The DJ Who Loved to Sing
“Every year that is exactly divisible by four is a leap year, except for years that are exactly divisible by 100, but these centurial years are leap years if they are exactly divisible by 400. For example, the years 1700, 1800, and 1900 are not leap years, but the years 1600 and 2000 are.”
This is the tenth edition of the Gonzo Papers, and I only have one question this time: Do you guys know how fucking complex our calendar is? It seems simple, right: 365 days a year, each day 24 hours long. Right, except, that’s not the end of the story. Some years, of course, we have 366 days. This is because...well, there are a few imperfections in the neat 24-hour-day thing. Turns out the earth rotates once every 23.94 hours. Close to 24, but not exactly—and the tiny deviations add up, to the tune of a full extra day every four years.
Except, that’s also not the end of the story. Because adding that extra day every four years actually slightly overcorrects for the tiny deviations from 24 hours that occur each day. So every 100 years, a year that would normally be a leap year is not. In other words, 1896 was a leap year, and so was 1904, but 1900 was not.
Except...that’s still not the end of the story. Because that absence of a leap day every 100 years very slightly overcorrects again, this time in the other direction. So every 400 years, a year that would normally be removed from the leap year cycle is made a leap year again, as my friend Mr. Wikipedia summarized above.
The point? Each day is the same length—23.94 hours—but some days sure as hell feel longer than others. I used way too much fucking space to arrive at the point, but there it is nonetheless. And last weekend I experienced one of those days that felt longer than the others, one of the longest days of my life. It had more twists than a Dan Brown novel, more drama than a Greek tragedy, and enough unexpected events to make it comfortably at home in this endlessly unexpected year of 2020.
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Saturday, October 24 began when my alarm screeched me out of a very pleasant dream about some beach in the Caribbean at 6:30 a.m., an unholy hour. I pulled on two coats because it was like twelve degrees and drove to my girlfriend K. Evelyn Dean’s house; my hands were so cold I was barely able to grip the steering wheel and my windshield was more or less opaque. Kate greeted me calmly and after a short wait, my brother arrived in his F-150 to pick us up: we were roadtripping, baby.
Our destination? The wilds of western Nebraska, where I somehow seem to have traveled more often than usual this year. My cousin was getting married, and in O’Neill, Nebraska, that could only mean one thing: there would be a fucking party. O’Neill is my mother’s hometown, three hours northwest of Lincoln, and the drive was uneventful, excluding the time some crazed small-town driver swerved across the center line to pass but timed it so poorly he forced some poor soul off into the shoulder. O’Neill, which styles itself as “the Irish Capital of Nebraska,” has a rather interesting claim to fame: at one of the intersections along the main road, the “world’s largest shamrock” is painted bright green right onto the pavement. Forty feet across. On the street. Right. What’s your claim to fame? How many forty-foot shamrocks have you painted? That’s what I thought.
The snow had been falling lightly and there was a light dusting on the streets as we searched for a place for lunch and to watch the Nebraska game. We settled on an O’Neill classic: the Good Timin’ Bar. It’s a long, low, narrow building that looks like an abandoned gun range with a sign out front announcing it was karaoke night. Inside were several grizzled regulars shouting at the TV whenever Nebraska missed a tackle. The waitress/bartender came up to our table and just stared at us blankly— “Do you serve food?” we asked. “Yup,” she said, bored, then offered no further information until prompted. We eventually came to understand that we could have a pizza, but only if we picked it out of the freezer ourselves. Sure. Whatever it takes. This we did, and after sipping almost-but-not-quite-cold beer for twenty minutes, a steaming hot pizza arrived, brought to us by our tight-lipped waitress while the man in camo hunting gear at the bar gave us city slickers suspicious looks. I burned the shit out of my mouth on the pizza, which would have ruined my turn at karaoke night.
Realizing too late that our hotel check-in time wouldn’t allow us to check in before the wedding at 2, we improvised and strode into the hotel anyway to change in the public bathrooms. That’s how, for the record, I came to find myself shaving my face in the ground-floor Holiday Inn Express unisex bathroom in O’Neill, Nebraska. One of my finer moments, it was not. Kate had it worse, as she had to do her hair and makeup, but my brother decided that shaving was too much work and thus kept his “beard” (admittedly much more masculine than mine) for the wedding. Staring at myself in the mirror while I dragged the razor over my filthy facial hair, the absurdity of what I was doing and where I was doing it hit me. I felt detached, removed from my body, looking down at my situation from above. At times like that I could only wish the day would be over sooner than its normal 23.94 hours.
The wedding itself, held in the nearby town of Stuart, passed without incident until we left, when we all discovered it was turning into a fucking blizzard outside. Snow fell without pause until we reached the reception at 5, back in O’Neill at the Community Center after a brief stop at our hotel to check in. The community center was a large airy building with a great hall decorated in typical wedding style. Of immediate note was the large DJ setup in the corner.
Then we saw him.
DJ B came out like the world’s nicest Grim Reaper. He was a sixty-year-old man wearing a black vest and an enormous smile. He loved to talk and cracked several jokes while he had the mic, clearly genuinely enjoying his job. Personally, I kept myself going by drinking bottomless dirty Shirleys and pissing every fifteen minutes.
One of the funniest moments was when he told my cousin, over the microphone with everyone listening, to “Introduce us to the new Mrs.!”
My cousin, slightly drunk and very recently married, had the perfect response: “How the hell am I supposed to do that?”
We were all wondering the same thing. When the dancing finally started and all the speeches were done (DJ B gave a very bizarre one that featured audience call-and-response), DJ B finally revealed his most astonishing act of the night: he sang along to the songs. Over the mic. While his own DJ speaker system was playing them. Right. I’d never seen anything like it before. And it’s not like he was a great singer—he just wanted to sing. For that man, I realized, every night is karaoke night.
“BAAAA DEEEE YAHHHHHHH,” he belted as “September” by Earth, Wind, and Fire played. “SAY THAT YOU REMEMMMBERRRRRR!”
During “Love Shack” he made suggestive grunting noises. During “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough,” he did an inspired Michael Jackson falsetto. And during “Thunderstruck” he almost lost his voice by growling the word “thunder” under his vocal range eighty times in a row.
My brother’s face when DJ B was going IN on those “Locked out of Heaven” vocals. Just full volume. You could barely hear Bruno Mars.
He was truly one of a kind. By the end of the night, when I had been up for 18 hours and was swaying with exhaustion, he still had more energy than most people half his age. That’s how my longest day ever came to a conclusion: DJ B singing his heart out to “Shut Up and Dance.” Considering it was still the same day as when I woke up in Lincoln and ran through the snow in Stuart, it all seemed like some strange madness of the day itself. I’d say DJ B was a symptom, not a cause, of the day. There was clearly something different about him, one of those people with that kind of energy that belongs in a category all its own. Something nameless but awe-inspiring, an unhinged lack of self-awareness that can either make or break a party. Something so rare there must be a unique reason for it.
Maybe he was born on a leap day. I’ll ask Mr. Wikipedia.
The reception really was a lot of fun. Here’s Kate and I on the dance floor after they passed out glow sticks, which kick ass no matter how old you are. DJ B was probably singing the high notes on “Don’t Stop Believin’ “ around this time.
