Julian looked at me and sat back down. “What?” he asked.
“Sing the guitar part of some song at Whirly Gigs. On Karaoke Monday.”
He laughed through his nose, shook his head and stood up again. “I don’t think so.”
I stood up with him, wobbling a bit. “Think about what a great last stand it would be! A karaoke crowd wouldn’t know what to do with a performance like that.”
Julian looked at me as if I were losing my mind or, at the very least, too drunk to drive him to the El. I bent over the console, took the mouse in my hand, clicked once, twice, then double clicked. Cued to its final minute, “Do You Feel Like We Do?” erupted through the speakers with Julian’s vocal track in place of Frampton’s guitar. As accurate as they were, Julian’s unmixed notes sounded ridiculous backed by the instruments recorded live at San Francisco’s Winterland in 1975. Julian smiled and we both laughed out loud, though our laughter was nearly drowned out by the playback. He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed, and I wrapped my left arm around his waist and pulled him toward me.
Then the basement door opened.
“Brian?”
Julian and I pulled apart immediately.
“Brian, it’s three in the morning,” my mother said. “Can you keep it down?”
“All right,” I said.
As I turned the volume down, my face flushed. I hadn’t called her mom, and she hadn’t called me son, but there could have been little doubt in Julian’s mind to whom that voice belonged. Her tone and our dynamic said it all. Now I did want Julian to leave, not because of anything he’d said or done, but because he had seen me as I really was.
With my head down, I grabbed my car keys. Julian, getting the message, picked up his keys and wallet from the console and pushed them into the front pockets of his jeans. Then he followed me out the door and to my car.
For the first few miles of the drive to the El station, we were silent.
“It’s not a big deal, you know,” he said, eventually. “Living with your parents, I mean. A lot of people I know do it. And you’ve got such a great setup down there! I wouldn’t ever want to move—”
“Thanks, but can you just—?” I tried to smile through my shame, but came up short. I did manage to exhale and start over. “Thanks.”
The incident with my mother wasn’t even my largest source of embarrassment. I could still feel my hand on Julian’s belt, grabbing it and pulling him toward me. At the thought of Julian replaying the corresponding sensation in his own head, I wanted to make a deep, exhausted, guttural sound that would have forced my tongue out of my mouth. But I had to swallow that urge for another mile or so.
I rolled to a stop in front of the station stairs, put the car in park, and kept my eyes straight ahead. I was aware that this would probably be the last time I saw Julian, but I didn’t want to look at him.
“I’ll be over tomorrow,” he said. “Around eight. We’ve only got a week to put this thing together.”
It took me a moment to realize that he was talking about performing at Whirly Gigs.
“They’re going to hate us,” Julian said, smiling. Then he clapped me on the shoulder blade with his left hand, got out of the car, and closed the door behind him.
The next night, we found a song worthy of Julian’s talent. Over the next five evenings, we put Julian’s rehearsals up against the original lead guitar track of Cream’s “White Room,” noted each difference, and honed his rendition into a precise sonic imitation.
In spare moments at work, I laid out a graphic treatment to accompany Julian’s performance. When I had leaded and kerned the type to my satisfaction and synchronized text to sound, I burned the finished product to a DVD. If Julian’s voice-guitar would be the blow to the gut of karaoke nation, I imagined my graphics would dig the knuckles deeper.
On the final night, after rehearsing until almost four in the morning, I asked Julian if he wanted to crash at my place instead of heading home. He declined. I offered to drive him home or to the El. He said he had money for a cab, slapped me on the back, and left.
The following Monday, we walked north from the Belmont station toward Whirly Gigs. When we approached Starmakers, I looked away, as did Julian. But there was no way to avert our ears. A woman half in the bag and half a measure behind the accompaniment was singing Billy Joel’s “Only The Good Die Young.” She didn’t sound young, but she was certainly dying up there.
A few paces after the woman fell out of earshot, I voiced the question that had been on my mind the whole trip up here.
“What are we doing?” I asked.
Julian stopped and squinted at me. “What do you mean?”
“If you go up there and do this tonight, are we any different than that woman in there? Sure, you’re doing the guitar, not the vocals, and you’re better than she is, but what we’re doing is still karaoke—at a karaoke night, on a karaoke stage.” I lifted my palms and smiled hysterically. “I might as well get up there and sing ‘Faithfully.’ Would it be any different?”
Julian nodded, turned, and resumed his march toward Whirly Gigs without saying a word.
“Julian,” I said, walking after him. When I put my hand on his shoulder, he whirled around, knocking it off with a windmill-swing of his right arm. I flinched and gave a shallow, startled gasp. I recognized the look in his eyes, having seen him give it to bands with no talent, women who couldn’t dress, and men who wouldn’t leave him alone. It was disgust. He took a breath and ran his fingers through his hair, seeming suddenly aware that he was in public.
“Look,” he said. “You helped me find my mistakes and fix them, and you did the graphics. But I do the performing. So I guess I don’t need you anymore.”
He said the words matter-of-factly, with only the barest hint of malice, but they struck a heavy blow, and pulverized the notion that Julian and I were somehow in league together.
When I made no reply, Julian started walking. I let him get a half-block ahead, then followed him. The moment wasn’t mine anymore, but I still couldn’t bring myself to miss it. Besides, I had nowhere else to go.
I took my usual seat at the bar. Casey arched one eyebrow, poured me a bourbon, and handed it to me without a word. Julian was talking to the karaoke DJ, punctuating the rhythms of his speech with small movements of the DVD case he held in his hand. The DJ nodded his assent to whatever Julian was saying, took the DVD, and went backstage. Julian sat on the stool closest to the stage and turned his back on it.
Julian’s regular booth was occupied by two Korean couples, laughing loudly and speaking in their native language. They were surrounded by casualties of what appeared to be a sizable after-work happy hour that had moved north from Downtown. A man from the happy-hour crowd guided an unsteady woman by the elbow to a spot a few feet away from my stool and proposed, in a whisper he probably thought was discreet, that she leave her husband for him. She demurred, citing the man’s “sexual problem.” I cleared my throat a few times to get them to move away, but they didn’t.
To
