Karaoke at the Portway

He considered all songs. Emily rolled her eyes and spit on the floor. Was he nuts? Why did he insist on karaoke when it was obvious the regulars at the Portway Tavern loathed sitting through another of his Dianna Ross renditions? He was beyond awful and even beyond those terrible singers who get up after a few gin and tonics, urged on by friends who then laugh viciously at them. Friends who most likely want a video they can threaten you with later, something they can pull out for a teasing and immediate humbling if it seems you’re becoming too cool for them.

“I just don’t get it,” she begged him for an answer and not to do it.

But, there was no response, just his focused attention on the sticky, white binder full of song picks. She watched his squared pointer finger stroking for solid gold, but he never looked up.

After all, she’d gone on for months with subtle hints and diversions to dissuade him—“look too many people in line, you’ve got an early morning,” but nothing had worked. In June of last year, she’d finally found the courage to tell him he must be tone deaf and that nobody—especially her—wanted to hear any more of his warbling, but her warning had fallen on his deaf ears and obviously her contemptuous eye rolling had not registered either so she’d actually spat on the floor this evening, which even surprised her! Still, it wasn’t enough to prevent him from micro-phoning his shortcomings.

He turned the corner and it felt as if his heart fell to the floor. Emily was making out with some beefy, bald guy, arms covered in tattoos and wearing some sick, old, skater shoes with holes in the toes! What the fuck, he said to himself before catching himself on the bar with his right hand, the bartender motioning that she’d be with him in just 1 second, or 1 minute? She’d held up one finger and the bar seemed full of happy, smiling people not one of which seemed to notice that his life had just slowed to a sudden halt, an almost stop—his mind having problems in equating and filing what was now happening right in front of him, or was this some other world, a nightmare he’d wake up from?

In Emily’s mind it was a good idea. She hadn’t thought much about it, so not premeditated, and she figured she could explain all of that to him later, that she’d simply leaned forward when this dude had walked up to her asking her if she wanted to dance to Pour Some Sugar on Me which had broken the silence as it came blasting from the juke box. Some fisherman fresh off the boat in his late fifties had selected the song and apparently his friend liked it too, made him brave, puffed up, and he’d asked her to dance, called her sugar, and she knew it’d be a way to get out of the bar without having to suffer through his singing.

The cage in the middle is what the slight, red-headed officer had said when he told the other elfish officer where Erik was being held. No, he wasn’t in the drunk-tank, there’d be no bail, but he was ticketed and the court date, time and location were scrawled on the back of the pink paper in boxed, hen-peck. Emily wondered if this was the penmanship of the officer standing in front of her or another’s? She couldn’t really recall which pair had shown up last night when the fight had erupted. Only that she’d felt herself falling to the floor and not that she’d been shoved, but more of a trip in a tangle of legs, she’d sort squeezed out, or been pushed aside like a raggedy Ann doll dropped for a more exciting toy. A woman with blackened wine-teeth and painted on eyebrows had dragged her out the front door as the bar erupted in swearing and chair scraping noises. Still it hadn’t even occurred to her that her Erik was involved and it wasn’t until the police came out with him cuffed and pressed his dirty blonde hair down as they loaded him into the back seat of the wonder-bread car, lights flashing that it registered.

First photo my own, second compliments of foursquare.com