It was a rainy, unseasonably cool evening in the bar downtown. Pain was in the air, you might even say. It was the kind of night where you didn’t look anyone too closely in the eye. We were in Indiana. We were in the shadow of Chicago, of the University of Notre Dame, of Michigan, and of crop life that looked so relatively beautiful, compared to us.
As usual, it was really easy for me to tell who was into me and who wasn’t. Then again, some people were just in there going through the motions. Some of the girls working there achieved poignant, extended smiles, that even seemed a little genuine. Some seemed nervous. We were all dispatching from our own corner of zodiac, of size and shape, but on this night, these things seemed pronounced, with no prevailing method of unity and solidarity apparently emerging too clearly.
The bar was having karaoke. The one girl was there, too, who like, peeled the paint off the walls, doing country songs, and sh**. She was really good, I have to admit. She was really attractive, too, and really nice, to the point of accepting me hitting on her with the sort of congeniality that comes with doing what you love and loving what you do.
The time eventually came for me to go up and sing. I chose “Ft. Worth Blues” by Steve Earle. I was dressed in a royal blue windbreaker and New Balance sneakers — the cosmological antithesis of Steve Earle, roughly.
Before singing, I made a brief announcement into the microphone.
“I’m going to attempt to sing a Steve Earle song other than peckerhead road,” I said. “I hope nobody has a stroke or anything.”
A couple people laughed, nervously. I heard a lot of grumbling. I saw a lot of people talking to each other, seriously. It never ceased to amaze me how sensitive people around here were, especially since they usually seemed so unscrupulous in acting like I creeped them out and denying me positions as bank teller and pest control technician.
I started singing, kind of nervous.
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