Andy Abramowitz: Thank You, Goodnight

The point was this: I could go to London if I wanted. If I was stupidly obsessed, or let’s say I just wanted to sleep again, I could scoot on over and settle this. And who wouldn’t want to lay eyes on his legacy? Even when you knew your legacy had all the esteem of a cornflake smudge.

“I have nothing further,” I heard the questioner say. He hunched over the table and peered all the way down to where I was sitting—in person, if not in spirit. “Mr. Tremble, do you rest?”

“Hardly.” I snickered.

With a yawn, I stood and embraced the end of what I could’ve sworn was an endless day. But I’d used this period of immobility and repeated caffeination to its fullest meditative potential. All factors pointed in one direction. That direction was east.

A cluster of young guys behind me at the Heathrow customs line were speaking, through wide Boston accents and with macho rowdiness, about the bachelor party they had flown in for. It suddenly struck me that every bachelor party I’d ever been to had been a disappointment. Warren’s, for example, was both lame and disastrous. Which was precisely what we should’ve expected, seeing as how it had been masterminded by Jumbo Jett, our train wreck of a guitar player who himself was both lame and disastrous. He had a penchant for debauchery that made Keith Moon look like a Downton Abbey dandy, yet he was somehow a total drag. We’d been home for a stretch after the second record was completed, holed up with our jitters, awaiting the release of the album and the launch of the tour. A tour we had no business headlining. A tour I’d insisted upon against my better judgment and that of everyone within shouting distance of me. A tour I’d steered us toward pigheadedly out of ego, jealousy, and other unbecoming emotions. Somehow it had fallen to Jumbo to plan Warren’s send-off into monogamy, even though Warren couldn’t stand the sight of the guy. Jumbo may have had a hyperdeveloped instinct for partying, but he had no instinct whatsoever for organization. Hence, his elaborate plan consisted of tooling around our home base of Philadelphia all day and eventually staggering into some gentlemen’s clubs. Not exactly the decadence and excess befitting a bunch of musicians in their twenties. But with Jumbo at the helm, we could’ve easily ended up in a roadside motel with an emaciated hooker. So it went in the win column.

After navigating the maze of antiseptic airport corridors, collecting my bags at the luggage carousel, and hailing a cab, I was soon checking into the boutique hotel just off the Strand that Kathleen, my secretary, had booked last minute. The cold water I splashed on my face wasn’t so much revitalizing as it was simply cold. Then I headed straight for the Tate Modern, ready as I’d ever be to confront my legacy.

Amid the swirling foot traffic at the museum entrance, I paused for a breath. There was a seemingly homeless Rastafarian on a vibraphone. I think he was banging out “9 to 5” by Dolly Parton.

Inside, the atmosphere was art-school vibrant and airplane-­hangar reverberant. Swiping a floor map from the visitors’ desk, I moved among the meandering appreciators, all the while fighting off a swell of anxiety. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to see whatever it was Warren wanted me to see. On the escalator up to the second floor, I felt that adrenaline-fueled thump, a schizophrenic cross between This better be worth it and God, I hope it’s a letdown.

The escalator deposited me in an open room with high ceilings, white walls, and artwork of varying species blooming in every direction. With a pit in my stomach, I started combing through the halls, detouring into the various chambers situated off the main room, a keen eye toward anything that could possibly shed light on what the hell I was doing there.

By the time I’d completed one revolution around the floor, anxiousness had given way to frustration. What if my legacy was gone, carted off to another gallery? What if I was looking right at it but just didn’t get it? It occurred to me that I might very well walk out of there empty-handed. It also occurred to me that that might be the best possible scenario.

Then I noticed one wall at the end of the main room that I hadn’t yet examined. I walked toward it and came upon a photography exhibit, pictures of seemingly random people printed on large canvases. They were candids of distantly familiar faces. The first shot was of a New York Yankee from the seventies or eighties—an outfielder, if memory served. He was aging and whalelike, besieged by pockmarks, lugging his big old self down a busy Manhattan avenue in a rumpled suit. The way he glared at the camera, Charles Manson daggers in his eyes, suggested that life after baseball had not been kind, albeit flush with hot dogs. I grunted in satisfaction; fuck the Yankees.

The next photo depicted a postcute woman in her midtwenties standing at a bus stop, an army-green duffel bag slung over her shoulder. She was wincing from the weight of the luggage and peering down the quiet road, impatient for the bus. Her features seemed awfully worn for someone in the flower of youth, and her hair seemed to be in a protracted estrangement from water and shampoo. I’d seen this woman before. She was the daughter of a right-wing senator who’d been excommunicated from the party upon revelations that he enjoyed parading around the house in his wife’s lingerie. Either that or she was the former starlet who tipped one White Russian too many with Lindsay Lohan and ended up the target of a restraining order by that guy from That ’70s Show . I hadn’t thought about her in years, and the look in her eye suggested she knew it all too well.

The third photo was even sadder, a woman enshrouded in a raincoat on a rainless day, flanked by cops on a street corner. A high-end boutique clothing store stood in the background, and the way the officers loomed over the poor woman made the story all too clear. Thief ! Her eyes were downcast to the concrete and her hands were stuffed dolefully in her jacket pockets, the very picture of humiliation. Although the hood of her raincoat snugly enveloped her head, one could still make out the woman who, fifteen or so years ago, had been the unflappable matriarch of a sitcom family, dishing out good-natured one-liners at her husband and children while carrying a basket of laundry. This actress-cum-shoplifter, like the bloated Yankee and disgraced starlet before her, had clearly seen better days.

Speaking of which: the next picture was of me.

It was a doozy. I was in a Mexican-themed cantina, the sort of place where the ceiling fans drone high overhead, the menus are laminated, and the heavily cheesed burritos stay with you for days. The photographer had snapped me unawares as I sat alone at the bar with a plate of mango salsa nachos and a mojito. At the precise moment that the shutter winked in my direction, I’d clumsily scooped an unbalanced heap of salsa onto a chip and the whole thing had fallen apart, leaving a bloodstain of sauce trailing down my shirt and a hailstorm of chopped onions, chicken squares, and jalapeños heading south for my lap. My chin was thrust forward buffoonishly and my lips were agape, a last-ditch attempt to steer the chip into my mouth before it lost its cargo. As a bonus, an unsightly sliver of cilantro was lodged between my two front teeth. You could see it perfectly.

Nobody in the history of our species had ever looked more foolish.

There was more. The title of the photo was printed on a little white card next to the canvas. Riffing cleverly on my band’s number-one hit song, “It Feels like a Lie,” the picture was called It Feels like a Lie . . . and It Looks like a Mess , which I guessed would seem funnier later. The photographer was someone named Heinz-Peter Zoot from someplace called Unterseen. Both sounded made-up.