Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

Jumbo snorted. “You’ll have to quit both of those.”

Mackenzie, to her credit, ignored him.

“You’ll definitely need a car,” I told her. “That’s a necessity. Do you have one?”

“No.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Warren’s Camry has a lot of trunk space.”

“It’s my dad’s Camry,” Warren was quick to correct in defense of his pride.

“It holds most of his kit,” I went on, “and the rest of us don’t have a lot of gear anyway. Our PA system is pretty puny, although once we make some money, we’ll upgrade. I’m thinking we’ll mic up your bass amp instead of running it directly through the board. You okay with that?”

“Yeah,” she said, not really paying all that much attention.

Jumbo pointed a stern finger at her. “There may be drugs. Can you handle drugs?”

Again, Mackenzie ignored him. She was a quick study.

Our very first show together was a fraternity basement, and even though it was the only venue that would even consider booking us—and by booking, I don’t mean to suggest that any money changed hands—I’d accepted it with an air of condescension. My grandest musical accomplishment up to that point had been in high school when my aggrieved rendition of Richard Marx’s “Right Here Waiting” separated Debbie Devereaux from her bra right there on my parents’ piano bench, and yet somehow I still felt that the ZBT house was beneath me.

The gig was not uneventful. Around midnight, the room mobbed and sweltering, we were in the middle of “Nevada Blue Sky” when Jumbo’s guitar simply cut out. That happened with college bands. Technical difficulties bedeviled many a gig, as equipment would burst into an ear-splitting buzz or hum or simply make no sound at all for no apparent reason. Fortunately, “Nevada” was one of my least imaginative compositions, with one groove that you could ride from intro to coda. So while Jumbo fiddled with and pounded madly upon his moody amp, I waited for the song to fall apart one instrument at a time. Mack, meanwhile, played on unfazed. She and Warren kept the pulse of the song alive, pressing on with the beat and the bass line through a colloquy of foxy smirks, improvising a stream of flourishes, runs, and fills that stewed up so natural a jam that we sounded like we did this every night. I was dazzled by her poise and mesmerized by her low-key sense of showmanship, though very much relieved when Jumbo’s Strat rejoined the proceedings.

After the show, as we hauled our gear across campus, I said to Mackenzie, “Nice going. You handled that curveball like a pro.” As if I would have any insight whatsoever into how a pro behaves.

A few weeks later, she appeared at my door on a Sunday afternoon, her guitar case and mini-amp weighing her down.

“Sorry I’m late,” she panted.

“You’re not. You’re two hours early.”

“Shit. Really? I thought we said four thirty.”

“Six thirty. But come on in.”

She dropped her gear on my floor and ruffled her hair with a hand that bore the indentations of her guitar case grip. “I hate to ask, but how busy are you right now?”

Minutes later, we were in my hand-me-down Saab en route to the Center City row house that her boyfriend, a Wharton student named AJ, shared with three roommates and where she’d left her bag of schoolbooks. Mack was under the impression that AJ had some departmental dinner, so she wasn’t surprised when nobody answered. But she desperately needed her schoolwork for the next morning and was reasonably certain a back window was unlocked and accessible to anyone equipped with a modicum of derring-do, and who wasn’t skeeved out by inner-city shrubbery and the untold varieties of rodentia therein.

I followed as she vaulted a waist-high fence and crept down an overgrown alley that ended at a small patio at the rear of the house. There was a back door that looked militarily reinforced, kitchen windows covered over with wrought iron bars.

“Your boyfriend lives in Rikers Island,” I observed.

“That’s his room,” she said, pointing up at a second-floor window. She scoured the patio for implements of elevation; there was nothing but a sagging bag of charcoal and a rake. “If you can somehow lift me up to the windowsill, I can pry it open and slip inside.”

I dropped to a knee and Mack placed one sneakered foot in my hand. Then, leaning against the mossy bricks to offset her weight, she planted her other shoe in my free hand, and I hoisted her up the side of the wall.

“Sorry I’m not anorexic,” she quipped. She was light and taut, like carrying an empty bookcase.

With Mack’s small feet in my hands—sleek Pumas with pink stripes on the sides—I was eye level with the back of her immaculately toned legs, still deepened with the trace of a summer tan. I tried not to stare too long at the hovering hemline of her olive cargo shorts.

“Are you high enough?” I called out, shifting my head to the side. I thought it untoward to speak directly into the space between her legs.

“I’m at the ledge,” she replied. “If you can boost me a little higher, I think I can lift the window. Can you give me a few more inches?”

I chuckled.

“Okay, that was gross,” she allowed.

Simulating a barbell curl, I raised Mack higher until she said, “That should do it.”

At the sound of wood sliding in a frame, I hazarded a glance upward, just in time to watch her legs sail out of my hands and through the window.

I was already in the car when she came bounding out the front door, one strap of a backpack over her shoulder. Something clicked in me at that exact moment. I guess you could say I fell in love with her, although there was so much to love about what was happening in those days and the many tomorrows that followed that it would be hard to parse out the particulars. I would come to think of that time as the best days of my life, and, on more than one occasion, I have wondered if she was the reason.

There was a lot about being the bassist in a successful band that she had to look past. She didn’t luxuriate in the fatuous dissection of the songs, the laboring over macro aspects of music. (“Suppose we introduce a low pump organ to really bring out the angst in the second verse”; “You can’t have two thematically similar songs, both in E minor. Are you insane?”) Nor was she in it for the camaraderie. To her, Jumbo, Warren, and I were like irritating brothers with whom she was trapped in the family sedan for a summer road trip. On a good day, and when she was so inclined, we rose in the ranks and became two-bit drug dealers who could connect her to the occasional joint. Although she was the most articulate of all of us, she had little tolerance for verbalizing what was best left said by the music. At band meetings, she was typically silent, eyeing us secretively from under her short shag haircut, finally offering input that didn’t sound like input at all: “If you guys are done talking, can we just play the damn thing?”

With a glance at the clock on my condo wall, I realized time was getting tight. It was a five-hour trip out to Pittsburgh and I’d reserved for myself the last appointment of the day at the sex therapy offices of Mackenzie Highsider. Under the stream of a nervous shower, I allowed the conversation—the one that I’d been preparing for for years and that was now going to happen this afternoon—to unfold in my head.

I knew that Mack felt some complicity in the destruction of my marriage, a detail she seemed to struggle with until Tremble went on permanent hiatus and she didn’t have to face me every day. I fully expected that she’d nurtured a keen bitterness and resentment toward me, perhaps made all the worse by the gradual realization that maybe we were each other’s missed opportunities. If we hadn’t been caught that evening under such cheap and trashy circumstances, if we hadn’t been busted, who knows? Maybe we would’ve had a chance.