Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

I looked around the auditorium and felt the energy of a stage rising up before expectantly positioned seats. My eyes lifted to the row of intense spotlights hovering above us like an alien spacecraft.

“I can assure you this visit is not about retribution,” I told him. “It’s about the opposite of retribution.”

“Hmm,” he mused. “The opposite of retribution is forgiveness, Teddy. What have you done that begs my pardon?”

We strolled through the abandoned hallways, past the regiments of lockers. Scruffy kids sloped by slinging backpacks, each of them lurking beneath a hapless misfire of a haircut. A brunette with phosphorescent green mascara and an outfit conducive to stuffing small dollar bills flashed Warren a wave of twittering fingers.

“Do the people here know who you are?” I asked as Warren fumbled for keys outside an office door.

“Who am I?” he replied, chuckling.

“Someone who used to be someone else.”

“Some of the teachers know, the older ones, but nobody cares.” He pushed open the door to what was little more than a closet with a desk and a chair. “Lauren and I have lived over the bridge in Lambertville pretty much since the band split, and, trust me, there’s no royal treatment. I’m just the guy who teaches band and art appreciation. Every now and again, the owner of the coffee shop near my house will talk music with me, ask me if I ever met so-and-so, ever jammed with such-and-such. They don’t realize how far removed I am from that world. I don’t know jack about the music scene now. Somebody asked me the other day what I think of Ray LaMontagne. I was like, Ray LaMontagne? Sounds like someone who sang with Sinatra. But hey, I’m happy to shoot the shit. It’s not like I went all Eddie and the Cruisers.” His bag of papers landed with an exhausted thud on the floor, and Warren sat down at his desk. “I’m just living my life.”

If Jumbo’s basement home was a dismal shrine to a ship that had long ago sailed over the horizon, Warren’s office was the witness protection program. The walls were lined with bookshelves packed with scholarly texts— The Elements of Music , The Annotated El Greco , Botticelli Explored , An Integrated Approach to Harmonic Progression —as opposed to self-aggrandizing memorabilia.

A single picture frame angled toward Warren’s chair. I picked it up and took in the family photo. Lauren still looked magnetic, standing on the front step of a row house in a purple Lycra cat suit, two feline ears protruding from her hair. She had her arm around a young boy dressed in a Phillies uniform.

I turned the photo toward Warren. “I thought women stopped slutting themselves up for Halloween after they had kids.”

“Not the right woman.”

“And this gentleman?”

“That’s Patrick. He’s seven.” He smiled at the picture he’d seen a million times.

I listened to my old friend wax tranquil about his blissful domesticity, which I’d come to upend. Warren, unlike Jumbo, had something to be stolen away from.

He slid open a desk drawer and took out a sandwich mummified in plastic wrap. “PB and J,” he said. “I’ll split it with you.”

I shook my head, and he proceeded to unwind the layers of plastic and bite off at least a quarter of the sandwich. Warren had always subscribed to the view that physical health was maximized by having not three meals a days but five. The guy ate constantly. To have a conversation with him, you had to factor in time for him to chew.

I leaned forward. “Look, I need your help.”

“What’s up?”

I let out a breath on which my last shred of dignity escaped. “I want you to play music with me.”

He stopped chewing. “What do you mean?”

“I want you to make an album with me, a Tremble album.”

The words dropped like an anvil onto the desk between us. “Get out of here.”

I stared seriously at him.

He stared back. “You want to regroup the band?”

“I’m doing it and I want you to be part of it.”

He laughed heartily, then reached out and patted my knee. “Teddy, my old, dear friend, don’t you have anyone in your life to tell you what a ridiculous idea that is?”

“I add two or three every day.”

“Well, let me say from the bottom of my heart, I thank you for inviting me to join your band, but unfortunately, I am an adult now, so I’m going to have to say no.”

“You need some time to warm up to the idea.”

Laughter. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Are you joking?”

“No.”

“Okay, then can I ask you something else?”

“Sure.”

“Are you crazy?”

“That’s not a question I can answer.”

He looked at me sadly. “Teddy, I don’t even want to know the whys and wherefores, the sorry circumstances that made you wake up one morning and think, Doggone it, it’s time to play rock star again. Count me out. Good luck.”

“You’ll give it some thought.”

“I will not. This may be hard for you to comprehend, but I’m a member of a community. I teach kids about the wonders of music and art. I coach Patrick’s Little League team. I’m on the board of my neighborhood association. Do you think I’d give all of that up for the privilege of sweating like a beast behind a drum kit in some empty bar well past my bedtime? I did that before. I’m glad I did it, but I won’t be doing it again.”

“Stop being practical and hear me out. This isn’t a whim. It’s been in the works for months. I’ve written a bunch of new songs—”

“I’ll bet they’re very good. You are a talented songwriter, but—and please don’t take this the wrong way—I don’t really care all that much.”

I sat back and folded my arms.

“Come on, man,” he went on. “You’re out of your mind. What chance does a guy like you have? It’s overcrowded out there now. I have no idea how the game is played these days, but I do know the rules are a lot different. You know that Internet thing, something they didn’t have in our day? It’s an enormously effective tool for forcing you to confront your own mediocrity. We have access to music now like never before, and there’s an awful lot of it out there, most of it better than ours ever was. You’re a middle-aged lawyer, Teddy. Look in the mirror and that’s what you’ll see.”

“There’s no reason to be cruel.”

“Have you been sitting in your basement all these years with a guitar in your lap, weeping over old photo albums, mumbling to yourself about getting back on top?”

I snickered; his description of Jumbo was uncanny.

Warren began to fatten his leather satchel with various papers. “What about your law partners? They must think you’ve had a break with reality.” He paused and stared at me hard. “Have you had a break with reality?”

“I’ve had a break with my firm.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I took a leave of absence.”

“What does that mean? I’m not coming in for a while? Don’t give me any work to do? Don’t order me anything off the lunch cart?”

“I don’t know.” I hadn’t thought that far. “Maybe it means I quit.”

“You want my advice? Go and unquit. You’ve lost your crackers.”

“I need you, Square,” I told him. “I’d really rather not take the stage with musicians so young they look like I fathered them.”

Warren flicked out the lights and we started down the hall.

“Why now?” he asked. “What’s so special about right now? So somebody hung a bad picture of you in an art gallery. Big deal. Live with it. We put ourselves out there to be ridiculed if people so choose, to say we sucked, to laugh at us years after the fact. But we got paid a lot of money for that. Put on your big-boy pants and shake it off.”