Turn Around Bright Eyes

by Rob Sheffield

  In any age, there are social practices that seem acceptable at the time, until future generations decide they’re barbaric. Watch any old movie with a hospital scene and you’ll see doctors chain-smoke in the OR. Even in The Hunger, the David Bowie horror movie from the eighties, you can see Susan Sarandon lighting up in her white medical coat. (She’s having hot vampire sex with Bowie and Catherine Deneuve, so smoking may be the least dangerous thing she’ll do all day.) It looks bizarre to us, but are we really so different? Have we evolved? Or have we just changed our blind spots?

  In our time, there are many equivalents to the “smoking in hospitals” fad, such as “jogging on the sidewalk,” “texting at rock shows,” or “ruining a perfectly pleasant evening by saying ‘get home safe.’” I never heard anyone say “Get home safe” until the mid-nineties, then boom, it was everywhere. How did this become acceptable as a way to say goodbye? I hate when people question my ability to get from one place to another without mutilating myself. It’s tantamount to saying, “Try to get home without screwing it up like last time, dummy,” or “Farewell, for I may never see you again, given the mortality that awaits us all like a crouching panther.”

  I will never understand. But I hate “get home safe.” As valedictory clichés go, I would trade it to the seventies for “have a nice day.” Hell, I would swap it to the eighties for “later.” I have no idea why this chatty little curse got so popular, so quickly. But it did. And it’s evil.

  Certain fads can show up and seem like they’ve been around forever. It may be shocking, but the thumb-and-pinkie “call me” gesture? Did not exist before the nineties. People had been holding their phones that way for decades, yet nobody thought to wiggle a thumb-and-pinkie as a social invitation before. First time I saw it was on The Arsenio Hall Show, in 1992. (David Alan Grier, star of In Living Color, was the guest, greeting a foxy lady in the studio audience.) Then it spread until the novelty wore off. You still see it today, even though there aren’t any phones you hold that way anymore.

  I don’t know how it works, but sometimes that’s how it happens: Abnormal behavioral quirks get normal overnight. People singing along with machines, to instrumental tracks, reading the lyrics off a screen—once it might have looked sick, even sinful. Yet people fell in love with it fast, so they decided to see it as normal, the way previous generations regarded bow ties, shuffleboard, Quaaludes, or witch-burning. You go to the movies, you expect a karaoke scene, just as forties audiences weren’t fazed to see a World War II pilot light a stogie while gassing up his Tomahawk.

  Sometime soon, be it two or twenty years from now, people will stop saying “get home safe,” and then we’ll all make fun of our earlier selves for saying it. But we still haven’t realized this about karaoke. That’s one of the most glorious miracles of our time.

  NINE

  10:35 p.m.:

  99 Luftballons

  As the summer of 2001 ended, with a string of hundred-degree dog days, I was still living downtown, by the World Trade Center. Apartment 7Q felt like a dead white box in the sky, and I still felt like an alien in my steel-and-glass ice chamber. But I didn’t have the energy to move out, so I renewed my lease for one more year, effective September 1. When my hunger pangs got stronger than my inertia, I walked a block down the alley to the Thai restaurant, in a strip mall called the Excelsior Plaza, to eat in a brightly lit white room—much like the one I slept in—not even tasting the noodles, just sitting in my table next to the air-conditioning vent and listening to myself breathe and thinking, “These people are near you but they can’t hurt you. They can’t see you or hear you. It’s okay. They will go away. They will leave this room. We will all leave this room. Nobody will remember you were here.”

  The Thai place always had the Top 40 station on, usually playing something by Destiny’s Child, who were a rare sign of life on the radio. The girls sang like machines until they turned into machines, chanting “say my name, say my name” in heavy rotation. The lyrics were about paranoia and jealousy, but the music was about calming down and chilling out and not giving a fuck. The production was scientific and precise. I loved it.

  None of the machines around me seemed to function except Destiny’s Child. My time was spent rushing from one narrow metal tube to another—apartment, staircase, sidewalk, subway, street. The subway station led to a maze of underground tunnels. It could take up to an hour to find my way up to the sidewalk, or longer after dark, when they started closing off exits. I got used to feeling lost, wandering the tunnels under the World Trade Center. They had an entire mall down there, catering to other disoriented travelers looking for a way out. There was a Gap, a Body Shop, an Urban Outfitters. You knew you were close to escaping when you smelled the Krispy Kreme.

  They even had a record store, a Sam Goody. One Friday afternoon I found an old hair-metal artifact there that brought back fond memories. It was a CD by the band Blackeyed Susan, the side project by former Britny Fox singer Dean “Dizzy Dean” Davidson, absurdly overpriced at $4.99. I already had a copy at home, which I snagged for two dollars on a visit to Berkeley in 1992. But I got a sentimental rush holding that Blackeyed Susan album in my fingers, marveling at how far it must have journeyed to end up here, a bargain bin in the basement of a skyscraper. I decided I would have to come back and rescue it someday. It was September 7, 2001.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, THE neighborhood was rubble. There was a column of smoke where the towers used to be. I spent the evening at Chelsea Piers, an athletic complex that had been quickly set up as a makeshift hospital, with a bunch of other volunteers. The doctors had us form a fire line to load medical supplies off a truck. (Nobody knew these supplies would never get used; the next day, they’d all have to get loaded back onto the truck.) A cop came around to instruct us on how to identify wounded officers by their badge numbers. We sat on the floor all night with the doctors and watched CNN, waiting for the ambulances to bring the survivors. But there weren’t any ambulances, because there weren’t any survivors. Around 2 a.m., they told us to leave. There was nothing to be done.

  It was a few weeks before I could get back into my apartment; there were tanks rolling down my street. I slept on couches for a month, borrowed socks, got to know my local public men’s rooms, went into the Rolling Stone offices to work whenever they had a spare desk. Two days after the attacks, I was walking to the office in midtown, up Sixth Avenue. The streets were full of pedestrians, since there weren’t any cars or trains operating. Then, somewhere in the upper 30s, everybody began to run like crazy. I ran, too. Total stampede, blind panic. Did somebody see something in the sky? Was it a sudden noise? Literally thousands of us in the street took off, running for our lives.

  We stampeded for two blocks, and then the panic died down, as rapidly as it had begun. People started to walk again, looking around nervously, out of breath. Nobody made eye contact, obviously; there was no conversation. I never did find out why we all started running. I didn’t mention it when I got to the office. I hunted in the papers the next day, but there was nothing about any midtown scare on Sixth Avenue. It was just another moment of fear nobody would ever talk about.

  Everybody around the world knows this was a time when New Yorkers rallied together, rose to the occasion, hugged it out, etc. Unfortunately, we also got stupider, like the rest of the country except more so. We got more insane, volatile, paranoid, and unstable, which (understandably) nobody likes to remember. Two weeks later, when the 1 train was running again, I was riding uptown with a bunch of friends, planning a Saturday afternoon walk in Central Park. A one-legged homeless guy with a crutch confronted me and accused me of being one of the twin towers. (I’m really tall.) He kept clobbering me with his crutch while he yelled about how I’d fallen on the city and killed everyone. I had no room to slide away, so I just held on to the pole and pretended this wasn’t happening. Everybody on the train looked away. My friends didn’t step in because . . . well, who the hell wants to argue with a one-legged hobo swinging a cru
tch? We got off at the next stop, which took forever. Nobody said a word. My friends felt awful. I felt awful. We sleepwalked through the park until I slunk away. None of us mentioned it again, not that day, not ever.

  There were a lot of scenes that never got mentioned. We all witnessed things daily we wanted to forget. If you looked in the paper, you saw that in Washington, D.C., they were dismantling the Constitution. If you wanted to see if it was okay to go back to your apartment, the only way to find out was to walk downtown, stop at the checkpoints to show soldiers your ID, and see how far you got. (You walked down the East Side because they were more lenient letting people through in Chinatown.) Nobody knew if the air would ever get safe to breathe. Bad news was arriving faster than anyone could absorb it.

  By the time the soldiers let residents return, my neighborhood was one of the world’s most famous tourist attractions. The streets were congested with visitors, lined up for blocks to gawk and take pictures of the hole in the ground. Leaving the apartment meant putting on my dust mask and elbowing through the crowds. Sticking around meant breathing in the smoke, and knowing that the smoke was the dead. I still couldn’t see anything out of the windows, but now it was because they were caked with that smoke. There was a bike still chained to a lamppost on my street; the messenger had gone into the WTC and never come back. Every wall was plastered with pictures of the people who disappeared in the explosion, photocopied fliers with faces and phone numbers to call if you found them. Dead eyes followed you everywhere.

  It was hard to live with, day by day. It was everything I had moved to New York to get away from. I’d left Virginia to escape the shadow of death; now I lived in a shrine of mourning, surrounded by cameras. Everybody wanted to talk about death all the time. I stared uncomprehendingly at the swarms of people who came here every day, more than the tiny sidewalks could hold, eager to be part of it. I looked at them the way a hopeless drunk probably looks at the crowds on New Year’s Eve: amateur night. This is what grief looks like for normal people? How does it feel for them? Do they go home and sleep it off?

  Some of the dead faces on the walls were young wives. One husband had added her last words on the phone to the flier (“They’re telling us to leave, I have to go now”) as if it would help people identify her when they found her. “This husband could be in this crowd,” I thought. “Looking for a trace. We could walk past each other and never know it.” I tried not to look at the fliers as I walked past, breathing through my mask and feeling the smoke settle into my bones. I tried more desperately than ever to avoid the topic of my past, because if I confessed I was a widower, people changed the subject to 9/11. Now I wasn’t just reeling from the grief of a personal apocalypse; I was witnessing mass grief with no idea of how to fit into it. There were so many topics I wanted to dodge, I could barely hold a conversation.

  It was a month or so before rock shows started happening again. There was something uneasy about groups of people gathering in public, especially at downtown venues like the Bowery Ballroom, where you could smell the smoke for months. I met up with some Virginia friends who came to see the British band Clinic, but my friends got so spooked by the way lower Manhattan smelled, they turned around and drove home. Clinic came out in their standard high-concept stage costumes, wearing gas masks as a symbol of modern alienation. Poor guys, they were a little late to impress us. We’d all worn those masks to the show.

  Jonathan Richman played the Bowery Ballroom that fall, on October 12. There was a hush in the crowd, watching Jonathan on guitar with just his stand-up drummer. With no introduction or explanation, he sang a song from one of his earliest albums, “Lonely Financial Zone,” a song I’d loved as a teenage boy but hadn’t thought about in years. He sang to a silent room. “In the lonely financial zone, by the sea, I have walked under moon and stars.”

  MY FRIEND CRAIG HOSTED HIS birthday party, a karaoke bash at Sushi Desse in the East Village. The original date had been Friday, September 14; when he rescheduled for a couple of weeks later, he sent out an email with the subject heading “The Return of Irony.” But irony didn’t show up at all. For most of us, it was our first night out in public, in the city, in a crowded room, in quite a while. There was a giddy kind of release about it, and also something anxious. The way we laughed and hooted for each other’s songs was more than catharsis—it was more like hysteria. We cried sometimes, too. Everybody sang that night, including friends who never sing. The first song I did was a Neil Diamond ballad, “I Am . . . I Said.” When I got to the line about New York, which I hadn’t even remembered was in the song, people screamed so loud it was startling. A roomful of adults hollering along with “Sweet Home Alabama” sounded like group therapy.

  Obviously, everybody was trying to avoid sad songs, since the whole point of us gathering together that night was that we all needed some relief. But even the silliest songs were hitting a nerve. When the birthday boy sang “Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes,” a seventies bubblegum ditty, people seemed to go through emotional convulsions.

  I met Craig’s friend Rebecca that night, who’d been in a nineties band I liked a lot. I thanked her for some of the songs she’d written, and she made me tell her husband stories about how awesome her band was. We flipped through the songbook and she laughed about Nena’s “99 Luftballons,” the classic German new-wave antiwar song. We cracked up about what a wildly inappropriate choice that would be. So instead, we had a drink and sang a duet on Dolly Parton’s “Here You Come Again.” But a couple of hours later, and more than a couple of drinks later, the joke about “99 Luftballons” had spread all around our corner of the room. We all started daring her to sing “99 Luftballons” until Rebecca finally put in her request, though even when the bartender put it on, as the last song of the night, I didn’t think Rebecca would actually go through with it.

  She did. She was clearly nervous (and this was a pro), as people recognized the tune. Oh right, you could see it sink in. Really? This one? The song about the girl who watches her city get destroyed by bombs? Somebody’s really going to sing this? Rebecca started to jump up and down, because we were crying and laughing and clapping along. She was singing the English-translation lyrics, not the German, though most of us didn’t know any words beyond the chorus, “ninety-nine red balloons go by.” I remember feeling terrified, too. Is this bar going to get shut down? Are we going to get bombs dropped on us, right now? Then it was all over and we were standing pretty, in this dust that was a city.

  The song didn’t have any answers. But the way everybody sang along—it felt like maybe there were some answers in there somewhere.

  TEN

  10:47 p.m.:

  Church of the Poison Mind

  Every karaoke love story has a Boy George. And sometimes Boy George is a girl, which is how it goes tonight. Like so many other girls who grew up in the eighties, Ally always had a raging crush on the Boy. She daydreamed about dressing up with him, sharing his lipstick, borrowing his frocks. She mooned over his videos, studying the evolution of his hair. Tonight she gets to be him for a few minutes.

  Ever since we started hanging around in karaoke joints, Boy George has been her karaoke twin, her go-to guy. His hits with Culture Club are a perfect match for her low, throaty voice. So the first thing she does with a songbook is flip through the C’s. If she feels like rocking out, she goes for “Church of the Poison Mind.” If she feels a little saucier, she does “Karma Chameleon” or “Miss Me Blind.” If she craves a slow jam, it’s “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?” When she sings the line “Choose a color, find a star,” she is the star I find and the color I choose, the ziggiest stardust in my sky.

  If we didn’t have karaoke to bond over, we would have found something else, no doubt. Her grandparents, who have been married almost sixty years, are really into bird-watching, and Ally and I sometimes look forward to the years when we will take up birding, even though at this point we can’t tell a cactus wren from a yellow-rumped warbler from a rubber chicken. But righ
t now, karaoke is one of the places where we go to form our own culture club, which is one of the millions of things a relationship is—building a shared language out of the things that fire up your blood. Couples need as many of those languages as they can get. That’s why Ally and I spend some of our happiest moments together trying on disguises and pretending to be rock stars. Stepping into these voices and wearing them for a while—that’s one of the ways we communicate.

  Boy George might have sung about “kissing to be clever,” but everybody knows you can’t kiss and be clever at the same time. Clever can get you only as far as the kiss. Beyond that point, you’re on your own.

  ALLY OPENED UP NEW WORLDS to me—new galaxies, new solar systems, new Oort clouds and Bok globules and Eggenites. Everything looked different, seeing it and hearing it with this theoretical girl. She split the strong nuclear force holding my protons together, right down to my subatomic realms.

  My wife is an absurdly cool mix of completely girlie traits and total dude traits. On one hand, there’s her fashion sense, her love of pencil skirts, her thirty thousand pairs of shoes. On the other, there’s the side of her that resembles a nineteen-year-old boy. When we’re eating pizza, instead of tearing a paper towel off the roll, she might wipe her fingers on the roll. Once, after dinner, she took a half-empty can of soda, put a baggie over it, and fastened it on with a rubber band. Then she put the can in the fridge. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I felt like the luckiest guy in the world. I couldn’t even tell any of my male friends about this story, or it would just make them wistful.