Turn Around Bright Eyes (3 page)

What I get out of karaoke is a little weirder than mere musical competence. It’s a love ritual that keeps me coming back, craving more, because this is where the songs are. And the songs are full of stories. Every one we sing is charged up with memories of the past or dreams of the future. Every song reminds me of good times or bad times. Yet they all hold surprises.

When you sign up for a whole night of this, you can’t really predict how the music is going to feel. You begin to sing a song expecting to get one story out of it, then you get another. You pay for this but they give you that. Every tune tells me a different tale. Every song I sing makes me feel what it’s like to be a son, a brother, a lover, a husband, a fan. There are famous singers I have spent my whole life pondering, but after I pick up the mike to try their songs, I’m more fascinated by them than ever. Some of these singers are legends, yet when I slip into their songs, I feel like they’re helping me figure out some of my own basic questions. Some of these singers mean the world to me; others are just vessels for the song. One is Billy Idol. But their voices are burned into my soul.

Some of the memories I’m not so crazy about, especially the ones that involve beginnings and endings. I’m more of a “middles” guy. But I know it took some of these painful beginnings to launch me into the middle where I am right now. In a radiant, ever-expanding universe with this particular girl in it. Just us and the songs we like. Loads of those.

I have a photo of me singing karaoke, from my birthday last winter. Of course, it’s a private room at Sing Sing. As the TV monitor shows, the birthday boy is singing TLC’s classic slow jam, “Red Light Special.” That means it’s still early in the night. I am wearing a tiara and carrying a bouquet of roses. My sash says S
WEET
S
IXTEEN
. In all candor, this birthday bitch is not a pretty sight, not to mention nowhere near sixteen. I look like a holy mess and I know I must sound that way. Yet I can see how blissed out I am in this picture. I am enraptured in the song. I am powered by the red-light special. I am a singer, damn it.

I look at this picture, and I know for a fact I look ridiculous when I sing. But I look closer, and I see there is no shame in my eyes. No fear. No trouble at all. I wonder why.

8:45 p.m.:

I live in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, which is loud and crowded and frantic and my favorite place ever. It’s full of punk rockers, Polish immigrants, feral cats, three-deckers with saint statues, fliers for cat reiki, and bars that offer “Morrissey speed-dating” nights. Music is everywhere, whether it’s the Eurodisco thumping in the nightclubs or just the old dude who dances on Manhattan Avenue outside Bakery Rzeszowska, with his radio blasting doo-wop oldies from the fifties.

I moved here in the summer of 2002. I got a creaky, narrow, dusty railroad apartment on the second floor over a diner, with the sweet smell of kielbasa in the air. I took the sad-to-look-at pictures out of their boxes and put them up on the wall because I needed to do a little more crying over them and I was building a safe place to get some of that done. I’d been living in downtown Manhattan for a couple of years and I was sick of that scene. My new favorite song was Missy Elliott’s “Work It,” the kind of song you need in your corner to pump you up when you’re trying to put your thing down, flip it, and reverse it. I certainly had a lot of working it to do.

My landlady tried to teach me a few Polish phrases to get by—“excuse me,” “thank you,” “please do not punch me in the face.” She did her best but I couldn’t hack the accent. I could spend hours looking out the back window: the yard full of wild kitties, trees buzzing with birds, the laundry hanging on the lines, the auto shop on McGuinness Boulevard with the yellow Chevy Nova parked on the roof. It was a quiet place to stay up and write all night, drinking coffee until the cheerful traffic started to rumble around dawn. That’s when the birds started, too. (I had forgotten all about birds. I guess birds and I had some catching up to do.)

I thought Eckford Street would be my spot for a Bowie-in-Berlin year of isolation and rejuvenation, but it turned out to be something more mundane, a home. I walk around my block and see the Japanese pizza guy, the Yemeni deli guy who sells me coffee and tries to teach me to pronounce
mocha
correctly, the skater kids blasting Polish hip-hop. A few of us were born here, but most of us had to travel a while. This is a neighborhood people come to with a dream, whether that’s getting a job or writing the world’s greatest song or raising a kid who has a favorite Gun Club record. My big dream? I came here hoping to hit the ground running, though I would settle for just hitting the ground.

This has been my home for ten years, four thousand nights, hundreds of rock shows, two of Britney’s weddings. There is always some crazy shit going on here. If I wanted a two-foot-tall bottle of Polish vodka shaped like a statue of the late Pope John Paul II wearing his miter and carrying a shepherd’s staff, with a lamb at his feet, I wouldn’t even have to leave my fucking block.

The Saturday I moved in, I stumbled sun-dazed up Driggs and down Wythe and back up Humboldt and bought a dictionary at the used-book store that is now a cheese shop and ran into some rocker kids on the sidewalk selling homemade lapel pins for a quarter each. I bought one that had Paul McCartney’s face (I react to auguries of Paul McCartney’s face the way Greek warriors in
The Iliad
respond to the sight of a heron—it is a propitious omen from the gods) and stuck it on my sweater. I wore the sweater all day even though the sun was out and played my Walkman and told myself,
Okay, maybe now is when you should start breathing
, and for once I got the
now
part right.

There is a girl here, too. She’s my favorite thing about this neighborhood. But she wasn’t here yet, and once upon a time, I wasn’t, either.

WHEN I MOVED TO NEW
York in 2000, I was in fragile condition. I was only thirty-four but I felt old and tired. At an age where many of my friends felt their lives were just beginning, I felt mine was over. I was married early in my twenties, and then my wife died suddenly when we were both thirty-one. I was a man who had found love at a young age, and I thought I had the perfect life. I was a rock critic who got to spend every waking moment listening to the music I loved, living with another writer who shared all this music and joy with me. We felt right at home in Charlottesville, Virginia, surrounded by friends and music. It all changed so abruptly, when she died of a pulmonary embolism, in May 1997. Without her, everything was different. Three years later I still wasn’t handling grief well, or at all, and I needed to make some changes. So I left Charlottesville, where I’d lived for more than a decade, just because it was so laden with memories. I wanted to try a fresh start in another town.

I left Charlottesville, the place I thought would be my home forever, and went out looking for another one. I went to New York to start over again. Most of my friends lived there, and
Rolling Stone
, the magazine I wrote for, was there as well. I pictured myself looking out at the city lights, while the sax solo from “Walk on the Wild Side” played in the distance. I was afraid of getting trapped in the past, turning my life into a shrine to the good things that used to be alive in me. I knew the future would be a challenge, as well as an adventure, and I knew it would be difficult. But I couldn’t keep hiding forever. I needed to make changes and I needed a safe place to make them.

So I moved to lower Manhattan, into one of those creepy, griefy, deathy, white high-rise apartments that people in their early thirties move into when they’ve decided to give up on life for a while. Big windows. Shiny wooden floors. High ceilings. A lobby downstairs. No dust, no mold, no bugs, no noise from next door or upstairs or downstairs or
anywhere
. The kind of white room where astronauts go to die at the end of Stanley Kubrick movies.

I lived downtown on John Street, right under the World Trade Center. My new neighborhood was not yet known as “ground zero.” It was merely the “financial district,” a place where nobody really lived, or even set foot except for jury duty, which meant in terms of real estate it was euphemistically described as “up and coming.” The streets reeked of dashed hopes and emptied bladders, with no view of the sky and barely any oxygen in the air.

It was a bleak little neighborhood, even at the time. Getting blown up by terrorists did not sweeten its personality, believe me. Every now and then, maybe a couple of times a year, I pass through the financial district and marvel that it somehow keeps getting more depressing. They closed the Strand Bookstore Annex? Now it’s a Lot-Less Closeouts? I give up, financial district—how
could
you get any worse? Wait—the Dunkin’ Donuts is gone? Congratulations, financial district! You
did
it! And I’m so proud. Who’s a grim little hellhole? Who is? That’s right—
you
are!

Now I guess I know why my grandfather never wanted to go back and visit Ireland after he got out. When you chew your way out of a steel trap, you don’t return for a receipt.

The problem with moving is that you tend to take yourself with you, so when you get there and you’re still unhappy, you know the problem is you. To my surprise, I found that my new life in Apartment 7Q had most of the same issues as my old life. Now I lived on the seventh floor, where the view out the window was the office building across the street. I kept the blinds closed, or open—it didn’t matter. I had to turn on the Weather Channel to see if the sun was out. For the one and only time in my adult life, I got into housekeeping, and kept the apartment squeaky clean. (“Spotless,” in the words of a friend who visited, and she knew me too well to mean it as a compliment.) No dust bunnies here. I finally took off my wedding ring and kept it off. I didn’t put any pictures of my dead wife up on the fridge, because it hurt too much to see her face. I packed up the photos, the journals, the letters, the tapes, barricaded it all in the closet. I boxed up my past—and I had a lot of past.

By day, the streets were packed with pedestrians, competing for each step on the tiny sidewalks; a walk around the block was like waiting in line at the post office, except getting hit with bikes now and then.

I got obsessive about work, which became my drug of choice. When I didn’t have any magazine work to do, that’s when my mind would wander and I’d get sad. Most nights I sat on the couch, listening to records I bought on eBay while watching TV with the sound down. Like eBay, TiVo had just been invented, and I had plenty of
Designing Women
reruns to catch up on. My kitchen had a dishwasher, but since I had nobody to cook for and no appetite myself, I mainly used the dishwasher as background noise to try to lull myself to sleep at night.

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?”