Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

My father approached me in a shiny blue tank top. He regarded my shirt, which bore the Chicago Cubs logo.

“You still have that?” he said, smiling. “I bought that for you when I was out there for a meeting with the Wrigley Company. You must’ve been in high school.”

“Actually, you got this on a trip to Vancouver. You had a layover at O’Hare on the return. Thanks for thinking of me.”

I have never been a Cubs fan.

Dad wiped a modest sheen of perspiration from his brow and flashed a frothy grin at a young woman on a shoulder press machine.

“So, what are we doing, Rocky?” I asked him.

“I just finished up with cardio, so let’s do some weights. Easier to talk that way.”

I didn’t mind that my old man still hit the gym with the optimistic verve of the skinny kid on the wrestling team. Nothing wrong with a guy raging against the dying of the light with forty-five minutes on the treadmill. But this business of weight lifting, of snarling at the mirror while urging his sun-spotted skin to rise up into biceps: just fucking inane. It was fueled not by the quest to stay alive or even by a healthy modicum of responsibility, but by this pathetic fantasy that he was hot, that he could inspire impure thoughts. You’re north of seventy, Lou. You’re only hot when you step out of the condo in Delray that you should be wintering in.

To be fair, my father was not the only member of the family clinging to an obsolete self-image.

He led me over to the free weights and slid a forty-five pounder onto each side of a bench press bar. Then he said, “I ran into Marty Kushman the other day.”

Fuck. The Philadelphia legal community was quaintly incestuous, and I should’ve anticipated that the news would reach my father in nanoseconds. Plus, my old man had known the managing partner of Morris & Roberts for centuries.

“Know what he said to me?” he went on.

“I can probably guess.”

He rested his foot on the bench and squinted like a cowboy. “You’re leaving the firm?”

“I left the firm.”

“And you didn’t think to mention this to me?”

“Did I hurt your feelings?”

“Why didn’t you tell me, Ted?”

“Go,” I said, nudging him toward the bench press.

He lay down and blew through a set of ten reps. He might have been the oldest guy in America who owned weight lifting gloves.

“You’re looking huge, man,” I said. “Huge.”

He leapt to his feet. “So, what’s all this about?”

“It’s not about anything. I’ve just decided to try something else for a while.”

I added a twenty-five pound plate to each side of the bar before sliding onto the bench. I do have my pride.

“Another firm? Why didn’t you come to me? You know I have very good relationships with all the major players in town.”

“I know,” I said, gripping the bar. “You’re adored throughout the community.”

With quick, shallow puffs, I bounced the bar off my chest, hoping to outpace the fatigue, to reach ten reps before my arms caught wind of what was going on. They grew wobbly after about four. The last time I did any hard-core weight lifting was college. Because I’m an adult.

As soon as I’d dropped the bar back onto the supports, he continued his cross-examination. “Where are you going?”

“I haven’t decided yet, but it’s not going to be a firm.”

Someone took a fishing wire and yanked up his eyebrows. “You’re going in-house?”

There was no good place to have this discussion with my father, but perhaps a gym was preferable to a dinner table, where Lou was liable to end up with a salad fork in his neck.

“All right, look—I’ve been talking to some people about cutting another record. I’m going to try to get back into the music business.”

“What in the hell are you talking about?”

I didn’t blink.

“You’re serious.”

“I am.”

“Did something happen at the firm?”

“People leave law firms all the time. There’s no need to get a booger up your nose about it.”

“So let me see if I’ve got this straight. At the age of—what are you now?—forty-one, you’re giving up the law to try to be a rock star again?”

“I’m thirty-eight, Dad, but don’t feel bad. It’s a pointless detail. I’ll just go ahead and refer to you as eightyish.”

“Ted,” he said darkly. “Why in the world would you do this? Why throw away all your hard work, your stellar reputation?”

“Save it, Lou.”

I lay down on the bench and labored through ten angry reps. Lactic acid was already swamping my arms. I would soon be bench-pressing a bar with no plates on it.

“If you’re feeling burned out, take some time off. Hell, we all feel burned out every now and then. Go to the Bahamas.”

A powerful-looking woman in yoga pants asked if we were still using the bench.

“Oh, we’re done here,” I said pointedly, scooping my towel off the floor and crossing the room to an array of intensely individualized weight machines. I leaned against an ab contraption and stared out the window.

All too soon, my dad was standing next to me again.

“Ted, am I not allowed to ask you about your major life decisions?”

“You can ask about them,” I said. “Politely.”

“Fair enough. I apologize for my tone. I’d just like to know why you’re doing this.”

I resisted a surge of fluster. That’s how you lose with my dad, by letting him get to you. The son of a bitch has an answer for everything.

“Can’t we just agree that you and I are very different people?” I asked.

“So?”

“So—we won’t always understand each other. I can make my own fucking decisions. I am, after all, forty-one or thereabouts.”

“Oh, cut the bullshit.” His arms were now crossed over his chest in civilized battle stance. “All I want to know is what makes you think you can go back to your teenage fantasy of being Elvis.”

Something about his invocation of the King triggered a loud guffaw from my throat. Suddenly I was fat and sideburned, combing the gaudy halls of Graceland in a jacket with an oversized collar.

“You know, it’s an interesting thing, getting schooled on age appropriateness by a granddad in a muscle shirt. How many protein bars did you chow before you came here? I mean, look at you. Haven’t you ever heard of golf ?”

“Don’t change the subject,” he lectured. “I’ve obviously struck a raw nerve, but I assure you that was not my intention. Look, Ted, if I had to sum up my spiel today in one word—”

“I really wish you would.”

“—it would be practicality. Judiciousness. Common sense. ”

“That’s more than one.”

It had been a huge miscalculation to come here. Actually, it hadn’t—my calculations hadn’t yielded any other outcome than this. When all your uncertainties were swirling around in a windstorm, the last person who would understand was a man for whom there were no uncertainties. He didn’t tolerate them. For my father, confusion was like sickness, a light mist that you could barrel through with backbone and denial. He never understood what it meant to be in a band. To him, when you had a son who was a musician, you simply had to wait around for him to outgrow it. And yet here I was, groping for reasons that he might deem worthy. He made me feel foolish and small in a way that only a parent can.

Then my head drifted to the flurry of music I’d written over these past weeks, the spikes of inspiration charging through every avenue of my life. The most revered producer in the business telling this motherfucker not to ignore it. I couldn’t remember the last time the sky had seemed so high.

I made a show of checking the time, an expedient gesture for facilitating departure. Then I looked at my father. Why did I give a rat’s ass if this made any sense to him—or, for that matter, to anyone else? Facing him now, I realized that this would’ve been the perfect occasion to follow the advice he himself had recommended so many years ago: Fuck off, old bastard, I’d say. It would’ve been healthy. Fuck off, you ridiculous geriatric Schwarzenegger wannabe. You gotta do it sometimes. It’s good for your blood pressure. I yanked one out of the quiver, brought it up to the bow, and tensed the string.