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

  Some nights I would go sit beneath the World Trade Center, a couple of blocks down John Street. A very strange skyscraper to have for a neighbor—even though it was the most visible landmark in the city, nobody ever came to look at it. There were never any tourists around; the entire neighborhood was Omega Man empty on nights and weekends. After dark I could sit with my Walkman for hours by the WTC, where I knew I wouldn’t see a soul. I’d perch on the stone plaza next to the water fountain and look up at the lights. You could see the twin glass towers shiver whenever the wind rustled. Sometimes the towers reminded me of the old Sesame Street song about the lowercase n that stands on a hill, weeping because it’s all alone, until a rocket ship lands and brings another lowercase n to keep it company.

  A lowercase n. Standing on the hill. The wind is very still. For the lowercase n.

  The towers weren’t so ugly, really. For obvious reasons, of course, nobody talks about the World Trade Center being ugly anymore, not the way they used to. By 2000, the towers were a quarter-century old and nobody resented them anymore, yet they weren’t sentimental icons like the Empire State Building or the Chrysler Building. They were just tall and silent and luminous and cold, and it’s strange for me now to think of how many hours I sat beneath them, watching the glass lights blink on and off, semi-mesmerized by the sparkling surface, but not really feeling very much at all. The wind is very still, for the lowercase n.

  America had an election that fall, more or less. On election night, I watched as George W. Bush began his acceptance speech. Desperate for a laugh, I switched to Comedy Central. As it happened, they were showing a Saturday Night Live rerun from 1993, the Charles Barkley episode with Nirvana as the musical guest. So I flipped right from the meltdown of the democratic system to Kurt Cobain singing “Heart-Shaped Box.” I turned it off and stared blankly at the wall for a few hours. It seemed obscene to think the nineties had ever happened. As for the election results, nobody ever found out, because a few weeks later, on December 12, the Supreme Court blocked the state of Florida from counting its ballots and appointed a new commander in chief. That isn’t supposed to happen, is it? In America? It happened.

  After 12/12, the bad news just kept coming. I flew down to Washington, D.C., to cover the inauguration for Rolling Stone, which remains hands down the most miserable assignment of my career, and I say that as someone who saw Limp Bizkit live. I shivered in the rain by the Lincoln Memorial, as Wayne Newton sang Neil Diamond’s “America” and Ricky Martin asked, “Mr. President, may I have this dance?” There was a “Salute to America’s Youth” concert, where I sat through speeches from Colin Powell and the little kid from Jerry Maguire. Jessica Simpson stomped around the stage and changed the words of her songs so they were about George Bush. Destiny’s Child performed, too. Beyoncé kept trying to rally the crowd with the chant, “When I say George, you say Bush! George! Bush! George! Bush!” The new president came out at the end to say, “Thanks to all the entertainers. Pretty darn good entertainers, aren’t they?”

  A couple of months later, in March 2001, the stock market crashed. Magazines started going out of business like going out of business was going out of style. The nineties boom was over. I was backstage at Saturday Night Live with Aerosmith, whom I was following around for a cover story; we watched from the greenroom as Tina Fey did Weekend Update. “And in the stock market this week . . .” She pulled a flask from her blazer and took a drink, bursting into tears. “Whyyyy? Why, Lord, oh whyyyy?” We all laughed. Then Aerosmith went out and did “Big Ten Inch Record.” What else was there to do?

  Everywhere I went in New York, people went out of their way to be kind and generous to me. This city had more kind people per square foot than any place I’d ever seen. The guy at my local coffee shop always called me “Please,” because he approved of my manners. “Please is a good word,” he told me. “You’re not from around here, are you?” I went to a record store in the West Village, Rockit Scientist, and bought a Television live bootleg from 1978. The dude didn’t charge me because the record was scratched. I took it home and played it all night, and of course it played fine, so I went back the next day to pay for it. “Keep it as your ‘Welcome to New York’ present,” the guy told me. “You’re new in town, right?”

  People always meant “you’re new here” as praise. They were obviously seeing something human on my surface that made them want to do me favors or give me a break, but it was obviously the trace of that girl who had loved me, molded me, shaped me into whatever I was, the girl who had died. I felt like a fraud traveling under those pretenses. I didn’t want to talk about death, so I tried to avoid the topic of being a widower and dodged the subject of my past. I got so anxious about it coming up that being around people made my head rattle.

  That Jim Morrison song gets it all wrong. People are strange when you’re a stranger, but it’s not because they ignore you—it’s when they notice you and smile, that’s when you realize you’re alone out here. Their kindness is what makes you notice how weak you are. That’s when you know it’s not the city’s fault, it’s yours. These people are in the same strange town, but they’re not letting the strangeness eat them up and turn them into robots. That’s just you.

  In my twenties, I had counted on my wife to make friends for me. She was vivacious and chatty and extroverted; she did the people-finding for both of us and pimped me out for my social life. Now I had to learn on my own, without her to guide me. The powers that be left me here to do the pimping. Connecting to other people was yet another job I didn’t know how to do for myself, tied up with all the decisions I’d always counted on her to make.

  I spent so many hours listening to music under the twin towers, but I didn’t take much of that music with me when I left and moved out to Greenpoint. The songs I listened to there were mostly ruined for me, because a chill got into them. At least I did myself a huge favor by not liking the new Radiohead album, Kid A, because when I started playing it a few years later, it wasn’t tainted by association. One song struck me as especially bad at the time—“Idioteque,” with those gauche clunky beats straining for significance. I agreed with the negative review in the British music mag Select, which singled out “Idioteque” for ridicule: “What do they want for sounding like the Aphex Twin circa 1993, a medal?”

  I love that song now. Sometimes I wonder if I would have gotten anything out of it—the high melancholy voice, the awkward beats, the way Thom Yorke yelps “This is really happening”—if I’d tried singing it with my own voice. Maybe that would have helped me hear what they were trying to say. Maybe that would have even helped me hear myself in that song. But I doubt it. I wasn’t really happening.

  I was convinced the rest of my life would be a bitter dwindle. I did nothing to suggest I deserved any better. I’d been a depressed teen, but this was different because I was old enough to know better, an adult who had loved and been loved. I was old enough to know what I wanted and to know I wasn’t making things any better for myself. Every day in New York I kept having moments of good luck, but assembling those moments into a new life was my job. All I needed was to go ahead and work it.

  FIVE

  8:54 p.m.:

  Livin’ Thing

  When I had to live by myself, I found out that I could do it. I was surprised, and in a way disappointed, that I was up to the challenge. Living alone wouldn’t ever be my first choice, but I learned to hack it. For me, it entailed a lot of late nights eating microwave soy burgers and watching Lifetime movies. I honestly hope I will never have to live alone again. Because at this point, I have seen all the Lifetime movies that have ever existed and eaten my way through 80 percent of the world’s microwave soy burger supply.

  The main difference between the burgers and the movies? Sometimes you take the first bite of a burger and you don’t know how it’s going to end.

  One of the things I love about Lifetime movies is that these ladies like slow transitions. The heroines of these movies find life as daunting
and complicated as I do, and when they get into a mess, they react the way I tend to react, by not reacting at all. They are resistant to change, to say the least. When the heroine finds out her sorority sister is a machete-wielding killer, as well as the mother of her ex-husband’s stepdaughter’s guidance counselor’s baby, she inevitably says something like “I feel like this might affect our friendship.”

  You know Poison Ivy 3: The New Seduction? Oh, stop lying, for once in your life: Yes, you do. Well. In the classic Poison Ivy 3: The New Seduction, the mild-mannered racquetball champion invites her new best friend, Jaime Pressly, to move into the family mansion, never suspecting Jaime has a few dark secrets. If you’ve ever watched any Lifetime movies, you can guess how that friendship turns out.

  Racquetball Girl eventually discovers that Jaime has:

  1. seduced her father

  2. murdered her father

  3. murdered her boyfriend by injecting him with a fatal cocaine overdose

  4. after blowing him in the pool

  5. seduced her racquetball partner

  6. murdered the housekeeper

  7. ruined her performance in the championship racquetball match by spiking her Gatorade with rum, and most heinously of all,

  8. worn her mother’s earrings without permission

  So how does she respond to this discovery? She says, and I quote, “Maybe you should start looking around for another place to stay.”

  That’s why I relate. Assertiveness can be a challenge for the doggedly lame ladies of Lifetime. They shy away from conflict. They avoid confrontation. They suck at moving on.

  The point is, sometimes we plucky little Lifetime heroines need a shove to embark upon difficult transitions. We need backstabbing, bloodletting vixens, or their philosophical equivalents, to force us to move. We need a strong personality, or a cataclysmic force, kind of like Jennie Garth in An Unfinished Affair. You’ve seen that one too—Jennie Garth has an affair with her art professor, Tim Matheson, but the cad goes back to his wife, so Jennie Garth comes up with an elaborate plan to destroy his life. She proceeds to seduce his son, make best friends with his wife, and join the family around the fireplace for a cozy game of Scrabble. While Tim squirms, Jennie spells out her word: “INVIOLATE.” Hey—fifty-two points!

  I watched a lot of Lifetime movies when I lived alone, because I was inevitably up all night, gnarled on the couch in a ragged old pair of Priority Records promotional sweatpants I’d gotten in the mail once to celebrate a Snoop Dogg record. Even if I could have gone to sleep, I didn’t see anything I wanted there or any place I belonged. There was nothing in my dreams, just some ugly memories. So I killed those nights staring at the ceiling, waiting for a sleepy feeling that usually didn’t say hello till dawn, bad blood pounding in my temples with nowhere to go except down my backbone and back up to my scalp. Sometimes that noise in my head seemed so loud it was echoing off the walls.

  I could stay in bed and sweat it out, or I could move to the couch. It’s usually a good idea to get up and find a distraction, something to drown out that noise and change the colors in your brain. Sometimes music works, but sometimes certain songs bring back the same painful memories that got you to this sorry state, so TV is often a safer bet. So what’s on at 2 a.m., 4 a.m., 6 a.m.? There’s always something on Lifetime, and it’s always a movie with a title like Shattered Trust or A Daughter’s Lies or It Was Him or Us IV: The Slapping.

  When one of those movies ended, another would begin. Lifetime ladies, they were my people, keeping me company as if we were cycle sisters via the airwaves. These gals took the same pitifully cautious approach to their pitifully cautious tomorrows as I did. When the future looks bad, they stick to the script and hope the future will go away. They’re always surprised when it doesn’t. They ignore all their looming disasters for the better part of two hours—if they noticed danger faster, there wouldn’t be a movie, now would there? The killer sorority sister has to start chasing them down the hall waving the machete before they blink and realize, “Oh wait, this is an and suddenly, isn’t it?”

  I am not an and suddenly person. I am a gradually, reluctantly, and begrudgingly person. I look before I leap, count to ten before I pop off, all that stuff. I don’t act on my first instinct, because my first instinct is usually idiotic, so I like to think things over for as long as possible. I distrust flashes of light or moments of clarity. Stealth is my jam and guile is my butter.

  How much of this comes from being Catholic? A lot, I suspect. We do not give a lot of extra points to dramatic conversion narratives. The mentality has more to do with the plodding offer-it-up everyday grind, where every day has its saints and every trivial annoyance is a spiritual exercise, giving you the chance to get a few degrees incrementally holier. (When you’re a Catholic kid, the nuns teach you that when something is annoying you, you “offer it up,” as a sacrificial gift, which admittedly is far from terrible advice to high-strung children, even if it’s just an attempt to shut up a rowdy CCD class.) It’s always funny to hear a Catholic congregation sing “Amazing Grace”— nothing could be less emotionally Catholic than “I once was lost but now am found / Was blind but now I see.” I was raised with this sort of implicit idea that there’s something showy about religious experiences that depend on emotional climaxes. I distrust grace when it’s amazing. I like my grace to be drab and ordinary and manageable. And I prefer the universe to be methodical and tedious, making its moves one at a time, with change as something I can see coming in the distance, a slow train round the bend.

  In my everyday life, I’ve always been prudent and careful. Talking myself out of half-baked impulses is a specialty. I like to feed myself soothing reminders like “better safe than sorry” or “haste makes waste” or “the reward for patience is patience” or “a no you regret is better than a yes you regret.”

  There are upsides to being wired this way: I rarely punch cops, I never kick a hole in my furniture, I am more than capable of chuckling at provocations without taking them personally. So there are upsides. But the downside means sometimes you can let entire months of your life ooze by without eating anything except microwave soy burgers or making human connections or realizing that you are ignoring a few of the and suddenlys lurking under your couch. You are becoming inviolate, which is a sad fate for anyone.

  So what turned out to be my Jennie Garth? What was the vixen that chased me off the couch and out into the world? What forced me to say “yikes, this is what and suddenly looks like” and run for my life? Karaoke.

  The first time I sang karaoke, what startled me most was that it turned me into the sleaziest villainess you could ever encounter in any Lifetime movie. It brought out my pushy, slutty, noisy side like nobody’s business. Where does all my good sense go when I sing? Out the window, that’s where. And karaoke rooms don’t even have windows. The sensible shoes I wear when I’m walking the line in my mind, they turn into stilettos, kicking holes in the walls I’ve gone to so much trouble building. Within a few songs, I go from being the Lifetime heroine to the Lifetime psycho. I might start out like Josie Bissett in Deadly Vows, or Nicolette Sheridan in The People Next Door, or even Hilary Swank in Dying to Belong. But hand me the microphone and I turn into Rose McGowan in Devil in the Flesh.

  The first time I made that leap, it was a Tuesday night in the East Village. I was dining with my friends Nils and Jennie at a fancy restaurant, Craft. I wish I remember what I ate, because people always talk about that place, but I have to admit I can’t recall a single thing I ate during the meal, not a single condiment or garnish, yet I remember every Natalie Imbruglia song I sang later that night. (Two of them! Two different Natalie Imbruglia songs! Yes, “Torn” and another one! Her second hit, “Wishing I Was There.” Google it, bitches!) Hey, we all have our different relationship to different sensual pleasures, and as much as I enjoyed the dinner, what jumps out of my memory is that we ended up going for karaoke afterward, when someone observed that we were merely a block from a (now-de
funct) Japanese karaoke bar.

  This place was swanky but no fun—the martinet karaoke drillmaster was just not giving our table any love. We waited for more than an hour for one of us to get a turn, but no matter how many pricey cocktails we ordered, there was no “Piña Colada Song” for us. The tingle of our turn coming up (our song! maybe next!) turned to rancid adrenaline in our stomach. Different karaoke jocks have different ideas about crowd control, but this house style was apparently to make one table sing for twenty minutes at a time, then exhaust another table, instead of bouncing around. It was fun watching the table in the corner do “Good Morning Starshine” and “She’s Not There,” but we didn’t even get thrown a piña-colada-flavored bone.

  Nils had obviously set his mind on karaoke satisfaction, because he rose to his feet abruptly and announced, “We are leaving.” He whisked us off to a place in Koreatown where we could get a private room, and we stayed until ten the next morning, rampaging through the songbook. There were mirrors all over the walls, a white shag carpet, brass candelabras, two vinyl couches, and a big glass table, giving off a Boogie Nights ambience of shabby indulgence, except the only drug was music—I had never sung so hard for so long in my life and all I could think the next morning, as we dragged ourselves down Sixth Avenue to our respective subway stops, doing the walk of Commodores-induced shame, was that I wanted more.

  The next afternoon, I woke up and retraced all those steps in my head, writing down the title of every song I could remember singing. Some of these were songs I’d sung to the bathroom mirror for years; others were songs I had just fantasized about singing. I sang David Bowie’s “Young Americans.” (Not so hard, if you remember most of the words.) I sang Cameo’s “Word Up.” (I was sucking wind by the chorus.) I sang “You Are So Beautiful,” which is easy since it has six words and lots of breathing room in between. I sang Neil Diamond, which felt like home—this, this, was the voice I was born to sing with. This was me, or at least some song-sung-blew version of me.