Concrete Seconds

“C’mon Rory. You know how tight money’s been, and Rose is on my ass about every little thing since I got laid off,” Liam takes another sip of the beer that I bought him while he continues to try to squeeze pennies out of me. He’s dressed in his normal ratty band shirt, dad jeans and black hoodie even though I told him the bar was business casual.

“Why would girls talk to us when you show up wearing that shit? This is Neon Bar, man, not Paddy O’s.” I vigorously brush lint off of my pressed button down and scan the place. Neon signs that say things like good vibes only litter walls that are coated in fake green leaves. Two blonds laugh at the chic granite bar, margaritas begging to be refilled. I want to be the one to offer to fill them, in more ways than one. But what does it say about me if my wingman has what looks like an avocado stain on his chest?

“Dude, I’m telling you. You do this for me, and we’ll both be so rich you’ll forget you were ever single.”

I honestly can’t believe he of all people would stoop to this. He’s heard me complain for years about how I’m fucking done being a guinea pig.

I shake my head, “get Shane or Mike to do it. Or, I don’t know - ask your kids or something.” The fucker shat all over my night the moment he showed up, and now he’s just rubbing it around. He wants me to test out his app. He only thought about making the app in the first place because I’m his friend, and thought I’d do him a solid. I peek back over at the blonds. One of them is shaking the ice around, trying to garner one more sip of her drink.

“No, no I can’t!” Liam says, “It’s gotta be the best option for consumers out there if we’re gonna do this for real, and to make it the actual best we need—“

“Seriously Liam, drop it.” I’m stern about it, and he throws up his hands. “All right, all right.”

I’m the worst singer in the world. It’s so bad that I was clinically diagnosed with severe tone deafness when I was six. The choir teacher would have me wait in the hall while she taught my section their parts, because she was scared I’d confuse everybody if I tried to join in. She asked my mom to drop me off to school an hour early so she could work on pitch matching with me. It didn’t work.

When I hear music I feel like I’m on a different planet. It’d be like if an American suddenly woke up in Tuvalu, or another country they’d literally never heard of, and all the street signs were in Tuvaluan. That’s how I feel when I actively listen to music. I can ignore it good enough when it’s on in the background. Forget about trying to sing it.

And I had but all forgotten about trying to sing it after that year in first grade chorus. But then after I graduated college, I was flat broke and up to my knees in debt and I saw an ad for a job on craigslist. Wanted: Tone Deaf Worker. So I applied.

The interview was pretty straightforward. It was in a rental unit of a commercial office building that was mostly vacated, except there was a freelance podiatrist on the level below. They had some munchkins and a box of joe from Dunkin’ in the waiting room, where I waited for around fifteen minutes. Then I was called and escorted into a sterile, fluorescently lit room. There were three people who all looked so similar I forget which one wore the pantsuit and which one had glasses on the tip of their nose, so maybe they all had glasses and pantsuits. They had me pick three songs and sing karaoke.

I have a long and hard history with karaoke. I am banned from a local bar to this day. The owner said my tone and song choices subconsciously aggravated the patrons and caused bar fights. So I had kind of sworn it off, but I figured this job could pay good money, so why not pick up the old microphone once more?

I sang Everywhere by Fleetwood Mac, followed by Build Me Up Buttercup and Sweet Caroline. All classics of mine. It was sort of hard to get into it though, what with the lighting, and the stoic pantsuit/glasses people behind their card table. But I must have done something right, because I became an app developer after that. That was my official title. I didn’t code or anything. I just went into a lot of fancy tech buildings and sang for lanky engineers. I’ve only ‘developed’ one type of app. It’s that one where you hum a song into your phone and the app tells you what song it is.

There’s a surprising number of companies that have apps that do this. For big names, there’s Shazam, Google, or Amazon. But then there’s lesser known applications like NameThatTune, SongGuesser, earWormdigger, TongueTipper and iForgetTheSong, just to name a few. And they all paid handsomely. I haven’t had to job search since I found that craigslist ad. I guess word of mouth has made me the guy. Because my voice is so bad, these engineers think that if they can create an app that can guess the correct song, even when it’s sung by the worst singer in the world, it’ll be foolproof. But the truth is that none of these apps really work. They’ve all still been produced and released even though not one of them have been able to figure out what I’m singing when I do my go-to stumper. It’s called Concrete Seconds by a band named Pinback.

I got burnt out and decided to quit a year and a half ago. I got tired of all these tech bros and app developers poking and prodding at me. I also think I may have developed vocal nodules, because it hurts to sing the high notes now. I have enough savings and investments where I likely don’t have to work another day in my life. When people ask what I do for a living, I tell them I was a professional singer. They ask if they’d know any of my work and I say probably not. The conversation usually ends there.

The girls are now looking around the bar, one of them twirling a bleached lock of hair, clearly wondering why no one has asked to buy them a drink yet. It’s killing me.

“I’m just saying, Rory.” Liam’s still on this. “We could really do this! You’d actually have ownership of this one. It’ll be me and you - 50/50.”

“Fuck, Liam. I told you, I’m done with that shit. I don’t want to be the guy with the terrible voice anymore! I want to, like, actually do something that helps the world. Those apps are probably the biggest waste of server energy out there. They probably account for, like, 3% of CO2 emissions.” I take a swig of my Heineken.

“No way, dude! Do you know how annoying it is to be singing a song and have no idea what it is?! We will be saving lives, man.”

I rolled my eyes, “If I had a beer for the number of times I have heard that pitch.” I shake my empty beer bottle,“I’d be shitfaced.” I stand up and head over to the bar.

“Get me another?” Liam yells after me. Broke bastard.

I haven’t been laid since I quit my job. My shrink will tell you it’s because my identity was too wrapped up in it and I lost my mojo when I stopped. I was the guy after all. I suppose it didn’t always feel good to be prized for something I couldn’t do rather than something I could, but still. All press is good press? Right?

Identifying with something I’m a total failure at is definitely part of the cause of my dry-spell. But the other reason I haven’t filled anyone’s glass, so-to-speak, is Bex. She’s the one who showed me Concrete Seconds by Pinback, my stumper song. She was into all of those obscure Pacific Northwest grunge bands. She had a record collection that would embarrass any beanie-wearing, penny-boarding, scrawny art school grad with an ironic ‘mom’ tattoo. Music was her language. And despite my inability to comprehend anything with pitch, we dated for six years. Concrete Seconds was sort of our song, as much as someone who is clinically tone deaf can have a song. When I listened to it with her, I didn’t get that same stressed-out, Tuvaluan feeling that I normally get when I hear music. There was something special about that song, or something special about the two of us that was illuminated when we listened to it on her dusty record player.

Deep in the throws of heartbreak and missing Bex, I looked up the meaning of Concrete Seconds. I found a post on a forum called songmeanings.com by a user with the handle wasteofwebspace. wasteofwebspace wrote the following:

the lyrics reference a play called ‘waiting for godot.’ its a tragicomedy about 2 dudes waiting at a tree for some guy named godot. godot nvr shows, and the play is existential. life has no purpose or meaning or whatever. its obvious bc the lyric tht repeats over and over ‘anything I say to you is gonna come out wrong anyway’ refers to one of the fundamental pillars of existentialism - the inability to communicate.

wasteofwebspace has done more for me with that lower-cased paragraph than my $250/hr therapist ever could. Through a single half-assed post on a clunky, antiquated forum, the legend made me truly understand why Bex and I broke up. The truth is, I think Bex loved music too deeply to be with me, the guy who can ruin any song if you invite him to karaoke. I was a disgrace to her language. I have that existential inability to communicate the song was referring to.

I’m standing at the bar a balanced distance away from the girls. I’m not too close to where I’m creeping them out, but I’m not too far where they won’t notice me. While I wait for the bartender to come my way, I glance at them fleetingly in a way that won’t make it obvious. One of them gives pilates mom, while the other has a septum piercing. I can’t decide which one I should shoot my shot with, so I decide to try my luck and go over there.

Tonight is a good night, I think. Even without a wingman, I’m feeling pretty good. I’ve been spending a lot of time on my physique now that I’m unemployed, and it shows. My hair looks just like the guy on the shampoo bottle and my new twelve-step skincare routine must be doing something. I look around. I suppose up against the other dudes at this bar, my guns are pistols next to their automatics. But, compared to what my arms looked like six months ago, my muscles are practically popping out of my sleeves! Anyway, I’m probably funnier than those ripped guys. I like my chances.

I’m next to septum girl, and I’m about to drop the pickup line of the century when the baseline seeps into my eardrums. It’s an iconic, treble-y line fingered high up the neck. It soars while the drums hold down a clean rock groove, and the flanged out guitars wash the perimeters of the sound map. I wouldn’t mistake that intro anywhere. It’s Concrete Seconds by Pinback.

I’m standing in front of these girls and my mouth is open, but the words have been snatched from my throat and I’m in fucking Tuvalu.

Sitting at a bus stop

Trying to take my shoes off

But my laces are all knots and you

Looking for an answer to an old question

So easy I can’t explain it

And anything I say to you is gonna come out wrong anyway

I shut my gaping mouth and turn away from the girls. I urgently flag the bartender down and get two more beers, not daring to look in their direction. I scurry back to our table. I just about slam the bottles down on Liam’s coaster. “There you go,” I mutter. I slump in my chair, arms crossed, and take a big gulp.

Anything I say to you will probably come out wrong anyway

“Please, Rory. I’ve never asked you for anything, all these years. This will be the last one you’ll ever work on. I’m just asking you to think about it.”

I sigh. “Alright, fine. I’ll think about it.”

Anything I say to you is gonna come out wrong anyway

I turn back around to look at the girls. There’s two bros talking them up, and their glasses are filled with fresh margaritas.