Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

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.

After 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.