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