Andy Abramowitz: Thank You, Goodnight

Alaina shook her head with mock wonder at my mute rejection. “Do you seriously not see what a perfect crime we Asian Jews are?”

“Take care, Alaina,” I said, and headed home to Philly.

I devoted the next several weeks to cultivating a full-bodied gloom. While my bandmates took the news in stride and moved on with their lives like adults, I sat on the edge of my bed at two thirty in the afternoon trying to visualize how I was going to make it through the dreariness of the next half century.

Then one day, my wallowing was interrupted by a call from my father.

“Ted, let’s meet for dinner tonight,” he said, more summons than proposal.

Lazing on my sofa with A Fish Called Wanda on pause, I sighed with great majesty. “I don’t know, Dad. Tonight’s not good.”

“Come on. Get off your duff and meet your old man.”

My duff and I had become quite close during those mopey days, and my father wasn’t exactly the guy to coax me off it. “How about next week?” I said. “Let’s shoot for next week.”

“I’m in Charleston next week. Tonight. I’ll make a seven o’clock reservation at Raymond’s.”

Raymond’s was the stodgy steak place directly across from my father’s law office that served as his personal dining room at least two lunches and one dinner per week. My dad was of that ilk, the ilk that went to steakhouses for lunch. A veggie burger was fine so long as you were wearing pantyhose.

I sat up. “Fine. I’ll meet you. But I really don’t want any shit, Dad. I’m not kidding.”

“You’re a gentleman and a scholar. See you at seven.”

Whatever the fuck that meant.

Dad never hauled me in for a meal without an agenda, so I had to face the fact that I’d just booked myself an evening of unsolicited advice. This was a dinner meeting, and like all dinner meetings, it would be stiff and laborious, like the tough T-bone I would order.

Five o’clock found me slogging through town, a trucker’s cap with the Harley-Davidson logo pulled tight over my eyes, intent on drowning my dread with a couple of predinner cocktails.

At the empty end of a bar, SportsCenter hanging overhead, I stared into my bourbon. Getting booted from my record label was a walk among the roses compared to dinner with Lou Tremble. The man had always dispensed wisdom like a pitching machine—hard, constant, sporadically accurate—wearing you down with dense sacks of bullshit packed into long stretches of uninterrupted speech until you surrendered. Surrender was good, because at least then you could get up and walk the hell away. The problem, of course, was that he wasn’t all bad or all wrong, so you couldn’t dismiss him outright. Yet as auteur of some ignoble deeds of his own, he left you with nagging doubts as to his credibility. He tried to instill in his two boys a strong conscience and a hardscrabble work ethic, and yet I always wondered how his practice of accepting blow jobs from perky little paralegals fit into that creed. Such behavior won’t get you disbarred, but it turns out it can get you dismarried. Whatever. I’m not the first guy to be chewed up by the stunning humanity of a parent.

With ice cubes shrinking in my glass, I recalled the night I learned just what it was that made my old man tick. There was my mother, rinsing dinner plates and glasses, arranging them with tactical precision in the dishwasher. There was me, loitering at the table with my social studies textbook, learning about how Sam Adams incited a flock of bewigged colonists to dress up as Mohawks and spill some English tea in the name of the very freedom that my classmates and I so ungraciously took for granted. And there was my father, pacing about the kitchen with a phone to his ear, shouting at some underling about an important document that had to be sent out that night and had to be flawless. Swinging the coils of the phone cord like a jump rope while the remains of his fruit cocktail sat in a puddle of syrup, Dad barked at the young lawyer as if raising his voice would actually improve the quality of the work. (I have since learned that it sometimes does.) His dander was up particularly high that evening and he was firing off commands and insults at his dimwitted associate, half covering the receiver from time to time to share with the family just how dimwitted this guy was. Can you believe this guy?

Then, suddenly, midsentence, like a power outage silencing a stereo, he stopped yelling. My mother and I looked over at him with a mix of relief and concern. Had he suffered a stroke? Had the coagulated syrup from the fruit cocktail triggered a diabetic coma? He just stood there, holding the phone away from his face, marveling at the receiver.

Eventually, with a dumbfounded chuckle and a terrifying eye-of-the-hurricane calm, he said, “That kid just told me to fuck off.”

I braced for a demonic bay of rage so mighty that it would echo over the Great Wall of China. Instead, he hung up the phone, sat down, and looked at me.

“That kid just told me to fuck off,” he repeated. “Now, don’t misunderstand. The little turd was way out of line and he’s going to live to regret it. But there’s a lesson here, Ted. What he did was healthy. A lot of times the world is going to crowd you. It’s going to get in your face.” He illustrated the point by leaning his mug right up to mine. “And there are two types of people out there. There are people who take mounds and mounds of shit and don’t know how to stop the shit from piling up, and they just get buried deeper and deeper. And then there are people who, every so often, when it’s absolutely necessary and called for, tell everyone to fuck off. Those people—mark my words—are happier.”

Let’s just say, I learned the hell out of that lesson. I tell an awful lot of people to fuck off, and the old bastard was right—it usually feels pretty good. I expected to need the full extension of that skill that night at dinner, so in what was fast developing into a pub crawl, I drained my bourbon, left the bar, and proceeded to shuffle down to Raymond’s. Where I took a seat at the cougar-ravaged bar and sipped more bourbon.

When Dad blew into the restaurant, his tie strewn over his shoulder, I was already sporting a comfortable buzz. The host, whom my father greeted by name, showed us to Dad’s special table, handed us menus, and said, with a rather excessive dash of corniness, how nice it was to have both Mr. Trembles here tonight. Dad thanked him; I ordered another bourbon.

“I read your review in Rolling Stone ,” he began.

“It’s not my review. I didn’t write it,” I said through a bitter laugh. “And since when do you read Rolling Stone ?”

“A kid at the office handed it to me. Sounds like they weren’t all that enamored with the new album.” He was grinning like we had one of those relationships where we could say anything we wanted to each other, no hard feelings. We didn’t have one of those relationships. But since the review declared the album “equal parts catnap and faked orgasm,” my dad’s characterization was not altogether unfair.

“I don’t read reviews,” I lied. “But if I did, I certainly wouldn’t read Rolling Stone .”

Funny how my old man never invited me to dinner when the critics genuflected in praise.

Dad ordered a porterhouse, I a Delmonico, and then he tilted his head as might the diplomat of a first-world nation when preparing to educate his third-world counterpart. “Can I give you some free advice?”

“Why do I feel as though I’ll somehow end up paying for it?”

“I promise it won’t cost you anything.”

“Let’s just see what it’s worth.”

With a smile freighted with empathy, he said, “Ted, son, I think it’s over.”