Andy Abramowitz - Thank You, Goodnight

Away I composed in that A-frame cabin of knotty pine. Once birthed, I christened the songs with achingly enchanting titles like “Does Your House Have Seasons?” “A Milliner’s Lament,” and “He Asked Whose Sheep They Were and I Said I Watched Them for Lord Wren.” Oh, how the critics would pant!

When it was complete, I decided I was too close to the project to render a fair critique. I needed someone else’s ears. Ears I trusted. So I stalked Sonny Rivers, the legendary producer behind the two Tremble records, at his LA studio. He wasn’t ecstatic to see me. I watched nervously as he listened, elegantly consuming cigarettes on his swivel chair for the full fifty-three minutes. When it was over, he said this:

“No, no, no. No. This is not you. I don’t know who this jack-off is, but it is not you. The fact of the matter is, this shouldn’t be anybody.”

“All right. Okay. So you don’t like it.”

“No, man, I don’t.”

“You know, I recorded it in only four days.”

“It sounds like it.”

“Understood. Any ideas how to make it better?”

“Toss it. All of it. Start from scratch. Did I hear you sing something about the dogs of enlightenment running through the meadow of your mind?”

“You might have.”

“That’s a shame.” He took an unhappy drag. “And shit—‘She questioned my Aquarius’? Come on, man—what the hell does that mean? And what’s with that Appalachian track you got in there? Just because you’re playing banjo and singing about somebody’s girl getting swept down the river, that doesn’t make it bluegrass. And why are you singing bluegrass anyhow? You’re better than this.”

Perhaps I wasn’t.

“I get it,” I said, taking a breath. “It needs some work.”

“And don’t you know how much concept albums suck? They suck a lot. They’re hokey, overly theatrical. They’re like medicine—at best appreciated, never enjoyed. Tell me, Teddy Lloyd Webber, do you want to write rock songs or do you want to dance across a Broadway stage in a costume? This is Cats , man! Don’t bring Cats into my house! Write a song. Don’t give me a three-part miniseries. Just sing me a goddamn song.”

“Okay, I hear you. I’m going to scale it back.”

“You’re not hearing me. I’m not saying scale it back. I’m saying get rid of it.” His features contorted in pain. “And who’s that lady singing soprano on that one track? No guest vocalists, man. You think you’re Carlos Santana?”

Lady? He must have been referring to the English murder ballad that I decided to chirp out in falsetto. I guess it did sort of sound like Joan Baez getting shot in the kneecaps.

“And one last thing: white boys don’t scat.”

“You don’t have to get racist about it.”

“It’s racist for you to scat. You enslave my people when you scat. You enslave them musically. It’s a civil rights issue, starting now.”

Sonny tapped out his cigarette into a dirty ashtray and got up. He gave me his signature bear hug and said, “I love you, motherfucker.” Meeting adjourned.

Right then I made a decision. I didn’t want to become a walking humiliation. I didn’t want to release crap music that I knew would be panned before I even recorded it. I didn’t want to get booked at Holiday Inn lounges where I shared the signage with “Happy Bar Mitzvah, Josh!” And I sure as hell didn’t want to drift downward into those desperate, what-strain-of-crack-were-you-smoking? collaborations. Def Leppard and Juice Newton with the London Philharmonic. Alice Cooper Sings Gershwin and Bacharach.

So I walked away. I was done.

I probably should’ve just died. Dying would’ve been the right play, for oh how the cultural whorehouse doth moan, pant, and keep eternal vigil for the artist who flames out young. Heroes and legends are born from our tendency to mistake the brief life for the inspired one. I would’ve benefited from that phenomenon.

I should’ve OD’d in a Vegas suite while a pasty stripper pounded on my chest. My private jet should’ve torpedoed into a cornfield. Some wacko should’ve shot me, and as I lay there struggling through my final bloody breaths, I should’ve winked and wryly uttered some kickass last words—“My ride’s here,” or “I’ll see you troublemakers downstream”—that would someday be silkscreened on T-shirts worn by disaffected youth.

None of that happened. I did not die. I’m still here. Reading memos about statutes of limitations. Arguing about the meaning of paragraph 41(b). Buying soy yogurt at Trader Joe’s and carpet cleaner at Rite Aid.

And plotting revenge against the dirtbag who rubbed my nose in my legacy.

As early as it was back home, I knew Metcalf would pick up. For him, the true stress of the day was that apprehensive no-man’s-land between waking up—the moment when it all came flooding back—and arriving at his desk, where the anxiety of all that lay before him was at least partially alleviated by the ability to begin chipping away at the load.

Metcalf answered halfway through the first ring. “Hey, Teddy. How’d the dep go?”

“Fine. Look—I need you to do me a favor.” I spoke loudly as I walked back over the Millennium Bridge, the rush of the river wind colliding in noisy sibilance with the speaker of my phone.

“Sure.”

“I need the phone number for a guy named Warren Warren somewhere in the Philadelphia area, possibly Jersey.”

“Did you say Warren Warren?” Metcalf was a nerd, but he was no geek. The name might have rung a bell or two for a geek.

“Yes. You’re going to have to hunt around a bit. It could be an unlisted number. I took a quick look and couldn’t find it. I need this fast. It’s an emergency.”

“Sure. No problem.” He drew out the words to accommodate his note-taking. “When do you need this by?”

“I just said it’s an emergency.”

“Okay. Well, I’m working on a brief for Yoshida today, but I suppose—”

I hung up.

Resting my forehead against the cold rail, I watched the Thames course by beneath the steel-latticed bridge. I had a vague notion that the years hadn’t carried Warren too far from our hometown. Last I heard, he was puttering around some high school way the hell and gone near Allentown, teaching band or something. The way it came together in my head, he was probably here on vacation, sauntering through the Tate with his family when he came across his old friend looking like an unmentionable slob. “I know that guy!” he surely cackled. But then he probably started shaking his head, glad he no longer knew the guy in the photo. He was glad it wasn’t his life. His legacy.

I considered two minutes a sufficient interval to wait before checking back in with Metcalf. “Any luck?”

“Not yet. Is this a name that came up in the dep? Did I miss something? He wasn’t on one of the transaction documents, was he?”

“Calm down. It’s nothing like that.”

“Okay, good. I’m going to need a little more time. It’s kind of tricky. You know, since his first name is the same as his surname.”

“Just do it, Metcalf.”

Surname . It was hard for Metcalf to suppress his fine Boston breeding and Harvard polish. He used to ask “How would you characterize the immediacy of this assignment?” when I gave him something to do, an annoying relic of upper-crust that would prompt me to bark, “You mean, how soon do I want it?” He used to have shrimp for lunch and play squash and get calls from friends named Devon and Lanier. That Metcalf was long buried under the new one, the one with perspiration and pudge. And yet the vestiges of a refined upbringing occasionally burped to the surface. Surname .