Love of All” without so much as glancing at the words. The happy-hour crowd ate it up. Then one of their own, a man I had seen standing alongside a booth listening to conversations in which he was never directly addressed, took the stage and sang Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down.” His rendition was competent but boring, and the Koreans joined his coworkers in ignoring him.
As the man placed the microphone in its stand, the DJ said, “All right. Please welcome Julian to the Karaoke Monday stage. Julian, are you here?”
Julian drained his bourbon, swiveled on his stool, and walked calmly and coolly to the stage. By the time he got up there, the perfunctory applause had extinguished. He pulled the microphone from the stand and stood with his arms at his side.
The screen behind him changed from green to a rich black. In silence, 84-point white Futura type reading “White Room” appeared against the black background for a moment and faded slowly to black. When the first haunting bars of the song rang out, no images appeared on the screen, and as the song’s original first-verse vocals played loud and clear over the portable sound system, Julian kept his mouth shut. We had been sure that this close-mouthed protest would raise the ire of the karaoke fans. But now, as I looked around the room, the Koreans were laughing at a private joke while, over my right shoulder, the unsteady woman was in the midst of another refusal to leave her husband for her lover. This time I actually heard her say “erectile dysfunction.”
Eventually, a man with a red necktie loosened beneath his collar cupped his hand around the right side of his mouth and yelled, “Hey buddy! If you’re going to lip synch, move your lips!”
I exhaled. Finally, Julian was getting some fraction of the hatred he had hoped for. He seemed to be resisting the urge to smile.
Casey put another bourbon down for me. “What’s he doing?” he asked, his eyes on Julian.
“He’s about to start,” I said.
“Start what?”
“Singing the guitar parts.”
Casey turned to me. “Singing the guitar parts?”
The song entered verse two and I realized that, in a few seconds, no explanation would be necessary. After Jack Bruce sang the verse’s opening line, Julian flawlessly rendered Eric Clapton’s howling, bending notes with his voice. The moment the first sound left his mouth, white text exploded on the black screen: “Bow, wha goo wow ooh wow wow wow owe owe owe own.” The combination of text and sound won the Koreans’ attention.
After the second line, Julian hit Clapton’s notes again: “Whoa ooo-wow-ooo-wow-ooo-wow, ooo wow ah-ooowhan wow.” As I witnessed my bold graphic mockery of karaoke convention, I flushed with pride and excitement. But both pride and excitement cooled when I remembered that Julian had claimed my work—and this moment—for himself alone.
By the end of verse two, the Koreans had returned to their conversation, the happy-hour crowd seemed more bored than annoyed, and Casey had turned his back on the stage to mix a martini. Even the DJ had his head down, cueing up the next song. I was the only one watching Julian now. We might as well have been in my parents’ basement.
As verse three began, Julian seemed to notice the crowd’s indifference. He began pounding his heel in rhythm with the drums. His diaphragm clenched visibly beneath his tight black t-shirt, and his mouth and throat performed the complicated contortions required to imitate the open-door-closed-door effect of the wah-wah pedal. Hitting even the high notes cleanly, he screeched and squealed and roared with confidence.
And still they ignored him.
When the final solo began, Julian slammed the mike into its stand. He braced his right wrist against his pelvic bone, pinned his left elbow against his ribs, and held his left hand in the air with its back to the audience. Julian recreated the sound of Clapton’s solo with staggering fidelity, capturing the energy and emotion of the playing in his voice. All the while, he picked and fingered an imaginary guitar.
Feeling sick to my stomach, I put my elbow on the bar and shielded my eyes with my hand.
“Is this part of the act?” Casey asked.
I didn’t answer. Finally, mercifully, the song faded out and Julian returned his arms to his side.
“Let’s hear it for Julian,” the DJ said.
The audience offered a few whoops and a short round of applause. Julian walked off the stage with his hands in his pockets and his head down. I slid off my stool and walked out to the main floor to meet him. He passed me without so much as a glance. I stood there facing the stage, feeling exposed on all sides. I touched my jeans to assure myself I wasn’t naked and headed back to the receding comforts of my stool.
Having sung a guitar solo, played the air guitar and pandered to an audience he knew to be beneath him, Julian would never allow himself to return to Whirly Gigs. The performance had been a clean break with the club, and a clean break with me. Whatever we had been must have mattered to Julian at least as much as Whirly Gigs had; he’d put the torch to both. And I had helped him gather the tinder.
“All right,” the DJ said. “Let’s get our next performer up here. Give it up for Tommy, everybody.”
Tommy, the alleged sufferer of erectile dysfunction, staggered to the front of the stage. The top three buttons of his oxford shirt had come undone, revealing a v-neck undershirt and a thin patch of long, scraggly black hairs. “This is for you, Lisa,” he yelled, causing the speakers to screech ear-splitting feedback. Then, his brow furrowed in earnest emotion, Tommy began to sing over the backing track of “Love Will Keep Us Together.” He was sharp on every note. Lisa, clearly mortified, put her drink on a table and hurried to the ladies’ room. Some of her and Tommy’s colleagues laughed at the spectacle, while others put their heads down or covered their eyes. But I kept my eyes on Tommy, and applauded politely when he finished. Then I got Casey’s attention, pointed at my credit card by the register, and pointed at the stage. Tommy’s next drink was on me, and his song choice was only part of my reason for buying it.
While one of the Koreans performed Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me,” I sat on my stool, sipped my bourbon, and listened. Karaoke, it turned out, presented some interesting audio conundrums, like the variable volume levels of the backing tracks, and a performer’s struggle to determine the appropriate distance between his mouth and the microphone. They were sonic images simple enough for me to envision on my own, without Julian, and whether the hipsters would have admitted it or not, these performers were no worse than some of the bands we had seen over the years.
And as I sat on foam padding compressed into a mold of my buttocks, I decided I wanted a clean break, too—from the old Whirly Gigs, and from the absence pulsing from the empty stool beside me. I looked around at the Koreans, and at Tommy leaning over the drink I had bought him, and realized that I could make my clean break right where Julian had made his, and that I could do it my way, without torching anything or hurting anyone. My path was laid out straight: four minutes of hot pink peaks, valleys and flatlands magnified one-hundred times.
At the thought of taking the stage, I started to sweat, and saliva thickened in my throat. Keep your eyes closed, I told myself, and all you’ll see is sound.
I wiped my forehead with my hand and scanned the tables for a thick black binder. I spotted it in a booth occupied by Lisa, whose chin was bobbing with half-sleep, and two of her female coworkers. With the club’s north wall, the two ladies formed a perimeter around Lisa, probably to protect her from Tommy’s drunken
