I was also never one for protocol, and what scant decorum I have tends to spoil in the oppressive pit of boredom.
“I’m handing you an exhibit—” I began, passing around a document I’d barely reviewed, when I noticed a short, squiggly hair dangling over the top page. “I’m handing you an exhibit that appears to have a pube on it.”
Gags of horrified laughter filled the room. I blew a short breath at the hair. It sailed off in the direction of the witness, who gasped and shifted out of the way.
“Objection,” said his lawyer.
That kind of thing might get someone else complained about or fired, but people at my shop tended to cut me a little slack, given who I am. Or who I was.
When my work with the witness was done, I handed him off to another lawyer with her own battery of questions. I could now sit back, zone out, mentally leave the building. I could scarf down twenty sugar cookies and fifteen cups of coffee.
I perused the Irish Times. There was a story about a member of the British Parliament charged with groping a young woman. A photo depicted him on the courthouse steps hand in hand with a sturdy, matronly lady. “Throughout all of this,” the disgraced politician was quoted as saying, “my wife has been an absolute brick.” What every woman yearns to be called.
The witness droned on about credit default swaps. I read the sticker on my banana.
He sermonized about political risk insurance. I tried to fantasize about the hottest person in the room. It was me. By a mile.
My thoughts kept returning to Warren’s message like a tongue to a mouth ulcer. There was a time when I was accustomed to his good-natured shenanigans. This was, after all, a guy who used to amuse himself by pretending he was his own identical twin. But last I heard, he was now a teacher, a legitimate member of the community. If inciting me to drop everything and rush to an art exhibit on another continent was his idea of a practical joke after a decade of radio silence, it seemed out of proportion. Was he kidding? Was he drunk? Was he sending a coded message from a hostage situation?
I decided I’d try to call him at the end of the day, even though I suspected he would be disinclined to divulge details. He didn’t seem to want to tell me about the Tate; he just wanted me to go there. And if he found out that I was actually in Dublin, a temptingly short trip from London, he’d be even less forthcoming. What a hilarious little caper he’d constructed.
The fact was, I could go. My firm was hardly holding its breath for the return of its favorite malcontent. Morris & Roberts would be there for me whenever I got back, with its bloated files and its nimrods down the hall, like Don Yoshida and his riveting tales of his dog’s escapades.
Sara too would survive a few extra nights on her own. She’d trudge into the condo, splash some Spanish wine into a glass, and concoct an unnecessarily elaborate dinner. Langostinos in a red sauce, or a chickpea curry with spinach. Afterward, she’d drape herself in a T-shirt three sizes too large and sink into the couch for the guilty displeasure of reality TV—the selection of a wedding dress by someone too ugly to get married, the perusal of a new house by a couple who’d only end up divorcing and fighting over it. She’d eventually lose interest, her eyes would drift down to the book in her lap, and she’d fade into worlds puppeteered by Jhumpa Lahiri or Meg Wolitzer. She’d get through a dozen or so pages before passing out, waking up an hour later, and shuffling into the bedroom. If I were there with her, the scene would unfold almost exactly the same, except my legs might be crisscrossed with hers on the sofa or she’d talk me into a few rounds of Boggle or her sister in Sacramento would call and Sara would wave frantically at me while mouthing I’m in the shower, I’m in the shower.
Sara might actually applaud my absconding to London under the circumstances. For her, any day spent in the company of paintings, etchings, sculptures, or mundanely arranged soup cans was a good one. She bought in to the whole art racket with an uncharacteristic lack of cynicism. At how many galleries and museums had I watched her standing there, nodding in accord with the voice in the headset, her long, wispy limbs ideally suited for poses of artistic engagement?
Sara was more than an interested spectator in that word; she was something of a covert art hobbyist herself. For years now, she’d been scurrying up to her friend Josie’s studio in Northern Liberties to let the hours float by in the service of her medium of choice: mosaic mirrors. This studio was a place where she and other mosaicists, both professional and aspiring, would—and this is just an outsider’s perspective here—basically break shit up into little pieces and arrange them in weird patterns. Josie’s commune was inhabited by a pack of breezy yet intimidating women who sipped wine, spoke caustically about everything, and set out to push the boundaries of expression. (If they failed at that, they at least succeeded at pushing the boundaries of fashion.) They accepted Sara as one of their own even though she’s not gay, has the gumption to let her hair grow beyond her ears, and has a job that doesn’t begin with the word freelance. But they took her in, Sara, their stray cat.
I, by loud contrast, had spent a lifetime nurturing a deep suspicion of art as an enterprise. An odd trait for a musician, I admit. I accompanied Sara to all the latest openings, but once there, I had a tendency to retch over the pontification about an artist’s ability to transform the ordin’ry into the exquisite. Notice the eyelash. There’s something slightly audacious, scandalous perhaps, about the way in which the paint is applied. In that one simple brushstroke, Akerblom subverts everything we know about contemporary portraiture. While Sara pursed her lips at a canvas smothered corner to corner in bronze paint and curiously titled Three Trees, I stared mistrustfully at it and thought to myself, I don’t see trees, I don’t feel trees, nothing about this painting is bringing a tree to my senses, much less three of them.
The point was this: I could go to London if I wanted. If I was stupidly obsessed, or let’s say I just wanted to sleep again, I could scoot on over and settle this. And who wouldn’t want to lay eyes on his legacy? Even when you knew your legacy had all the esteem of a cornflake smudge.
“I have nothing further,” I heard the questioner say. He hunched over the table and peered all the way down to where I was sitting—in person, if not in spirit. “Mr. Tremble, do you rest?”
“Hardly.” I snickered.
With a yawn, I stood and embraced the end of what I could’ve sworn was an endless day. But I’d used this period of immobility and repeated caffeination to its fullest meditative potential. All factors pointed in one direction. That direction was east.
CHAPTER 2
A cluster of young guys behind me at the Heathrow customs line were speaking, through wide Boston accents and with macho rowdiness, about the bachelor party they had flown in for. It suddenly struck me that every bachelor party I’d ever been to had been a disappointment. Warren’s, for example, was both lame and disastrous. Which was precisely what we should’ve expected, seeing as how it had been masterminded by Jumbo Jett, our train wreck of a guitar player who himself was both lame and disastrous. He had a penchant for debauchery that made Keith Moon look like a Downton Abbey dandy, yet he was somehow a total drag. We’d been home for a stretch after the second record was completed, holed up with our jitters, awaiting the release of the album and the launch of the tour. A tour we had no business headlining. A tour I’d insisted upon against my better judgment and that of everyone within shouting distance of me. A tour I’d steered us toward pigheadedly out of ego, jealousy, and other unbecoming emotions. Somehow it had fallen to Jumbo to plan Warren’s send-off into monogamy, even though Warren couldn’t stand the sight of the guy. Jumbo may have had a hyperdeveloped instinct for partying, but he had no instinct whatsoever for organization. Hence, his elaborate plan consisted of tooling around our home base of Philadelphia all day and eventually staggering into some gentlemen’s clubs. Not exactly the decadence and excess befitting a bunch of musicians in their twenties. But with Jumbo at t
he helm, we could’ve easily ended up in a roadside motel with an emaciated hooker. So it went in the win column.
After navigating the maze of antiseptic airport corridors, collecting my bags at the luggage carousel, and hailing a cab, I was soon checking into the boutique hotel just off the Strand that Kathleen, my secretary, had booked last minute. The cold water I splashed on my face wasn’t so much revitalizing as it was simply cold. Then I headed straight for the Tate Modern, ready as I’d ever be to confront my legacy.
Amid the swirling foot traffic at the museum entrance, I paused for a breath. There was a seemingly homeless Rastafarian on a vibraphone. I think he was banging out “9 to 5” by Dolly Parton.
Inside, the atmosphere was art-school vibrant and airplane-hangar reverberant. Swiping a floor map from the visitors’ desk, I moved among the meandering appreciators, all the while fighting off a swell of anxiety. I wasn’t so sure I wanted to see whatever it was Warren wanted me to see. On the escalator up to the second floor, I felt that adrenaline-fueled thump, a schizophrenic cross between This better be worth it and God, I hope it’s a letdown.
The escalator deposited me in an open room with high ceilings, white walls, and artwork of varying species blooming in every direction. With a pit in my stomach, I started combing through the halls, detouring into the various chambers situated off the main room, a keen eye toward anything that could possibly shed light on what the hell I was doing there.
By the time I’d completed one revolution around the floor, anxiousness had given way to frustration. What if my legacy was gone, carted off to another gallery? What if I was looking right at it but just didn’t get it? It occurred to me that I might very well walk out of there empty-handed. It also occurred to me that that might be the best possible scenario.
Then I noticed one wall at the end of the main room that I hadn’t yet examined. I walked toward it and came upon a photography exhibit, pictures of seemingly random people printed on large canvases. They were candids of distantly familiar faces. The first shot was of a New York Yankee from the seventies or eighties—an outfielder, if memory served. He was aging and whalelike, besieged by pockmarks, lugging his big old self down a busy Manhattan avenue in a rumpled suit. The way he glared at the camera, Charles Manson daggers in his eyes, suggested that life after baseball had not been kind, albeit flush with hot dogs. I grunted in satisfaction; fuck the Yankees.
The next photo depicted a postcute woman in her midtwenties standing at a bus stop, an army-green duffel bag slung over her shoulder. She was wincing from the weight of the luggage and peering down the quiet road, impatient for the bus. Her features seemed awfully worn for someone in the flower of youth, and her hair seemed to be in a protracted estrangement from water and shampoo. I’d seen this woman before. She was the daughter of a right-wing senator who’d been excommunicated from the party upon revelations that he enjoyed parading around the house in his wife’s lingerie. Either that or she was the former starlet who tipped one White Russian too many with Lindsay Lohan and ended up the target of a restraining order by that guy from That ’70s Show. I hadn’t thought about her in years, and the look in her eye suggested she knew it all too well.
The third photo was even sadder, a woman enshrouded in a raincoat on a rainless day, flanked by cops on a street corner. A high-end boutique clothing store stood in the background, and the way the officers loomed over the poor woman made the story all too clear. Thief ! Her eyes were downcast to the concrete and her hands were stuffed dolefully in her jacket pockets, the very picture of humiliation. Although the hood of her raincoat snugly enveloped her head, one could still make out the woman who, fifteen or so years ago, had been the unflappable matriarch of a sitcom family, dishing out good-natured one-liners at her husband and children while carrying a basket of laundry. This actress-cum-shoplifter, like the bloated Yankee and disgraced starlet before her, had clearly seen better days.
Speaking of which: the next picture was of me.
It was a doozy. I was in a Mexican-themed cantina, the sort of place where the ceiling fans drone high overhead, the menus are laminated, and the heavily cheesed burritos stay with you for days. The photographer had snapped me unawares as I sat alone at the bar with a plate of mango salsa nachos and a mojito. At the precise moment that the shutter winked in my direction, I’d clumsily scooped an unbalanced heap of salsa onto a chip and the whole thing had fallen apart, leaving a bloodstain of sauce trailing down my shirt and a hailstorm of chopped onions, chicken squares, and jalapeños heading south for my lap. My chin was thrust forward buffoonishly and my lips were agape, a last-ditch attempt to steer the chip into my mouth before it lost its cargo. As a bonus, an unsightly sliver of cilantro was lodged between my two front teeth. You could see it perfectly.
Nobody in the history of our species had ever looked more foolish.
There was more. The title of the photo was printed on a little white card next to the canvas. Riffing cleverly on my band’s number-one hit song, “It Feels like a Lie,” the picture was called It Feels like a Lie . . . and It Looks like a Mess, which I guessed would seem funnier later. The photographer was someone named Heinz-Peter Zoot from someplace called Unterseen. Both sounded made-up.
This was my legacy. This was what the world now thought of the lead singer of Tremble, one of the most popular bands in the world a short decade ago. When they thought of him at all.
I struggled to suppress the stream of profanities boiling upward in my throat, and I came dangerously close to spending the night in a British jail for attacking a defenseless photography exhibit.
One final poster cemented my disgrace. It spelled out the title of this collection in bold black letters:
FADED GLORY:
WHERE DO THEY GO WHEN THEY HAVE NOWHERE TO GO?
A mug shot of the artist was conveniently located underneath, just in case the viewer was moved to spit, deface, or otherwise trash what he or she was looking at. This Heinz-Peter Zoot was a burly, shaven-headed, toothsome son of a bitch, some breed of carnival barbell slinger looking merrily proud in a white muscle shirt—fucker got all dressed up for his photo. I studied the features of this meathead, a man soon to die by my hand. To my immense horror, it dawned on me that I knew him.
I marched back to the picture of me and the nachos. Yes, goddamnit! I knew him! The memory of the encounter came roaring back. The cantina was in Amsterdam, where I’d traveled two years ago on firm business. All I’d wanted that night was a quiet dinner, but I kept noticing some jerk staring at me. I probably said something polite, like “Do you fucking mind?” and he apologized in heavily accented English—English dunked brusquely in the milk of Somewhere Else. Then he said he recognized me the moment he walked in and couldn’t believe his luck. He was a big fan. I must’ve been in a good mood, because instead of swiveling my chair in the opposite direction, I invited him to pull up a stool. Which he did, and then proceeded to regale me with the extent of his fandom. He sang the praises not only of our first record, but also of our follow-up album—which exactly nobody owns—and even claimed to still listen to our music on a regular basis. I didn’t dislike him. I bought the moron a drink. I smiled for his camera. I raised a Corona with him as another patron took our picture together. I was downright affable, and usually I am downright not.
And where did all that accessibility land me? In one of the world’s most famous galleries, looking like the King of the Schlubs. In case the world was wondering where that loser from that nineties band was hanging out these days, he was sitting alone in a cheap Mexican tourist trap, a big fat salsa stain on his shirt and something gross in his teeth.
I glared at the act of betrayal hanging on the wall and plotted a riotous squall of violence. “I’m going to fucking kill him,” I seethed.
A sudden flash of light burst onto the canvas. At first I thought the photo had somehow come alive. Then I turned my head. The flash went off again, this time searing
into my eyeballs. Someone was now taking pictures of me, right there in the Tate. When I regained the use of my retinas, I saw the culprit. He looked like a rat. “Ha! It is him!” he crowed. Today was this scrawny little punk’s lucky day. He’d watched the subject of a photo witnessing himself in that photo, and thought, Well golly, that itself should be a photo. How meta. How Being John Malkovich. There’s something slightly audacious, scandalous perhaps, about the way in which the miserable slob observes himself being portrayed as a miserable slob.
I bared my teeth at the kid, but was somehow only able to point to the sign in the doorway. “No photos! Can’t you fucking read?”
He hooted and darted off in a blaze of raw denim, leaving me to worry about which gallery that picture would end up in.
* * *
My exit from the music world was not graceful. We called the second record Atomic Somersault, but a more apt title would’ve been Atomic Belly Flop. No hit single, undetectable levels of airplay, and an unacceptably low draw on tour, all culminating in the inevitable blow of being dropped by our label. My agent, the otherwise indefatigable Alaina Farber, conveyed that particular news item at her chic New York office, rare vapors of surrender in her voice. Clad in a tight, hypnotically pink pantsuit—the color of teenage rebellion hair—she rocked back in her desk chair with a leg up on the table. While squeezing one of those hand grippers that make your forearms look like a relief map of Mexico—Who’s the go-to person for opening jars now!—she informed me that she’d gotten a call from the record company.
“Game over, cupcake,” she said. “Tremble is being released.”
I’d seen it coming, but still it stung. “What are our options?”
“Well,” she sighed. I’d never seen her sigh before. “We could always see if there’s interest from an indie, something smaller but still with decent distribution. It’s worked for other bands.”
Thank You, Goodnight Page 2
