And here we have the winner, Dave Reidy's "The Regular." Apologies in advance for any formatting issues. If you want to read it in hard copy, it will be published in the next issue of The Frostproof Review, along with Charles D'Ambrosio's comments about it. I'd go order a copy now - I can promise you there are other great pieces in that issue!
The Regular
Around eight each weeknight, I left work and took the El north to Whirly Gigs, a small rock club known for giving indie bands with promise their first Chicago appearance. My messenger bag, two-toned cotton sweater, jeans, and brown plastic-framed glasses identified me as a member of the creative proletariat coming straight from work. While roadies or band members wrangled cords and tuned guitars on Whirly Gigs’ tiny elevated stage, I sat at the narrow end of the bar against the matte-black wall. My stool was the furthest one from the stage, and blasé, aging indie kids ordering drinks sometimes blocked my view, but I didn’t care. I could hear everything I needed to see.
Julian held court each night in the booth closest to the stage—his booth. Guys who barely knew him approached and extended their hands for a hipster’s handshake, a curled-finger lock, tug, and release. Julian obliged each one coolly. The girls sitting with him communicated interest, excitement, or jaded lust with their eyes. Julian absorbed their attention without courting it. He was younger than I was, maybe twenty-four, out of school long enough to know the scene and young enough to be its poster boy. If my look identified me as someone with a job, Julian’s sloppy hair, denim jacket, and tub-soaked tight jeans put him outside the workaday world. What Julian looked like didn’t matter much to me. I cared more about what he could see.
When the first act took the stage, Julian would leave the adoring courtiers and his stage-side seat for the stool next to mine. One night I asked him why no one ever tried to drag him back to his booth, or pull him into the crowd to dance. He shrugged, and sipped his bourbon. “I put the word out,” he said, his eyes on the stage. “During the shows, I listen to the music, and I talk only to you.”
I’d been a regular at Whirly Gigs since moving back home from college in 1996. Julian arrived five years later. I noticed him right away, but never spoke to him—I spoke only to the bartender, Casey, and once he knew enough to give me a bourbon when I sat down, we didn’t talk much. But one night, on his way back from the bathroom, Julian stood next to my stool during the opening act of a three-act bill. The band was aping The Stooges without the punk pioneers’ energy or talent, but energy and talent wouldn’t have made them sound any better. Not to my ears.
Distaste was surely visible on my face, but Julian never looked at me. “The snare is peaking too high,” he said.
The analysis was that of an audiophile, one who lived for sound and executed unconsciously and crudely what a sophisticated computer program could do electronically and exactly. Julian heard instrument and microphone inputs as visible tracks—jagged peaks above deep, repeating fissures—stacked like a dense, multicolored polygraph display. I could hear the same images in my own head.
For the next three years, Julian and I analyzed every live set at Whirly Gigs as if it were being recorded. We spoke of sound in terms of two-dimensional images: distorted guitars crying out for compression, backing vocals that needed gating. We weren’t friends. We were something less. I’d never seen Julian outside of Whirly Gigs, never spoken to him on the phone, and it seemed, beyond our nightly meeting place, that seeing sound was all we had in common. But that was enough to make sitting alongside Julian the high point of my day.
When the headliners, whoever they were, had played their final encore, Julian would clap me on the back and head back to his booth. I would pay my tab and head for the El. As I walked to the Belmont station, I would pass a karaoke club called Starmaker’s. Because of its stock in trade, Starmaker’s—the name alone—was an insult commonly overheard at Whirly Gigs. If a singer’s performance was overly earnest or overwrought, one regular might shout “Starmaker’s” into the ear of another before heading for the bar. To associate an act with karaoke was worse than calling its sound dated, or derivative, or even boring. At Whirly Gigs, Starmaker’s was the atom bomb of on-the-spot reviewing.
Despite the hipsters’ disdain, Starmaker’s was usually packed with corporate types drinking cocktails, even when I walked past the plate-glass façade each night around midnight. Sleeves were rolled up and collars unbuttoned. Skirts were twisted from repeated shimmies across vinyl benches to visit the bathroom and the bar. In my head, I kept a rough tally of the songs I heard. “I Will Survive” and “Like A Prayer” were favorites, and bachelorette parties often tackled “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” en masse. But the real treats were the choices that confounded me for weeks on end, like the warbling older woman who performed Janis Joplin’s “Me and Bobby McGee” as if it were a Presbyterian hymn, and the guy who gave a pitch-perfect rendering of Michael McDonald’s supporting vocals on “This Is It”—a 1979 duet with Kenny Loggins—but declined to sing Loggins’ parts, reducing the song’s verses to underfed synthesized instrumental breaks. Once I heard—but didn’t see—a man singing Captain and Tenille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together.” What sort of guy, I wondered, would select that song from a binder full of more appropriate choices? Would I have been able to guess his story by the way he dressed or held the microphone or carried himself? I promised myself that if ever again I heard a man singing that song, I would get a good look at him, and buy him a round. He would deserve it, somehow.
I got off the El just near my office, just north of Downtown. In ten years at Fahrenheit Graphic Design, I had risen from the rank of junior designer to senior art director, a position I’d held for almost four years. The creative-director position had opened twice in that time. My bosses had never considered me. I had never complained.
I walked to the open-air lot where I’d parked seventeen hours before, and drove home to the edge of the city, one of only a handful of Chicago neighborhoods with a zip code that did not begin with 606. Mine was 60707, and when I looked out the windshield at the ample street parking, and the soccer fields that separated my apartment from the car dealerships and day-care centers on Fullerton Avenue, the 607 seemed about right.
My apartment was in the basement of my parents’ house, a duplex with a door in the gangway that enabled me to come and go as I pleased without waking them. The apartment had three rooms: a bedroom just big enough for a twin bed and a dresser, a bathroom with a shower but no tub, and a main room with a kitchenette on one wall. The main room was dominated by my home studio: sound-absorbing cotton panels on the walls and ceiling, four top-shelf microphones, and a Mac G5. A band looking to cut a good demo on the cheap would have killed for my setup. I sometimes wondered if failing to give musicians access to my studio was a sin on par with hoarding grain while people starved.
Though I didn’t record my own music, I put the studio to good use. When I arrived home from Whirly Gigs, usually around one or so, I scoured file-sharing networks for individual tracks of multi-track pop recordings. I imported each song piece by piece—the drums isolated from the bass, the backing vocals separated from the lead—and investigated every hiss or fumble or bleed that caught my eye. I once spent two weeks of late nights with The Clash’s “Clampdown,” searching for the reasons Joe Strummer’s guitar had been buried in the final mix and deciding for myself whether or not Topper Headon deserved his “Human Drum Machine” moniker. (To my eye, he did.) When I’d seen all there was to see in a given song, I returned to the networks, poached another masterpiece, and started breaking it down. By the time I fell into bed, it was usually around three. I caught up on sleep on the weekends.
This was my life. It was static, and less than I wanted. But with my studio, Whirly Gigs, and Julian, my life was just enough to live on.
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