She Will Survive
I didn’t really expect anything to be happening in sleepy little Fremont on a Sunday night, but here at the Triangle Lounge, I have been proven wrong. It’s odd enough that I’m here in the first place, since all my prior experience with this place has been underwhelming to say the least. But since every other watering hole on the main street is dead, here I am.
At karaoke night.
It’s not bad as karaoke nights go. There’s the usual mix of tuneless warbling and serious singing skills. Everything starts to get interesting when the bartender comes on though. His hair is done in an ironic 80s retro razor-stripe quasi-mullet, and his belly tattoo reads “Fucking Innocent”. He’s chosen “Gin & Juice,” but the Snoop Dogg lyrics scrolling across the monitor in the corner are not the ones he’s belting out. I don’t recognize what he’s rapping, but it’s dirty. Bitches and Hoes and Booty and Dick. It’s unexpected and the crowd is eating it up.
A friend of the bartenders, a tall lanky hipster with a trucker hat and handlebar moustache is up next. He needs to top his friends performance, so he climbs up on the bar, struts across it, taking sips from people’s drinks between verse of ZZ Top’s “Tush”.
It’s calmer now. The singing ebbs and flows, as good-to-awful renditions of everything from “Summertime” to “Bohemian Rhapsody” are performed.
Up now is a girl who sang earlier. She’s doing “I Will Survive,” strutting around the room and singing directly to her friends, to random people in the audience. She’s completely tossed, and only knows half the words, but she’s selling the performance. We’re into it. She’s wagging her finger in my face as if she’s my jilted lover, admonishing me for thinking she’d crumble, thinking she’d lay down and die, but no, not her. She rounds the corner of the bar to my left, and I swivel on the stool to see her climb up onto the counter. It’s not the steadiest climb, and I flinch, but she makes it. She’s upright, pointing across the bar over everyone’s heads, letting us know she’ll survive.
Then she falls. Straight backwards, crashing to the floor with a thud, rattling the bottles of Tequila that her head collides with on the way down.
There’s a collective gasp, but only a momentary pause in the music, as seconds later, she’s up again, having only missed a line or two. Concerned friends rush for her, but she doesn’t need their help. She trots out from behind the bar, singing and pointing as if nothing happened, leaving the bar back to examine the bottles she amazingly didn’t break. The song ends and we all clap like we’ve just seen a virtuoso performance, and we have, sort of.
I call it a night. How can you top that?
