By Matt Starr
The other night, my in-laws texted my wife: There’s this guy on The Voice from Matt’s hometown.
They texted his name and age, and my wife asked, “Do you know him?”
I said, “Yeah, I know him.”
I pulled up the clip on Twitter, and sure enough, it was him. Looked a little different but sounded the same. Voice like a rock blanket, smoothing out a stone. Scraping away the rough edges. Not perfect, or really my cup of tea, even, but compelling in its heartfelt way. He was singing a country song.
I don’t watch shows like The Voice, but my understanding of how it goes is this: There are four judges sitting in chairs. They start off with their backs turned to the stage, and a contestant begins singing. If the judges like the voice, they hit a button, and their chair will dramatically turn to face the singer.
When one of the judges smacked her button about thirty seconds into the number, it was like I was spinning around with her. Back to this bar from my early twenties. The Speakeasy was all wood and old-school fixtures and dim lighting. They’d tell you that was on purpose. To create a warm, nostalgic ambiance, but it was really so we couldn’t see how sad we all were. Maybe you were supposed to feel better drowning your misery at a place that wasn’t suffused in seedy neon, the Prohibition vibes intended to feel classier than, say, the sports bar down the road with its quarter wing nights, swarming flatscreens, and Journey cover bands. I don’t know. I didn’t feel better anywhere.
That night the guy who would later be a contestant on NBC’s The Voice was on this platform they’d fashioned in the front corner of the bar. Growling something or another into the mic. Long hair, highlight-streaked and curly. I’d seen him somewhere, but I couldn’t put my finger on it until he finished his set and ambled over and plopped down on the stool next to me.
We sat beside each other for a few minutes, sipping our beers out of pint glasses, separated by that awkward void in which someone wants to say something but doesn’t know how. I was buzzed, and by buzzed I mean drunk. He broke the silence.
“Do I know you?”
“I think we take classes together. Over at Genesis.”
“I knew it.” He snapped his fingers and we shared a laugh.
The laugh said: Ain’t it some bullshit that people get away with the things they do every day, but not us, no, we just happened to get caught when we did, and now we have to drag our sorry asses to class at eight o’clock every Saturday morning and fork out sixty bones to hear some poor underpaid social worker read off of a page that has About.com printed across the top, and if we’re lucky, if, at eleven o’clock, after all the group therapy and cigarette breaks, we blow and hum into this tiny plastic box and it comes up goose eggs, we get to come back and do it all over again?
“How’d you wind up here?” I asked, meaning the situation rather than the place. But were they really all that different?
“They got me coming home from a gig. Blew right at the limit. Can’t beat it, huh?”
I shook my head. Pretty standard stuff.
“I don’t know, man,” he continued, looking into the backbar mirror. “My dad’s a preacher. I always felt like I let him down by trying to do music instead of preaching like him. And now this.”
I’m still not sure what I did for him to volunteer this information to a stranger. But in a way, I guess I knew. Sometimes you speak truth into the darkness, hoping it won’t find its way back to the light. Or, that by the time it does, it won’t be the truth anymore.
“What about you?” he asked.
It hit me in a flash. The abbreviated whoop of the cruiser’s siren at 7:30 in the morning. Saying my ABCs backwards. The bald cop who put me in cuffs. The expression on my mama’s face.
“My dad’s dead,” I said to him.
He nodded. You don’t always have to understand.
On The Voice, across time and space, he finished his audition. Told the judges where he was from. I hit the home button.
If, after all is said and done, on the day of my judgment, if there’s even a God in the first place, if I am faced with the backs of four chairs, surrounded by a constellation of souls, an audience of faceless angels, if I sing about pain and heartache and regret and everything in between, if I belt the words until I am hoarse, if I empty my lungs, will anyone turn to listen?
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Matt Starr is from North Carolina.