I was sent to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas to attend the Combined Arms and Services Staff School (CAS3) while I was stationed at Eighth United States Army (EUSA) G4, United States Forces Korea (USFK), Yongsan, Seoul, Republic of Korea (ROK). While I was attending school at Fort Leavenworth, there wasn’t a whole lot to do during my available time off when I wasn’t wrapped up doing homework and working on assigned projects. One thing that CAS3 and the Command and General Staff College (CGSC) obsessed about was volleyball. They loved volleyball at Fort Leavenworth. I don’t know what their obsession was with volleyball. They forewent normal PT to play volleyball. Who in the hell would forgo performing normal PT in favor of playing volleyball? Shit. You might as well be playing badminton. There wasn’t any sand. There was no ocean. There weren’t any women in bikinis. Why in the hell were they playing volleyball? It defied logic. They even had volleyball tournaments among the different classes. When I first got there, I was not the greatest of volleyball players, and here is why. I had never been anywhere before that obsessed over volleyball. Most of the places I had been to obsessed over football and I played football. Football was good. Volleyball, not good. Anyway, I was not a big fan of volleyball, so I only played when I was forced to play. That still left a gaping hole in my free time schedule. Then I learned that the officers club had karaoke. And the people that went to karaoke didn’t care how bad you sang because they were all drinking or already drunk. And a drunk audience is a captive audience, as long as you offer entertainment value. It’s not so much how well you sing as how well you entertain the audience. And the lady that ran the karaoke machine could adjust the machine to make your voice sound halfway decent. Once I figured that out and I figured out that people didn’t care how bad you sang, I started putting my name in to sing the songs I knew. What songs were those? Excellent question. Any Hank Williams tune worked. No, not Hank Williams, Junior. The original Hank Williams. I could sing his tunes with the same twang and warble that he put into the tunes. There were a couple of the Steppenwolf tunes like Born to Be Wild as well. People that knew the Steppenwolf song said that I sounded like a crude version of lead singer, John Kay. That particular song and the song, Kaw-Liga by Hank Williams, were my two most popular karaoke hits. I even had a fan base, believe it or not. There were a few officers from other classes that specifically requested my name to sing specific songs. But that’s not all. There was a group of schoolteachers that came into the club. This group of schoolteachers taught at the Post schools, and they came to the club with a friend who was an instructor at CGSC. These teachers seemed to love country music. They especially loved Hank Williams music. Go figure. The first time they requested that I sing for them, the karaoke lady came over and asked if I would do a special request. I looked at her like she was nuts and asked, “Just exactly what in the hell is a special request? Cuz my name is Friday. I work on Wednesday. I don’t work on Tuesday. And I don’t do Windows. Any questions.” She looked at me like I was crazy and asked, “What? No, no. Nothing like that. Do you see those ladies over there?” “Yeah, I see them. So, what?” “They would like you to sing Kaw-Liga, and then they want you to go over to their table and join them.” “Oh. I guess I can do that. It ain’t going to cost me nothing. Is it? Cuz, if it is, then the deal’s off.” “Well, I’ll tell you what, you go up and sing. And while you’re singing, I’ll go over and find out if it’s going to cost you anything. Sound like a deal?” “That’ll work.” So, I sang the song, and the karaoke lady did some G2 (intel). It turned out that the ladies wanted to buy me a drink. There was also a bar in downtown Leavenworth that ran karaoke on Saturday nights. I went there occasionally as well. What is funny is that my fan base followed me to the bar downtown, once they figured out that I was going to karaoke downtown. I don’t know how they figured out I was going downtown. I didn’t tell anybody. Word-of-mouth spreads like fire in a little town. And Leavenworth is not what I would call a big town. At least it wasn’t when I was there. It was a little town. After I had been doing karaoke for a while, I even started getting requests to do songs that other people sang such as Bust a Move by Young MC. I had heard the song. But that song was not me, and I could not do it justice at all. So, I wouldn’t even try it. The karaoke lady asked me if I wanted to attempt it at first, but I said no. My personal philosophy on that is ‘a man has to know his limitations’. As my fame or probably more accurately, my notoriety, grew, I started getting requests to do duets with other karaoke singers. What the hell. I could sing backing lyrics and do crowd management at the same time. After all, it was all about the show. Entertain the audience, that was the name of the game. Karaoke may have been an exercise in futility, but it sure did help me pass the time.
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