It’s late and I am very tired and the day went by fast but not too fast since all that is on my mind is that my back is killing me. In the corner of a beachfront parking lot my feet carry me to the front doors of a what looks like a remodeled dive bar. The neon sign reads something with “Blue” in the title. Inside it’s not what its exterior gives off. Everything is new, hip, polished and painted. That new car smell’s older rougher cousin.
I reach the bar and everyone around me, all the snide voices and banality and the pasted smiles put me somewhere in the past, a place of discomfort and annoyance. The dim lighting never ceases to fulfill predictability and I begin wondering that maybe bars do that so you won’t know exactly what kind of beast you’ve roped in until you’re inside your apartment and it’s way past the point of no return.
The music is loud, loud to where you have to shout in someone’s face at pointblank range to order a drink. You couldn’t tell from standing outside. Its patrons sit around the hip new circle shaped particleboard tables high up on stilts and their feet dangle while they play card games drinking goblets of black-red wine. High up in their chairs. Every once in a while an explosion of laughter erupts from their mouths and their heads tilt into the open air above them; their wine breath fuming up and out in a terrible buckling bellowing sickness. Chests bounce up and down. Arms flailing. Fingers pointing at one another.
The music is familiar, but not. I’m hearing a song I know, but I’m hearing it differently. It takes me a few moments to realize the sounds coming out of the speakers, the cackling voice that pierces my eardrums and brings my shoulders high up are the sounds of live singing. I turn toward the source of the noise and see a woman wearing a ball cap and ponytail sticking out the back holding a microphone.
Karaoke night.
Her mouth is drawn open far and wide and her throat wails into the mic. The little uvula at the back of her throat smacking from side to side in a flutter. Her voice goes through the round silver windscreen. The sound pierces the diaphragm inside. The diaphragm vibrates and the coil moves the signal, it feeds from a magnetic field down a length of black cable into a overpriced P.A. and the signal mixes there with the pre-recorded music—high frequencies peaked to a sharp shriek, the mids crinkling high, lows booming and giving my balls a good time—then it outputs the racket into two large mounted speakers. What comes out of them turns my stomach and my jaw clenches and my shoulders creep higher up, then over my ears. My hands in my pockets make fists.
Karaoke night.
I need a drink.
My hand is signaling the bartender. The bartender ignores my hand waving in the air at him. He’s the young smiley type—always smiling, perfect face the girls swoon over, straight back, fatless physique, wearing all black, clean, shirt neatly tucked in, wash towel hanging from his waist. His hands are reaching out, grabbing at the chandelier of freshly washed high ball and pint glasses, the brandy snifters and rocks glasses, grabbing and pulling the glasses away, setting them out in front of me and the smile is now making the drinks. His eyes narrow into a friendly, sensual squinting, aiming toward the party of over-the-hill middle-aged party women that scream out of excitement at every new song playing so very, very loud throughout this place.
One hand holds the glass still, pressing it into the rubber mat, liquid squishing out. The other reaches for the ice and the squinty smiley bartender looks up at me and the squint leaves: “I’ll be right with you, buddy.” His smile had stayed so I try a smile of my own and the words “Thank you,” come out although what I meant to say was, “Bourbon, neat, double. Something cheap.” He walks away and already I’m shaking my head. So many times in my life have I played into others and let them decide when I speak, how I speak, all while keeping me at an arms-length distance. The sleek dark player’s shirt he wears reflects what little light emits from the bulbs above his head. The lush typical scent of magazine cologne wafts about from his movements.
After icing each glass the bartender reaches into the well, grabbing bottles containing various colors—brown, yellow, clear, green, dark burgundy—and his hands bring the bottles up in the air, twirling and spinning between smiling fingers. The liquor splashes into each glass in just the right proportions and the aging rabid women bring their jewelry-clad, manicured hands up to their faces and their eyes bulge and they are utterly impressed. Smiley the bartender responds with a boost of confidence and a paced assuring nod as if to say, “I know, I know . . .” Somewhere, Tom Cruise gets a chill.
The Karaoke drowns out the “Oohs” and “Ahhs” coming from each of the four cougars and they all bite their lower lip when the bartender sets each of their drinks in front of their cake-covered stretch-wrinkled faces. “Excuse me,” I inquire, but Smiley doesn’t hear me. He just keeps impressing the starved eager pack of would-be Milfs. He spins around and stops in a “Ta-da” pose—it’s all in the presentation—the women applaud at their well crafted overpriced drinks, and for a moment the sound inside the whole place is nothing recognizable. Just a shattering, ever-blurring canvas of all colors bleeding on top of each other inside your ears. Gray, brown, indiscernible clatter-noise.
In two seconds the wall of sinister fuzz ceases, burns out. The ladies of the night turn their heads down and each of them suck at their straws in a very suggestive way. Smiley the bartender let’s out a macho laugh to himself and inflates his chest. For a moment, our eyes meet. His eyes didn’t see me, they just kept going. He reaches for his towel and wipes off his hands. He turns, passes me by—me sitting in this uncomfortable stool with my feet swinging underneath my seat and my shoulders plugging my ears shut against the terror of 90’s hits revisited scattering the room looking for lost souls, shaking my hands in front of his eyes with no result—and walks through a black rubber door into the kitchen.
The woman with cap and ponytail is on her third round. After the current song tunes out she sits behind a kiosk and presses a few buttons. A radio hit with real its original vocals chimes in and the volume is louder than its Karaoke version. The cap woman has disappeared and her ponytail sticks out from behind the kiosk. The music pulls me from the barstool and yanks me through time and into the eighth grade. My head is spinning, sweat begins to run from my brow and I don’t know why I am still in here.
My feet hit the ground and they carry me into the restroom and the lights are brighter than the bar and the tile is clear, white and smooth. The countertops are new, black and gray granite, and are covered in puddles of murky water everywhere. Pink liquid hand soap drips from one of two dispensers fixed to the wall below the mirrors so cleverly cut into the shapes of multiple favorable polygons. The thick pink liquid falls drop after drop, bombing into the swamp of clam semen puddle water. The sharp mint smell of urinal cakes is inescapable.
The door swings closed and you wouldn’t believe how much that door muffles the outside sound. The dripping of liquid soap booms like a cannon on a deserted battlefield. No one else is in here. My hands push through the door of a stall and I step inside with my hand at my zipper. The door swings closed behind me and I empty my bladder. I shake, repackage, zip up. My eyes catch a hand-carved sign as I turn toward the door. It reads: “This is that last place she got off.”
The glare from the bathroom stays in my eyes as I re-enter the darkness of the bar. The chatty-chattering from the circles and the heavily re-recorded rock music accompanied by cacophonous squealing voices echo out of the speakers. It comes whooshing back into my ears with a kind of resentment, as if I had walked away from an edgy person in mid sentence.
As I walk my eyes begin adjusting and shapes of legs folded over each other and elbows and wrists reaching for glasses and floral-patterned vacation shirts come to be. The stool I had been sitting in hasn’t been taken so I pull it out and hop up onto its cushion. The cougars are feeling the effect of their drinks and their laughter has gone up an obnoxious notch but I’m trying to ignore this. The bartender with the never-ending smile is still not back from the kitchen. My elbows come up and rest against the freshly lacquered bar top and my eyes watch the black rubber door.
A new Karaoke song is beginning. It is some pseudo-love ballad a rock band led by blonde twins always mistaken for women wrote. Two voices are singing. Two male voices. The cougars are erupting. I crane my head, then my body follows. The momentum takes the stool and I spin in my seat. My attention goes toward the corner. Next to the Karaoke kiosk there’s Smiley the bartender, standing arm-in-arm with a server friend of his. They are each holding their own microphones. Both still have wash towels stuffed in the front of their pants. And neither of them can carry a tune.
The women scream at the recital of their favorite lyrics and the two guys laugh and trip over each other. They giggle into the mics and the wine gamers have halted the cards as the nostalgia takes hold. Two of the wine-women sway at their table.
The server is tall and has a shaved head, and in between verses he keeps looking at Smiley saying, “Dude, this is so gay . . .” The screaming next to me turns into aroused laughter. I turn my back and face the bar. Another smiling employee emerges from the behind the black rubber door and walks behind the bar. He starts jabbing a finger into the touch-screen of a cash register mounted next to the bottles and my arms are up and flailing to get his attention.
He turns to walk back into through the door and he sees me out of the corner of his eye. He leans in, flicks his jaw at me. I tell him my order as I pull some cash from my pocket. He waves a hand at me saying, “Sorry, I can’t serve you.” I can feel the creases in my face growing deeper and he can see my confusion. The guy says, “I don’t tend.” He shrugs, “Not allowed. You’ll have to wait ‘till Brandon is back from his break.” He flicks his jaw toward the two guys holding microphones—faces red, backs arching, both of them up on their toes, heads going back, leaning backward—and one of the singers hits an uncomfortable pitch. He holds the note, pushes the note, and I look over my shoulder again to see Brandon’s big smile turning red, then redder. Everyone is applauding, everyone is riveted by the performance.
My head falls into my folded arms and as the song crawls toward its painful weeping crescendo I feel a nudge on my shoulder. I ignore it. Maybe it was my imagination . . . Nope. It happens again. Nudge, nudge, nudge. My head lifts up and I look to my right. One of the illustrious cougars, Midori breath in my face, smiling and chuckling. She has a drooping bulbous double chin and in front of her on the bar is a dismantled plate of strawberry dessert chocolate mousse cake. “You look like you’re just having a great ol’ time tonight!” The woman goes into a loud bubbling laughing fit at her own amusement and obviousness. Her flesh bounces, shaking at the mercy of her bellowing lungs. My head looks straight into the mirror behind the bar. In the reflection all four of them are laughing. Cougars making like Hyenas. Faces aimed in my direction.
The music is getting louder—odd, and terrible—the guitar swarms, their singing thumps away in a not-so-sudden off-time pattern, and it’s sucking at everything, sucking everyone in, a vacuum reaching out at us, at me, a windy and definite black hole, and it grabs me by the collar and reaches up; it begins pulling at the back of my neck. My hands clamp down around the edge of the bar.
A creeping pain. I’m feeling the hair start to go at the base. The skin rips, and a twinge of stinging salt air burning the exposed meat that sends goose bumps up and down my limbs. Then the skin around my ears starts tearing, then up the sides, the corners of my jaw, my temples, it’s all coming off. The skin ripping from my skull. The warm sensation as it flows down beneath my shirt. My hand wants to go there, touch it, confirm it, care for it, but it stays put. It stays gripping the chewy edge of the bar. I push my back out, I pull against the current—I must break free of this.
My body moves back and forth, it builds a motion, it gains momentum. The barstool spins me around and around in a winding catastrophe. The reflections from everyone’s glasses and the track lighting along the corners and where the walls meet the ceiling; it wraps in my vision, turning and turning into one continuous jarred spacing of glowing lines. At first a blur, then gradually sharpening.
I stop spinning, quickly, abruptly, and I’m facing the room dead on. All of the people around me are standing and walking, still in their clothes, sitting at their tables, at the bar—all of them are skinless, dark, deep red dripping, viscous blood fluid everywhere, puddling underneath them, soaking up the carpets, staining the grout between the tile, everywhere, slippery, gelatinous, like the mucous soap swamp on the restroom countertops. Everyone is a red stencil glob of their former mass—the tablegoers, the cougars, the Karaoke host, the employees, fucking Brandon and his bandmate.
The mix of black blood mixing with lighter shades of red, blood and viscera, is filling shoes and sandals, purses and shopping bags. Hats and sunglasses are lost in the pooling fluid, floating like ghost ships lost at sea. Playing cards and key chains, cigar lighters and ashtrays—debris meandering amongst a great wreck. The wine in their glasses churning, mingling, smothering with the mess, and lights begin flashing—great powerful God-like lights—strobing through my eyes into my brain and out of my ears. The smell is thick like glue. It fogs the inside of my nose, slathers the walls of my sinuses, and I hear the words wax and shit and vomit repeating in loops. Wax vomit. Liquor vomit. Smoke vomit. Shit vomit.
The music is growing and growing, loud and gigantic, making a peep of the gray brown noise from before, rattling my teeth, inside my fillings. Cheekbones crack. My eyes shake; they seizure in the tight clamped muscles of their sockets. My mouth is sewn shut, and I begin to open it, to breathe in, and the air stutters its way down my throat. I’m gulping it down, helping the feed. My lungs expand, I hold it in and breath out.
My lungs start coughing up black-red molten hot jell-o. It gurgles out from my mouth, down my chin, down my shirt, onto my lap. My guts are melting. The result, a stinking slimy mass is crawling up my throat. It comes in gradual waves. Up and out and it covers my shirt, my pants. I open my eyes. The patrons of the remodeled establishment are bubbling and foaming, spitting, and degenerating into this horrific meat chowder stew that we’ve all created. Smiles droop and fold off of faces. Limbs crumble and bend, losing tension, piling and melting into each other. Dripping chins and rolling necks.
We all drown.
A roaring applause shatters the fading ballad and people are on their feet cheering. I look across the bar into my reflection and the laughing women have turned toward the big finale of our heroic on-stage duo. Everyone’s eyes are on them. The rock stars take turns taking bows. They hi-five each other in rapid succession. The tall server is shaking his shaved head. He turns toward Brandon and says into the mic, “Dude, so gay . . .”
Suddenly my hands are flat on the surface of the bar and they push all of my weight from the stool. I’m on top of the bar in a crawling position and the hanging overhead glasses tap against my forehead. They jingle out a tune like distant hollow wind chimes. My hands and knees are scurrying and I feel the cold air from the ice cooler as it brushes the skin of my face. I spin, lift, and drop behind the bar. The sound of my feet hitting the rubber mat on the floor is a whisper under the cheering. Silent as a stealth ninja.
I stand up straight and see Brandon smiling bigger and brighter than ever. His arms are outreached like a champion, larger than life, and his hand lets go of the mic. It falls with a quick whistle sound followed by a loud thud echo from the speakers. I’m spinning back toward the bottles and glasses, ice and more bottles laid out within my sudden reach. One hand goes for the Irish Whiskey, the twelve year. I open my coat and it gets shoved deep and secure into an inside pocket. My other hand grips the neck of a dusty bottle of top-shelf single-malt Scotch. Unopened.
My eyes peer out to the crowd of backs. Hands still clapping. My eyes stop on the triumphant Brandon. Bright, shiny, smile. I stand there. I wait for him to see me. His eyes are full of pride and happiness. Those happy eyes linger about the room, stopping randomly to connect with each and every onlooker.
His eyes get close to mine, my stance strengthen. Closer. Brandon doesn’t look past me this time. He stares in disbelief. My eyes stare back. His chiseled smile goes from it’s notorious arc to a flat line across his jaw. His arms go flaccid and they fall by his sides. My nodding head is all he needs to see. The crowd still has its back to me, and no one takes notice of Brandon’s sudden change of temperature.
My hand raises the bottle of Scotch. His head begins moving back and forth, side to side. I unscrew the cap. The paper foil seal rips and the pressure inside the bottle hisses as it escapes. I toast Brandon and take a good, long pull from the dusty bottle. I look at the bulbous cougar and wink. She startles, confused by my emerging grin, and I mouth the words, “You bet your ass I am.”
Author: Lawrence Goodwin
