Turn Around Bright Eyes (2 page)

That intimacy is what makes it such an addictive vice. With karaoke you’re really putting yourself out there. People are going to watch you and stare. But the whole culture around karaoke creates a temporary environment of total acceptance. When we do karaoke, we sing along with songs we hate. We cheer for the weirdos across the room. We high-five strangers. You dim the lights, crank the volume, and you can get away with anything.

Over the years, I’ve gotten totally obsessed. Like I said, I have a karaoke problem. But admitting the fact that you have a problem is the first step toward making it an even bigger problem.

I got obsessed with karaoke around the time I got obsessed with Ally. It’s a fact: Getting obsessed with a girl is a good way of getting obsessed with anything.

For us, karaoke is one of our shared passions, and it’s one of the ways we communicate. Ally is an astrophysicist and a glam rocker, so I always keep learning new things about the universe from her. And even after years of marriage, I still find out strange new things about this girl when we sing together. Every time we get our microphone cords tangled up, I get a little more obsessed with her.

I got into karaoke at a time when I felt like my life was a used firecracker. I was only in my early thirties, but I figured it was all too late for me. I was a miserable widower with no idea how to muddle on. The happy chapter of my life was over, and the world had run out of surprises. But it turned out my life was just beginning. I fell in love, I got married, I found a new life and a new home. Karaoke was just one of those surprises. But for me, it turned out to be a way of finding my voice. Something about it opened up doors for me emotionally. For me, it was part of coming back to life.

Right now, here in the basement of Sing Sing, Ally and I are in for the night. We’re punching in the numbers and loading up the machine for hours to come. We don’t know where the songs will lead us, what kinds of memories or sensations they’re going to trigger. But we will clutch the mike and feel the surge. If friends show up to join us here, all the better. That just means more songs. We’ll blast each other with requests and duets until they kick us out at 4 a.m. Then it’s good-night hugs and cabs. There will be friends dropped off until it’s back to just Ally and me. As soon as we get home, we’ll fix some toast with cheddar on it, before we fall asleep to dream of rock & roll.

Is this thing on? Good. Because I am. We’re here to sing. Every now and then we come together. Every now and then I fall apart.

8:09 p.m.:

Yucca Valley, California: the dead of winter, on Route 62, out in the Mojave Desert, under the stars. The parking lot of a barn-size roadhouse called the Joshua Tree Saloon. The sign outside proclaims, “Wednesday Karaoke Night.”

We’re a couple of strangers in town, but we give it a try. A booth, a pitcher of beer, a plate of fries. It’s full of mostly cowboys, bikers, local ladies, nobody under thirty. It’s hard to know who’s here for the tunes, and who’s here just because it’s the local watering hole.

The stage has a mirror ball, and a giant clown face overhead: We’re talking full-on serial-killer clown face. The karaoke DJ is a friendly young guy who resembles Billy Ray Cyrus back in the “Achy Breaky Heart” days, with muscles, a flowing mullet, a cowboy hat, and a salmon tank top. His DJ rig has a discreet microphone for him, so he can cover the vocals in case the singer freezes or loses her voice. The lady who sings “Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under?” starts giggling hysterically with fear, so he turns her volume down and takes the song himself. You get the sense he’s handled this before.

There’s a long line of folks waiting to sing, mostly the ladies. They do “Chain of Fools” and “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” and “Hell on Heels.” A silver fox named Smitty whose cowboy hat is older than I am does a lightning-fast country chestnut I’ve never heard, “The Auctioneer” by Leroy Van Dyke. A fiftyish guy who gives off that preacher vibe does a somber version of “Live Like You’re Dyin’.” “Good evening, Joshua Tree,” he says. “I think it’s about time for
you
, time for all of us, to finally learn to live . . . like you’re dyin’!” A surly gent named Grant follows that with “Lay Lady Lay.”

The song I write on my slip is “Mama Tried,” the country classic by Merle Haggard. Great karaoke pick: easy, short, fast, to the point, rousing chorus. But it’s also kind of a sacred song, so I’m nervous not to screw it up. You want the regulars to like you, to know you respect their house rules. My slip’s been in the pile for a while when the DJ comes over to get my initial, since there’s already a Rob here tonight. Another Rob? That makes me sweat a little. So I’m Rob S. now, and Ally’s decided she’s not going near the stage, since one of the older women just did this mega-hostile Miranda Lambert song about slapping the crap out of sassy young ladies who come sniffing around your man.

The table right in front of the stage is six cowboy hats, six beards, Waylon and Willie and Paycheck songs. These guys are the only hell their mamas ever raised. But the really tough patch of the crowd seems to be the fifty-something mamas, who are out for blood. They brought their own karaoke CDs, which means 1) they rehearsed all week, 2) they don’t trust the DJ to play a version that meets their standards, and 3) he knows enough to take their orders. It’s a heavy local scene. You remember in
Dogtown and Z-Boys
when the skater punks talk about their “Locals Only” surf spot? Where if you try to invade the waves, they come up to you right on the beach and hand you the carburetor out of your car? It felt like that.

When the DJ calls Rob S., I feel a sudden pang of I-hope-they-like-me tingles. I picked this song because the saloon reminded me of all those years I lived in Virginia, my Blue Ridge Mountain days. That’s where I first heard this song, learned to love it, learned what it meant. It reminds me of friends and family. I spent years learning to speak the language in the South. On the road, no matter where I go, I always seem to slip into this temporary accent I think of as “travel Southern.” The accent that says, “I’m a mellow Virginia boy, not one of those uptight out-of-towners. I have a burning desire to get along and be accommodating. I am not hassling you about how long this rental-car transaction is taking, honest. I am absolutely not from Boston.”

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
.

8:15 p.m.:

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:

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 D
O
N
OT
S
TEP ON THE
F
URNITURE
, 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.