not Topper Headon deserved his “Human Drum Machine” moniker. (He did.) When I had seen all there was to see in a given song, I would return to the networks, poach another masterpiece, and start the process all over again.
This was my life. It was static and less than I wanted, but with my studio, Whirly Gigs, and Julian, it was just enough to live on.
One Monday, I had to work late and didn’t arrive at Whirly Gigs until twenty minutes past nine. I found Julian standing next to my regular stool, staring at the stage. By this point in the evening, the stage was usually cluttered with a drum kit, a half-dozen amps and a slithering mass of black cords. Tonight, however, a portable projection screen flanked by two elevated portable speakers occupied the drum kit’s usual position. To the left of one of the speakers, a laptop and two microphones rested on a folding table. The front of the stage was barren but for a monitor mounted on a spindly metal tripod and an empty microphone stand.
I dropped my bag between the stool and the bar and glanced at Julian. “Are they doing an open mike night?” I asked, hoping it wasn’t so. He didn’t say anything. He just kept staring at the stage.
A woman at the bar ordered a dirty martini. The platinum band of her engagement ring was milky in the stage light, and her silk blouse laid neatly on the curve of her left hip. Over her shoulder, two men wearing khakis and golf shirts emblazoned with corporate logos sat in a booth, chatting up two women sitting across from them. The woman closer to the bar wore nylons, black high-heeled pumps, and a gray jacket-and-skirt set. After the guy across from her dribbled beer foam on his shirt, both women erupted in nearly identical cackles.
That was when it hit me. They were sitting in Julian’s booth.
Suddenly, Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” blasted from the portable speakers and the projection screen ignited with quick-cut images of Asian men and women riding bicycles, slurping noodle soup, and pruning topiary menageries. A slightly overweight young man wearing a white short-sleeve button-down, blue jeans, and ear-covering headphones was now standing behind the folding table. A wireless mike, protected by black foam shaped like a wrecking ball, was held in front of his mouth by a plastic arm connected to the headphones. He looked like the pilot of a traffic helicopter.
“Welcome,” he announced, “to Karaoke Monday at Whirly Gigs.”
As Casey put my drink on the bar, I asked him what was going on. He told me that management had been running an ad for “Karaoke Monday” in the Tribune for the past two weeks and had stopped booking bands on Mondays. “Management” was a rotating cast of shadowy Serbians, a pair of whom showed up at least once a week in loose, open-collared black shirts and tailored black slacks to let the bartenders and the bouncers know they were watching everything. Since taking over Whirly Gigs a few years ago, the Serbians had twice threatened to convert the club into a hookah lounge. In each instance, a week-long, sold-out residency of local bands made good—Smashing Pumpkins the first time, Wilco the second—had put enough money in the Serbians’ pockets to stay the club’s execution. Were the Serbians now using karaoke to take Whirly Gigs back from its regulars? Were they trying to turn the place into Starmakers?
“What about the other nights?” I asked.
“Bands,” Casey said, “just like before. But with this ....” He turned to the stage and his voice trailed off.
“The regulars won’t ever come back,” I said.
Casey nodded.
When I turned to commiserate with Julian, he was gone.
I grabbed my bag and hurried out to the street. Julian was already a half-block away. I jogged after him, coins and keys jangling noisily in my pockets, and slowed to a walk as I fell in alongside him.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” Julian’s clenched jaw and flattened eyebrows were probably supposed to make him look angry, but his wet eyes gave him away.
As we walked along in silence, something soured in my stomach. Whirly Gigs was dying; in a sense, it was already dead. I could find another place to see sound—this was Chicago, after all—but would Julian follow me there? Would sound look the same if he wasn’t there to share it?
But Julian’s loss was even greater than my own. He was now a king without a country, his throne occupied by consultants who saw Whirly Gigs as a place to sit while they waited their turn at the karaoke mike. Even if Julian decided to find another club and make it his own, he would be nothing more than another good-looking hipster.
We were crossing Racine Avenue against a red light when my mind flashed to a place that could return to us some of what we had lost. When we reached the sidewalk, I grabbed Julian’s elbow, stopping his retreat. “Last night I found the individual tracks of Cheap Trick’s At Budokan.”
Julian looked at me as if he hadn’t understood. “What?”
“I found the individual recording tracks of Cheap Trick’s At Budokan.”
“You mean each song.”
“No. Each track of each song.”
He stared at me. “Where did you find them?”
“File sharing,” I said. “I’ve got them all loaded into my computer. Come over to my place. We’ll give them a look.”
Julian lowered his eyes to my hand, which still held his elbow. I let go, and replayed the previous ten seconds in my head. My mouth went dry as I realized that my proposal had sounded something like a proposition, the audiophile’s equivalent of the bachelor’s ruse in which he tells a potential conquest that she must see the breathtaking view from his apartment.
Julian began to nod, almost imperceptibly at first. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”
As we walked toward the Belmont El station, I assured myself that Julian had understood that I had meant nothing untoward, and if any doubt lingered, I would prove it at my apartment by delivering what I had promised and nothing more. And just when I had managed to put my mind at ease, I realized that my invitation had left me vulnerable in a way I’d failed to anticipate: what if Julian found out that I lived with my parents?
I led Julian around the side of the house, down the three concrete steps, and inside. I turned on the lamp near the door, but the dim yellow light failed to brighten things up. In that moment, I experienced the space as I thought Julian might have: the trapped aromas of mildew and micro-waved meals, the oak footboard of my twin bed detailed with carvings of dogs and cats, bundled cords emerging from the back of my recording console, untreated wooden stairs leading to the floor above.
I took off my coat, laid it over the footboard, and looked for the bottle of bourbon I’d started the night before.
“Nice place,” Julian said.
“Thanks.”
I poured bourbon into two coffee mugs and set them down on coasters in front of two rolling chairs. I sat in the better chair, not wanting to make things more awkward by overtly deferring to Julian, and immediately called up the At Budokan tracks. I double clicked on the lead-guitar track of “Hello There” and watched the thin, vertical black line move from left to right over the visual representation of the music we heard in the speakers.
“Wow,” Julian whispered.
