Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

Then I made for the high road. It was out there somewhere, and the sooner I found it, the sooner I’d be free. I was going to be the bigger guy—if not the one with more defined delts.

“It’s been a pleasure as always, Dad, but I really must go. But listen, if you’re going to max out on squats, make sure you get one of those kids over there to spot you.”

I wasn’t done with Warren Warren. Again I stalked him from the deep reaches of the auditorium. Again I hid in the cheap seats, waiting for rehearsal to end while the conductor did his best to cajole something akin to music out of his students. When I finally emerged like Nosferatu from the shadows, Warren shook his head and gathered up the leaves of sheet music from his music stand.

“Another ten years go by already?” he said grimly.

The novelty of having me back in his life had lasted precisely one day. Just about my lifetime average.

“Relax. I just came back to buy you a drink,” I told him.

“Bullshit.”

“No, I felt bad for blindsiding you with the band thing. And it was good to see you. I just wanted to hang.”

“You want to have a beer with me, you call me up and ask me proper. Then we’ll pick a mutually convenient date. That’s how it’s done. You don’t just show up at somebody’s job. What, you think I’m stupid? You didn’t like the answer you got the other day, so you’re back here asking again.” He made a show of looking weary. “I’ve got a life, man. A wife, a kid, papers to grade. I don’t have time to sit in a bar and get badgered. Go sell crazy somewhere else.”

He started up the aisle toward the auditorium doors.

“What about me?” I said, trailing him. “You think I was sitting on my ass eating Ho Hos, looking for something to do, when you called and told me to go to London? Fucking London, man.”

“I didn’t think you’d go, fool.”

We paraded through the doors and entered the school lobby. It was deserted save for a nervous-looking boy, backpack straps over both shoulders, texting with his phone held up to his face. Warren asked him if he had a ride home, and with a pubescent fidget, he said he did.

Once we were alone in a dim corridor, I grabbed Warren’s arm and pulled him to a stop. “One drink, man. Just one drink.”

“Hell no. I am not going to sit down and get pestered for an hour about what has to be the most asinine, most juvenile, and the most downright stupid idea I’ve ever heard in my entire life. And take note of where I work. I hear stupid ideas all day.” He paused. “Teddy, listen to me. I’m not trying to step on your dreams. If you think playing music again will make you happy, you should go and do it, one hundred percent. I support your rebellious spirit and I promise I will be rooting for you. But because Teddy has always been all about Teddy, you’re confusing what you want with what I want. I don’t want to be a musician again.”

“That’s a big fat lie. You’re a goddamn music teacher.”

“Do you know what I do when a student is giving me grief and I just can’t take it anymore? I walk away.” Warren’s voice lowered, and his eyes drooped sorrowfully. “Teddy, please don’t make me walk away from you.”

“Just let me buy you a drink. One drink. We can go somewhere close.” A mischievous grin pushed its way through. “Real close.”

He looked on warily as my hand disappeared into my jacket pocket and extracted a long-necked bottle. His head swiveled left and right, film noir style, checking if there was anyone else to witness this atrocity. “Did you bring wine into my school?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

The bottle that emerged from my jacket contained a red-brown liquid, the color that a desperate actress might dye her hair in a stab at self-reinvention.

“Bourbon.” He was aghast. “You brought bourbon into a high school.”

“Doesn’t it just sicken you as an educator?”

What I’d smuggled in was not your run-of-the-mill piss in a bottle where one sip makes you want to chug a homeless man’s vomit just to get the taste out of your mouth. My agent of seduction was Eagle Rare Kentucky bourbon, Warren’s favorite. Not the ten-year swill either; the Antique Collection. Ninety-proof, aged in charred oak barrels for seventeen years. You feel a little more hillbilly just taking its narcotic embers into your nostrils.

He gave a deep sigh, faltering in the presence of kryptonite. “You didn’t.”

“I did. And I didn’t even bring glasses.”

I used to inhabit a universe without rules. For an unhealthily long spell, speed limits, closing times, that thing about not going into the clubhouse to meet the players—none of that applied to me. The Super Bowl was never sold out. Restaurants were never booked. Even the concept of a clock had a looser application to me. I was encouraged to show up to places at specified times, but if I was ten, fifteen, ninety minutes late, people smiled and did their best not to look inconvenienced. Such echelons of deference will go to someone’s head, and despite all the humbling experiences I’ve had since, I couldn’t help but continue to carry some of that entitlement around with me. Still, it seemed well over the line to be dribbling a basketball and sipping whiskey in a high school gym long after dark. I felt under imminent threat of getting in trouble , even if I’d probably aged out of the jurisdiction of the principal. (Are we ever beyond the jurisdiction of the principal?)

“Aren’t we going to get busted?” I asked, as Warren sank a foul shot.

“Who’s we? You’re not a student and you’re not a teacher, so you’re not getting sent to the office and you’re not getting fired.”

“You’re not really a teacher though,” I posited, as he snatched the bottle from my hand. “You teach band and art. Aren’t you sort of expected to treat rules with contempt?”

Teachers are not one-size-fits-all. They’re pigeonholed, fairly or not but mostly fairly, depending on what they teach. You stared up at those dreary souls in class and pictured their weekends, trying not to feel sorry for them. On Saturday nights, science teachers sat at home and read magazines in an easy chair with public radio on in the background. English teachers had other English teachers over to play Boggle and trade salty barbs speckled with Joseph Conrad allusions. Gym teachers got shitfaced on Bud Light at a friend’s corner bar. Math teachers cooked for, and spoke to, their cats.

But the music teacher—he was a man of mojo. You and your friends would occasionally run into him out on the town. You’d catch him on the street with his groovy wife and hipper-than-thou friends, and they’d all have excellent names. Meet my wife, Ocean. And these are my friends, Silas and Boo. He wouldn’t say goodbye either. He’d say Onward! or Peace on you. Then you and your buddies would spend an hour debating whether or not he was stoned. Did you see his eyes, man?

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Warren said, wiping a wet slurp onto his rolled-up sleeve. “My band teacher was a five-foot tightass who wore bow ties. And my art teacher was a semisenile battle-ax who went to school with my grandmother.”

For quite some time, we alternated taking shots and doing shots, dribbling the ball in and around the paint, our jumpers getting wilder, our layups increasingly off the mark as the smooth Eagle Rare glided through our bloodstreams and did its thing.

“How did you find that Tate exhibit anyway?” I asked him.

It had been on the field trip he chaperoned each year, he explained. A family that owned art galleries in New Hope had started a foundation that annually sent five students who possessed a “highly developed appreciation for art” to visit museums out of the country, where the art is obviously better. Kids had jetted to Paris to appreciate the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, to Amsterdam for the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum, to Florence, Rome, Berlin. This year was London.