Thank You, Goodnight (4 page)

I sat up. “Fine. I’ll meet you. But I really don’t want any shit, Dad. I’m not kidding.”

“You’re a gentleman and a scholar. See you at seven.”

Whatever the fuck that meant.

Dad never hauled me in for a meal without an agenda, so I had to face the fact that I’d just booked myself an evening of unsolicited advice. This was a dinner meeting, and like all dinner meetings, it would be stiff and laborious, like the tough T-bone I would order.

Five o’clock found me slogging through town, a trucker’s cap with the Harley-Davidson logo pulled tight over my eyes, intent on drowning my dread with a couple of predinner cocktails.

At the empty end of a bar,
SportsCenter
hanging overhead, I stared into my bourbon. Getting booted from my record label was a walk among the roses compared to dinner with Lou Tremble. The man had always dispensed wisdom like a pitching machine—hard, constant, sporadically accurate—wearing you down with dense sacks of bullshit packed into long stretches of uninterrupted speech until you surrendered. Surrender was good, because at least then you could get up and walk the hell away. The problem, of course, was that he wasn’t all bad or all wrong, so you couldn’t dismiss him outright. Yet as auteur of some ignoble deeds of his own, he left you with nagging doubts as to his credibility. He tried to instill in his two boys a strong conscience and a hardscrabble work ethic, and yet I always wondered how his practice of accepting blow jobs from perky little paralegals fit into that
creed. Such behavior won’t get you disbarred, but it turns out it can get you dismarried. Whatever. I’m not the first guy to be chewed up by the stunning humanity of a parent.

With ice cubes shrinking in my glass, I recalled the night I learned just what it was that made my old man tick. There was my mother, rinsing dinner plates and glasses, arranging them with tactical precision in the dishwasher. There was me, loitering at the table with my social studies textbook, learning about how Sam Adams incited a flock of bewigged colonists to dress up as Mohawks and spill some English tea in the name of the very freedom that my classmates and I so ungraciously took for granted. And there was my father, pacing about the kitchen with a phone to his ear, shouting at some underling about an important document that had to be sent out that night and had to be flawless. Swinging the coils of the phone cord like a jump rope while the remains of his fruit cocktail sat in a puddle of syrup, Dad barked at the young lawyer as if raising his voice would actually improve the quality of the work. (I have since learned that it sometimes does.) His dander was up particularly high that evening and he was firing off commands and insults at his dimwitted associate, half covering the receiver from time to time to share with the family just how dimwitted this guy was.
Can you believe this guy?

Then, suddenly, midsentence, like a power outage silencing a stereo, he stopped yelling. My mother and I looked over at him with a mix of relief and concern. Had he suffered a stroke? Had the coagulated syrup from the fruit cocktail triggered a diabetic coma? He just stood there, holding the phone away from his face, marveling at the receiver.

Eventually, with a dumbfounded chuckle and a terrifying eye-of-the-hurricane calm, he said, “That kid just told me to fuck off.”

I braced for a demonic bay of rage so mighty that it would echo over the Great Wall of China. Instead, he hung up the phone, sat down, and looked at me.

“That kid just told me to fuck off,” he repeated. “Now, don’t misunderstand. The little turd was way out of line and he’s going to live
to regret it. But there’s a lesson here, Ted. What he did was healthy. A lot of times the world is going to crowd you. It’s going to get in your face.” He illustrated the point by leaning his mug right up to mine. “And there are two types of people out there. There are people who take mounds and mounds of shit and don’t know how to stop the shit from piling up, and they just get buried deeper and deeper. And then there are people who, every so often, when it’s absolutely necessary and called for, tell everyone to fuck off. Those people—mark my words—are happier.”

Let’s just say, I learned the hell out of that lesson. I tell an awful lot of people to fuck off, and the old bastard was right—it usually feels pretty good. I expected to need the full extension of that skill that night at dinner, so in what was fast developing into a pub crawl, I drained my bourbon, left the bar, and proceeded to shuffle down to Raymond’s. Where I took a seat at the cougar-ravaged bar and sipped more bourbon.

When Dad blew into the restaurant, his tie strewn over his shoulder, I was already sporting a comfortable buzz. The host, whom my father greeted by name, showed us to Dad’s special table, handed us menus, and said, with a rather excessive dash of corniness, how nice it was to have both Mr. Trembles here tonight. Dad thanked him; I ordered another bourbon.

“I read your review in
Rolling Stone
,” he began.

“It’s not my review. I didn’t write it,” I said through a bitter laugh. “And since when do you read
Rolling Stone
?”

“A kid at the office handed it to me. Sounds like they weren’t all that enamored with the new album.” He was grinning like we had one of those relationships where we could say anything we wanted to each other, no hard feelings. We didn’t have one of those relationships. But since the review declared the album “equal parts catnap and faked orgasm,” my dad’s characterization was not altogether unfair.

“I don’t read reviews,” I lied. “But if I did, I certainly wouldn’t read
Rolling Stone
.”

Funny how my old man never invited me to dinner when the critics genuflected in praise.

Dad ordered a porterhouse, I a Delmonico, and then he tilted his head as might the diplomat of a first-world nation when preparing to educate his third-world counterpart. “Can I give you some free advice?”

“Why do I feel as though I’ll somehow end up paying for it?”

“I promise it won’t cost you anything.”

“Let’s just see what it’s worth.”

With a smile freighted with empathy, he said, “Ted, son, I think it’s over.”

I slurped loudly.

“I don’t like seeing you like this.”

“Like how?”

“Unhappy. It’s a tough business, this music industry. You had a tremendous amount of success, you traveled the globe, you won a goddamn Oscar! Now go do something else, kiddo.”

“Something else,” I grunted. I wanted to go do something else right now.

“With your head held high,” he added. “Look, you came, you saw, and you conquered, but let’s be honest, your fifteen minutes are probably up. And let’s be even more honest, none of you guys are heartthrob material. I don’t mean to be harsh here, Ted. You’ve got a lot to be proud of. Lord knows I’m proud of you.”

“Oh, well, that means a lot.”

He paused and frowned. “Why do you always do this? Why do you always butt heads with me?”

“Why do I always butt heads with you when you tell me I suck at my job and I’m ugly?”

He held out his open hands, wrists up like a surrendering felon. “I’m just being your father here.”

“That you are, Louis. That you are.”

“I just want what’s best for you. You know that.”

I laughed too loud, took an ungainly sip of my drink, and had to
wipe my chin with my sleeve. The whole maneuver struck me as very alcoholic. Not alcoholic like the half-naked bum swaying deliriously outside the liquor store, but like the tragic drunk, expensively falling apart while his family stages an intervention. “Just for fun, what, Dad, in your view, is best for me?”

“Something more stable,” he replied. “Less time in hotels. You’re a smart guy. You should see that this part of your life is over and now you have the luxury of doing something different, something with a better lifestyle. Look at Denny. He’s a fine example.”

Denny is my younger brother. (Real name Denny, not Dennis, an oddity my parents have never sufficiently explained.) He’s smarter than I am, showy about it too. We never did much together, the five-year age wedge causing us to shift through childhood on only sporadically touching tectonic plates. The one thing I really ever did with him was take the mouthy little tyke to IHOP on weekends to split a pile of pancakes. To highlight an older brother’s generosity, I’d point out that I’d given him the bigger half of the stack. To highlight his superior intelligence, he’d point out that there’s no such thing as a bigger half, halves being defined as two equal parts. To highlight my irritation, I’d fork a couple of pancakes off his plate and back onto mine and tell him it looked like I had the bigger half now. Other than those IHOP trips, I have exactly one memory of him from childhood: at age seven, he caught our dad red-handed looting his Halloween candy and yelled, “You son of a bitch!” It took the old man ten minutes to catch his breath from laughter before scampering up the stairs after him with a rolled-up
Atlantic Monthly
.

These days I barely know the guy. I see him once a year at my father’s office Christmas party. The two of us stand in the corner eating Swedish meatballs and ask each other if it’s too early to split. Denny’s business card reads Professor of English Literature at Ohio State University, but as far as I can tell, his job seems to be sitting in his office and downloading Grateful Dead bootlegs and/or napping. Despite the fact that he’s a middling professor of who cares and I’m an Acad
emy Award winner, my nerd younger brother manages to speak to me with this air of superiority on the rare occasions when our paths cross. It forces me to remind him that for an unacceptably lengthy period, his favorite band was Tears for Fears. That tends to shut him up.

“I’m not comparing you to your brother,” my dad went on, having just unfavorably compared me to my brother, “but wouldn’t it be nice to have a job that doesn’t require you to wake up every day and pray that the magical forces that have made you successful don’t capriciously vanish? You can get around to having a family. Listen, I’m not laying blame here, son, but wasn’t it this crazy musician’s life that caused things to go south between you and Lucy?”

“Uh, is this the part where I point out that you’re no longer married to my mother?”

Dad consulted his place setting. “Mistakes were made. No one’s denying that.”

“A mistake? Like wearing socks with sandals? Showing up at the barber on Tuesday for a Wednesday appointment?”

“I don’t blame your mother for leaving and I don’t blame all of you for resenting me on some level. Lord knows I’m in no place to judge anyone else’s relationship and I’m sure as hell not judging yours. Nevertheless, we are all adults and we should all learn to move on.”

Suddenly, there it was, all coming into sharp focus. I was the musician whose marriage was undone by a wacky, unbound lifestyle. He was the high-powered lawyer whose marriage was undone by pathetic dalliances with women too young even for his sons to date.

“You know what, Dad? We’re both clichés. We might as well drink to it.”

A thick silence hung over our table, the kind of mutual discomfort you can only share with a parent. Eventually, the waiter brought our steaks. My dad thanked him; I ordered another bourbon.

Maybe he was right. Maybe after years in the music industry, the only place I was qualified to work was Moe’s Copy Service or the Yankee Doodle Diner out on 611.

“Look, I didn’t ask you to dinner to argue with you,” he lied. “I came here with a suggestion.” I pretended to concentrate on carving off a wedge of steak. I guess we hadn’t gotten around to his free advice yet. “Want to hear it?”

“I’m not sure why you’re bothering to ask.”

“Law school.” He said it with an air of majesty, as if revealing the answer to an astrophysical algorithm that had confounded all the world’s best minds—Copernicus! Einstein! Hawking!—but him.

I dropped my fork and knife.

“Think about it,” he continued. “You’re a smart kid, you’re well-spoken, you’ve got a creative eye, and you’re argumentative as hell.” He chuckled. That was how lawyers complimented each other. With insults.

“You’re serious,” I said.

“Of course I’m serious.”

“Dad, every lawyer I’ve ever met is a complete ass.” I looked at him. “No exceptions.”

“All I’m saying is, it’s a great way to support yourself, you’d be quite good at it, and obviously, you’ve already got inroads in the legal community. Look, Ted, if I had to reduce my little spiel tonight to one word—”

“And I really wish you would.”

“—it would be
security
.”

I resumed cutting the dead beast on my plate, this time with venom. “I promise to give it the consideration it deserves.”

That night, as the meat sweats kept me awake and uncomfortable in my bed, I ruminated. I didn’t completely dismiss the idea of law school, even if it had come from my father’s mouth. It sat in the back of my mind like a safety date while I tried my best to come up with something better.

Crickets.

I decided to give music one last try. I devoted the next six months to writing and recording a solo album. I’d rock the cynics, rise above
the legions of doubters. This would be my masterwork—intimate and personal, a gorgeous departure from anything the world had yet heard from me. Teddy Tremble’s beautiful soul on display. That kind of thing.

I pursued inspiration all the way across the country. And inspiration, I decided, lay in a cabin on the Oregon coast that I rented for purposes of staring meaningfully at the sea, feeling the salty breeze tangle my hair, and eating fresh salmon. After a lot of introspection, it finally dawned on me that what the world needed was a concept album about a soldier’s emotional journey as he walked from the bus station to his house upon returning from war. I didn’t even pick a war. It was to be a serious and somber affair. The production would be almost entirely acoustic and I’d play all the instruments. I would call the album
st. agathe under low clouds
, which had no connection to the material, and it would be written just like that, poetically forsaking capital letters in a way sure to make e. e. cummings claw away at his coffin.