Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

“Both are accepted.”

“But one is wrong.”

I felt him staring at me, studying the person he’d known in some form or other his entire life. “How does it feel to be right all the time?” he asked.

“It’s an enormous responsibility.”

He laughed tolerantly. “I love you to pieces, Mingus, but you’re a little mean. You were never like that before.”

“Yes, I was.”

“Well, it’s okay. Music will cure you.” He patted my knee.

“Get off,” I said, swatting his hand away.

Jumbo twisted his fleshy neck toward the backseat. “Hey Daddy-O, you hungry?”

In the rearview, I watched the old man muster up a nod.

“We’ll stop at the next exit,” I muttered.

As we proceeded to tunnel through the Alleghenies, I was treated to another vicious ball scratching by my front-seat passenger, the sixth or seventh of the day.

“Fuck.” Jumbo was growing concerned. “Do you think you can get lice in your pubic hair?”

I rolled down the window and took shelter in a wallop of fresh air. “You can do anything you want, Jumbo.”

It’s easier than you might imagine to ruin everything.

We were in New York for the sessions that would become our second record, Atomic Somersault . Expectations were hefty. Our hit had propelled our debut album to platinum status, and within the past year we’d stood on a stage in LA and been handed a little gold statue before the eyes of the world.

The strange thing was, I actually believed these new songs were stronger. They say you spend your whole life writing your first album and only a year writing your second, but I didn’t think I needed a second quarter century to pen a follow-up. Maybe we didn’t have a chart-topping single this time around, but I didn’t care. I actually preferred it that way. There was more to these songs, more places to lead the listener. This album would earn us fans who cared about music, not just kids who needed an anthem to belt out the window at their horrible, autocratic parents.

At the end of a long day of recording, my bandmates and I were clustered at the hotel bar, nursing drinks almost like civilized human beings, when a blustery voice slashed the tranquility.

“Teddy fucking Tremble!”

I turned and saw Simon Weathers, lead singer of the Junction, sauntering over. His hair was cut in jagged spikes, and he was clad in a black leather jacket with black leather pants and black leather shoes, as the world had seen him countless times on the cover of People , and in a mug shot or two for some drunk and disorderlies.

Simon strode up to us and pumped my hand. “What in the fuck are you guys doing here?”

“Hey, Simon.” I’d met God’s gift once or twice before, having shared the stage at a music festival. We also shared a record label at the time. “We’re just in town finishing our new record.”

“Good for you, man, good for you.”

I reacquainted him with my cohorts, and he nodded at each of them, sizing them up one at a time.

“What brings you here?” I asked.

He scratched his head with practiced weariness. “We’re doing a couple shows at the Garden starting tomorrow night.” The Junction purveyed a sixties-inflected form of brash Brit rock, despite being a quartet of Ohioans.

“Nice,” I said.

“You like playing MSG?” Jumbo jumped in with a critical lean. “See, I’m not a big fan. I get this weird vibration on the stage there. Wah! Wah! Wah! It’s very distracting. I’ve complained. You ever get that? Wah! Wah! ”

“Anyway,” Simon said, turning to Mackenzie, “what are you playing these days? I remember seeing you with a Fender jazz bass at South by Southwest. Do I have that right?”

“The sunburst one,” Mack said, smiling coquettishly.

Simon nodded in approval. “A Geddy Lee special. Rocked my world, baby. I remember wondering what in the fuck the bassist for Tremble was doing with an instrument like that. You know what I mean? You don’t do jazz, you don’t do prog—like, what do you need that for? But you made it work, baby. You dug a deep-ass groove with that thing.”

“Thank you.” Mack blushed. For all her glorious ascension in the world, the woman still blushed.

“Next round’s on me,” Simon declared with a wink.

“I have to pass,” Mack said. “I’m wiped. I’m going to call it a night.”

“Boo!” Simon heckled. “Really? The night is so young.”

“Not for some of us,” Mack said, and with a wave, she bid us all goodnight. “Nice seeing you, Simon.”

“Likewise. Likewise indeed.”

Simon summoned the bartender with an open-handed smack on the bar. “Ketel One, rocks for me”—he drew circles in the air with his index finger, a cowboy closing in on a steer—“and another round of whatever my friends are drinking.”

Simon then proceeded to ponder the vacant doorway through which Mack had just exited. “What is it about her?”

I shrugged. “What do you mean?”

“She’s fantastic.”

“Mack? Yeah, she’s great.”

“There’s something about her. Every time I run into her, she lingers in my mind for days. I can’t explain it. There’s something very real, very tangible about her.” He was impressed with himself for using the word tangible . He turned his head to me. “You ever hit that?”

“No, Simon, I have not hit that.” I raised the finger with my wedding band (though I wanted to raise the one next to it).

He grinned. “Ah. Gotcha.”

Could it be that Simon Weathers was tiring of the dull parade of starlets and Victoria’s Secret models? That as he lay awake in bed, a Brazilian goddess in angelic repose six inches to his left, he pined for something more, something meaningful, for someone with whom he could trade erudite barbs, with whom he could pass a slow Sunday morning on the veranda with coffee and the New York Times ? Please.

He suddenly gave my shoulder an epiphanic pounding. “Here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to bring Tremble on tour with us.”

“What?”

“It’s perfect! We’ve both got new music on the way. We’ll hit the road together. It’ll be huge. Six months ought to be enough time for Mackenzie to develop, shall we say, an appreciation for me, right?” He snickered in a way that everyone else in the world must have thought was magnetic.

I stared at him. “You want to do a Junction/Tremble tour so that you can seduce my bass player?”

“Isn’t that the whole point of everything, man? Seduction. It’s the reason we write songs and the reason we sing them out loud. Disagree with me. I dare you.”

“I disagree with you.”

“You’re full of shit,” he said, laughing. “And anyway, who fucking cares? Do you have any idea the kind of scratch you make playing to sold-out stadiums?”

“I have some idea,” I said tightly. “We did eighteen months of them.”

He took three gulps of his vodka in rapid succession while I glared at him, a lean fury flaring up inside me. Did this lout actually think we needed his charity? Did he really expect that we’d allow ourselves to get hauled from one city to the next as his opening act, diluting our brand, warming up the stage for him?

And did he really think Mack was up for grabs?

“Maybe you should come open for us,” I suggested, grinning without joy.

“You never know. Stranger things have happened.” Then he emptied the glass down his craned gullet.

I was confident his proposal would be forgotten in the brine of Ketel Ones. Oh, but I was wrong. A few months later, Alaina called and relayed what she considered the best news in the history of news.

“I’m not going on tour with the Junction,” I told her, indignant and a little whiny.