Open Mic
A free novella for you
This novella is the first in a series of texts I’ll be releasing through this newsletter — pieces that have been dying a slow death in my drawers, or are currently out of print.
1
If you’ve been to the open mic you know the meaning of sadness.
Retro Rosie, who comes every Tuesday night to peddle her pound-shop folk, is the embodiment of terminal sadness. Surrey Selassie, this pink dreadlocked dude who bawls out of tune to dance hall MIDI tracks, is fraudulently sad. Sad are the Sensitive Siblings who play depressing tunes torturing a Spanish guitar and a cheap synth — anyone who makes music with a nylon string guitar is destined for sadness. And sad must be MC Deadbeat, the French DJ who runs the open mic nights — any person doing this for a living has to be sad. Needless to say, the rest of the talentless musicians, oeuvre-less poets, and joyless stand-up flops who haunt the open mic are up to their neck in their pitiful sadness, endlessly trying and failing to quit — failing to grasp at some shred of dignity, that is.
And the sadness doesn’t stop there. On this end of the basement, away from the tragic stage, sits Fake Cockney, the house’s regular dickhead. His nightly six to eight pints of weak lager — not even the strong liver-punishing stuff that would finish him off quickly — make his sadness crystal clear. And my fellow bartender Radek is sad too, since he’d much rather be in Warsaw now, doing whatever people do in Poland, instead of pulling pints for losers down here. Even Ray, the giant bouncer from Trinidad, is sad. He’s sad about the terrible weather in this island where he’s lived all his life, and sad about the dreadful music they play in the basement — so sad about the latter that he usually wears earplugs to at least block out some of the sadness.
But maybe I’m overdramatic. Maybe I’m wrong and the open mic isn’t an infallible gateway to the saddest depths of the human condition. After all, there are others who show up regularly and seem perfectly content: happy Shoreditch rejects who descend into this muggy Hades in Old Street to cruelly laugh at those who can’t resist the pull of the stage. Then, maybe I’m the one who sees sadness everywhere. Maybe it’s me who’s incredibly sad. In this city I’ve just arrived in. Where I hardly know a soul. Where I’m just one more lost, anonymous face, slogging through a shit job, overpaying for a bedsit, with zero idea as to what tomorrow holds.
