Yellow

It was a summer night in the Midwest, maybe twenty years ago. I was at a bar alone, a habit that I practiced quite often back then. I loved the freedom and the small degree of anonymity found by sitting at the bar by myself. I am not chatty; I will certainly speak to someone if he strikes up a conversation (almost always a “he”), but usually the only dialogue was between the bartender and me, and that was usually a brief conversation.

“What would you like to order?”

“A Jack and Coke, please”.

“Here you go.”

“Thank you.”

“Another one, please.”

“Thank you.”

(Repeat the last two lines another 10 times or so).

The bar could only be categorized as a dive bar, which was perfect for me. That was my comfort zone. Cheap drinks. Questionable clientele. A jukebox with a full inventory of hard-luck songs. Smoke. It was chosen because of its close vicinity to my house, increasing the probability of getting home without encountering law enforcement at 2 a.m. after a long night of drinking.

I grew up in this type of bar, it was the kind of place where my parents always hung out. I was the kid standing in front of the Donkey Kong or Ms. Pacman machine with a pocket full of quarters, spending hours inflicting myself with carpal tunnel syndrome decades before I would actually hear of that condition.

That night the bar featured karaoke. Except for the performances of a few people who take karaoke very seriously, it was usually a mess. But it was a mess that is fun to witness occasionally, even considering the toll that it took on one’s eardrums. I am not particularly good at karaoke, but I can hold my own on tracks with limited vocal requirements. I can cover some Stone Temple Pilots songs, Tom Petty, a few country songs, and a few classic rock songs. The Metallica remake of Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page” was a favorite for a number of years, and I can usually growl that one out satisfactorily.

I had a friend who used to karaoke “American Woman” by The Guess Who, but would do it death metal style. It was glorious to look around at the faces of people who were expecting Johnny Cash or Hall & Oates, but instead found themselves being verbally assaulted by my long-haired friend screaming like a lunatic. Afterward, there would be an awkward microphone hand-back to the MC (ideally with a brief shriek of feedback), and he would triumphantly exit the stage to a room full of stone-faced, glaring barflies.

My willingness to participate in karaoke correlated with the magnitude of my blood alcohol content. On that night, a woman approached me who had seen me sing a few weeks ago (so much for anonymity). She recalled that I did a Tom Petty song (probably “Mary Jane’s Last Dance”), and asked if I would join her in a duet of “Stop Dragging my Heart Around”, where I would play the part of Tom and she would play Stevie Nicks. If Tom was a talentless, bald-headed drunk and Stevie was a nicotine-fueled 40-something-year-old intoxicated biker woman with a lisp. I was many Jack and Cokes in and felt like this was a reasonable request and would definitely go over well, so I agreed.

She put in the request with the MC. A few more people performed and then it was our turn. I may have done a shot of Jägermeister to loosen up the ole’ vocal cords a bit. I felt a certain degree of pressure because I wasn’t that familiar with the song, and if I screwed up, I would embarrass us both.

I recall (or imagine) that it was fairly well-received. We got the usual polite spattering of applause and I returned to the bar to continue working on emptying the bottle of Jack that was on the shelf above the cash register. I wasn’t too worried if I did finish it; I knew from experience that there was always another bottle somewhere in the bar. No respectable (or even disrespectable) bar ever runs out of Jack Daniels, it has never happened in the history of drunken mankind.

There was a guy with a Cubs hat and a blond beard a few seats down who was also flying solo. I noticed he was looking through the white binder of karaoke songs. He filled out a slip of paper, turned it in, and a few songs later, he was called up. He started singing a song that I wasn’t too familiar with at the time, Coldplay’s “Yellow”. I had heard it on the radio before, but I don’t think that I actually knew who sang it. This song is a pretty difficult one to sing, because the lead singer (Chris something or another, the guy who married that actress and named their kid Apple or something ridiculous. No, I’m not looking it up for this story, it barely matters) hits a lot of high notes.

I felt the need to use the men’s room and made my way to the back where the restrooms were located. After I finished, I took a path to the bar that brought me closer to the stage. The bearded guy was still singing. He looked down and made eye contact with me. He gave me a smile and a visible nod and kept singing. I smiled slightly, nodded back, and returned to my stool.

I had a few more drinks, and then suddenly I felt like I had reached that point where I needed to leave. There is a tilting point where I transition from being comfortably, peacefully drunk to unpredictably drunk. The latter, as you may have guessed, results in unpredictable behavior, and any number of unfortunate, regrettable outcomes may occur. Failing to hit the kill-switch at this juncture would be a big mistake, but one I routinely made back then.

As I finished my last Jack and Coke, I felt a sense of euphoria that only drinking a lot of whiskey in a dark dive bar can inspire. It is the depths of dysfunction that this was the setting that triggered my happiness, but it did. I was drunk, I sang a song that didn’t result in humiliation, and I connected with a stranger in an odd, indescribable way that I still remember decades later. It was like maybe we were brothers in a desperate, empty, misfit social circle, where we communicated solely by alternately singing Tom Petty and Coldplay songs. Maybe he was on the brink of white trash euphoria like I was, and we recognized it in each other, and that nod was the acknowledgment of this kinship.

I over-tipped my bartender and made my way to the door.