Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

I watched him parse through my critique. “I don’t trying to make fun of you. I think you are victim of fame. This is what exhibit is all about.” He waved his arm expressively as he said this.

“Well, art usually goes right over my head,” I said.

“You are one time very famous,” he explained. “But then it go away and you are not happy. Yes?”

No. “You don’t know the first thing about me. You met me one time in a stupid restaurant in Amsterdam. And in that restaurant, did we talk about that? Not that it would’ve been any of your fucking business, but did you say, ‘Hey, Teddy, now that you’re no longer a famous musician, does your life suck?’ No. Instead, you pretended to be my friend, you snapped some pictures of me, and a few years later, you stabbed me in the fucking back. I even bought you a goddamn drink.”

He turned his body in my direction as if we were in couple’s therapy. “No, no. My exhibit is showing fame is very painful for famous peoples. If you are happy or sad for real life, this not matter.”

“It matters to me. Hey, you know what? Maybe I’ll write a song about some miserable oaf who lives in the mountains and takes pictures of people having dinner and pretends to understand them. And maybe I’ll call that song ‘Song about Heinz-Peter Zoot’ and I’ll post it on YouTube and play it in Times Square. What do you think?”

Heinz-Peter looked troubled. “What is this—miserable loaf ?”

I leaned back and held the cold compress to my lip. Tires crunched gruesomely over either a thick branch or a crossing guard. A woman in a billowy dress hung clothes on a line outside a small red cottage while a young boy straddled a bicycle. They were going to have meat pie for dinner.

“I am very sorry, Teddy.” The sentence was delivered cleanly—no accent, appropriate use of a linking verb. No doubt he could apologize proficiently in most of the world’s languages. “I am big fan. I don’t try making fun at you.”

“Oh no? Faded Glory ? It Feels like a Lie and It Looks like a Mess ?”

He threw me a look of confusion.

“That was the name of your exhibit, remember? The name of the photograph.”

“Oh, yes, yes. Marius, my assistant, he make names. I don’t too good English.”

“You don’t say.” I should’ve guessed that there was a coconspirator, someone with the necessary tools to slander and be cute about it.

“My pictures say only that you are human being like other peoples.” Heinz-Peter continued to plead his case.

“Well, other peoples aren’t hanging in the Tate, staining themselves with nachos.”

Without any warning or the slightest decrease in speed, the car lurched off the road into a small, unpaved parking lot. “Here is dentist!” he announced.

At the far end of the lot sat an old stone hut. The front door was a thick slab of oak, reminiscent of that pub in Dublin. I noticed a chimney and thought it a curious feature for a dentist’s office.

“Are we meeting him at a bar?”

Heinz-Peter got out and headed toward the door of the hut.

I had no choice but to shadow the big lug across the gravel parking lot, a hand on my battered jaw. “Faded glory,” I muttered. “Faded fucking glory.”

Inside, a prune of a man who seemed to be a casual if less than enthusiastic acquaintance of Heinz-Peter’s led me back to a dim room with a reclining dental chair. A cigarette dangling from his lip, he peered into my mouth, then shook his head in discouragement. “I don’t know,” he mumbled in a thick accent. He frowned at a tray of sharp metal instruments. “I don’t know.”

He then proceeded to hack and claw at whatever remnants of tooth were still wedged in my gum. He pulled and tugged, at one point practically kneeing my chest for leverage. After ten agonizing minutes, he dejectedly tossed his tool—Early Man’s version of an ­X-ACTO knife—back into the pan and extinguished his cigarette right next to it. “I don’t know,” he grumbled again. “I don’t know.”

I asked this ray of fucking sunshine for some novocaine. Startlingly, the word was not within his lexicon. “Novocaine?” I repeated with growing alarm. I, of course, had no clue how to say “numbing agent” in any dialect but my own. How do you pantomime “local anesthesia”? I said ouch and ow and winced with great cinema until he got it and, looking annoyed, shuffled away to see if he had some lying around.

He returned a few minutes later and unceremoniously injected a gallon of colorless serum into the inside of my cheek, which hurt just as much as Heinz-Peter’s uppercut. Within seconds I felt seriously stoned and indifferent to the clear fact of my imminent death. I felt myself slipping away, but my last thought before blacking out for the second time that hour was remarkably sensible: Are you supposed to lose consciousness during a routine dental visit?

Through a gathering fog, I watched as the dentist miserably poked an unlit cigarette between his lips and struck a match.

Here’s where I note that Sara had strongly counseled against my coming here.

I called her from the London hotel, told her the whole story, how all these years I never knew that my legacy actually involved a little piece of cilantro staining my smile. She seemed to consider the tale a sort of dark comedy—until I mentioned how I’d decided to modify my travel itinerary.

“That’s a very bad idea,” she’d said. “It’s dangerous, Teddy. You don’t see that?”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Look, I know you think you’re a bit of a tough guy, but having a temper doesn’t make you a badass.”

I hooted. Sara never used words like badass —she’d gone to Dartmouth—­and she could only hope to sell it by attaching it to a cute little sneer.

It was rather unlike her to interfere. We tended to stay out of each other’s way. We shared an apartment and looked forward to the comfort of each other’s company at the end of the day, but we could go for long stretches where we were little more than apparitions haunting the same apartment.

“I’ll be fine,” I assured her.

“This is foolish, Teddy,” she charged, a siren of panic in her voice. “Traveling to some unfamiliar place to find some man you know nothing about? And then what?”

“Calm down, Sara.”

“It’s not me that needs to calm down. You’re angry now, but your anger will subside, probably just as you’re staring into this photographer’s face. You can’t stop people from saying things about you. You should have thicker skin.”

“This is different. It’s a cheap shot.”

“You can’t stop people from taking cheap shots at you either.”

“Sara—you’re making far too big a deal out of this.”

“Me?”

“I’m going to Switzerland to have a little chat with an artist. I’m not going to Bolivia to take down a junta.”

Having reached something akin to a crescendo, Sara sailed over the edge into a plane of helpless silence. Helpless silence was, in fact, her stock in trade. It greeted her first thing in the morning and planted its cold kiss on her each night. She had learned the hard way, maybe the hardest way, that life shouldn’t be frittered away on vanity and caprice. I was a former rock star, however, so vanity and caprice were my stock in trade, with a warehouse that never ran low on inventory.

“I’m not going to disappear, Sara. I promise.”

“Do whatever you want.” And she hung up.

How idiotic to promise someone you won’t disappear, as if vanishing were something you scheduled.

There was a degree of justice in my landing here in this dentist’s chair. The universe had witnessed my clamoring rage, and for my trouble had awarded me a prosthetic denture. Surely a perverse contortion of biblical justice, this tooth for a tooth. For Sara, there was no concept as meaningless as justice. She’d learned from experience that there was no justice, would never again be justice. That was as plain as day. But some of us needed to be hit over the head.