Call the Police

Two in the morning, karaoke night, and I’m standing in a room full of people absolutely butchering the hits of three decades because we’ve had enough beer to think we’re incredible. The 80s, the 90s, whatever we could find—it all sounded the same when we were singing it, which is to say it all sounded terrible. We knew it was terrible. We just didn’t care.

The neighbors cared. That’s how the cops showed up.

By the time they actually got there, I wasn’t even surprised. The whole thing was inevitable. You get drunk, you sing, you get loud enough to piss off the people next door, they call it in. It’s the natural order of things. And honestly, it probably was better for everyone that it happened when it did. We would’ve kept going otherwise, kept digging deeper into our own awful versions of these songs, kept getting louder about how much we were enjoying ourselves.

The cops didn’t have to say much. They just appeared, and you understood that the night was over. Everyone scattered home, still drunk, probably still laughing about something we’d done or said. There was something right about the way it all turned out—the inevitability of it, how everything played out exactly as it should have.