“I’m sorry I beat you up,” the photographer said. “It is big honor to have you in my house.”
“It really is,” Tereza echoed. “We’re big fans.” Then she pointed at my mouth and conferred with her father in their native tongue. Whatever information was passed, it clearly upset the man, for he issued some emphatic grunt of surprise—Boonsk?!—and looked at me with grave concern.
“Let me see mouth,” he urged.
Feeling foolish, I opened wide—there’s no unfoolish way to pre-sent your throat to total strangers—and after a brisk inspection, the man’s arms shot up over his head in a cartoonish show of frustration. Then he stormed out the front door in a fit of yapping and baying.
“He went to look for your tooth,” Tereza translated.
“Are you serious?” I noticed it was easier to sit up now, what with some alpine analgesic whipping through my bloodstream.
“Let him look,” she said, sitting down and crossing her legs.
“Stop him, would you?”
Even if the mad photographer poked around in the boot-stomped mulch and somehow came bursting back in with a dirty dislodged bicuspid between his fingers, I wasn’t likely to put the thing back in my mouth.
Tereza looked at me lying lamely on her sofa, and an apple of a smile absorbed every feature on her cherubic face. “I love your music. I really do.”
My eyebrows dropped into a skeptical furrow. “That’s nice.”
“I’m a huge fan. Seriously. I know everything you’ve done.”
“You’re funny,” I said, meaning You’re insane.
“I’m not joking.”
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“You shouldn’t even know who I am.” I struggled to my feet and staggered toward the front door to call Heinz-Peter off the case. It now looked as if I had an outside shot at getting out of there alive and saw no reason to squander the miracle.
“I listen to all kinds of music,” she went on.
“You should listen to many kinds of music. No need to listen to all kinds.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, clearly amused.
“I mean, sometimes old music is just old music.”
“Is there something wrong with listening to old music?”
“It depends,” I said, readjusting to the sensation of walking. “If it’s Led Zeppelin or Nick Drake, then no. If it’s Missing Persons or the Osmonds, then quite possibly yes.”
“I listen to Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and U2 and Black Sabbath. I also listen to Tremble.”
“You should probably go easy on the Black Sabbath. As for Tremble, your time would be better spent with Boy George solo albums.” I paused in my tracks to massage a boulder of pain out of my temples. “Look, you’re young now, but trust me, that won’t always be the case. Don’t piss away your listening years on music that’s just not good. My point is—do you know what the word myopic means?”
Tereza stared at me with scientific wonder. “You’re not what I expected.”
“Well, we’re all having new experiences today.”
She gave me a once-over that was just probing enough to be insulting. “You’re shorter, more pale.”
As I hobbled through the house, I took note of the photographs covering every wall. I was struck by their mastery, the thought and skill rendered in each composition—experiments in angle, distance, and color saturation. “Your old man has some talent,” I mused. “Although obviously I wish he’d never been born.”
Upon reaching the foyer, I peered through the screen and observed my tormentor crouched apelike as he scoured the grass for my lost tooth. It was a noisy exercise, with snorts and grumbles of disgust. I pushed the door open. “Uh, friend?”
“I will find,” he called without looking up. His thick fingers brushed through the grass. “I knock out, I put back.”
“I don’t think it works that way.”
The man suddenly bounded to his feet, pointed at my mouth, and, as if it had just occurred to him, declared, “You need dentist.”
I spun toward Tereza. “There’s a dentist around here?”
The offense she took at my surprise was a few paces from playful. “Where do you think you are?”
“Lost,” I replied. “Hopelessly lost.”
* * *
Heinz-Peter drove at the speed of a camera shutter on the burst setting, flinging us along slender streets and charmingly precarious bridges. I bounced around the passenger seat, ice held to my lip, suffering steep penance for picking the wrong fight. My driver grinned and patted my knee like I was his date. “Mr. Teddy Tremble in my car,” he boasted, showing precious little interest in the road. “This is big thrill for me.”
I pointed at the windshield. “Focus.”
He steered at a nauseating clip over a hill that dropped into a small town center with narrow cobblestone streets, shops that had no doubt thrived for centuries. An old gray woman with a cane crept up the walkway of a stone house. Children in school uniforms strolled alongside the road with boisterous chatter. All these people looked busy and happy. We’d probably ride over some of them.
“You don’t like picture in museum?” Heinz-Peter asked, resuming our conversation.
“No, I’m afraid I don’t. But hey, my drummer loved it, so don’t feel too bad.”
“Why you don’t like it?”
“Well, let’s see. It makes me look like a dipshit—that’s certainly a big part of it. And you hung it up alongside pictures of other dipshits and you called the exhibit Let’s Laugh at the Losers or something. Those are probably the main reasons I didn’t love it. Would you like to hear others?”
I watched him parse through my critique. “I don’t trying to make fun of you. I think you are victim of fame. This is what exhibit is all about.” He waved his arm expressively as he said this.
“Well, art usually goes right over my head,” I said.
“You are one time very famous,” he explained. “But then it go away and you are not happy. Yes?”
No. “You don’t know the first thing about me. You met me one time in a stupid restaurant in Amsterdam. And in that restaurant, did we talk about that? Not that it would’ve been any of your fucking business, but did you say, ‘Hey, Teddy, now that you’re no longer a famous musician, does your life suck?’ No. Instead, you pretended to be my friend, you snapped some pictures of me, and a few years later, you stabbed me in the fucking back. I even bought you a goddamn drink.”
He turned his body in my direction as if we were in couple’s therapy. “No, no. My exhibit is showing fame is very painful for famous peoples. If you are happy or sad for real life, this not matter.”
“It matters to me. Hey, you know what? Maybe I’ll write a song about some miserable oaf who lives in the mountains and takes pictures of people having dinner and pretends to understand them. And maybe I’ll call that song ‘Song about Heinz-Peter Zoot’ and I’ll post it on YouTube and play it in Times Square. What do you think?”
Heinz-Peter looked troubled. “What is this—miserable loaf ?”
I leaned back and held the cold compress to my lip. Tires crunched gruesomely over either a thick branch or a crossing guard. A woman in a billowy dress hung clothes on a line outside a small red cottage while a young boy straddled a bicycle. They were going to have meat pie for dinner.
“I am very sorry, Teddy.” The sentence was delivered cleanly—no accent, appropriate use of a linking verb. No doubt he could apologize proficiently in most of the world’s languages. “I am big fan. I don’t try making fun at you.”
“Oh no? Faded Glory? It Feels like a Lie and It Looks like a Mess?”
He threw me a look of confusion.
“That was the name of your exhibit, remember? The name of the photograph.”
“Oh, yes, yes. Marius
, my assistant, he make names. I don’t too good English.”
“You don’t say.” I should’ve guessed that there was a coconspirator, someone with the necessary tools to slander and be cute about it.
“My pictures say only that you are human being like other peoples.” Heinz-Peter continued to plead his case.
“Well, other peoples aren’t hanging in the Tate, staining themselves with nachos.”
Without any warning or the slightest decrease in speed, the car lurched off the road into a small, unpaved parking lot. “Here is dentist!” he announced.
At the far end of the lot sat an old stone hut. The front door was a thick slab of oak, reminiscent of that pub in Dublin. I noticed a chimney and thought it a curious feature for a dentist’s office.
“Are we meeting him at a bar?”
Heinz-Peter got out and headed toward the door of the hut.
I had no choice but to shadow the big lug across the gravel parking lot, a hand on my battered jaw. “Faded glory,” I muttered. “Faded fucking glory.”
Inside, a prune of a man who seemed to be a casual if less than enthusiastic acquaintance of Heinz-Peter’s led me back to a dim room with a reclining dental chair. A cigarette dangling from his lip, he peered into my mouth, then shook his head in discouragement. “I don’t know,” he mumbled in a thick accent. He frowned at a tray of sharp metal instruments. “I don’t know.”
He then proceeded to hack and claw at whatever remnants of tooth were still wedged in my gum. He pulled and tugged, at one point practically kneeing my chest for leverage. After ten agonizing minutes, he dejectedly tossed his tool—Early Man’s version of an X-ACTO knife—back into the pan and extinguished his cigarette right next to it. “I don’t know,” he grumbled again. “I don’t know.”
I asked this ray of fucking sunshine for some novocaine. Startlingly, the word was not within his lexicon. “Novocaine?” I repeated with growing alarm. I, of course, had no clue how to say “numbing agent” in any dialect but my own. How do you pantomime “local anesthesia”? I said ouch and ow and winced with great cinema until he got it and, looking annoyed, shuffled away to see if he had some lying around.
He returned a few minutes later and unceremoniously injected a gallon of colorless serum into the inside of my cheek, which hurt just as much as Heinz-Peter’s uppercut. Within seconds I felt seriously stoned and indifferent to the clear fact of my imminent death. I felt myself slipping away, but my last thought before blacking out for the second time that hour was remarkably sensible: Are you supposed to lose consciousness during a routine dental visit?
Through a gathering fog, I watched as the dentist miserably poked an unlit cigarette between his lips and struck a match.
* * *
Here’s where I note that Sara had strongly counseled against my coming here.
I called her from the London hotel, told her the whole story, how all these years I never knew that my legacy actually involved a little piece of cilantro staining my smile. She seemed to consider the tale a sort of dark comedy—until I mentioned how I’d decided to modify my travel itinerary.
“That’s a very bad idea,” she’d said. “It’s dangerous, Teddy. You don’t see that?”
“I can take care of myself.”
“Look, I know you think you’re a bit of a tough guy, but having a temper doesn’t make you a badass.”
I hooted. Sara never used words like badass—she’d gone to Dartmouth—and she could only hope to sell it by attaching it to a cute little sneer.
It was rather unlike her to interfere. We tended to stay out of each other’s way. We shared an apartment and looked forward to the comfort of each other’s company at the end of the day, but we could go for long stretches where we were little more than apparitions haunting the same apartment.
“I’ll be fine,” I assured her.
“This is foolish, Teddy,” she charged, a siren of panic in her voice. “Traveling to some unfamiliar place to find some man you know nothing about? And then what?”
“Calm down, Sara.”
“It’s not me that needs to calm down. You’re angry now, but your anger will subside, probably just as you’re staring into this photographer’s face. You can’t stop people from saying things about you. You should have thicker skin.”
“This is different. It’s a cheap shot.”
“You can’t stop people from taking cheap shots at you either.”
“Sara—you’re making far too big a deal out of this.”
“Me?”
“I’m going to Switzerland to have a little chat with an artist. I’m not going to Bolivia to take down a junta.”
Having reached something akin to a crescendo, Sara sailed over the edge into a plane of helpless silence. Helpless silence was, in fact, her stock in trade. It greeted her first thing in the morning and planted its cold kiss on her each night. She had learned the hard way, maybe the hardest way, that life shouldn’t be frittered away on vanity and caprice. I was a former rock star, however, so vanity and caprice were my stock in trade, with a warehouse that never ran low on inventory.
“I’m not going to disappear, Sara. I promise.”
“Do whatever you want.” And she hung up.
How idiotic to promise someone you won’t disappear, as if vanishing were something you scheduled.
There was a degree of justice in my landing here in this dentist’s chair. The universe had witnessed my clamoring rage, and for my trouble had awarded me a prosthetic denture. Surely a perverse contortion of biblical justice, this tooth for a tooth. For Sara, there was no concept as meaningless as justice. She’d learned from experience that there was no justice, would never again be justice. That was as plain as day. But some of us needed to be hit over the head.
Literally.
* * *
The scenery wore the refreshed, vital colors of early evening when Heinz-Peter steered us back up the stone driveway. The day had begun to end.
A dinner invitation had been repeatedly extended—if he now considered me a friend, he had a rather twisted concept of the word—and roundly rejected. I’d survived H-P’s fist, his driving, and the handiwork of the village dentist. It seemed ungracious to push my luck. I waited in the car while the nutjob fetched my bag from inside his house.
Sensation was returning to my face. The anesthesia had worn off and yet the throbbing pain that I’d considered inevitable, given the crude dentistry practiced upon me, had not come. I climbed out of the car to breathe the sweet mountain air and consider the logistics of getting home.
And that was my last glimpse of Swiss serenity.
Just then, the front door of the house opened and a dozen or so teenagers poured out onto the lawn. I looked on dumbly at the collection of youths that had materialized out of nowhere, when Tereza appeared on the front step, hovering over all of us. Like the shepherd of the flock, she pointed directly at me. “There he is!”
Before I could grasp what was happening, this babbling little mob came swimming over to me and practically pinned me up against H-P’s jalopy. They called out my name, they shook my hand, they smiled goofy smiles. They were loud and unruly and unacquainted with notions of personal space, and it was all so fucking weird that I was certain I was still conked out and drugged in the dentist’s chair.
As Tereza stepped down onto the lawn, hands tucked deep in the pockets of her zippered hoodie, looking self-satisfied and casual, I caught her attention. What the fuck?
“I love your music,” said one shabbily dressed girl who couldn’t have been more than a kindergartener the last time any of my songs had played on the radio. A boy with a tepid, desperate growth of facial hair stood next to her and echoed the sentiment. “I grew up on your albums,” he said through a mild accent. On came absurd rapid-fire declarations and inquiries that competed for my attention: “I know every lyric of ev
ery song you ever recorded!” (A dim accomplishment; we only had two albums.) “When is the band getting back together?” “Are there any plans to release rarities, outtakes, bonus tracks?” Even sadder, some of these bedraggled fools clutched Tremble memorabilia—copies of my CDs, album jackets, photos—and held them up to my face for me to sign. It was as if they were all part of a pathetically misguided cult, celebrating my guest appearance at their compound. I had no idea what was going on; I just knew I wasn’t happy about it. Was the London exhibit not a sufficiently elaborate means of ridicule? Had Heinz-Peter hired a herd of young extras to pretend to adore me?
I reached into the crowd and grabbed Tereza’s arm. “You want to tell me what’s going on here?”
She pursed her lips. “What do you mean? I knew they’d want to meet you. How’s your mouth?”
“Who are these people?” I pressed. “And what’s wrong with them?”
She held out an open hand to the prattling sea of losers. “They’re fans.”
I was at a total loss. “Of what?”
The front door swung open again and Heinz-Peter stepped out to tower over the merriment. He raised up his arms and laughed with the showmanship of a mad carnival barker.
I turned to Tereza. “It’s been a really long day. Can you give me a lift to the train station?”
It was then that I became aware of a deep grinding rumble behind me. It grew louder and louder, like a rusty chain saw, at last revealing itself as a weathered, puke-green van waggling up the driveway. It had barely stumbled to a stop when its doors burst open on all sides and a giddy throng of adolescents of all shapes, sizes, colors, and acne concentrations leapt out to join the commotion.
I surveyed this most motley crew. Everyone was of high school or college age and clad in attire I could only describe as densely European and weather-nonspecific. A brown suit here, a knit slouchy hat there. A plum-cheeked bleached blonde with vampish eye makeup and a London Calling T-shirt here, a bespectacled boy in a striped Izod with raised collar there. All of these boneheads wanted a word with me.
Thank You, Goodnight Page 5
