Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

“Must be nice,” I said. “None of my field trips had ever required a passport.”

“Nor mine. If we couldn’t get there in twenty minutes on a yellow bus, we weren’t going. But I gotta admit, when I saw that picture of you in the Tate, I was sorry I hadn’t taken it myself.” Warren cackled with callous joy. “ Faded Glory . Classic.”

“Like you could pull that off,” I said. Warren’s harmless and mostly good-natured pranks were rarely executed with the necessary deft.

He bristled at the affront. “Are you kidding? Candid photos of you looking like an idiot? That’s shooting fish in a barrel.”

“You mean like Clark, your identical twin? Was that shooting fish in a barrel?”

Warren laughed. The man had once decided, for reasons that eluded all of us, to pretend he was his own identical twin. Groupies, waitresses, autograph seekers—to each and every one he would deny that he was the drummer for Tremble. Nah, I’m his brother, Clark, he’d say with a smirk.

“That was an awfully complicated way to have fun,” he allowed.

“Or when you decided to change the pronunciation of your last name?” One day he decreed that, effective immediately, his last name should be said with the accent on the second syllable. War- ren .

“That was a French thing. I still think I might be a little bit French.”

“Like your name isn’t enough of a joke.”

“What it lacks in creativity, it makes up in emphasis,” he stated.

He gave the basketball a serious bounce. It thwacked off the hardwood, surged high up toward the banners, and sailed down through the net with a breathy swish.

“Damn, Square!” I exclaimed.

He affected nonchalance. “Why does everybody always forget I’m black?”

Joining me on the bleachers, Warren snatched the bottle from my grasp. “Can’t say I’m surprised that a photo like that sent you careening into a midlife crisis. It’s like a switchblade right across this legacy of yours. Right? It leaves you no choice but to get back out there and rewrite history.”

“So you understand then?”

“Sure I understand. I just think it’s stupid. What have you got to be ashamed of ? You went where just about every kid with a guitar dreams of going. You’re not allowed to get older? You’re not allowed to sit in a restaurant and eat a goddamn taco? You’re even part Tex-Mex, aren’t you?”

“That’s a cuisine, not a nationality.”

“Whatever. Leave me alone.”

We sat in the gymnasium, polished in sweat and hazy from the booze. It didn’t seem like twenty years since I’d banged around the walls of a high school gym. Memory does that sometimes, jumbles things up, messes with your sense of chronology. Some moments linger in sharp focus, reminding us that they happened, reluctant to drift away because they suspect we need them.

Warren asked, “How’s Sara?”

“She’s good.”

Even if that was true, I wasn’t in much of a position to know for sure. We’d both been rather preoccupied lately.

“She’s been hanging out with her ex-husband,” I said.

“Really?”

“Yeah. He came out of the woodwork and asked for a divorce.”

“Well, that’s probably a good thing, right? Closure for them, closure for you two.”

The fact was, it hadn’t felt like anything was closing. It was more of a rattling of hinges. “I don’t know. I haven’t been around much. And she tends toward tight lips anyway.”

“That’s gotta be hard for her though,” Warren said.

“Sometimes it feels like I live with a ghost,” I said. “She’s like this presence I observe through dishes in the sink or impressions on a pillow. I won’t see her, but I’ll know she was there because of a blouse slung over a chair.”

“Maybe she’d say the same about you. Except for the blouse. Or maybe not except for the blouse.”

“I hate to say it, but she may just be happy to have me out of the house.”

“Well, it sounds like you’re being the supportive fellow I would’ve expected,” he said, slapping my back.

I forced myself to my feet. The dizzying disconnect between my senses and my brain’s processing of them was now fully pronounced.

I staggered toward a red rubber dodge ball sitting in a far corner of the gym. It took forever to get there, what with the whiskey pushing the wall further and further away. When I’d finally retrieved it, I trudged back toward Warren and stood over him. Then I pulled the ball back behind my shoulder, poised to release it into his face.

“Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” he yelled, holding up his hands defensively.

“Join the band or you get it in the nose!”

“You throw that at me and I will kick your ass!”

“Warren War- ren !” I stood firm, ready to heave the ball at point-blank range. “I need you, damnit! We can do this!”

“Screw you, man! I have a goddamn life. Go get one yourself.”

My throwing arm quivered. “Don’t make me bring the heat.”

“I promise I will kill you. You will die.”

“Join me, young Skywalker. Together we can rule the galaxy!”

“You need therapy.”

“And that stupid strip of a beard makes your chin look like it’s swinging in a hammock. You have a fucking hammock on your face.”

In a sudden blast of motion, he sprang up from the bench and hurtled himself at me like a linebacker. With a wallop not dissimilar to the one delivered by Heinz-Peter back in Shangri-La, Warren tackled the shit out of me. As I came down on my back under his weight, I learned why they call it hardwood. I didn’t come close to getting off a throw.

“Get the fuck off !” I yelled, struggling against his lean network of muscles. The tussle only ended when he finally rolled over and writhed in inebriated laughter. The alcohol did little to cushion the cracking of my spine against the floor, and for a few searing seconds I thought I might need a stretcher. But soon we were both lying there, catching our breath, staring up at the artificial incandescence of the ceiling.

And then Warren started singing. In a low register and an unrelenting operatic vibrato, he began to belt out “It Feels like a Lie.”

“Shut up,” I whispered, as his gratingly tremulous baritone boomed up to the pennants.

The sound of that song was pure mockery, a symbol of my years of creative bankruptcy, a sonic taunt that practically dared me back into the ring. But on he sang in this new and intolerable vibrato. He sounded like a goat.

As I gazed up into the fuzzy gymnasium lights, it was all starting to seem familiar. I was flat on my back, I was drunk, the room was spinning, and I’d had some sort of physical altercation.

“You know what I think?” I began, once the last echo of Warren’s voice had faded. “I think that on the day you die, you regret all the things you wanted to do but didn’t try hard enough at.” I sat up and looked at him. “Do you know what I mean?”

Warren grunted without so much as lifting his head. “I think on the day you die, you regret all the homeless people you walked past and didn’t buy a sandwich for.” He frowned at me sideways. “Self-centered dickhead.”

Moments or hours later, we were sitting in my car. We’d staggered out of the building to fill our lungs with fresh air, and I’d shepherded us toward the visitors’ parking lot. My car was the only one around, yet it still seemed like a minor miracle that we found it.

Like zombies, we sat in the front seat with the windows down, the stereo casting my rough demos out into the sleeping world. Warren rubbed his beard and looked faintly troubled but substantially drunk. After three songs, I shut off the radio. Just when I thought Warren might’ve passed out, he up and spoke, his voice a slow, drained grumble. “You’re putting me in a difficult spot, Teddy.”