Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love and Karaoke Read online

  “Relax,” Niki told me. “She just needs a little time to play it cool while she figures out if you’re for real or not. You’re not like other guys. So she needs time to make sure it’s not an act. She’s a smart girl. She will figure it out.”

  “Thanks. She is a smart girl. Have I mentioned what she told me about the earth crashing into the sun in a few billion years?”

  “Why, yes. You have.”

  I knew how much I had to learn. Meeting Ally made me want to learn. She made my head buzz with curiosity and a little courage to go with it. She filled my brain with things I had to know. How to make her smile, what numbers to dial—burning questions like that. I was not going to scare her away with overdoing or bore her with underdoing. I was going to get some love technique.

  We had known each other just a few months, but she was a new experience for me. She did not want to have DTR conversations. She never asked loaded questions like “What are you thinking?” or “Where is this going?” She did not seem to have any “We need to talk” crises. She never wanted to spend our time together analyzing the relationship or questioning the relationship. In fact, she didn’t talk about the relationship at all. This made me wonder whether we were even having a relationship.

  She had her own scientific method of dealing with emotional glitches. When she wanted something she wasn’t getting, she approached it rationally. One night, when we were sitting around reading, she told me, “I would actually like to have a little more of your attention right now, if you have any more attention to give. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the level of attention you are paying me tonight. If you want to continue at that level of attention, that’s fine. But if you do have some more, I would love to receive that.”

  Believe me, after that she had my full attention. I had never heard anyone express their emotional needs so efficiently before. I mean, I was definitely used to various people in my life expressing that same desire for attention. But I was used to people (including me) expressing it in the traditional, old-fashioned ways, like crying in the bathroom or smashing a bottle or pretending to be mad about something that happened six months ago. Ally’s way seemed dangerously attractive. So this was how adults did it? Exotic!

  While I was waiting for her to move to New York, I came down with a case of mono. That meant that instead of hanging out in sleazy punk rock bars till 4 a.m., watching my friends defy the brand-new smoking ban, I was spending my nights comatose on the couch, sending her a lot of incoherent fever-headed emails. I listened to WTJU online every Friday afternoon as DJ Astrogrrl did her weekly radio show, and she dedicated get-well songs to me like Depeche Mode’s “Shake the Disease” and X-Ray Spex’s “Germfree Adolescents.” In my state of delirium, I mused about this girl and wondered how she could possibly be as cool as she seemed.

  Every time she visited, she noticed all kinds of things about my life I’d missed. I must have walked down my sidewalk hundreds of times before Ally pointed out the graffiti somebody had written in the cement—the logo for the band Twisted Sister. This graffiti had to date back to the late summer or early fall of 1984; there was a very narrow window of time when Twisted Sister could have inspired that level of devotion. All these years, this message of love had been there on Eckford Street, beneath everyone’s feet, all our shoes scuffling over it without noticing. When Ally pointed it out to me, I felt like Twisted Sister themselves had blessed our bond.

  That summer, right before she made the big move to the city, I realized we were a bona fide couple. It was the first time the cops showed up for us. I guess there’s always something romantic about that, right? The first time the cops bust you for making out, you’re officially a couple.

  It wasn’t much of a bust, to tell the truth, but it was enough. I was visiting her down in Charlottesville. She invited me to see the telescope where she worked, in the woods of Observatory Hill. I was tingling with excitement just being in the laboratory, as she slowly opened the dome. It was just like Young Frankenstein. She sat at the telescope, adjusting the lens, so she could show me the sky, the way she saw it. She would find a star or a constellation, focus the lens on it, and let me take the seat. All of this was new to me. I was used to looking up at the sky, but not with the sense that I knew what I was looking for. She was showing me patterns that I had walked underneath for years; finding me new points to focus on, new ways to see the entire universe.

  After a couple of hours at the telescope, we had the urge to step out into the night air and look up at the stars. We stretched out in the tall grass on the side of the hill, as she pointed out the same galactic patterns she had shown me with the telescope. We took a fresh look at them with the naked eye. Fortunately, that’s all that was naked when the cops came. Not real cops, just university police, but they still seemed disappointed we weren’t nude tripping teen runaways. We couldn’t stop giggling as they gave us the flashlight. We were so happy to be together tonight, it seemed comically strange to remember that other people even existed.

  The idea of going to jail together seemed romantic, but since this was university property, all they really wanted was to see some university ID. I thought it would be funny to pull out my old grad school card, which I still had in my wallet. Ally grabbed the card from my hand as the cops drove off—she’d never seen a photo of me at such a tender age. We studied it together. Damn, I was young in this picture. I was twenty-three. My first day of grad school. A mere boy, with my whole life ahead of me. And here I was now, a full-grown man, in love with this full-grown woman. We were a couple. Anyone could see that. But there was nobody else watching on Observatory Hill now, nobody but us. So we ran inside and sat back down at the telescope. We had the rest of our night wide open, with an entire sky to explore.

  SHE LOVED THE KATE SPADE patent leather Mary Janes. I wasn’t overdoing, after all. Once I gave them to her for her birthday, she wore them the rest of the summer. She was wearing them the night of the aforementioned Lower East Side karaoke loft party, the one where somebody allegedly brought the vial of liquid mescaline. The room was full of aspiring musicians, aspiring actors, aspiring designers, aspiring models aspiring to bang the aspiring rock stars, and so on. I assumed I was especially fascinating at this party, since everybody I chatted with stared intensely into my pupils and nodded. One of the aspiring actresses kept gushing, “You are fancy!”

  Since it was 2003, everybody in the loft sang the latest hits by the Libertines and the White Stripes and Hot Hot Heat. There was no stage, just two mike stands on the floor, gigantic room, high ceilings, and an even higher audience. I sang AC/DC’s “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” with a Lower East Side playwright and an Australian bassist. It’s always a fun, effective pick, with all those Bon Scott screams. (Even if you have to wonder, just how many dirty deeds did Bon have in his repertoire? I count only two, homicide and fornication. That’s enough to go pro?)

  Ally got on the mike to do Blondie’s “Rapture” all by her lonesome. Maybe it was all the dilated eyeballs, but I saw lots of downtown scenesters, people who’d been too cool to remember my name the other forty-six times we’d met, staring in awe at this girl as she rapped the Debbie Harry poetry about the man from Mars who eats bars and cars and guitars. I thought, “Hey, it’s not just me. Everybody else is crazy about this girl, too.” Considering that she barely knew a soul in the room besides me, it was impressive courage. She made some fans that night—for years I ran into people who asked me about Rapture Girl. Afterward I joined her for “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” and it was an honor to be on her team.

  She loved the Mary Janes so much, I couldn’t remember why I had been so afraid of overdoing. Was I afraid to get the size or style wrong? Or was I afraid of getting caught paying too much attention? Was it the fear I wouldn’t be able to keep up that level of attention? All of these things, no doubt, plus lots of others. The fear I was making a big deal out of nothing. The fear I was pretending to be much more tasteful and fashion-conscious than I was,
setting her up for disappointment. The fear I was setting a boyfriend standard I couldn’t live up to. There were plenty of valid reasons to be afraid. That’s probably why she was so impressed. My friend Melissa had been right—it wasn’t the shoes, it was the way I’d noticed her liking the shoes.

  Shoes are still one of those female languages I have struggled to comprehend. I wish I could advise my adolescent self to learn how to talk about shoes; it would have been useful to learn that whole vocabulary at a young age. But I still work at it. Last December, I was in line outside a designer shoe boutique in Soho that was having a word-of-mouth sale. When I was young, I didn’t know sales like this existed, much less places like this, but a friend tipped me off, so here I was, hoping to pick up a surprise for my girl. The shop only held twelve customers at a time, so when one person left, another was allowed inside. The line was forty women deep, looking like one of those 1980s Alphabet City heroin dealer lines you read about, determined to tough out the arctic-tundra weather. Everyone had brought a book or a pair of headphones; everybody came prepared for a Stalingrad-level wait. I was the only male in line. Inside the boutique it was like the mosh pit at a Black Flag show, everyone throwing elbows and kicking ankles. There were no rules except the law of the shark pool: Eat the wounded. Women were stepping on my hands while climbing on me to get a clearer shot at the merch. I felt lucky to get out of there with some seven-and-a-half pumps and my teeth. Once again, I get scared of overdoing, then end up finding out overdoing is the only thing to do.

  NINETEEN

  1:32 a.m.:

  Wouldn’t It Be Nice

  So my friend Jacob calls me up. He wants to meet.

  His new girlfriend is dangerous, just his type. I like this one. After I met her, he called me while I was still in the cab. “She will kill you,” I said. “Then she’ll bury you in a shallow grave with the knife still sticking out of your heart. Then she’ll dig you up so she can kill you again.”

  How could this go wrong? Somehow it’s going wrong. Jacob wants to talk tonight, so we meet at a bar in the East Village. They’ve been broken up for three days.

  “Remember that night you came over for dinner? She was mad.”

  “I could tell. She didn’t say a word all night.”

  “She was mad before you got there.”

  “She had her arms folded. Mad girlfriend arms-folded. What was she stewing about?”

  “She was mad all night. I kept asking what was wrong and she wouldn’t say. It wasn’t until four hours after you left that she came out and said why she was mad. She said, ‘I found a condom. In the kitchen trash. A used condom.’ I said, ‘Show me.’”

  “Was it there?”

  “It was a tea bag. That’s what she was mad about.”

  “That doesn’t prove you’re innocent.”

  “She was mad all night. She had to stay mad longer because it was a tea bag. Eight hours. So we broke up. We’re meeting for a drink tonight.”

  “I’m not sure this is a good idea.”

  “You need to come with me. Make sure I leave by midnight.”

  “This is stupid.”

  “I know. Don’t leave me there.”

  It’s already twelve thirty when she shows up. The three of us sit in a booth for twenty minutes or so. There’s a bar trivia night we’re trying to ignore. Occasionally Jacob’s girlfriend leans back to whisper a clue to the booth behind us, just because she knows she looks hot at that angle. One-third into the second drink, they’re kind of not broken up anymore, and I grab my raincoat.

  There are no cabs on Avenue A tonight, so I walk up to the L train. The sidewalk is full of ostentatiously disappointed girlfriends, mad about something, three or four paces ahead of the boys trailing along, with those determined angry-haughty stomps, arms folded in that showy way. It’s February, drizzly, windy, so their arms would have been folded anyway, but if you’ve been a boyfriend, you can see the difference.

  You know the German term schadenfreude, which means secretly finding relief or even pleasure in someone else’s misfortune. There is a similar phenomenon that I like to think of as schtraight-boyden-freude, which is when you see other men’s girlfriends and you feel a certain guilt-riddled joy in not being that woman’s boyfriend.

  This is not an admirable trait, but you can’t avoid it, especially when you’re walking in New York. Every block seems to have one of these girlfriends. You see the stomp-and-follow and you feel a certain relief you’re not in this scene, not this time, anyway. You try to act like you don’t notice. Some nights, especially weekends after eleven, every street serves up a schtraight-boyden-freude smorgasbord.

  I am grateful for my girl. I could tell her this story but I will probably tell her something else about today instead. I will probably describe walking up Avenue A, the rain, the headphones, the puddles seeping into my socks, the songs I listened to, the wind. When I get home, she’s asleep. The next day, she will ask, “So how’s Jacob?” I will say, “He’s great,” and it will be the truth.

  JACOB AND I FIND EACH other exotic. He’s a woman magnet, so we’re at total opposite ends of the romantic spectrum. So we’re fascinated with each other’s love lives. We are driven by anthropological curiosity to observe each other’s mating games. He finds my choices just as bewildering as I find his. We were talking on the phone in the summer of 1991, at the absurdly tender age of twenty-five, not that it seemed that way at the time, a few weeks before my wedding. (He couldn’t make it, as he was at his French girlfriend’s country house.) While we talked, I had the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds playing, from “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” all the way to “Caroline, No.” I quoted the line about how Brian Wilson is trying hard to find the people he won’t leave behind, because that’s the adventure I was on. Jacob made sad clucking noises. “I never should have let you listen to that album.”

  Maybe a husband needs a pet womanizer, just as a womanizer needs a pet husband. It helps protect you from the delusion that other people are having more fun than you are, a delusion that seems to create at least 40 percent of the misery in an American’s life. Like Humphrey Bogart says in Casablanca, Jacob is like other men, only more so. When he’s on the prowl for another danger girl, I make a wish list for him: I think I should have a say in who he chooses, since I have to listen to him complain when it blows up. That French girl’s name still makes him jump like a World War II veteran when a car backfires.

  But he never listens, because deep down he believes I have no idea what I’m talking about when it comes to women, and he’s probably right. He’s never aspired to be a husband, just as I’ve never aspired to be a womanizer, and neither of us has it in him to function anywhere in between. We admire each other’s commitment to one particularly insane kind of devotion, but we each think we’re the one having the fun.

  Being part of a couple is the most mysterious of human experiences, and yet nobody really seems to get how it works. Nobody knows how good love goes bad, or the more baffling question of how good love goes good. You often hear the words “they finish each other’s sentences,” yet I’ve never been able to understand why this is supposed to be a good thing. In my experience, trying to finish a woman’s sentence means taking your life in your hands, and if someone finishes one of mine, it’s usually “I’ve heard this one” or “Sorry, dude, you lost me when you compared Bell Biv DeVoe to Alfred, Lord Tennyson” or “Your head is so far up your ass right now you could play your prostate like a kazoo.”

  Another thing people say in praise of couplehood is “She calls me on my bullshit.” Again, I’m not sure why that’s a positive thing. I, for one, have zero trouble finding people to call me on my bullshit, especially since my bullshit is not really the hard-to-notice kind. I can barely walk around the block without getting called on my bullshit. (Today, for example, I went down the street to Uro Café for a coffee and two of my fellow pedestrians snickered at what I was wearing. But since that was a hot-pink T-shirt for a band called Nuclear Power Pants, I can�
��t blame them.) So that old phrase is still not really a sufficient description of how people live together successfully.

  There is a lot about love I will never know, just because I have been lucky in love. Everyone I’ve fallen for has been a solid gold, true-blue good person, someone who was kind and admirable, whether we got along at the time or not. So I have no idea what it’s like to be cheated, mistreated, played, betrayed, used, abused, lied to, painted blue, led astray, walked this way, shot through the heart, sliced apart, run over with a Dodge Dart, deceived by the deception of which she was practiced at the art, etc.

  Sometimes this makes me miserable about how much I’ve missed out on, as a music fan. There are lonesome songs I can sing along with, and happy songs and desperate songs and angry songs and dumped songs that have been near to my heart at one time or another. There are “ever fallen in love with someone you shouldn’t have fallen in love with?” songs and “tangled up in blue” songs and “good lovin’ gone bad” songs and “prayin’ for the end of time so I can end my time with you” songs. All those songs I’ve lived out for a night or three. But songs about falling in love with someone mean who does you wrong and treats you like dirt—those are science fiction to me. I sing along with them the way I sing along with songs about robbing banks or shooting up with Andy Warhol or knowing how to dance.

  But if I’m being honest, the things that bring couples together will always terrify me more than the things that tear us apart. They will always be harder to explain. They will always keep me up later. Love gone wrong has inspired so many great songs, but somehow, love going right is what’s bizarre. It exposes deep freakcraft in the universe. As far as I’m concerned, “some people are very kind” is the scariest line Bob Dylan ever wrote. Compared to that, his breakup songs are kid stuff. Some people are very kind and there’s nothing in the universe to explain why.