Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

“Go make a record, motherfucker.”

I stopped and looked at him. “What?”

“Get it down and get it down right. You need to make a record.”

“Are you serious?”

“I don’t like it when people ask me if I’m serious. It undermines all the other words that come out of my mouth.” Then he checked his watch. “I’m late.”

He folded up his laptop and bore down into the camera, pointing the blistering end of his cigarette at me. “You be careful with these cunning plans of yours. You hearing me?” He returned the cigarette to his lips and added, “I love you, motherfucker.”

The screen was overtaken by a hand reaching out at me, as if to cover my eyes, or tear off a blindfold. And then he was gone.

I stood next to my guitar, unable to move, the light sweat of terror staining my shirt. Sonny’s directive had taken on a dreamlike quality, like something I was told to do a millennium ago.

You will never again feel the way you do at this moment.

That’s what he told us on our first day in the studio. At the time, I took our producer’s words as both a call to Zen and a call to battle, a maxim intended to rouse a band of tenderfeet into both savoring the promise of the moment and delivering on it. Over the years, I’d recalled those words with melancholy. Sonny was right. Never again did I feel the way I did at that moment, on the precipice of my life, awestruck by everything, including my own sense of limitlessness.

Sony Music had signed us on the strength of some hook-driven demos and a strong draw on the bar circuit all along the Mid-Atlantic. From the Bitter End in Greenwich Village to the Bottle & Cork in Dewey Beach, from the 9:30 Club in DC to the Chameleon in Lancaster, we packed the house. Our pitch for a record deal had been played tantalizingly by a brash agent trying to make a name for herself. Two meetings with the slicker-than-thou Alaina Farber—a woman who could imbue the act of picking up dry cleaning with a whiff of eroticism—and the Sony rep, a seasoned, affable, and prematurely gray chap named Colin Stone, was putty in her hands. He believed her when she informed him— informed him—that we were destined to make a brilliant album or, at the very least, a homogenous blockbuster. Our debut, The Queen Kills the King , ended up going multiplatinum.

At the first of those recording sessions, we were led through the chic Brooklyn studio a little before noon (first thing in the morning in musicians’ hours). The bewitching instruments, sparkling microphones, and serpentine arrangement of boards, cords, and wires lay about us like an indoor state-of-the-art Garden of Eden.

Sonny immediately ordered us to take up our instruments and play through the songs we considered our strongest, the ones we felt defined us. As we obliged, he sat on a swivel chair in front of the board, staring at us through the glass with his legs crossed and an inscrutable expression on his face. He reacted to nothing; his eyebrows had gone on hiatus. When we were done, I arrogantly volunteered my views as to which songs were radio ready and which were the deep cuts and how each was necessary for a complete and whole record. I said this to the man who made Aerosmith’s and Dave Matthews’s bestselling albums.

While I went on about hit potential and the demographics of college radio and the mass-market pipelines of MTV and VH1, Sonny stared back at me through piercing eyes. When my mouth had finally emptied itself of nonsense, he pounded a pack of smokes into his palm and said, “You can make something that people will celebrate or you can make something that’s worth being celebrated. You have until I finish this cigarette to decide.” And he walked outside.

It was the band’s unanimous conclusion that his question was rhetorical.

But now, all these years later, standing alone in my condo, there was only the memory of confidence, only the metallic taste of fear. And then I heard a key sliding into the door.

Something about the way Sara entered the room made me forget all about music for a moment. With eye contact that felt slippery and hasty, she paused at the curious arrangement of instruments and computers clunking up the living room, then turned to the closet, drawing her long, chestnut-brown jacket off her shoulders.

“Everything okay?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she answered over the wind chime of coat hangers. Brushing the hair out of her eyes, she nodded at the mess. “And what exactly is going on here?”

“I was just screwing around,” I said with a shrug. “Hey—Ravi called.”

“Here?”

“Yeah. Something about a meeting.”

“That’s odd. He knew I wasn’t going to be around. I specifically told him. I was with Josie and Wynne.”

I waded back over the wires and proceeded to remove the mic from the clip and dismantle the boom stand.

Shifting her frown to me, Sara said, “Teddy, not once in all the years we’ve lived together have I come home to find you playing music. That is, until the past few weeks.” She looked serious, unusually pensive. “Let’s talk. Can we do that? Both of us?”

I’d shared very little of my recent musical reawakening with Sara. While she could plainly see I’d taken to strumming the guitar again, I’d told her nothing of my Switzerland hijinks, or of this unforeseen avalanche of music and words.

“You know Sonny Rivers, right?”

She nodded. “He produced your records.”

I took a long breath. “He wants me to record again.”

“He wants you to what?”

“I’ve been writing a little lately, and I played him some of my new songs tonight. He kind of liked them. He thinks I should record them.”

“Like, with the band?”

“We didn’t get that far, but I think so.”

Her face was a blank slate.

“I don’t get it either,” I offered helplessly.

“That’s great,” she said, her voice tepid, her eyes beset.

Even if Sara had known I’d been writing songs again, it never would have occurred to her that I harbored any sort of plans. She would have assumed I was writing songs the way most people write poetry, or the way she did her mosaics with her friends—as an outlet, a tawdry little secret. You write your songs or your sonnets, and then you bury them in your dresser drawer where they gradually sink lower and lower under the cuff links and condoms.

“So what does this mean?” she asked.

“I don’t really know.”

“You must know. Why else would you have played him your songs in the first place?”

Standing in the living room of my apartment, a lawyer of generic looks and advancing age—hardly the moment to ramp up a career in pop music—there were simply no words.

“I’m not kidding, Sara. I don’t know what this all means.” I looked away from her. “I don’t know what’s going on.”

Sara circumnavigated the gear and yanked on the sliding door that opened onto the balcony. The room had become stale and muggy, the strumming and singing and perspiring having stirred the air into a broth.

“I see somebody’s having a hard time getting older,” she ventured with a smirk.

“Maybe.”

Sara eyed the disarray before her—the chairs, the amplifier, the computer, the snake pit of cables, all of which looked as if it had been swept into the room by a flood. She took ginger steps to the sofa, smoothed out her pant legs, and dropped onto a cushion. “Let’s back up. You wrote some new songs and decided to play them for the guy who produced your band’s albums fifteen years ago.”

I nodded, continuing to wrap the microphone cable in large loops that extended from my hand down around my elbow.

“And you did this because . . .”

“Well. It’s complicated.”