I am not what you’d call a karaoke guy, what with my voice training by Philip Morris, complete lack of rythmic sense, and dignity.
My girl, however, loves it. She comes from a family with a rich tradition of musicianship, with at least three professional musicians and one music teacher… whereas my family has a rich tradition of white-collar crime, bitter recrimination and pathetic failure. So my girl can play guitar and sing beautifully, while I can snidely point out the shortcomings of others while blithely ignoring my own.
For years, I have had to come to terms with the fact that when my girl has a half-day at work, I will arrive home to find her engaged in Winamp Karakoe, i.e., sitting in front of her computer with a mostly-empty bottle of sake, belting along with her MP3 collection.
Which is, in and of itself, harmless; even with the windows open, our neighbors across the street who like to greet the Saturday dawn with loud Narcomariachi rap music aren’t in the position to cast stones, even if I suspect they are in the position to open fire with an automatic rifle. However, after an hour or so, I do become convinced that if I have to hear T’Pau’s Heart and Soul one more time, I will invent the warp drive so I can nuke the planet Vulcan.
The downside to Winamp Karaoke is that I have learned the hard way that it is not an activity, but a symptom, the way a vague painful itch precedes a horrible herpes outbreak. If I come home to hear my girl belting, with perfect pitch, “I want your sex“, I know that she soon be fucking me… by stumbling drunkenly downstairs and querulously demanding, “I wanna go to karaoke.”
The closest karaoke bar to The American Jerk home office is a forty-five minute walk away, with seven-dollar pitchers of Miller Lite. I would say that they keep the price down by watering it, but I’ve never drank water that makes me wake up convinced that I am suffering from, or praying for the blessed relief of, a massive cerebral hemorrhage.
Which would be okay, except the bar is populated by people from the neighborhood that, on a day-to-day basis, I go out of my way to avoid eye contact with. Plus, my girl always demand that I sing at least one song, so I go with the Dropkick Murphys “Kiss Me I’m Shitfaced” (Because I usually am)… which means that locals start yelling, “Hey, it’s ‘I’m shitfaced’ guy!” when they see me around. I wouldn’t mind the title if I’d earned it by merit, or if they’d not yell it out while I’m at the drugstore buying Listerine and rubbing alcohol.
But historically there’s been no way out of it. If I try to intimate that maybe two bottles of chardonnay shouldn’t be the high-water mark for going to the bar, she gets teary and tells me she’s going anyway, and I’ll deserve it if she gets raped and killed on the way there… even though this is a girl who once, while we were playfully wrestling, broke my wrist with some kind of ninja hammerlock that would’ve made Batman want to buy her a drink and pick her brain.
I have learned over time that her issue isn’t just the singing, it’s that every once in a while she needs to hold an actual microphone and prove that she’s a better singer than other people. Because above all, my girl has a competitive streak a mile wide; there have been mornings when I’ve awakened with a horrible, aching pelvis because she decided to prove at least one person in the house was capable of causing multiple orgasms… although to be fair, to beat me, she would only need to cause one.
I had resigned myself to occasional nights at the dive bar, lost to wretched draft beer except for memory snatches of off-key renderings of Jimmy Buffet songs (“Searchin’ for myyyyiie… last chigger of REEEETCHHHH… ptew! Can I get another pitcher and a clean microph – my own damn jolt!”)… until a year ago, when technology saved my life.
“This is Rock Band,” I told her last fall. “It’s a simulation of an actual rock band for the XBox. I’ll play a plastic guitar controller, and it’s got an actual microphone that you can sing with. Whenever you get the singing urge, you tell me and we’ll play. Because I cannot face another night at that bar drinking that horrible spiked beer; whatever they put in it is damaging my brain so badly that I’m losing my grasp on basic English language… stuff.”
And it worked. We started an online band with Nightingale on vocals, and the shredding lead guitar work of virtuoso Drunky McPorno – and we haven’t been to the karaoke bar in almost a year, but… what I forgot was, when my girl gets the singing bug, she likes to sing for hours. And I am not a guitar player, so I simply cannot finger that fast for that long, hence The American Jerk Home Office Orgasm Gap of 2001 – 2008.
The problem is that Rock Band has a leaderboard, where you can see where your band ranks in comparison with all the other fake bands in the world. So instead of coming home with trepidation over Winamp Karaoke, I came to fear the cry of, “Get your guitar! We’ve dropped out of the top 15,000 bands! Work through the pain, you big pussy! You can learn to wipe with your other hand!”
Eventually she started a solo career, reaching the top one hundred singers on the Rock Band leaderboards… while Drunky McPorno’s solo career ended ignominiously with his retirement after being booed off the stage while trying to play Run To The Hills on medium difficulty. Rumor has it McPorno retired to Boston to drink beer with a straw while his wrists heal.
However, it’s been almost a year, and she’s sung all the songs and beaten all the challenges, so the shine’s off the game for her now. She’s begun humming along with her MP3s again, which means that the painful, suppurating outbreak of townie singing can’t be far behind.
So thank God that Rock Band 2 comes out day after tomorrow. Not only should it buy me another year or so out of karaoke, but it means and end to the terrible and destructive detente in the Orgasm Gap. After all, when your left hand is numb, it feels like somebody else, and that’s too golden an opportunity to pass up.
[tags]Rock Band 2, karaoke, dark humor, satire[/tags]
