Penny and I are sitting in Sports Bar #54 in downtown Green Bay. Around us, fraternity boys in baseball caps with the brims curved just so are playing video golf and drinking Heineken. I didn’t really want to go out drinking but I accepted Penny’s proposition to go to karaoke, where I could drink just water if I wanted to. Penny is going through a divorce and facing that inevitable realization of just how much time being married takes up. I suspect that there are palpable points in her life that can almost be labeled ‘This is where the married part went’. It’s a good thing that Penny is getting a divorce, though. Her husband is a dick. A very small one actually.
The karaoke setup is overly loud and somehow overly quiet as well. The karaoke lady is wearing skin tight denim leggings and looks like a Weeble Wobble that someone has stuck legs on. Her fans call her Lady Di because of her short blond hair, but honestly I’m certain that the late Princess Diana would have been horrified. I wonder if Weeble Lady wears her seat belt when trying to escape the karaoke paparazzi. I somehow think she would. And that her paparazzi would consist of drunken men with flowing mullets asking if she will let them do Garth Brooks ‘The Dance’ again because their girlfriend was throwing up in the bathroom during their first rendition. Her voice booms out at us from the speaker on our left while she sings to our right. There’s no escaping it.
Penny wonders about ‘You Don’t Even Call Me By My Name’, because Carissa, who is at home this night, being a mom and putting in her married time, always bellows out the song. Carissa, like apparently the rest of the state of Wisconsin with the exception of perhaps five of us, really enjoys country music. A lot. The sad thing about that particular song is that the first three hundred times I heard it were at karaoke bars, therefore the one time I actually heard the recorded version, it sounded worse than some of the renditions I’ve sat through. It is a rule that some drunken man in five-day Levis and a shirt unbuttoned too far must sing ‘You Don’t Even Call Me By My Name.’ The direct correlation to this is that if the crowd is younger, a group of college girls with too much makeup must sing ‘Love Shack’ terribly off key. The B-52’s dress like some tequila dream, but there are harmonies there that shouldn’t be attempted while intoxicated.
‘You Don’t Even Call Me By My Name’ and ‘Love Shack’ might just be the ying and yang of bad karaoke.
There is a diva in the crowd tonight. No, it’s not me. It’s another fat girl, this one wearing far too much makeup, but in a tasteful way if that’s at all possible. Like Halle Berry does, with those enormous overly white teeth of hers. This karaoke diva is the classic ‘such a pretty face’ kind of girl. I’ll bet she hears that a lot. I used to hate that. People just can’t resist the comment when they can see possibility. She sings a Celine Dion and a Shania Twain. She’s very predictable and I want her to be unique, because she’s a pretty fat girl and I want her to not fit so easily into the Fat Girl Showing That At Least She Can Sing like a Thin Girl category. Sadly I make a mental prediction that ‘And I Will Always Love You’ will be attempted.
I am not wrong. She sings the Whitney Houston version from The BodyGuard and then goes back up and slams the Dolly Parton version on the head for good measure.
My own voice sucks tonight. I’ve been battling an almost hoarseness for the last month and a half and it’s delving into the land of laryngitis. Even so, I attempt a song, but apparently grabbed the wrong mic and you could barely hear it. Penny is the only person who claps. My single fan. I thank her profusely. The boys in the perfectly curved baseball caps don’t even look up from the electronic hole 5.
A man wearing a leather vest, black t-shirt and jeans with sitting creases on the thighs and a five year mullet cascading down his back approaches the stage. The beginning strains of ‘You Don’t Even Call Me By My Name’.
There is a part in the middle of the song where the singer begins talking about the song itself, telling you who wrote the song and how it would be the perfect country western song if it talked about trains or getting drunk or getting out of prison. I hate that song. I hate it because it tries to be all Ferris Bueller and embraces the meta and I hate that. I hate that because I do that too. Also I hate it because it seems to be everyone’s favorite part of the song, because it’s showing that they realize how completely stupid the music tends to be as well. Perhaps it’s an apology for polluting the world with pointy-toed boots and trucks with Nascar symbols and Calvin Peeing stickers. And I suspect that the song is so popular because of that countrified rap part. (Old joke: what do you get when you mix together country and rap? CRAP!), just like everyone’s favorite part of Love Shack is the Tin Roof Rusted part. It’s the part everyone knows. It’s the part that makes me vomit. Perhaps vomit glitter on the highway.
A middle-aged barfly walks past us. I would guess she is in her late forties but she has that indeterminate age of people who smoke too much and drink far too much, do most of their living after 10 pm and get most of their vitamins from wedges of lime. She reminds me of the very worst parts of my mother, except that she’s wearing a hideous little sailor outfit, with the stripes and epaulets detailed in gold lame’. My mother would never touch that outfit. The barfly is wearing possibly every piece of QVC jewelry she owns. She walks through and I cringe because we’re so remote here that they allow themselves to dress like idiots.
Penny and I talk about a lot of things. We talk about Operation Hottie and how I don’t necessarily want to be a classical ‘Hottie’, I just want to look more like myself and when I look into the mirror I want to someone who looks like my innermind picture looking back at me. I want to be where I was when I was 21′ still curvy, still round, still by all indications overweight, but my legs looked good in a skirt and I wore miniskirts and got hit on in bars (although I didn’t know it at the time because I was clueless). We talk about how everyone is always asking about when we’re going to have children and how Penny isn’t interested and never has been. We talk about my plan to finish my graduate degree and how I wouldn’t want to even consider getting pregnant until after that and how I’ve always had the number 34 in my mind because it just seemed like a good age to have children and be like Hope and Michael on thirtysomething, having the intent to focus on their children’s lives and not trying to smush it into everything else. My mother had me when she was 20 and honestly, she wasn’t ready for children then. She had my brother when she was 38 and to me that seemed colossally old at the time (I was 18, what did I know) and she is a much better parent this time. I always envied those kids who had older parents. They were at all of the ballgames, the recitals, the plays. They remembered the names of their kids’ friends. They owned homes and seemed content to be in them. They orchestrated environments and not the slipshod thrown together amalgamation of cast offs and stolen moments that I and other children of haphazard parents had come to understand as home.
A curved baseball hat goes up and attempts ‘Margaritaville’. He doesn’t pick the broken mic but is so very quiet and shy that you can barely hear him and the Karaoke Lady Who Does Not Look Like Lady Di cranks up the background help vocals. His friends look up from their video golf with surprise and cheer. Perhaps they are drunk enough to believe that their friend suddenly grew an extra set of perfectly-tuned vocal cords.
The Nautical Barfly walks past us on her way out the door, having gained herself a staggering middle-aged man in the process. I tell Penny to look at her and then said ‘What do you think’ Hooker on a cruise ship?’ Penny laughs and then said ‘Yeah, like that girl from Love Boat?’ ‘Julie, your cruise director’ twenty years later.’ Poor Lauren Tewes’ even with the cocaine addiction, she doesn’t deserve that. Without her, Paige Davis of Trading Spaces would be nothing.
We drink Smirnoff Ice because they don’t have Stoli Citroen. Over the course of the evening, we each have two. Half of my second goes warm and begins to taste like acrid urine in the back of my throat so I switch to ice water. I explain that I didn’t really want to go out tonight because I worry about going out too much. We’re planning a big Bad Bar night in two weeks with the entire crew and I wanted to save up my irresponsible behavior for November 1. We talk about how it’s not all that much drinking, especially in comparison to the rest of Wisconsin’s drinking society, where you go out to bars because that’s the only thing to do when the mercury drops below 20, as though people are trying to stop themselves from freezing on the inside too.
The Diva and her mother are now the only people singing, taking turns up down up down up down. Penny is nervous about going up and singing after the Diva but I point out that she’s going up every other song so there’s really no getting around it. She sings a Linda Rondstandt song that is often played at the Bad Bar. ‘When Will I Be Loved’. She nails it perfectly but both follows and precedes the Diva. Everyone is too drunk to notice.
Penny thanks me for coming out to karaoke and tells me that she had almost given up on me, as I didn’t call her until almost 9. I explain that I went to dinner with Esteban after work and then went home and screwed around trying to insert pictures into my diary entry about fall in Wisconsin and after 45 minutes of that, had Internet Explorer unceremoniously dump it. And my computer was toast and I hated it but my new one was at that moment being built by Joel and he was planning to join us after he finished. And how I felt bad for spending so much on a computer when I just went to San Francisco and I still haven’t bought my husband something decent for his birthday.
Everything in this bar is too yellow. As with many sports bars in Green Bay, the theme is the Packers. This particular bar has some credence, however, as it is located in the former Packer offices. In fact, the billiard room used to be Vince Lombardi’s office. At that moment, however, I am unwilling to forgive them for so much yellow.
At 1 o’clock, I call Joel. He’s having problems putting the PC together. I explained that we were leaving so he shouldn’t bother coming out. Penny and I walk out in separate directions. I like hanging out with her. She’s funny and she laughs at my jokes. It is very cold outside. It had snowed earlier that day, big fluffy white flakes that melted as soon as they hit the ground. My hands are freezing and I don’t want to touch the steering wheel. I wonder where my gloves are, but then I realize that they’re in the trunk of the car, have been there since last spring when I had probably been unloading groceries and tossed them there. They don’t match my jacket. Ohh, my sheerling jacket needs to be picked up from the cleaners. Hopefully they got the ink stain out.
I drive home listening to Michelle Branch’s ‘Goodbye To You’ and think about how succinct she is in ‘the last three years were just pretending’ and how sometimes it seems as though a life is pretend and the reality is the spaces in between. I think about how those people look forward to their Friday nights at Sports Bar #54 where they will walk around the yellow room and have nothing more to show for it than the sounds of drunk people clapping and an air of stale smoke on their clothes.
This is the part where I should come up with some observation, some lesson learned tied up in a bright little package, but I can’t. I’m still trying to figure it all out. But perhaps this will do it: The bar’s real name is Glory Years. That sounds so pat that I’m sure you will think I’m making it up, but it’s just one of those things that makes you think O.Henry is writing our lives like stories to fill in eighth grade lit books. But then, I suppose that Penny would be wanting to have children but be getting divorced and I would be not wanting to have children but happily married and everyone would be miserable in the end. It’s not that easy.
The bar’s name is Glory Years. That’s as close as I can get today.
