unexcitable boy

one of my earliest memories (and coincidentally one of my fondest) is my father’s one and only karaoke performance: an ineffective yet totally heartfelt rendition of warren zevon’s "werewolves of london." the scene is this: my uncle’s house (my mother’s brother). it’s my cousin’s birthday party, perhaps her tenth. the year escapes me. all you need to know, really, is that she’s still considered a pre-adolescent. my brother and I are a few years younger. my uncle has ordered a clown to the house’s family room to accent the celebration. the birthday girl and I cower in the adjacent room, paralyzed by the clown’s presence. if you were once afraid of the malicious goofiness certain clowns seem to just, like, exude, then you know what i’m talking about. after the clown meets tepid applause from anyone actually paying attention, he beats a retreat to his vehicle, which is parked outside against the curb. this is when the karaoke machine lights with power, and the adults gravitate towards its promise: an escape from all things preadolescent birthday parties entail. I cannot, with accuracy, convey the horror of what occurred. I can only tell you that the machine’s absence at future gatherings was ominous, yet nothing short of fortunate.

I remember riding shotgun in my family’s white jeep cherokee several years later, my father driving in step with warren zevon’s familiar growl. I confused the chorus, "ah-hoo, werewolves of london, ah-hoo" with "ah-hoo, werewolves a blunder, ah-hoo." dad thought this mix-up hilarious for reasons I still fail to understand. and for the record, I'm still unable to comprehend any given clown’s supposed charm.

there is no honorable way to phonetically convey the annunciation of zevon’s utterance: "ah-hoo." it would be helpful to imagine the cry of a wolf whose voice occupies the tenor range. but when crying to the moon, it airs more of a howl via throaty falsetto. my father does not have the skill nor the wherewithal to breach this higher octave, and so he assaults the song, echoing his on-stage performance from just a couple years prior, a performance that could have been mistaken for an impersonation of a balloon coming to a brutal and unnatural end.