Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

“Why would you have to pick a favorite person in the band?” I asked. “How would that ever come up?”

“That guy could really rock out,” she went on. “What was it like working with him?”

“Irksome.”

Jumbo Jett was a monstrously talented guitar player and just about the biggest mess of a human being I’d ever known. Unkempt, unpredictable, and uncouth, the ox that stinks up the dinner party. Whereas the hedonistic rock scene was never really my thing, Jumbo cannonballed himself right into that pool. Surely he was a livelier subject for a photography exhibit than I. The pictures would title themselves. Man Barfs Blue into Fake Plant at Morton’s . Inappropriately Displayed Butt Cheeks at Airport Lounge . Band Rehearsing While Guitarist Sleeps It Off on a Barge Downriver (Guitarist Not Pictured) .

“So much has been written about his impact on music,” the boy gushed. “Jack White of the White Stripes, James Mercer of the Shins, the guys from the Black Keys—they’ve all cited him as a major influence.”

“Well, I can’t stop people from saying stupid shit.”

“Come on. Even with his wild reputation, he couldn’t have made the music he did without being a true professional, right?”

The man was the very opposite of professional. The moron lacked even the faintest wisp of a work ethic, which, frankly, was understandable since he’d never held a real job. There was a brief stint at a small medical supply company after college, but he was quickly fired for tickling a coworker. There’s no tickling at work; most people understand that without even having to sit through the training seminar.

“Maybe you’re right,” I allowed. “He’s an accomplished guy. During the time I knew him, he gave up drinking alcohol at breakfast and having sex with strangers at truck stops. You can’t not call that progress.”

“How about Mackenzie?” the boy asked through a puppy-dog grin. “What is she doing now?”

The mere mention of her name could still release a tide of overwhelming thoughts. Thoughts that, even after all this time, tiptoed on the edges of my understanding.

“No idea,” I said. “Go look for her yourself.”

Around back, guests stood in clusters and slurped from longneck bottles or sat in chatty huddles at wooden picnic tables. Someone had brought out a portable stereo—a “boom box” to some of us—and, to pour salt on an already dangling scab, began blaring our second album, Atomic Somersault . I shook my head. The industry publications that had bothered to review it were at best dismissive, at worst cruel: “Dismal disappointment from a once promising band, the biggest miscalculation of producer Sonny Rivers’s career.” “I would sooner spend my hard-earned cash on their debut—which I already own—than on this waste of a follow-up.” “A horn section? Really? Is this Teddy Tremble and the News? Teddy Tremble and the Range?”

And yet, as those forgotten songs echoed across the darkening yard, the memories were not all bad. I was transported back to those high-octane days and euphoric weeks when we were holed up in the studio, cruising on the thunderclap of our Oscar-winning hit. We knew what the expectations were, and we had every confidence that we’d exceed them. I could still visualize Mackenzie standing in the recording booth in a baby-blue tank top, her fingers gliding over her bass, hair tucked behind her ears to make way for the Princess Leia headphones. I heard a subtle drum fill and immediately saw Warren twirling his sticks, tossing them high in the air, goofing off between songs. All of it was just as vivid as yesterday, and just as gone.

I remembered a time when I actually felt protective of these songs, when I believed our follow-up to have been unfairly dismissed and derided. The critics piled on because they were sick of our faces, I used to argue, sick of the ubiquitous nuisance that was “It Feels like a Lie.” So maybe it wasn’t Highway 61 Revisited . It wasn’t Milli Vanilli’s Remix Album either.

Suddenly, a flashbulb exploded in my face. Once the blinding white fuzz dissipated, the big troll himself was standing before us, clutching his favorite weapon and pointing it at his guests.

“Teddy!” Heinz-Peter cried, throwing an arm around my neck. We were lost brothers now. “You are happy? Having good time, yes?” He waved a grand arm at the crowd of kids. “Tereza make party for you!”

“I’ll have to find some way to thank her.”

“All of these nice peoples at my home,” he called out, hammering away at the darkness with his flashbulb. “Must to take pictures, Teddy. But this time I tell you I taking pictures, yes? No secret! Ha!” He beamed at his own cleverness, the Scooby-Doo smile too big even for that moon face of his.

“Tell me something,” I said. “Everyone else around here speaks perfect English. Why does yours suck so bad?”

He let out an exuberant laugh, which I interpreted as incomprehension, and patting me hard on the back, started for the house. Then he froze, pivoted, and pointed to the sky in a stroke of excitement.

“Look!” he bellowed, presumably meaning listen .

The song wafting from the boom box was “Troubleshooter,” a slushy puddle of a ballad I’d written in a fever of melodrama after the death of my English lit professor. I heard my double-tracked voice whining through the verse—“The old school walls fall down like rain / With ghosts of Shakespeare, Poe, and Twain.” Why couldn’t I have just rhymed rain with pain like a normal person?

“This song I love it!” H-P shouted, striding away and singing along. He couldn’t form even the most grammatically basic sentence in English, but damned if he didn’t know every last lyric.

“I’m not the only person ever to take a swing at that guy, am I?” I posed the question to a pair of boys shuffling skittishly on either side of me, bottles of local ale in their clutches.

“He’s quite entertaining, but a good man,” one said, his wire-rimmed glasses glimmering in the waning light. “And he really is a big fan of your music. A lot of people around here are.”

“You people scare me,” I said. “This place is like some kind of lost colony. You have no idea how alone in the world you are. There’s real music out there. I can show it to you. You’ve got the Internet in Switzerland, right?”

The kid with the glasses grinned up at me. “So what did Heinz-Peter do to make you so angry that you came all this way to fight him?”

I snorted; it hadn’t been much of a fight. Then a tiny itch of pride ripened inside me, and for some inexplicable reason I felt hesitant to elaborate.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess he captured a moment.”

At some point, it fell to me to man the grill, to poke and prod sausages and burgers, nudge them off their charred bellies and onto their backs. The affair had quieted down from a raucous backyard party into a subdued evening picnic replete with the easy murmurs and cinder-like aromas of a campfire. Tereza, a cagey ally at best, kept me company, and together we allowed our lungs to fill with mesquite as the charcoal hissed under the gridirons.

“You’re getting more comfortable with all of this, aren’t you?” she said, smiling. “You’re once more adjusting to your fame. I can see it.”

“Why aren’t you listening to Dr. Dog? Where’s your Pernice Brothers? Your War on Drugs? There’s all this good new music out there.”

“Don’t let all of this go to your head,” Tereza teased. “We don’t only listen to Tremble.”

“You realize that some bands actually deserve to be forgotten,” I went on, sliding a spatula under a sizzling mound of beef and hoisting it onto a paper plate. “Charles Darwin is alive and well in the arts.”