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

  Up in the spotlight, for some reason, my voice box chooses this moment to lapse into the most nasty-ass Boston accent I’ve ever heard out of my own mouth, as I tell the crowd, “I’d like to do a song by Mister Merle Haggid.”

  Great. I may as well sing, “Mama Tried Wicked Haaahd.”

  It’s all granite faces from the cowboys up front now. I can’t tell if I’m bombing. You always think you can scope out the vibe of a karaoke crowd from your chair, but you don’t know them until you sing. Maybe I’m ruining the song. Maybe I’m getting my ass kicked as soon as I’m done. Then comes the chorus and everything is golden. We all love this song, nobody’s here to judge because this is karaoke night, moron, just keep my eyes on Ally, she smiles, reminds me to smile, Mama tried, Mama tried, this is the best, when it’s done people will clap or nod politely because that’s what people do, and that leaves only me to blame because Mama tried. Wait, it’s over already? Already. Good night, everybody.

  A few hours later, we’re deep in the desert. We have a telescope in the trunk. Ally ordered it from an ad in the back of an astronomy magazine. A Galileoscope, a replica of the one that Galileo himself used to discover the moons of Jupiter. She assembled it back at our cabin. Tonight we park way out in the desert, where the visibility is astounding. By day, you can look around, see for literally miles, and know for a fact you’re the only two human beings on earth. At night, the sky is wide open. I’ve never seen stars like this, glittering in a sky as long as your arm. Ally sets up the telescope on the roof of the car. She finds the four Galilean moons of Jupiter, the ones he discovered in 1609: Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto. We take turns on the telescope, shivering in the January wind. Dead silence, just the sand crunching under our feet. She makes sure I can tell the moons apart. So many stars and constellations visible tonight, so many that are new to me. Castor and Pollux, the Gemini. Rigel—I’ve heard of that one, because it’s mentioned in an old song by Game Theory. Bellatrix, the Amazon warrior. The belt of Orion.

  Ally bets she can find Lepus, the rabbit constellation, south of Orion. It’s a race against time, whether our eyes can acclimate and pick out these tiny gleams of light before the constellations shift and some of them drop out of view. I’ve never heard of Lepus before, but I see it now. We stand there with our knees shaking, rewrapping our scarves tighter as the night gets desolately cold. The night is ours, just us and the yucca trees. No audience, no stage, nobody else on earth. No light except the stars, which explode out into many more different lights than I ever could have imagined, gleaming back at us.

  Good night, everybody. Please tip your waitress. Sure did talk to you. Sure did see you. If you’re driving tonight, please take your car. Good night.

  THREE

  8:15 p.m.:

  Sing Your Life

  Why do I get so obsessive about karaoke? Two reasons, which I’m pretty sure are the only reasons to get obsessed with anything on God’s green earth:

  1. Music

  2. Girls

  What else in life is there to obsess about? There be music, and there be girls. Everything else is paste.

  My girl Ally is my karaoke queen, and we have greeted a thousand dawns together with mikes in hand. We will greet many more dawns this way, unless either of us ever comes down with a throat infection or a sense of shame. Music is just one of our shared obsessions. There are many categories of geekdom we share (noisy indie rock, the Smiths, Japanese gangster movies, narwhals) and many categories of geekdom that neither of us has picked up yet (comics, Star Trek, interior design). We have individual geekdoms that we’ve turned the other one on to and individual geekdoms we prefer to enjoy alone. There are also the geekdoms that inspire us to try to convert each other. We have a lifetime to work on that. She got me into the greatness of Richard Feynman. I have given up trying to get her into the greatness of Bob Dylan. Karaoke is a good one to share.

  We have followed this obsession into some strange places. We did “spa-raoke” in Chinatown, at a spot where you can get a pedicure and sing at the same time. Ally busted out the Morrissey jams while she got her nails did. When she was out of town, I took the laptop to the bar for a round of Skype-aoke. We’ve sung across the country, from the Korean barbecue joints of Rhode Island to the tumbleweed taverns of the Nevada desert. A seniors’ retirement community in Fort Myers, Florida. The heart of New York City. We have followed our microphone lust all over this land. And everywhere we ramble, we find some place to pop in for a song or two, because that’s just how karaoke fiends roll.

  It’s a lot more fun with two of us. Before I met her, I was working hard on learning how to open up and sing my life. But singing our life is better.

  Ally is an astronomer who loves music as much as I do, so she can help me comprehend the music we share in terms of the entire universe. She makes all this music I thought I knew sound different. She can explain that when Radiohead sings the line “Gravity always wins,” in the song “Fake Plastic Trees,” they are not correct, because gravity is just one of four cosmic forces: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. Gravity sometimes wins, like when black holes form or galaxies collide. Sometimes the other forces trump gravity, like inside the neutron, where the strong nuclear force prevails.

  As soon as I met Ally, I could tell her gravity was going to win. Her nuclear force was something I couldn’t resist. I was drawn into her gravitational pull, and that drew me into my entire future.

  Ally got thrown out of Sing Sing with her friend years ago, after they did a dance routine to the Monkees’ “(I’m Not Your) Stepping Stone,” hopping from stool to stool. The Monkees would have approved, but the security guys did not. Awesomely, right afterward Sing Sing put up posters in the hallways warning DO NOT STEP ON THE FURNITURE, with little cartoon drawings of these women’s heads. They haven’t tried to throw Ally out since then, even though she always dances on chairs during Monkees songs. Dancing girls win, furniture loses: way of the world. Sing Sing gave up the fight. It’s one of the many reasons we love this place.

  Morrissey sums it all up in “Sing Your Life.” If it seems scary to open up and step to the microphone, that’s because it should be scary. These are emotionally dangerous adventures to go on. Singing what’s in your heart? Naming the things you love and loathe? You can get hurt that way. Hell, you will get hurt that way. But you’ll get hurt trying to hide away in all that silence and leave your life unsung. There’s no future without tears. Are you really setting your hopes on not getting hurt at all? You think that’s an option? You clearly aren’t listening to enough Morrissey songs.

  So I have to sing what is in my heart. In other words, music and girls.

  I WOULD LOVE TO CLAIM that all these years of karaoke helped me discover my buried talent as a singer. Hey, I found a way to unleash the inner beauty of my voice. The ugly duckling of my tonsils turned into the swan of my esophagus. I opened my mouth one morning and fluffy pillows of sound came out. I’d like to thank the Academy.

  This is not that kind of story.

  Listen to my “turn around’s.” There are three notes in the words “turn around” and I am blowing five of them. There are also three notes in the words “sing your life” and I don’t even want to tally up the damages. It doesn’t matter. This is my voice. They say you have to invest ten thousand hours into something to achieve greatness. I have put in my ten thousand hours of singing badly, so I guess by now I might even be a virtuoso at singing badly. Maybe that should bother me. It doesn’t. This is what they call “hitting rock bottom,” and they call it that because it rocks.

  What I get out of karaoke is a little weirder than mere musical competence. It’s a love ritual that keeps me coming back, craving more, because this is where the songs are. And the songs are full of stories. Every one we sing is charged up with memories of the past or dreams of the future. Every song reminds me of good times or bad times. Yet they all hold surprises.

  When you sign up for a whol
e night of this, you can’t really predict how the music is going to feel. You begin to sing a song expecting to get one story out of it, then you get another. You pay for this but they give you that. Every tune tells me a different tale. Every song I sing makes me feel what it’s like to be a son, a brother, a lover, a husband, a fan. There are famous singers I have spent my whole life pondering, but after I pick up the mike to try their songs, I’m more fascinated by them than ever. Some of these singers are legends, yet when I slip into their songs, I feel like they’re helping me figure out some of my own basic questions. Some of these singers mean the world to me; others are just vessels for the song. One is Billy Idol. But their voices are burned into my soul.

  Some of the memories I’m not so crazy about, especially the ones that involve beginnings and endings. I’m more of a “middles” guy. But I know it took some of these painful beginnings to launch me into the middle where I am right now. In a radiant, ever-expanding universe with this particular girl in it. Just us and the songs we like. Loads of those.

  I have a photo of me singing karaoke, from my birthday last winter. Of course, it’s a private room at Sing Sing. As the TV monitor shows, the birthday boy is singing TLC’s classic slow jam, “Red Light Special.” That means it’s still early in the night. I am wearing a tiara and carrying a bouquet of roses. My sash says SWEET SIXTEEN. In all candor, this birthday bitch is not a pretty sight, not to mention nowhere near sixteen. I look like a holy mess and I know I must sound that way. Yet I can see how blissed out I am in this picture. I am enraptured in the song. I am powered by the red-light special. I am a singer, damn it.

  I look at this picture, and I know for a fact I look ridiculous when I sing. But I look closer, and I see there is no shame in my eyes. No fear. No trouble at all. I wonder why.

  FOUR

  8:45 p.m.:

  Work It

  I live in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which is loud and crowded and frantic and my favorite place ever. It’s full of punk rockers, Polish immigrants, feral cats, three-deckers with saint statues, fliers for cat reiki, and bars that offer “Morrissey speed-dating” nights. Music is everywhere, whether it’s the Eurodisco thumping in the nightclubs or just the old dude who dances on Manhattan Avenue outside Bakery Rzeszowska, with his radio blasting doo-wop oldies from the fifties.

  I moved here in the summer of 2002. I got a creaky, narrow, dusty railroad apartment on the second floor over a diner, with the sweet smell of kielbasa in the air. I took the sad-to-look-at pictures out of their boxes and put them up on the wall because I needed to do a little more crying over them and I was building a safe place to get some of that done. I’d been living in downtown Manhattan for a couple of years and I was sick of that scene. My new favorite song was Missy Elliott’s “Work It,” the kind of song you need in your corner to pump you up when you’re trying to put your thing down, flip it, and reverse it. I certainly had a lot of working it to do.

  My landlady tried to teach me a few Polish phrases to get by—“excuse me,” “thank you,” “please do not punch me in the face.” She did her best but I couldn’t hack the accent. I could spend hours looking out the back window: the yard full of wild kitties, trees buzzing with birds, the laundry hanging on the lines, the auto shop on McGuinness Boulevard with the yellow Chevy Nova parked on the roof. It was a quiet place to stay up and write all night, drinking coffee until the cheerful traffic started to rumble around dawn. That’s when the birds started, too. (I had forgotten all about birds. I guess birds and I had some catching up to do.)

  I thought Eckford Street would be my spot for a Bowie-in-Berlin year of isolation and rejuvenation, but it turned out to be something more mundane, a home. I walk around my block and see the Japanese pizza guy, the Yemeni deli guy who sells me coffee and tries to teach me to pronounce mocha correctly, the skater kids blasting Polish hip-hop. A few of us were born here, but most of us had to travel a while. This is a neighborhood people come to with a dream, whether that’s getting a job or writing the world’s greatest song or raising a kid who has a favorite Gun Club record. My big dream? I came here hoping to hit the ground running, though I would settle for just hitting the ground.

  This has been my home for ten years, four thousand nights, hundreds of rock shows, two of Britney’s weddings. There is always some crazy shit going on here. If I wanted a two-foot-tall bottle of Polish vodka shaped like a statue of the late Pope John Paul II wearing his miter and carrying a shepherd’s staff, with a lamb at his feet, I wouldn’t even have to leave my fucking block.

  The Saturday I moved in, I stumbled sun-dazed up Driggs and down Wythe and back up Humboldt and bought a dictionary at the used-book store that is now a cheese shop and ran into some rocker kids on the sidewalk selling homemade lapel pins for a quarter each. I bought one that had Paul McCartney’s face (I react to auguries of Paul McCartney’s face the way Greek warriors in The Iliad respond to the sight of a heron—it is a propitious omen from the gods) and stuck it on my sweater. I wore the sweater all day even though the sun was out and played my Walkman and told myself, Okay, maybe now is when you should start breathing, and for once I got the now part right.

  There is a girl here, too. She’s my favorite thing about this neighborhood. But she wasn’t here yet, and once upon a time, I wasn’t, either.

  WHEN I MOVED TO NEW York in 2000, I was in fragile condition. I was only thirty-four but I felt old and tired. At an age where many of my friends felt their lives were just beginning, I felt mine was over. I was married early in my twenties, and then my wife died suddenly when we were both thirty-one. I was a man who had found love at a young age, and I thought I had the perfect life. I was a rock critic who got to spend every waking moment listening to the music I loved, living with another writer who shared all this music and joy with me. We felt right at home in Charlottesville, Virginia, surrounded by friends and music. It all changed so abruptly, when she died of a pulmonary embolism, in May 1997. Without her, everything was different. Three years later I still wasn’t handling grief well, or at all, and I needed to make some changes. So I left Charlottesville, where I’d lived for more than a decade, just because it was so laden with memories. I wanted to try a fresh start in another town.

  I left Charlottesville, the place I thought would be my home forever, and went out looking for another one. I went to New York to start over again. Most of my friends lived there, and Rolling Stone, the magazine I wrote for, was there as well. I pictured myself looking out at the city lights, while the sax solo from “Walk on the Wild Side” played in the distance. I was afraid of getting trapped in the past, turning my life into a shrine to the good things that used to be alive in me. I knew the future would be a challenge, as well as an adventure, and I knew it would be difficult. But I couldn’t keep hiding forever. I needed to make changes and I needed a safe place to make them.

  So I moved to lower Manhattan, into one of those creepy, griefy, deathy, white high-rise apartments that people in their early thirties move into when they’ve decided to give up on life for a while. Big windows. Shiny wooden floors. High ceilings. A lobby downstairs. No dust, no mold, no bugs, no noise from next door or upstairs or downstairs or anywhere. The kind of white room where astronauts go to die at the end of Stanley Kubrick movies.

  I lived downtown on John Street, right under the World Trade Center. My new neighborhood was not yet known as “ground zero.” It was merely the “financial district,” a place where nobody really lived, or even set foot except for jury duty, which meant in terms of real estate it was euphemistically described as “up and coming.” The streets reeked of dashed hopes and emptied bladders, with no view of the sky and barely any oxygen in the air.

  It was a bleak little neighborhood, even at the time. Getting blown up by terrorists did not sweeten its personality, believe me. Every now and then, maybe a couple of times a year, I pass through the financial district and marvel that it somehow keeps getting more depressing. They closed the Strand Bookstore Annex? Now it’s a
Lot-Less Closeouts? I give up, financial district—how could you get any worse? Wait—the Dunkin’ Donuts is gone? Congratulations, financial district! You did it! And I’m so proud. Who’s a grim little hellhole? Who is? That’s right—you are!

  Now I guess I know why my grandfather never wanted to go back and visit Ireland after he got out. When you chew your way out of a steel trap, you don’t return for a receipt.

  The problem with moving is that you tend to take yourself with you, so when you get there and you’re still unhappy, you know the problem is you. To my surprise, I found that my new life in Apartment 7Q had most of the same issues as my old life. Now I lived on the seventh floor, where the view out the window was the office building across the street. I kept the blinds closed, or open—it didn’t matter. I had to turn on the Weather Channel to see if the sun was out. For the one and only time in my adult life, I got into housekeeping, and kept the apartment squeaky clean. (“Spotless,” in the words of a friend who visited, and she knew me too well to mean it as a compliment.) No dust bunnies here. I finally took off my wedding ring and kept it off. I didn’t put any pictures of my dead wife up on the fridge, because it hurt too much to see her face. I packed up the photos, the journals, the letters, the tapes, barricaded it all in the closet. I boxed up my past—and I had a lot of past.

  By day, the streets were packed with pedestrians, competing for each step on the tiny sidewalks; a walk around the block was like waiting in line at the post office, except getting hit with bikes now and then.

  I got obsessive about work, which became my drug of choice. When I didn’t have any magazine work to do, that’s when my mind would wander and I’d get sad. Most nights I sat on the couch, listening to records I bought on eBay while watching TV with the sound down. Like eBay, TiVo had just been invented, and I had plenty of Designing Women reruns to catch up on. My kitchen had a dishwasher, but since I had nobody to cook for and no appetite myself, I mainly used the dishwasher as background noise to try to lull myself to sleep at night.