Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

He mulled the point. “She’d make a good one.”

The girl slid two mini-envelopes across the counter, told us we were all set—a hellaciously off-the-mark summation of our position in the world—and pointed us toward the elevators. As I handed one of the envelopes to Jumbo, I heard a voice over my shoulder.

“Holy shit, it is them!”

The two guys sitting in the lobby chairs were no longer looking bored. They were looking at us.

“Tremble,” declared one of them. He was in his late twenties with an impotent beard, adorned in loose jeans and a sweatshirt that read Penn State. “Aren’t you the guys from that band from, like, forever ago?”

Jumbo grinned with false modesty. “That’s right, fellas. Guilty as charged.”

The bearded guy looked at his friend, whose sweatshirt bore the name Ursinus, which I assumed was a college but could’ve just as easily been a glandular problem. “You remember these guys?” Then, to us, “I didn’t know you were still together. I just saw a VH1 Behind the Music about you.”

“Well, gentlemen, it’s all true,” Jumbo boasted, impervious to the guy’s tone of mockery.

“What the hell are you doing in a Best Western?” asked Ursinus.

“What the hell are you doing in a Best Western?” I shot back. I was in no fucking mood for this.

At that point, Penn State jumped up and began belting out “It Feels like a Lie.” He made a real big deal of it, with flair and flamboyance, raising his voice, getting most of the words wrong, waving his arms grandly like this sad little lobby was a Broadway stage. The counter girl looked uncomfortable. It was becoming a memorable shift.

“All right, all right, well done,” Jumbo cut in. “Glad they’re still grooving out to us in Pittsburgh.”

“Yeah, right,” the guy cackled. “Just like they’re still grooving to Dishwalla and A-ha.”

I was going to let it go. Run-ins like this went with the territory. At a mediation in New York a few years ago, a smug piece-of-shit lawyer looked across the conference table at me and said, “I’ll bet you never expected to find yourself here.” In line at Nathan’s Hot Dogs in the Orlando airport, I heard someone mutter, “Oh, how the mighty have fallen.” People occasionally whispered and pointed. I can’t say I’ve never lost my temper in those situations (I “accidentally” jostled the Nathan’s guy’s soda arm), but it was best not to escalate. You suffered the negative attention, maybe shot back with a simple insult—hair was always a safe target, so were clothes and weight—and that usually shut them up. You moved on.

“Well, it was a real pleasure meeting you guys,” I said, tossing my bag over my shoulder.

“So, what—are you still together? Still sharing hotel rooms?” Penn State heckled.

“Let’s just say you haven’t heard the last of Tremble,” Jumbo announced, yet again misreading the room.

“How will I ever contain my excitement?” Ursinus piped up. “Where’s the show tonight, guys? The Days Inn?”

“That’s really fucking funny,” I said sharply. “How many gold records do you have, dipshit?”

The dipshit’s grin vanished. Both gentlemen glared at me, pocketknives in their eyes. “Mouthy for a fruity little singer, aren’t you?”

Jumbo stepped between me and our two fans. “Okay now, fellas.”

The dipshit gave me a slow, menacing smile, a common antecedent to violence, I have learned.

“Back off,” Jumbo said mildly. “Let’s not have an incident, shall we?”

Jumbo was moderately burly but about as intimidating as Fozzie Bear. These clowns weren’t exactly in top physical shape either, but they were thick and meaty, considerably younger and less removed from their brawling days. The good money was on them.

The one with the fragmentary goatee—the amateur vocalist out of Penn State—took a step toward Jumbo, getting nose to nose with him. “Why don’t you back off, you big fucking zero?” As his taunting intensified, he opened his eyes wider and wider, and I wondered if maybe one of us should hold an open palm under his chin to catch his eyeballs when they popped out of their sockets. “I’m hearing some tough talk, but you know what I think? I think you’ve got nothing to back it up. I think you’re just a couple of little girls.”

“Now, friend, there’s no reason to get sexist,” Jumbo said, placing a fatherly hand on the guy’s shoulder.

It was a miscalculation, if it was a calculation at all, to initiate physical contact. In a frightfully swift motion, Penn State shifted his weight onto his back leg, then exploded forward and clocked Jumbo in the cheek.

“Ow! That fucking hurt!” Jumbo shrieked, staggering backward. He smacked into the reception desk, knocked a stack of brochures to the floor, and somehow nicked the ring-for-service bell.

In a flash, I was on top of Jumbo’s assailant—nobody hits him but me—ready to plant my knuckles in the guy’s beard. Turns out though, what seemed like a flash to me was more than enough time for the guy to duck and allow my fist to sail lamely past his face. Before I could blink, a mighty blow was delivered to my gut from Ursinus, who, last I checked, was on the other side of the room. The wind was knocked clean out of me and I crumpled to the floor.

Down on the cold linoleum, I braced for further beating—a shoe to the head, a hard kick to the kidneys, additional gusts of violence to solidify my mortification and disgrace. One man’s cautionary tale is another man’s war story, and I knew these punks would go back home and tell all their sorry punk friends how they delivered a beat-down to a couple of aging rock stars. As for me, I was tiring of getting punched—by dirtballs in Central Pennsylvania, photographers in Switzerland, interior decorators who shared my bed.

Then it was as if a thick blanket was draped over the room. Nobody moved, nobody spoke, nobody screamed in agony. I raised my eyes and beheld our two fans up against the wall, an elderly man clutching their throats. Their eyes were wide with fright and they gasped for breath as old Elmer Jett secured their windpipes with his gnarled fingers.

“Which one of you took a swing at my boy?” The sound that came out of the asthmatic-cum-military-chokeholder’s mouth was as ominous a tone as I’d ever heard. Neither punk could summon the air to respond.

“I showed up late to this party,” Elmer went on, his voice somewhere between a murmur and a snarl. “But I think maybe someone here has forgotten his manners.” He looked at each of his captives with a threatening scowl. “Now, which one of you hit my boy?”

While Jumbo nursed his jaw by the reception counter and I struggled to my feet and tried not to vomit, Jumbo’s dad, who hadn’t so much as moved or spoken all day except to have a seizure, had finally piped up to animate the cliché of old-man strength and Eastwoodian menace.

He leaned in as close as he could, his Depression-era wrinkles mere inches from the faces of these distinguished graduates. “I am an exceedingly violent man and I hold a bitch of a grudge,” he growled, low and gritty. “You better hope to hell I never see either of you again. I won’t be nearly so amiable.”

With that, he released his grip on the two throats, and the castrated duo crumbled into sputters of panting and huffing. (Seems wherever Elmer went, someone was short of breath.) They grabbed their overnight bags and hightailed it out into the evening.

Jumbo rushed over to his father. “You okay, Dad?”

Elmer simply nodded, the crusty geezer apparently restored to his default setting of mute.

The gut thumping I had taken was beginning to wear off, so once again, the only lasting injury was to my pride. My gratitude toward Elmer for his timely intercession was somewhat diluted by the revelation that we now required the services of a seventy-nine-year-old tubercular bodyguard. Go us.