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.
THINGLESS
Kyle woke up to a terrifying realization: he would start high school in two weeks and he had yet to find a thing. He hadn’t had a thing in junior high, and that had worked out okay, but El Dorado High had almost thirteen-hundred students. Kyle was sure that if he showed up on the first day of high school without a thing, he’d be swept up in the swarm and lost for good.
He’d seen it happen. Two years ago, Kyle’s next-door neighbor, Starlee, had started high school knowing exactly what her thing would be. She’d been co-captain of the dance team in junior high and spent three years choreographing, rehearsing and performing routines. Watching her lithe, precise movements during the halftime shows of junior-high football games, Kyle had marveled that Starlee, who’d begun to get her body, was the same girl with whom he’d spent so many summer nights playing Ghosts in the Graveyard. Back then, Kyle had considered himself Starlee’s equal—her better where running and choosing hiding places were concerned—but by junior high, running and hiding weren’t the yardsticks anymore. The year Kyle was in sixth grade and Starlee was in eighth, they spent every day at the same small school, and evenings and weekends in homes just fifteen feet apart, but they rarely said a word to one another.
Two weeks after enrolling at El Dorado High, Starlee was cut from the dance team. After that, she stopped doing her hair and putting on makeup. She was home from school by three-thirty most every day and emerged from the house only to smoke cigarettes on the crumbling slab of concrete at her back door. Kyle could not remember the last time he saw Starlee smile. If not having a thing could bring a creature like Starlee so low, Kyle shuddered to think what thinglessness would do to him.
Kyle had supposed that his thing—the thing he was meant to have—would manifest itself somehow, perhaps as a hand-me-down from an older cousin or a gleam in the mud of a creek bank. Such a revelation was still possible, Kyle figured, but he could no longer afford to wait for it.
For some time, Kyle had thought that the guitar would make a good thing. He liked the look of a guitar, the bowed symmetry of the body and the slight angle at which the head emerged from the neck. Guitars looked cool in a way that Kyle didn’t. But more importantly, guys who made the guitar their thing put themselves outside the usual pecking order. They didn’t sit around wishing they’d made the football team or been elected to student government. They hung out in each other’s backyards and carports, playing and singing. Kyle knew he wasn’t going to top the pecking order at El Dorado High, and he didn’t think he would want to if