As far as I was concerned, small children were pretty useless unless you wanted to preboard a plane. Parents always looked so miserable. I pitied them when I ran headlong into the interminable drudgery of their weekend grocery outings. They all looked like if you offered them immediate legal dissolution of the family, each member being handed a hobo stick and fifty bucks—“Good luck to you, son.” “Same to you, Dad.”—they’d go for it without a second thought. Young mothers seem to find catastrophe everywhere, even in the lunch tray that their husbands dared to bring over. You got Connor a hot dog? Connor doesn’t eat hot dogs! And the husband stares back at her with a mountain of desolation, thinking, I took this girl to one fraternity formal twenty years ago. How did things go so horribly wrong?
“So, about that thing I wanted to discuss,” I said when my companions had disembarked the ride. Jumbo had begun to tear off easily digestible quantities of turkey and bread and was handing them to Ingrid.
“Yeah, man, talk to me.”
“Well.” I searched for the right words; they didn’t exist. “There’s no other way to put this. I’m considering reviving the band.”
He stopped cold. “No shit?” His eyes shot to Ingrid. “I mean, no shoot?”
“I’ve written some new songs. I want to record an album. Sonny Rivers may produce, schedule permitting.”
“Sonny Rivers! Holy shit, man! That’s awesome! I mean, holy shoot!”
Fortunately, the little girl was too preoccupied for the naughty word to register. Some fur-suited characters were gathering at a makeshift stage, and Ingrid was trying to decide if they were terrifying or the most wonderful things she’d ever seen.
“I never thought I’d be doing this again, but some things have happened to me over the past few months. I’ll explain everything when we sit down and talk, but for the first time in a long time—”
Jumbo interrupted my backstory with unequivocal support. “Dude, I’m in. Definitely. Count me in.”
“Hold on. I want you to think about it.”
“Don’t need to.”
“Yes, you do. I’m talking about a commitment here. Taking risks, possibly leaving jobs. I’m not asking if you want an oatmeal cookie.”
“Mingus, you don’t have to tell me what’s what. I was in the biz, remember?”
All too well. “I don’t want issues, James. I’ve had enough of your issues.”
“I’m a lot more responsible than I used to be. Hello? Exhibit A?” He gestured proudly to Ingrid. As if keeping a toddler alive for a few hours erased decades of waywardness and debauchery.
“You’re a great musician, Jumbo. I wish you weren’t, but you are, and that’s why I’m here. But we’re not twenty-three anymore. I want to do this the right way, like adults. Do you hear what I’m saying?”
“Of course.”
“Well, just in case you don’t, I’m saying that I need to be able to count on you.”
“You can, dude.”
Just as it dawned on me that I was being told what I wanted to hear and that it was unfair to extract a promise that Jumbo was ill-equipped to deliver, our two-year-old companion suddenly shrieked and bolted in the direction of the costumed furballs. A bargain brand Big Bird had begun to juggle bowling pins before a mass of bewitched kids, and Ingrid would be damned if she was going to miss it.
“Ingrid!” Jumbo yelled. “Stay! Shit!”
As he pulled up anchor and gave chase, I almost had to look away. I don’t think I’d ever seen Jumbo run before, and there was something jarringly unnatural about it. It was like when they showed Kermit the Frog on a bike. It just didn’t look right. Who knew he had legs?
I followed my companions, shaking my head, my steps heavy with ambivalence.
Minutes later, we were all seated on abrasive concrete while a collection of teamless mascots and characters without a network—not-quite-Eeyore, Smokey the Bear’s inbred cousin—danced, cartwheeled, and wobbled on unicycles before captivated children and their wrist-checking parents.
I stared out into the harbor, watching sailboats make for the bay in slow motion. I had to do this, I reassured myself. This was necessary. Without Jumbo, more than anyone else, we were a different band, a lesser band. I needed him. I hated that I did, but I did.
I’d filled Sara in on this sorry road trip the night before. Armed with a bottle of Chianti, we’d walked three blocks to the Mediterranean BYO owned by clients of hers, expats from Cairo whose restaurant had been around forever despite never hosting more than a smattering of diners at any given time. The hostess led us to a table by the window, uncorked our wine, and allowed a stream of deep burgundy to tumble into our glasses, all the while recounting the chorus of compliments she and her husband had received about Sara’s decorating handiwork in their home. Soon afterward, a complimentary mezze platter of hummus, tzatziki, kalamata olives, and little cheese cubes surrounded by fallen dominos of grilled pita arrived at our table via a lovely olive-skinned young woman, the owners’ daughter. As we smiled her away from the table, I said to Sara, “So, I’m going down to Baltimore tomorrow to see Jumbo.” The night of my webcast with Sonny a week earlier had been the last we’d spoken of my musical fits and starts.
“Jumbo? Why?” She surfed a pita wedge through the tzatziki, then bent down beneath the table to retrieve her napkin. It was an endearing idiosyncrasy of hers that her lap seemed ill-fitted to accommodate a folded napkin, and at least twice every meal she had to blindly grope the floor.
“I’m going to ask him to help me. I think he could contribute to the recordings.”
“Isn’t he . . . kind of a moron?”
“He is.”
She smiled weakly. “But not enough of a moron.”
“He’s plenty a moron. Let’s put it this way: on the day of our record-company audition, he wore a tattered T-shirt that read ‘I Got Sand in My Pants at the Sig Ep Beach Party,’ and all I remember thinking was, Thank God he’s wearing a shirt.”
Sara gave me a mild smile behind which she was surely imagining the changes to come in the unlikely event anything actually happened with these songs. Where might this downward path end for the man with whom she cohabitated? Joblessness, the keeping of strange hours, shady characters crashing on our couch for weeks at a time, and then inevitably, tantrums, bitterness, alcoholism. It wasn’t money that concerned her. We were fine. She made enough to live on, and I’d amassed a respectable savings. The true source of distress had to have been that she lived with someone who, in the middle of his life, was capable of casting off everything for something completely asinine.
“And after Jumbo?” she asked.
“He may be the only one who takes my call, but after him, Warren, then Mackenzie. That would be the plan.”
At the mention of Mack’s name, Sara’s eyes skipped down to her glass. She changed the subject. “How’d it go with Marty Kushman today?”
Marty was the managing partner at my firm, which meant he faced a daily diet of tattletales, gossip, and all interoffice squabbles that required the services of a referee. He was also the guy you talked to when you wanted out.
“It went okay. I told him I was leaving but not quitting. A leave of absence, nothing permanent. Marty was cool about it.”
“He didn’t laugh in your face?” It was a cruel and entirely reasonable question.
“I didn’t tell him why I was leaving. People leave law firms all the time. He didn’t ask a lot of questions.”
“Here’s a question: Does your father know?”
“I’ll tell him when I tell him,” I said, irked at the very thought of his knee-jerk disapproval, how upon learning of my latest attempt to disgrace the family, he’d slam down his Legal Intelligencer and howl, “Goddamn that kid!” Had I forgotten all those scathing reviews, the hollow venues, the laughable royalty checks?
Sara swigged her wine as if she ne
eded it. How rudderless she must’ve felt, one man in her life heaving himself into a midlife tempest that was guaranteed to put distances between them, and another man returning from the past only to discuss goodbyes. I knew the prospect of revisiting that old minefield of memories with Billy was weighing heavily on her.
“Sara, I know this is all very abrupt and very weird, but I don’t want you to worry. About us.”
“I’m not worried about us,” she said a little too pointedly.
I cocked my head. “What does that mean?”
She swirled her glass and picked up a cheese cube, and for a moment, Sara seemed to drift up into the restaurant’s Middle Eastern music. A plucked guitar and the taut rapping of a goatskin drum coasted gently over our heads. At last she returned to me.
“Teddy, I think you came back from Switzerland a different person. But . . .”
“But . . .”
“But that’s probably not the worst thing in the world.”
I leaned across the table, unhitched her hand from her glass, and took her long, spindly fingers in mine. “I’m going to be there for you as you go through all this divorce stuff. You know that, right?”
She gave my hand a dismissive pat. “You don’t have to go all serious on me. I’m not afraid of what you want.”
It was those words that had stayed with me. Why wasn’t she afraid of what I wanted? I was terrified of what I wanted.
As I sat there facing the Baltimore harbor with Jumbo and the daughter of his ex-wife, I realized I’d crossed the Rubicon. The simple act of approaching a former band member and inviting him into my world of delusion had brought this folly outside the safe confines of my head. It would be harder now to turn back.
When the performance ended, Ingrid shot out of her seat and made for one of the fuzzy characters, some sort of moose. Jumbo tore after her.
It amazed me that this little girl felt comfortable in Jumbo’s charge—Oh Jumbo, tell me the story about how Curious George went to Marseille and got the clap—but it amazed me all the more that this Israel fellow felt comfortable leaving his child alone with him. Jumbo was not reliable and he was not smart, and for most of his career, he’d been out of work. Nor was he overeducated. He’d attended Guttenberg University, which might have a stately collegiate ring to it, like some liberal arts school for trust-funders or an ancient, woodsy institution in Bavaria. It was, in fact, a correspondence course outfit in the Cherry Hill Mall. The minute you even considered enrolling, you were in the running for valedictorian.
But as I watched him hawk over this child, there was no mistaking that this family had, in its own deeply peculiar way, come to accept him. And whatever complications existed between him, Sandy, and Israel, they no doubt sensed the clunky genuineness of his affection for their kids. Perhaps I was grasping at straws here, but was that evidence of growth? Maybe in his own microscopic, stunted way, Jumbo was evolving.
On the walk back to the car, an exhausted Ingrid slung over Jumbo’s shoulder with her thumb in her mouth, we passed a string of bars. Their doors were wide open on this pleasant Saturday afternoon, each one dark and empty of patrons, a scattering of bartenders and waitstaff lounging about. A chalkboard outside one establishment advertised the evening’s live entertainment. The Naked Mannequins were headlining, Pete Sake was opening. Open mic from six to eight. Dollar drafts from five to six.
I stopped in my tracks. “I have an idea. Let’s come back down here later.”
“Oh, hell yeah! Celebration is in order!”
“No. It’s an open mic. I want to play you a few of the new songs tonight, right here in this bar.”
The impulse was a protective one, for my songs, and for Jumbo’s first impressions of them. A maiden voyage through a song is like a first date, painting it with sensation and imagery that becomes forever inseparable from the music. It was asking an awful lot of my new songs to make themselves arresting when first heard in a dank basement, a single naked voice fighting its warbled chirp over a dampened guitar. A stage would serve the music better, kindle the flames of inspiration for Jumbo such that he would be moved to contribute to them, to make them better.
Jumbo grinned eagerly at my suggestion. “I like the way you think, Mingus.”
As we approached the family minivan, I took hold of Jumbo’s arm. “Look, this time around, if this actually ends up happening—and it’s a long shot if there ever was one—I need you to be better. Do you understand? I’m too old to deal. You’re going to go easy on the booze.”
“No worries, man. My tolerance is much better than it used to be.”
“You’re going to sleep when it’s nighttime, like everyone else. You’ll show up for things. You won’t tell anybody they look pregnant. You’ll wear clothes, all the time. We’re going to go about this very differently. You’re going to go about this very differently.”
Jumbo either said “I’m in” or “Amen.”
“Another thing. No makeup.” I was referencing his regrettable period of wearing heavy eyeliner and mascara on stage. It was garish and weird and made him look like the Phantom of the Opera.
Jumbo smirked in fond remembrance as he nestled the sleeping child into the car seat. “I’d forgotten all about that.”
“You’re lucky.”
CHAPTER 7
So Sandy was a surprise. Older and frumpy, with kind eyes jailed behind outsized eyewear, she looked like a new grandmother, down to the flaking rouge. Once upon a time, Jumbo considered it his right to work his crass charm over pretty little things in bars, sauntering up to them and saying things like “Why don’t you just tell me your safe word now?” Damned if it didn’t work every time. None of those women looked like Sandy. Though maybe their mothers did.
When we returned to the house after the bar later that night, gripping guitar cases like decaying versions of our former selves, Sandy greeted us in the foyer. In low tones suggesting sleeping children in earshot, she invited us to deposit our instruments in the basement and join her and Israel for a drink in the den.
“So, I see you married Mrs. Doubtfire,” I remarked once we’d descended to the seclusion of Jumbo’s subterranean living quarters.
Jumbo didn’t assume it was an insult. “Doubtfire was a handsome older woman, wasn’t she?”
“You do know that was Robin Williams.”
“Sandy’s a saint, Mingus,” Jumbo said, prying open a green army trunk. “Probably the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I loved her. Frankly, I miss making love to her.”
“Would you do me a favor and never say that again?”
People stopped “making love” when it became unfashionable to cry softly during sex. The very expression conjured up images of Magnum, P.I. mustaches and women in shoulder pads. Shasta fizzing on the night table. Roberta Flack.
I asked, “How is it that you got demoted to her basement and she brought in another husband? How did that go down?”
Jumbo looked uncharacteristically bruised. “I’m not the easiest guy in the world to live with, you know.”
“If you say so.”
As I returned the acoustic guitars to their stands, Jumbo fished around in the army trunk that doubled as a liquor cabinet. “You still a Southern Comfort man?” he asked.
“No, I’m not.” The question pissed me off, freighted as it was with bad history. “Why don’t you just have a nice civilized glass of wine with the rest of us, or a beer? A beer.”
“Chill, Mingus. I’m a mellow guy these days,” said the man who had stuffed a bag of weed into my glove compartment just hours earlier. “Do I have the occasional martini? Sure, but that’s just for the antioxidants. You don’t have to go acting like a wiener just because I offered you some SoCo. Sue me for wanting to celebrate with the good stuff.”
“I already told you—there’s nothing to celebrate. We’re keeping this quiet for now, James. Do you und
erstand?”
When we reached the den, Israel was setting down a tray on which our hosts had arranged a cascading pile of sliced gouda wedges encircled by a neat ring of melba toast. Jumbo said “Sweet!” and immediately plopped a hunk of cheese between two pieces of toast. With a loud, pulverizing bite, he instantly turned the crackers into a heap of crumbs on the rug. Israel’s smile tightened. Jumbo proceeded to assemble another gouda sandwich.
Sandy entered the room carrying two glasses of red wine. Handing one to Israel, she smiled at me and said, “I’ve got red, white, beer, anything you’d like.”
“Red wine is fine, thank you. I can’t stay long.”
I had a busy night ahead of me. I needed to drive home and grab a few hours of sleep so that I could wake up at 4:03 and stare into the darkness until it was time to get up.
Sandy returned with a glass of red for me, then watched worriedly as her ex-husband splashed a generous dose of SoCo over a glass filled with ice. At that point, the four of us took seats on the sectional like one big, happy dysfunctional family.
“So, what were you old rockers up to tonight?” Israel asked. “I saw guitars.”
Jumbo thumbed in my direction. “You should’ve seen this guy. He hasn’t lost it. Got up and did a few songs at the Muddy. Blew the place away.”
Sandy looked at me. “I didn’t know you were still playing. I’m sorry—was that insulting?”
I shook my head. “People said that to me throughout my career.”
“Jim always said you’d gotten out of the music industry.”
“I did. This was just for fun. Old times’ sake.”
That’s when Jumbo made an august announcement: “Teddy and I are getting back together! Wait—how gay was that? Let me try that again. Tremble is getting back together.”
I shot him a look that said Shut the fuck up.
Sandy’s eyes volleyed uncertainly between Jumbo and me. “Really?”
“Yeah, that’s why Teddy came down today,” Jumbo explained, beaming.
Thank You, Goodnight Page 11
