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Andrew Hamlin,
Seattle, WA, USA
My fantasy curtain comes up on "Left In The Dark" karaoke. I’m wearing the Marie Antoinette outfit I wore back at Halloween ’94 (can I swap the six years for the sixty pounds?), maybe though I’ve thrown that wig into the audience, or stomped on it, around the time of that second, agonizingly-whispered "But don’t tell me now, I don’t need any answers tonight." And I’ve warned the people important to warn, i.e. the wives or girlfriends or former girlfriends of my male friends, all present of course, that "I basically get up and have a ten-minute nervous breakdown onstage for ten minutes. It’s very exciting." After couple-three whiskey Cokes of course—people drink at karaoke for exactly why you imagine—and I’ve always wanted a microphone stand onstage so I can wield my drink in one hand lean on that mike with the other elbow—though it’s critical also to, if not belly-crawl, at least bend and grovel a bit, towards that foaming climax. So towards that end I’m weeping like I sometimes did before I started meds and like I do in unguardable moments now that I can’t afford any new meds until September. I think it’s appropriate to muddle your voice through tears through that second "But don’t tell me now I don’t need any answers tonight," like right where I howled, at the end of "Don’t Do Me Like That"’s bridge when karaoke was a going concern in my life and Wal and me did a "Paradise By The Dashboard Light" which brought me up even if it didn’t bring the house (I played Meat and Phil while Wal, a former pro in his native Hawaii, played Ellen Foley). Oh, and the world has or more likely had, a video record of my "Bat Out Of Hell," from a private karaoke birthday party, me sweating from lack of dress and insufficient alcohol and the awareness only slightly cut by insufficient alcohol that I’m swaying like an idiot during that intricate racing of a huge heart motorcycle guitar describes on the video-less karaoke disc as "instrumental section." I wanted to scamper over furniture you know, destructive testing on the couch springs, but hey, these were my friends and it wasn’t even my house, or my birthday. My dear old now-ex-best friend, the one who’d go on to ruin my 30th birthday and then take up with my girlfriend about a month later (they’re getting married), remarked, "Amazing…indistinguishable from the record." You needed blood from a rock quarry to get anything resembling a compliment out of this guy, and even then he never knew when he bled back.
I accepted Bat Out Of Hell as far-out ahead the greatest rock and roll album of all time (okay so Astral Weeks, Rubber Soul, Rocket To Russia, Trout Mask Replica, Marquee Moon, 96 Tears Forever: The Dallas Reunion Tapes, Every Picture Tells A Story, and Skullduggery nip at its wings) during the 1989-90 school year [look up Desert Storm for god’s sake] courtesy a tape my editor brought into the office, a cassette which of course seems to gleam in memory, though factually this was simply from harsh white lamplight over and around the layout tables. I re-played and re-played until everyone else in the office was sick of it, clearly (though they never asked me to drag it out of the player midside—only Mrs. Miller achieved such singular honor) and it supplied underpinning for everything that needed understanding, not "merely" relationships or my unsurprising chronic inability to instigate same but also such advanced concepts as my need to purchase, simply because it was there, a turntable/speaker set up in medical blue and trimmed, on the turntable and elsewhere, in streaked blurps of a glow-in-the-dark substance. Many, many pizzas I chomped (the sixty extra pounds still ten years up the road) as Meat came crawling back like a sinner before the gates of heaven, played varsity tackle, then parked by the lake. During the constant all-nighter hum to finish the school year I remarked to Edward, when we were alone in the office on one leg of the all-night, "It invites you to consider what life would be like if you’d married the first person you ever dated"—referring of course to the O. Henry neck-twist in "Paradise By The Dashboard Light"’s last minutes. "I thought about that very seriously," he said, and seriously. "Wondered a lot what life would have been like if I’d married D."—D. being, apart from the obvious, the mother of possibly the only child Edward will ever father. Edward lives with his wife and his girlfriend now, and yeah sometimes I find that unfair.
But that is exactly why we need Jim. To remind us how much is always under the surface.
Break a leg baby and Amen!
Andrew Hamlin
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