Thank You, Goodnight (17 page)

“Two weeks from yesterday.”

“You’re fucked.”

“Oh, I’m fucked all right. But it doesn’t matter. That Julie girl will make her fiddle sound like a dying animal, and her mommy and daddy will still give her a standing O like she’s Itzhak Perlman. But here’s the thing. I guarantee you that in every class there’s one kid who gets jazzed about what we’re doing. A circuit breaker flips in that kid’s head and—boom!—that’s it. He or she is one of us for life.”

“Listen to yourself. One of us. For life. That’s why you can’t say no. That’s why you have to accept my proposition.”

“Wrong,” he sighed. “That’s why I’m here, Teddy, and it’s why I’m not going to leave.”

We pushed open the doors and ambled out into the chilled evening air, our heels tapping out an echo under the high canopy of the front walkway.

When we reached the flagpole, I pointed to the student lot and said, “Well, I’m over there.”

He dipped his head toward the teachers’ lot. “And I’m over there.”

The symbolism was not lost on me.

“I’m sorry you came all this way for nothing.”

“It wasn’t nothing to me.”

He started to walk away, then stopped. “I’m glad you sought me out. Look, maybe you’re going through something strange in your life or maybe you’re still trying to find your way. I don’t know. We’ve all been there. Whatever it is, we’re still buddies. You know that.”

Through the darkness, I watched his form blend into the dim shadows. Goddamn you, Square. Goddamn you for pitying me.

Soon, I was rolling swiftly down 95.
The lanes of the highway were thick with cars, each one driven by some poor son of a bitch doing very little other than growing older. I jacked up the stereo and sought cover in a college radio station. It was playing a song I’d never heard before, a melody high, earthy, and sad. There was something about the night, the air, the music, the high-speed forward motion, the recent reconnections with lost things and lost people. Tonight it hung around my neck like a judge’s decree.

CHAPTER 9

“I
want to talk to you.” It was my dad on the phone.

“You do, huh. What about?”

“Meet me at the gym. We’ll talk there.” The gym was shorthand for the posh Sporting Club, an aristocratic spa where the well-bred of Philadelphia overpaid to perspire—certainly not sweat—in their Lululemon and Under Armour.

“What do you want to talk to me about?” I hate surprises. After college, there are very few good surprises.

“We’ll talk there.”

I didn’t relish being summoned like a lapdog, but my day was rather open and a little exercise wouldn’t kill me. On top of that, it is an axiom of magical thinking that the one day a son declines his father’s invitation is the day the old man up and dies. Like I needed that.

With the tart taste of passive obedience in my mouth and the dread of an impending lecture, I tossed on my most threadbare T-shirt and walked across town.

At the club’s front desk, a synthetically buff guy with feathered hair and spandex shorts told me to sign the guest book. Behind him, stacks of vitamin-enriched bottled water, Gatorade of all hues, amino shakes, and powdered whey towered over us. He handed me a towel and said, “Enjoy your workout.” An oxymoronic benediction, if ever there was one.

Through the glistening crowd of midday workout fanatics, I saw Lou Tremble climbing off a treadmill. He spotted me and pulled the earphones out of his ears, winding the little wire as he walked in my direction. I wondered what type of music got my father pumped up for a workout. Growing up, I would comb through his record collection and imagine a hipper past for the man. I’d finger through the cardboard sleeves with the psychedelic designs of Stevie Wonder, Cream, Spyro Gyra, and think, When exactly was this man cool? Somewhere along the line he must’ve gotten lost, his eight-tracks and cassettes sprouting overnight the names Manilow, Sedaka, Anne fucking Murray. Old, edgeless music seemed to pursue people throughout their lives, finally catching up with them when they were too slow and tired to outrun it. You grew up on Smokey Robinson and Dizzy Gillespie. Through your daughter’s bedroom door you overheard Springsteen, his voice filling you with a forgotten wildness. Somewhere in the nineties you hummed “Unskinny Bop” on your way to the office. And then you woke up at age sixty-five and found yourself singing “Ding ding ding goes the trolley.” The house always wins.

My father approached me in a shiny blue tank top. He regarded my shirt, which bore the Chicago Cubs logo.

“You still have that?” he said, smiling. “I bought that for you when I was out there for a meeting with the Wrigley Company. You must’ve been in high school.”

“Actually, you got this on a trip to Vancouver. You had a layover at O’Hare on the return. Thanks for thinking of me.”

I have never been a Cubs fan.

Dad wiped a modest sheen of perspiration from his brow and flashed a frothy grin at a young woman on a shoulder press machine.

“So, what are we doing, Rocky?” I asked him.

“I just finished up with cardio, so let’s do some weights. Easier to talk that way.”

I didn’t mind that my old man still hit the gym with the optimistic
verve of the skinny kid on the wrestling team. Nothing wrong with a guy raging against the dying of the light with forty-five minutes on the treadmill. But this business of weight lifting, of snarling at the mirror while urging his sun-spotted skin to rise up into biceps: just fucking inane. It was fueled not by the quest to stay alive or even by a healthy modicum of responsibility, but by this pathetic fantasy that he was hot, that he could inspire impure thoughts. You’re north of seventy, Lou. You’re only hot when you step out of the condo in Delray that you should be wintering in.

To be fair, my father was not the only member of the family clinging to an obsolete self-image.

He led me over to the free weights and slid a forty-five pounder onto each side of a bench press bar. Then he said, “I ran into Marty Kushman the other day.”

Fuck. The Philadelphia legal community was quaintly incestuous, and I should’ve anticipated that the news would reach my father in nanoseconds. Plus, my old man had known the managing partner of Morris & Roberts for centuries.

“Know what he said to me?” he went on.

“I can probably guess.”

He rested his foot on the bench and squinted like a cowboy. “You’re leaving the firm?”

“I left the firm.”

“And you didn’t think to mention this to me?”

“Did I hurt your feelings?”

“Why didn’t you tell me, Ted?”

“Go,” I said, nudging him toward the bench press.

He lay down and blew through a set of ten reps. He might have been the oldest guy in America who owned weight lifting gloves.

“You’re looking huge, man,” I said. “Huge.”

He leapt to his feet. “So, what’s all this about?”

“It’s not about anything. I’ve just decided to try something else for a while.”

I added a twenty-five pound plate to each side of the bar before sliding onto the bench. I do have my pride.

“Another firm? Why didn’t you come to me? You know I have very good relationships with all the major players in town.”

“I know,” I said, gripping the bar. “You’re adored throughout the community.”

With quick, shallow puffs, I bounced the bar off my chest, hoping to outpace the fatigue, to reach ten reps before my arms caught wind of what was going on. They grew wobbly after about four. The last time I did any hard-core weight lifting was college. Because I’m an adult.

As soon as I’d dropped the bar back onto the supports, he continued his cross-examination. “Where are you going?”

“I haven’t decided yet, but it’s not going to be a firm.”

Someone took a fishing wire and yanked up his eyebrows. “You’re going in-house?”

There was no good place to have this discussion with my father, but perhaps a gym was preferable to a dinner table, where Lou was liable to end up with a salad fork in his neck.

“All right, look—I’ve been talking to some people about cutting another record. I’m going to try to get back into the music business.”

“What in the hell are you talking about?”

I didn’t blink.

“You’re serious.”

“I am.”

“Did something happen at the firm?”

“People leave law firms all the time. There’s no need to get a booger up your nose about it.”

“So let me see if I’ve got this straight. At the age of—what are you now?—forty-one, you’re giving up the law to try to be a rock star again?”

“I’m thirty-eight, Dad, but don’t feel bad. It’s a pointless detail. I’ll just go ahead and refer to you as eightyish.”

“Ted,” he said darkly. “Why in the world would you do this? Why throw away all your hard work, your stellar reputation?”

“Save it, Lou.”

I lay down on the bench and labored through ten angry reps. Lactic acid was already swamping my arms. I would soon be bench-pressing a bar with no plates on it.

“If you’re feeling burned out, take some time off. Hell, we all feel burned out every now and then. Go to the Bahamas.”

A powerful-looking woman in yoga pants asked if we were still using the bench.

“Oh, we’re done here,” I said pointedly, scooping my towel off the floor and crossing the room to an array of intensely individualized weight machines. I leaned against an ab contraption and stared out the window.

All too soon, my dad was standing next to me again.

“Ted, am I not allowed to ask you about your major life decisions?”

“You can ask about them,” I said. “Politely.”

“Fair enough. I apologize for my tone. I’d just like to know why you’re doing this.”

I resisted a surge of fluster. That’s how you lose with my dad, by letting him get to you. The son of a bitch has an answer for everything.

“Can’t we just agree that you and I are very different people?” I asked.

“So?”

“So—we won’t always understand each other. I can make my own fucking decisions. I am, after all, forty-one or thereabouts.”

“Oh, cut the bullshit.” His arms were now crossed over his chest in civilized battle stance. “All I want to know is what makes you think you can go back to your teenage fantasy of being Elvis.”

Something about his invocation of the King triggered a loud guffaw from my throat. Suddenly I was fat and sideburned, combing the gaudy halls of Graceland in a jacket with an oversized collar.

“You know, it’s an interesting thing, getting schooled on age appropriateness by a granddad in a muscle shirt. How many protein bars did you chow before you came here? I mean, look at you. Haven’t you ever heard of golf ?”

“Don’t change the subject,” he lectured. “I’ve obviously struck a raw nerve, but I assure you that was not my intention. Look, Ted, if I had to sum up my spiel today in one word—”

“I really wish you would.”

“—it would be
practicality. Judiciousness. Common sense.
”

“That’s more than one.”

It had been a huge miscalculation to come here. Actually, it hadn’t—my calculations hadn’t yielded any other outcome than this. When all your uncertainties were swirling around in a windstorm, the last person who would understand was a man for whom there were no uncertainties. He didn’t tolerate them. For my father, confusion was like sickness, a light mist that you could barrel through with backbone and denial. He never understood what it meant to be in a band. To him, when you had a son who was a musician, you simply had to wait around for him to outgrow it. And yet here I was, groping for reasons that he might deem worthy. He made me feel foolish and small in a way that only a parent can.

Then my head drifted to the flurry of music I’d written over these past weeks, the spikes of inspiration charging through every avenue of my life. The most revered producer in the business telling
this
motherfucker not to ignore it. I couldn’t remember the last time the sky had seemed so high.

I made a show of checking the time, an expedient gesture for facilitating departure. Then I looked at my father. Why did I give a rat’s ass if this made any sense to him—or, for that matter, to anyone else? Facing him now, I realized that this would’ve been the perfect occasion to follow the advice he himself had recommended so many years ago: Fuck off, old bastard, I’d say. It would’ve been healthy. Fuck off, you ridiculous geriatric Schwarzenegger wannabe. You gotta do it
sometimes. It’s good for your blood pressure. I yanked one out of the quiver, brought it up to the bow, and tensed the string.

Then I made for the high road. It was out there somewhere, and the sooner I found it, the sooner I’d be free. I was going to be the bigger guy—if not the one with more defined delts.

“It’s been a pleasure as always, Dad, but I really must go. But listen, if you’re going to max out on squats, make sure you get one of those kids over there to spot you.”

CHAPTER 10

I
wasn’t done with Warren Warren. Again I stalked him from the deep reaches of the auditorium. Again I hid in the cheap seats, waiting for rehearsal to end while the conductor did his best to cajole something akin to music out of his students. When I finally emerged like Nosferatu from the shadows, Warren shook his head and gathered up the leaves of sheet music from his music stand.

“Another ten years go by already?” he said grimly.

The novelty of having me back in his life had lasted precisely one day. Just about my lifetime average.

“Relax. I just came back to buy you a drink,” I told him.

“Bullshit.”

“No, I felt bad for blindsiding you with the band thing. And it was good to see you. I just wanted to hang.”

“You want to have a beer with me, you call me up and ask me proper. Then we’ll pick a mutually convenient date. That’s how it’s done. You don’t just show up at somebody’s job. What, you think I’m stupid? You didn’t like the answer you got the other day, so you’re back here asking again.” He made a show of looking weary. “I’ve got a life, man. A wife, a kid, papers to grade. I don’t have time to sit in a bar and get badgered. Go sell crazy somewhere else.”