Andy Abramowitz: Thank You, Goodnight

I slurped loudly.

“I don’t like seeing you like this.”

“Like how?”

“Unhappy. It’s a tough business, this music industry. You had a tremendous amount of success, you traveled the globe, you won a goddamn Oscar! Now go do something else, kiddo.”

“Something else,” I grunted. I wanted to go do something else right now.

“With your head held high,” he added. “Look, you came, you saw, and you conquered, but let’s be honest, your fifteen minutes are probably up. And let’s be even more honest, none of you guys are heartthrob material. I don’t mean to be harsh here, Ted. You’ve got a lot to be proud of. Lord knows I’m proud of you.”

“Oh, well, that means a lot.”

He paused and frowned. “Why do you always do this? Why do you always butt heads with me?”

“Why do I always butt heads with you when you tell me I suck at my job and I’m ugly?”

He held out his open hands, wrists up like a surrendering felon. “I’m just being your father here.”

“That you are, Louis. That you are.”

“I just want what’s best for you. You know that.”

I laughed too loud, took an ungainly sip of my drink, and had to wipe my chin with my sleeve. The whole maneuver struck me as very alcoholic. Not alcoholic like the half-naked bum swaying deliriously outside the liquor store, but like the tragic drunk, expensively falling apart while his family stages an intervention. “Just for fun, what, Dad, in your view, is best for me?”

“Something more stable,” he replied. “Less time in hotels. You’re a smart guy. You should see that this part of your life is over and now you have the luxury of doing something different, something with a better lifestyle. Look at Denny. He’s a fine example.”

Denny is my younger brother. (Real name Denny, not Dennis, an oddity my parents have never sufficiently explained.) He’s smarter than I am, showy about it too. We never did much together, the five-year age wedge causing us to shift through childhood on only sporadically touching tectonic plates. The one thing I really ever did with him was take the mouthy little tyke to IHOP on weekends to split a pile of pancakes. To highlight an older brother’s generosity, I’d point out that I’d given him the bigger half of the stack. To highlight his superior intelligence, he’d point out that there’s no such thing as a bigger half, halves being defined as two equal parts. To highlight my irritation, I’d fork a couple of pancakes off his plate and back onto mine and tell him it looked like I had the bigger half now. Other than those IHOP trips, I have exactly one memory of him from childhood: at age seven, he caught our dad red-handed looting his Halloween candy and yelled, “You son of a bitch!” It took the old man ten minutes to catch his breath from laughter before scampering up the stairs after him with a rolled-up Atlantic Monthly .

These days I barely know the guy. I see him once a year at my father’s office Christmas party. The two of us stand in the corner eating Swedish meatballs and ask each other if it’s too early to split. Denny’s business card reads Professor of English Literature at Ohio State University, but as far as I can tell, his job seems to be sitting in his office and downloading Grateful Dead bootlegs and/or napping. Despite the fact that he’s a middling professor of who cares and I’m an Academy Award winner, my nerd younger brother manages to speak to me with this air of superiority on the rare occasions when our paths cross. It forces me to remind him that for an unacceptably lengthy period, his favorite band was Tears for Fears. That tends to shut him up.

“I’m not comparing you to your brother,” my dad went on, having just unfavorably compared me to my brother, “but wouldn’t it be nice to have a job that doesn’t require you to wake up every day and pray that the magical forces that have made you successful don’t capriciously vanish? You can get around to having a family. Listen, I’m not laying blame here, son, but wasn’t it this crazy musician’s life that caused things to go south between you and Lucy?”

“Uh, is this the part where I point out that you’re no longer married to my mother?”

Dad consulted his place setting. “Mistakes were made. No one’s denying that.”

“A mistake? Like wearing socks with sandals? Showing up at the barber on Tuesday for a Wednesday appointment?”

“I don’t blame your mother for leaving and I don’t blame all of you for resenting me on some level. Lord knows I’m in no place to judge anyone else’s relationship and I’m sure as hell not judging yours. Nevertheless, we are all adults and we should all learn to move on.”

Suddenly, there it was, all coming into sharp focus. I was the musician whose marriage was undone by a wacky, unbound lifestyle. He was the high-powered lawyer whose marriage was undone by pathetic dalliances with women too young even for his sons to date.

“You know what, Dad? We’re both clichés. We might as well drink to it.”

A thick silence hung over our table, the kind of mutual discomfort you can only share with a parent. Eventually, the waiter brought our steaks. My dad thanked him; I ordered another bourbon.

Maybe he was right. Maybe after years in the music industry, the only place I was qualified to work was Moe’s Copy Service or the Yankee Doodle Diner out on 611.

“Look, I didn’t ask you to dinner to argue with you,” he lied. “I came here with a suggestion.” I pretended to concentrate on carving off a wedge of steak. I guess we hadn’t gotten around to his free advice yet. “Want to hear it?”

“I’m not sure why you’re bothering to ask.”

“Law school.” He said it with an air of majesty, as if revealing the answer to an astrophysical algorithm that had confounded all the world’s best minds—Copernicus! Einstein! Hawking!—but him.

I dropped my fork and knife.

“Think about it,” he continued. “You’re a smart kid, you’re well-spoken, you’ve got a creative eye, and you’re argumentative as hell.” He chuckled. That was how lawyers complimented each other. With insults.

“You’re serious,” I said.

“Of course I’m serious.”

“Dad, every lawyer I’ve ever met is a complete ass.” I looked at him. “No exceptions.”

“All I’m saying is, it’s a great way to support yourself, you’d be quite good at it, and obviously, you’ve already got inroads in the legal community. Look, Ted, if I had to reduce my little spiel tonight to one word—”

“And I really wish you would.”

“—it would be security .”

I resumed cutting the dead beast on my plate, this time with venom. “I promise to give it the consideration it deserves.”

That night, as the meat sweats kept me awake and uncomfortable in my bed, I ruminated. I didn’t completely dismiss the idea of law school, even if it had come from my father’s mouth. It sat in the back of my mind like a safety date while I tried my best to come up with something better.

Crickets.

I decided to give music one last try. I devoted the next six months to writing and recording a solo album. I’d rock the cynics, rise above the legions of doubters. This would be my masterwork—intimate and personal, a gorgeous departure from anything the world had yet heard from me. Teddy Tremble’s beautiful soul on display. That kind of thing.

I pursued inspiration all the way across the country. And inspiration, I decided, lay in a cabin on the Oregon coast that I rented for purposes of staring meaningfully at the sea, feeling the salty breeze tangle my hair, and eating fresh salmon. After a lot of introspection, it finally dawned on me that what the world needed was a concept album about a soldier’s emotional journey as he walked from the bus station to his house upon returning from war. I didn’t even pick a war. It was to be a serious and somber affair. The production would be almost entirely acoustic and I’d play all the instruments. I would call the album st. agathe under low clouds , which had no connection to the material, and it would be written just like that, poetically forsaking capital letters in a way sure to make e. e. cummings claw away at his coffin.