Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

“I’m heading up to the room,” I muttered miserably. “I’ll call when I know what’s up.”

“We’ll be ready, Mingus,” Jumbo enthused. He’d already shaken off the most recent disaster; every moment was lived in a vacuum. “We’ll conquer Mackenzie and then we’ll head back west!” He pumped his fist.

“We live east,” I grunted, starting for the elevator bank.

“Ha! True enough. Don’t know what’s with me today. Jet-lagged, I guess.”

We had driven—and hadn’t changed time zones.

Jumbo turned to the receptionist and rested both elbows on the counter. “I got news for you. Where would I find a vending machine?”

My room greeted me with a burned-out bulb. After some blind patting on the walls, I happened upon a light switch in the bathroom. Now I could see, but breathing was becoming a problem, as my lungs clenched from the fog-like stench of cigarettes. A nonsmoking room apparently meant that no one was smoking in it right now. I could practically hear myself getting emphysema. When a complaint to the front desk proved discouraging—“All the nonsmoking rooms smell the same, sir”—I cracked a window, took in the breathtaking view of a buckling roof, and set out on a stroll while the room ventilated. I don’t know what more I could’ve expected from a hotel whose most lavish amenity was that it accepted credit cards.

After visiting the soda machine on the first floor, I carried a Diet Coke down the long, underilluminated hall toward the side exit. The journey brought me past a set of glass double doors through which I viewed an indoor pool encircled by balconied rooms. That never made sense to me, those indoor balconies. This was not a resort. What breed of guest was going to plant himself in a plastic chair with a Sue Grafton mystery and bask in the chlorinated air to the echo-heavy sound of splashing? If you were staying in this hotel, it was because you were in town for a funeral or for a cheap affair, or you were hustling your brand of mayo to the TGI Fridays across the street.

I pushed through the door at the end of the corridor and found myself in a remote area of the parking lot with a Dumpster. The huge green bin was abuzz with insects—tiny, rancorous voices celebrating the dropping of the sun like a throng of spring breakers. The insects and I weren’t alone. A woman with stringy, copper-hued hair was standing by the Dumpster, clad in a brown-red shirt and black vest onto which a Best Western logo was stitched. The woman’s lips were curled in a frown of monumental gloom. At least you’re not me, her empty eyes seemed to be saying. She raised a cigarette to her lips, sucked the life out of it, and flicked it over her shoulder into the bayou of wet diapers and warm tuna. “It’s like fucking Maui here, no?” she said, and headed inside.

Tremble’s second tour had, in fact, brought us to Hawaii. We took the stage in Honolulu as the headliners I declared us to be, belting out the songs for which we were famous and the songs that would soon render us unfamous, while the Junction ravaged the mainland with a rambling cyclone of sold-out shows. If my cohorts harbored the same concerns I did, they hid it well. They seemed to be having a blast on the road, on the planes, and in the bars and bistros of America, and when the house lights went down, we actually sounded better than ever. It was just that not that many people were around to hear.

Before long, I realized I’d made a grievous miscalculation with our collective musical futures. I would return to my hotel room each night feeling as lost and adrift as a tiny island in the Pacific.

Sipping cocktails on a breezy beach one night on Oahu, Jumbo removed a joint from his breast pocket and got up to light it in the bamboo tiki torch next to us.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I demanded of him, looking nervously around our table.

“What? I thought it’s legal here.”

“In the United States? Put that away.”

He returned the blunt to his pocket and sat back down. “I just thought it would chill you out a little,” he explained. “You’ve got to be the most uptight guy in all of Hawaii.”

I’m certain that at that moment my mind formulated some nauseatingly pompous response, like “Heavy is the head that wears the crown.” Something that paid tribute to both my overtaxed leadership and my unappreciated intellect.

“We sound awesome!” the guitarist enthused. “So what if the crowds are a little thinner than we’re used to? Look where we are, man!” He waved grandly at the star-peppered sky, at the surf that slumbered just out past the beach lights. “Last week we rocked the Fillmore in San Francisco. The week before that, the Showbox in Seattle. We’re living the dream, Mingus.”

Perhaps, but the dream was slowly dying—and I’d sort of killed it.

“Look around you,” Jumbo went on. “Pick out the hottest girl in this whole bar. No—you know what? Pick out the hottest girl on this whole island! You can sleep with her just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “You could do anything you want to her, and so could I. You know why? Because you’re Teddy fucking Tremble and I’m Jumbo fucking Jett.”

“You’re getting carried away.”

“Am I? You want me to prove it? You want me to prove it with that little slice of Lord-have-mercy over there?” I didn’t even bother turning my head to whomever he was pointing at and now waving and pirouetting his eyebrows. “The point is that you, me, Mack, and the Square are all on the best paid vacation anyone could dream up, and you’re the only one who doesn’t seem to realize it.”

Our server materialized with a tray of cocktails. “Gentlemen,” he said. “A Kona brown ale for you, Mr. Tremble, and a Southern Comfort on the rocks for you, Mr. Jett.”

Jumbo beamed grandly at his refill and said, “Mauna Loa.”

“Is there anything else I can get for you gentlemen at the moment?”

“I think we’re good,” I said.

“Please don’t hesitate.”

“Mauna Loa,” Jumbo repeated to the waiter, who smiled back and moved on.

I looked at my bandmate. “James, the Hawaiian word for thank you is mahalo . We’ve only heard it five thousand times in the past two days. Is that what you’re trying to say, or have you decided to recite the name of the world’s largest volcano to every person who hands you a drink or opens the door for you?” I dipped my lips into my auburn beer. “You could also simply say thanks. They understand English here in the US.”

The stench of roadside hotel Dumpster jarred me out of my old mistakes and back into my new ones. I pulled my phone out of my back pocket and called Sara.

“How’s the trip?” she asked.

“Okay so far. Jumbo ended up coming with me.”

“God—why?”

“Because it would’ve been weird if it was just me and his dad.”

In explaining how it came to pass that I set out on a trans-­Pennsylvania road trip with that father and son duo, it dawned on me that their reasons for driving out here were no less credible than my own.

Sara was still at the office, having just returned from the home of fabulously well-to-do clients on Delancey Street. A redecorating project was bleeding from one room to the next, as this genteel couple sought to address the discord of a house in which the Provençal lavenders of French country abutted the sleek blues and oranges of midcentury.

“It’s just as well you’re out of town,” Sara commented. “It’s probably going to be a late night for me too.”

“What’s going on?”

“It’s Michel’s last day, so there’s a dinner party.”

“Oh. That should be fun, right?”

“There’s been a lot of talk of sangria,” she said.