Last night Kirsten, Lindsay, and I returned to the lesbian karaoke bar The Hook-Up , after having a memorable time a few weeks ago. It wasn’t too crowded, so we sat at the bar. Lindsay quipped, “Here we are sitting at the bar, just three single gals.” “Looking for love in all the wrong places,” I chimed in. For the most part, we were ignored, but the bartender remembered Kirsten and her drink of choice from her one previous visit. Hot.
Since I’m currently obsessed with Willie Nelson’s cover of “Time After Time,” I decided to give Cyndi Lauper’s classic a go, to mixed results. I think the chorus worked when Kirsten and Lindsay harmonized with me, but otherwise it wasn’t a song worth adding to my repertoire. Lindsay, however, rocked the joint with her staple performance of Guns’n’Roses’s “Welcome to the Jungle.” It’s pretty amazing and turned many a lesbian head. Since this trip was Lindsay’s first, we warned her that she might be propositioned; following Lindsay’s stellar performance, she had a 50-year-old woman with scary teeth and a frosty Jheri curl breathing down her neck and singing right to her. She was a good sport, though, and snogged her for a few minutes. I’m kidding, I’m kidding. It was fifteen seconds, tops.
Next, Lindsay and I teamed up for ”Total Eclipse of the Heart”, a great duet to which to contribute raw emotion, particularly once it climaxes in a weepy mess. As the night wound down, I anticipated leaving the bar without any big news to report, in other words, nothing substantial to blog about. That’s when a remarkable character entered the picture.
The subject of college graduation speakers came up, and I commented on how my class’s speaker, politician Fabian Nunez, was lame and predictable. He pandered to a largely liberal audience by making easy proclamations like “Bush is an idiot.” Suddenly, this sixty-something year-old man who has been sitting next to us at the bar the entire night, not once saying a word, looks at me with intense, deranged eyes and adamantly declares, “Bush is NOT an idiot!”
I tried to clarify that I was paraphrasing someone else, but this man’s rant was already in full force. Apparently, it’s the commies and the immigrants that want us to believe that Bush is in idiot, led by that bitch Hilary Clinton. Although I knew I shouldn’t engage him, I couldn’t help but see if I could get a positive spin from him. “Who will you be voting for?”
“Well there’s McCain, but he’s a son of a bitch, too. I hate his father. His father’s a Commie. We did not lose the Vietnam War, it’s a myth that McCain’s father made up. They teach you that we lost the Vietnam War, but WE DID NOT!”
Since I’m not familiar with McCain’s father in any capacity, I tried to get clarification on the scenario he was describing, but got nothing but incoherent ramblings until he starting talking about the missteps of some politician he called Urkel. Because the only “Urkel” I know is Steve Urkel from Family Matters, I confessed that I wasn’t familiar with a politician named Urkel.
“You don’t know Urkel?”
“No…”
“That’s what everyone calls Obama!”
Ah, suddenly I got it, and I had to sip the melted ice from my glass to stop from laughing out loud at his outlandish bigotry. Kirsten rushed to pay her tab so we could make a necessary exit, but the man was not yet done sharing his views with me.
“There’s only been one Democrat in the office in the last 100 years who wasn’t a Commie bastard.”
“Who?” I ask, taking the bait.
“Jimmy Carter. And he’s retarded.”
“Dumb but lovable,” I found myself saying, but not sure why. There was no segue into his next rant.
“THIS COUNTRY HAS A PROBLEM WITH 80 MILLION PEOPLE! ILLEGALS! WE MUST EXTERMINATE THEM ALL! Get the beaners out of here.” Fortunately, Kirsten had paid her tab before I even had to figure out how to respond to such hateful rhetoric, and we up and left. I told the man to “take care” because that’s exactly what he needed to do. I didn’t feel bad about not challenging his views, because sometimes there’s no reasoning with someone that is that crazed and I especially didn’t desire to be stabbed by him for being a Commie sympathizer and fan of Urkel.
What’s peculiar about this incident to me is sadly not what he said, but where he said it. How does a deranged bigot end up at a hole-in-the-wall lesbian bar? He was clearly oblivious to the Sapphic affection all around him, and at least indifferent to the bar’s Latina demographic. Every time I go, I always see someone who doesn’t seem to understand where they’re at until too late. A few trips ago, I sat near a pair of presumably heterosexual women and overheard an exchange between them after a long time of silence.
“Do you… do you think this is a [mouthing the word]gay bar?”
“Hmm. I didn’t really notice. I guess it might be.”
I love the second woman’s overly PC answer, as if she simply hadn’t noticed the mullets, string of Melissa Etheridge songs, and lady-tonguing going on all around her. I suppose it’s the same blindness the intoxicated stranger next to us at the bar experienced, unaware that the people he claims to hate are serving him drinks and crooning Janice Joplin in his direction.
Songs to stream/download:
Willie Nelson – Time After Time
Bonnie Tyler – Total Eclipse of the Heart
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