newly found talent and wrote with such tireless energy that at summer’s end, I went back to college a changed kid. I was a songwriter now. It became my new identity. From there, way led on to way, all the way up—and all the way back down again.

I was now reconnecting with that kid. That old exhilarating spark was duking it out with the part of me that should’ve known better.

CHAPTER 5

A
fter all these years, Sonny Rivers still took my call, and he looked as unhappy about it as ever on the other end of our web conference.

He cleared his throat, his patience already vanishing. “You ready yet?”

“Hang on.”

I strummed and toyed with some amplifier knobs. The telecaster needed more treble. I checked the mic—check, check, one, two—then returned to the computer and started fidgeting with the camera.

“Do you know how valuable my time is?” he complained.

I positioned myself on the stool and reached for the guitar. “Can you see me okay?”

“Come on, man.”

“How’s the sound?”

“Play the damn song.”

I glanced at the screen and watched Sonny light up a cigarette in his Los Angeles home.

“You still smoke?” I said. “Who still smokes?”

He glared at me and shook the match dead.

I had set up this video conference in the living room, which I judged to have marginally better acoustics than the office or the bedroom. We used this software at work, but obviously never to broadcast something that required sonic quality.

I lowered my gaze onto him. “Remember. Total secrecy, Sonny. I feel stupid enough. If it sucks, you forget this ever happened.”

“I’m not in the habit of repeating myself and I’m not going to start now,” Sonny intoned. The man never lost his cool. Not after eighteen consecutive hours in the studio. Not when a session player couldn’t nail a part in twenty takes. Not when he couldn’t find just the right amount of snap for the snare. He got ornery and crabby and decidedly mean at times, but he never lost it.

I took a sip from a brown beer bottle perched on the amp. It was warm and nearly stale.

“See, the way it works is, I drink and then you sound better,” Sonny said.

“You’re fucking hilarious.”

“Play something.”

I breathed. “Okay. You ready?”

“Play something or I’m out.”

So I just went for it. For the next three minutes, I played “Whereabouts,” my first original song in ten years. It had a driving, midtempo groove that I could fall into, and a coastal-highway melody that forced me up to the gritty heights of my range.

My face reddened with self-consciousness at the very first vocal line, my voice sounding thin, characterless, old. The lyrics suddenly felt trite and empty. Did I really just mention train tracks and an airport runway in the first verse? I hid inside the song and plowed through, pouring myself into it, trying to lose myself the way I used to. It was an endless three minutes. Was that last verse and chorus necessary?

When it was over, I hazarded a glance at the monitor. Sonny was looking down, the cigarette secured on the side of his mouth. He might’ve been picking at his shoe.

“Did you get that?” I finally asked.

Without raising his eyes, he said, “Hang on a minute.” Then he got up and disappeared off camera.

I reached for my beer, warmer now and increasingly tasting of discouragement. Sonny had always been an enigma. He coaxed staggering performances from the fingers and mouths of artists of all genres, from hip-hop to country, and all talent levels, from as high as Stevie Wonder to as low as me, and unquestionably had one of the most respected ears in the industry. But an open book he was not. All told, I’d spent about four months holed up with the man in the confining quarters of a recording studio doing two albums with him on major label dime, and I knew next to nothing about him personally. But for all his mercurial moods and methods, you trusted him. Which was why he was the only option when I finally summoned the gumption to share. He would be blunt, just as he was when I played him that hideously ill-conceived, underwritten concept album years ago. He would tell me if I was no longer qualified even to sing “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore” at a day camp. Maybe this time I’d even listen.