Keening Karaoke

When I was in college, someone, probably my wife (then girlfriend) mentioned that it would be fun to go to some bar where they had karaoke. One of my roommates—a man who once claimed a ‘member’ the length of a Barbie doll’s height, a comparison whose origins still make me shudder—insistently corrected her pronunciation before anyone else could react. See, she, like most Americans, said something like “carry-okie”; he of the doll-sized penis said, no, it is “kara-o-kay”.

Later on, without the mattel-membered man, we celebrated a friend’s birthday at an empty bar that tried to drum up business on a Sunday night with a karaoke machine. The lasting memory of that night? My girlfriend (now wife) singing Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”, a song which she still claims to this day she has never heard and a song that no mortal man or woman should sing to karaoke.

Dive Bar Playlist

As I passed the mark of my mid-twenties, two things happened that forever changed my night-life. First, I moved back to my rural home from the decent-sized city where I attended college; and the second is that I realized I really was sick of college kids. This makes me sound like a prick, but after five years of attending graduate and undergraduate school and a decade of visiting siblings, I really desired a new crowd of people.  I wanted people whom I perceived were living real lives and not in the hallowed fantasyland of higher education. Of course, the folks I’m about to describe are at the other end of the spectrum in a sense and live in no less of a fantasyland then anyone else.  Basically, I missed the rednecks of my youth and wondered if I would be allowed back in the club.

I quickly learned that once a country boy, always a country boy. I had been gone five years but not much had changed (which is actually not a depressing realization for me). When everything else in the world is fucked, you can always depend on the local dive bar and the rednecks you grew up with for a good time and a helping hand when you need it.

My particular dive bar has a local reputation as being a biker hangout and generally a rough spot. I don’t mean lawyers who drove BMW bikes on the weekend, I mean gigantic patch-wearing dudes who like to get into fights for no reason. My bar is the only local spot where bikers can sport colors so it is a popular spot for these boys with names like “the Outlaws” and “Mountain Men” or sometimes even the “Iron Horseman” or “Hells Angels”.

It’s best to take care when dealing with these folks. Take a look and keep your distance. Identify and recognize the very real threat of violence.Unless you hit on their women, touch their bikes, or somehow interfere with their intoxication, they will not bite. Also, it helps if you know someone who knows them, which I do in the form of a good friend we will call “the general”.