Читать книгу Captive Audience - Dave Reidy - Страница 5

THE REGULAR

Around eight each weeknight, I left work and took the El north to a small club called Whirly Gigs. While roadies and band members wrangled cords and tuned guitars on the club’s tiny elevated stage, I sat at the narrow end of the bar, my messenger bag, two-toned cotton sweater, jeans and brown plastic-framed glasses identifying me as a member of the creative proletariat. My stool was the furthest one from the stage. Blasé, aging indie kids ordering drinks often blocked my view, but I didn’t care. I could hear everything I needed to see.

Julian held court each night in the booth closest to the stage. Guys who barely knew him would approach and extend their hands for a hipster’s handshake, a curled-finger lock, tug, and release. Julian obliged each one coolly. The girls sitting with him communicated interest, excitement, or jaded lust with their eyes. Julian absorbed their attention without courting it. If my look identified me as someone with a job, Julian’s sloppy hair, denim jacket, and tub-soaked tight jeans placed him outside the workaday world.

When the first act took the stage, Julian would leave the adoring courtiers and his stage-side seat for the stool next to mine. One night I asked him why no one ever tried to drag him back to his booth, or pull him into the crowd to dance. He shrugged, and sipped his bourbon. “I put the word out,” he said, his eyes on the stage. “During the shows, I listen to the music, and I talk only to you.”

I’d been a regular at Whirly Gigs since moving back home from college in 1996. Julian arrived a few years later. I noticed him right away, but didn’t speak to him at first—I spoke only to the bartender, Casey, and once he knew enough to give me a bourbon when I sat down, we didn’t speak very often.

One night, on his way back from the bathroom, Julian stood next to my stool during the opening act of a three-act bill. The band was aping The Stooges without the punk pioneers’ energy or talent, though energy and talent wouldn’t have made them sound any better. Distaste was surely visible on my face, but Julian never looked at me. “The snare is peaking too high,” he said. His analysis was that of an audiophile, of one who lived for sound and executed unconsciously and crudely what a sophisticated computer program could do electronically and exactly. Julian heard instrument and microphone inputs as visible tracks—jagged peaks above deep, repeating fissures—stacked like a dense, multicolored polygraph display. I could hear the same images in my own head.

From then on, Julian and I analyzed every live set at Whirly Gigs as if it were being recorded. We spoke of sound in terms of two-dimensional images: distorted guitars crying out for compression, backing vocals that needed gating. We weren’t friends. We were something less. I’d never seen Julian outside of Whirly Gigs, never spoken to him on the phone, and it seemed, beyond our nightly meeting place, that seeing sound was all we had in common. But that was enough to make sitting alongside Julian the high point of my day.

When the headliners, whoever they were, had played their final encore, Julian would clap me on the back and head back to his booth. I would pay my tab and head for the El. On my walk to the Belmont station, I would pass a karaoke club called Starmakers. Because of its stock in trade, Starmakers—the name alone—was an insult commonly overheard at Whirly Gigs. If a singer’s performance was overly earnest or overwrought, one regular might shout “Starmakers” into the ear of another before heading for the bar. To associate an act with karaoke was worse than calling its sound dated, or derivative, or even boring. At Whirly Gigs, “Starmakers” was the atom bomb of on-the-spot reviewing.

Despite the hipsters’ disdain, Starmakers was usually packed when I walked past its plate-glass façade. Inside, sleeves were rolled up and collars unbuttoned, and skirts were twisted from repeated shimmies across vinyl benches to visit the bathroom and the bar. In my head, I kept a running tally of the songs I heard on my nightly pass-bys. “I Will Survive” and “Like A Prayer” were favorites, and bachelorette parties often tackled “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” en masse. But the real treats were the choices that confounded me, like the warbling older woman who performed Janis Joplin’s “Me and Bobby McGee” as if it were a Presbyterian hymn, and the guy who gave a pitch-perfect rendering of Michael McDonald’s supporting vocals on “This Is It”—a 1979 duet with Kenny Loggins—but declined to sing Loggins’ parts, reducing the song’s verses to underfed synthesized instrumental breaks. Once I heard—but didn’t see—a man singing Captain and Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together.” What sort of guy, I wondered, would select that song from a binder full of other choices? I promised myself that if ever again I heard a man singing that song, I would get a good look at him and buy him a round. He would deserve it, somehow.

Getting off the El just north of Downtown, near the building where I spent my days working as a senior art director for Fahrenheit Graphic Design, I would walk to the open-air lot where I had parked my car seventeen hours earlier, then drive home to the edge of the city, one of only a handful of Chicago neighborhoods with a zip code that did not begin with 606. Mine was 60707, and when I saw the soccer fields, car dealerships and day-care centers on my stretch of Fullerton Avenue, the 607 seemed about right.

My apartment was in the basement of my parents’ house, a duplex with a door in the gangway that allowed me to come and go as I pleased. I had a bedroom just big enough for a twin bed and a dresser, a bathroom with a shower, and a living room with a kitchenette along one wall. The living room doubled as my home studio, which consisted of a Mac G5, a digital mixing board, four top-shelf microphones, and sound-absorbing cotton panels on the walls and ceiling.

Each night, after arriving home from Whirly Gigs, I would stay up until three or four in the morning scouring file-sharing networks for individual tracks of multi-track pop recordings. I imported each song piece by piece—the drums isolated from the bass, the backing vocals separated from the lead—and investigated every hiss or fumble or bleed that caught my eye. Once, I spent two weeks of late nights with The Clash’s “Clampdown,” searching for the reasons that Joe Strummer’s guitar had been buried in the final mix and trying to decide for myself whether or 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.

We spent the next three hours analyzing each track of At Budokan’s first two songs, finishing more than half the bottle of bourbon between us. As the backing vocals of “Come On, Come On” melted into the noise of 14,000 cheering Japanese, Julian said, “Let’s stop there. I could look at tracks all night, but I don’t want to use them all up, you know?”

My first thought was that Julian was making an excuse to leave, but he poured himself another drink and sat back in his chair. It occurred to me then that in stopping our analysis after only two songs, Julian was creating a reason to come back.

“We don’t have to stop if you don’t want to,” I said. “I’ve got other albums.”

“Track by track?” Julian asked.

I nodded.

“Can I see?” Julian said, leaning forward toward the monitor.

“Sure.” I let go of the mouse and Julian took it with his right hand. As I poured more bourbon into my mug, I took stock of the situation. Julian was in my house, on my studio computer, relishing the audio I had collected, showing no sign of leaving and every indication he intended to return. I had lost Whirly Gigs, but had gained something more of Julian. For the first time I could remember, I felt like my life could do more than keep me going: it could fill me up.

Julian scrolled through all my downloaded tracks, his heavy-lidded eyes glowing green in the monitor light. “The Clash,” he said with an approving nod. “Blur. Pavement. Nirvana’s In Utero sessions?”

I nodded.

“The original Albini sessions?”

I nodded again.

“Not sure how you found those,” Julian said. “Don’t want to know.”

I sipped my bourbon. Even if Julian had wanted to know how I got the In Utero sessions, I wouldn’t have told him.

“Journey?” Julian asked. It looked like he was trying not to sneer.

I felt blood flooding the vessels in my face. I could have played off having Journey in my collection as a hipster’s slumming lark, or cited the difficulty of finding any track-by-track recordings on the web—a sort of beggars-can’t-bechoosers defense. But the truth was that finding Journey’s “Faithfully” had been the culmination of a yearlong search. By coincidences of vocal quality and range, I could sing just like the band’s lead singer, Steve Perry.

The previous week, in the privacy of my studio, with my eyes closed and the mike in both hands, I had belted out “Faithfully” with the full band (minus Perry) playing in my headphones. When I was done, I moved my own vocal track, a horizontal, hot pink image of intermittent sound, just below Steve Perry’s neon green original and magnified both one-hundred times. At that size, a vocalist’s performance looks like impossibly steep summits and unfathomable glacial crevasses between flatlands of silence. I spent an hour comparing the visual representations of the two vocal tracks, noting tiny discrepancies and savoring the fine details of each similarity.

In another situation, the whole thing might have made for a funny story. But given the abomination we had witnessed at Whirly Gigs a few hours before, I had no intention of appearing to be in league with karaoke nation.

“Journey are people, too,” I replied, trying to laugh off Julian’s question. I took a sip of my drink. When I saw he was still waiting for an explanation, I said, “I was desperate for some new tracks, so I took them. I checked out the drum track and the lead guitar track and called it quits.”

Julian opened his mouth in surprise. “You downloaded ‘Faithfully’ and didn’t even give Steve Perry a look?”

As Julian turned back to the monitor with the mouse in his hand, I said, “No! Don’t!”

He must have thought I was putting him on, because he smiled and kept going. When he started playback, the neon green vocal track was still silenced. The hot pink vocal track was not.

My voice sounded like Perry’s but, unmixed and unmastered, the vocal was obviously not the original. Julian looked confused at first, but when the furrows on his brow began to flatten out, I couldn’t look at him anymore. I covered my eyes with my left hand and swiveled my seated body toward the stairs. The idea of singing in front of people made my hands shake, but I would have rather performed at a packed Carnegie Hall than witness my recorded voice being absorbed by this audience of one.

After Julian stopped playback in the middle of the second verse, I heard him picking up the mouse and putting it down over and over again like a bull pawing the dirt. I turned back toward him when he stopped scrolling and started clicking. At the time, I believed that Julian did what he did next in solidarity, so that I would have company in being embarrassed. Now I think that he probably did it to one-up me, to show that if there was a performer in the room, someone with talent and charisma, it was him. He opened the individual tracks of “Do You Feel Like We Do?” from Peter Frampton’s Frampton Comes Alive! and put on the headphones. Then he picked up the microphone and held it at his side.

I wheeled over and checked the computer monitor as the song began. “Julian, you’ve got Frampton’s vocals set to play back in your headset.”

“I know,” he said.

I figured Julian was using the original vocals as a crutch, either to help him remember the words or hit the right notes. But when the thin black line swept over the image of Frampton’s lead vocal, Julian didn’t sing. I looked at him, then scrolled through the two-dozen tracks. When I got to the lead-guitar track, I saw what he had in mind. I just didn’t believe he could do it.

Julian kept the mike at his side throughout the intro, three verses, four times through the chorus, a short guitar solo and a keyboard solo. Only he could hear the music. I watched it all on the monitor. Then, after six minutes, he began to imitate the sounds of Frampton’s most famous guitar solo. A skilled amateur with the right equipment could have played the solo note for note on the guitar. But Julian was playing it with his voice. With each passing second, Julian’s blue vocal track mirrored the size, shape and pattern of Frampton’s silenced red guitar track, like a string of genetic material being gradually cloned.

For the second movement of his solo, Frampton had employed a talkbox, which compresses the notes from an electric guitar and sends them as vibrations through a piece of plastic tubing taped alongside the lead-vocal microphone. By taking the tubing in his mouth and shaping the sound, Frampton had created the aural illusion that his guitar was singing to the live audience. Julian created the same effect without a talkbox, and without a guitar.

Then Julian dove into the fiery concluding movement, bending the notes through mouth shapes that ranged from the oval to the trapezoidal. His Adam’s apple pulled almost out of sight on the high notes and descended into view only when he approached the depths of his range. Another person giving voice to Frampton’s notes with a series of “no,” “nare,” and “wah” sounds might have aped the sort of histrionics that traditionally accompany guitar heroics. But Julian kept his eyes open, his hands on the mike, and his performance free of air guitar.

At the end of the song, Julian tore off the headphones and leaned in toward the monitor. “Let’s give it a look,” he said.

The discrepancies between Julian’s vocals and Frampton’s guitar were greater than those between my vocals and Steve Perry’s, but smaller than they might have been had Julian played Frampton’s solo on an instrument. His precision astounded me.

When we were done analyzing the visuals, Julian got up to leave. I didn’t want him to go.

“Wait,” I said. “You should do that next week.”

Julian looked at me and sat back down. “What?” he asked.

“Sing the guitar part of some song at Whirly Gigs. On Karaoke Monday.”

He laughed through his nose, shook his head and stood up again. “I don’t think so.”

I stood up with him, wobbling a bit. “Think about what a great last stand it would be! A karaoke crowd wouldn’t know what to do with a performance like that.”

Julian looked at me as if I were losing my mind or, at the very least, too drunk to drive him to the El. I bent over the console, took the mouse in my hand, clicked once, twice, then double clicked. Cued to its final minute, “Do You Feel Like We Do?” erupted through the speakers with Julian’s vocal track in place of Frampton’s guitar. As accurate as they were, Julian’s unmixed notes sounded ridiculous backed by the instruments recorded live at San Francisco’s Winterland in 1975. Julian smiled and we both laughed out loud, though our laughter was nearly drowned out by the playback. He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed, and I wrapped my left arm around his waist and pulled him toward me.

Then the basement door opened.

“Brian?”

Julian and I pulled apart immediately.

“Brian, it’s three in the morning,” my mother said. “Can you keep it down?”

“All right,” I said.

As I turned the volume down, my face flushed. I hadn’t called her mom, and she hadn’t called me son, but there could have been little doubt in Julian’s mind to whom that voice belonged. Her tone and our dynamic said it all. Now I did want Julian to leave, not because of anything he’d said or done, but because he had seen me as I really was.

With my head down, I grabbed my car keys. Julian, getting the message, picked up his keys and wallet from the console and pushed them into the front pockets of his jeans. Then he followed me out the door and to my car.

For the first few miles of the drive to the El station, we were silent.

“It’s not a big deal, you know,” he said, eventually. “Living with your parents, I mean. A lot of people I know do it. And you’ve got such a great setup down there! I wouldn’t ever want to move—”

“Thanks, but can you just—?” I tried to smile through my shame, but came up short. I did manage to exhale and start over. “Thanks.”

The incident with my mother wasn’t even my largest source of embarrassment. I could still feel my hand on Julian’s belt, grabbing it and pulling him toward me. At the thought of Julian replaying the corresponding sensation in his own head, I wanted to make a deep, exhausted, guttural sound that would have forced my tongue out of my mouth. But I had to swallow that urge for another mile or so.

I rolled to a stop in front of the station stairs, put the car in park, and kept my eyes straight ahead. I was aware that this would probably be the last time I saw Julian, but I didn’t want to look at him.

“I’ll be over tomorrow,” he said. “Around eight. We’ve only got a week to put this thing together.”

It took me a moment to realize that he was talking about performing at Whirly Gigs.

“They’re going to hate us,” Julian said, smiling. Then he clapped me on the shoulder blade with his left hand, got out of the car, and closed the door behind him.

The next night, we found a song worthy of Julian’s talent. Over the next five evenings, we put Julian’s rehearsals up against the original lead guitar track of Cream’s “White Room,” noted each difference, and honed his rendition into a precise sonic imitation.

In spare moments at work, I laid out a graphic treatment to accompany Julian’s performance. When I had leaded and kerned the type to my satisfaction and synchronized text to sound, I burned the finished product to a DVD. If Julian’s voice-guitar would be the blow to the gut of karaoke nation, I imagined my graphics would dig the knuckles deeper.

On the final night, after rehearsing until almost four in the morning, I asked Julian if he wanted to crash at my place instead of heading home. He declined. I offered to drive him home or to the El. He said he had money for a cab, slapped me on the back, and left.

The following Monday, we walked north from the Belmont station toward Whirly Gigs. When we approached Starmakers, I looked away, as did Julian. But there was no way to avert our ears. A woman half in the bag and half a measure behind the accompaniment was singing Billy Joel’s “Only The Good Die Young.” She didn’t sound young, but she was certainly dying up there.

A few paces after the woman fell out of earshot, I voiced the question that had been on my mind the whole trip up here.

“What are we doing?” I asked.

Julian stopped and squinted at me. “What do you mean?”

“If you go up there and do this tonight, are we any different than that woman in there? Sure, you’re doing the guitar, not the vocals, and you’re better than she is, but what we’re doing is still karaoke—at a karaoke night, on a karaoke stage.” I lifted my palms and smiled hysterically. “I might as well get up there and sing ‘Faithfully.’ Would it be any different?”

Julian nodded, turned, and resumed his march toward Whirly Gigs without saying a word.

“Julian,” I said, walking after him. When I put my hand on his shoulder, he whirled around, knocking it off with a windmill-swing of his right arm. I flinched and gave a shallow, startled gasp. I recognized the look in his eyes, having seen him give it to bands with no talent, women who couldn’t dress, and men who wouldn’t leave him alone. It was disgust. He took a breath and ran his fingers through his hair, seeming suddenly aware that he was in public.

“Look,” he said. “You helped me find my mistakes and fix them, and you did the graphics. But I do the performing. So I guess I don’t need you anymore.”

He said the words matter-of-factly, with only the barest hint of malice, but they struck a heavy blow, and pulverized the notion that Julian and I were somehow in league together.

When I made no reply, Julian started walking. I let him get a half-block ahead, then followed him. The moment wasn’t mine anymore, but I still couldn’t bring myself to miss it. Besides, I had nowhere else to go.

I took my usual seat at the bar. Casey arched one eyebrow, poured me a bourbon, and handed it to me without a word. Julian was talking to the karaoke DJ, punctuating the rhythms of his speech with small movements of the DVD case he held in his hand. The DJ nodded his assent to whatever Julian was saying, took the DVD, and went backstage. Julian sat on the stool closest to the stage and turned his back on it.

Julian’s regular booth was occupied by two Korean couples, laughing loudly and speaking in their native language. They were surrounded by casualties of what appeared to be a sizable after-work happy hour that had moved north from Downtown. A man from the happy-hour crowd guided an unsteady woman by the elbow to a spot a few feet away from my stool and proposed, in a whisper he probably thought was discreet, that she leave her husband for him. She demurred, citing the man’s “sexual problem.” I cleared my throat a few times to get them to move away, but they didn’t.

To kick off Karaoke Monday at Whirly Gigs, one of the Korean women performed a stunning rendition of Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest 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 advances. As I approached, the guards stiffened.

“Excuse me,” I said, pointing at the binder on the table. “Can I borrow that?”

“Suit yourself,” the woman next to Lisa said.

I picked up the binder and a stubby half-pencil and brought them to a table near the stage. I flipped to the Fs, found “Faithfully,” and jotted its alphanumeric code on a white slip of paper. Then I mounted the stage, handed the paper to the DJ, and waited my turn in the wings.