Anarchy in Cooper Square

I'm not sure if you'd call Karaoke a piece of Japanese culture or not but no other ethnicity can claim such an attachment to this strange past time. Personally, I feel that karaoke can be fun but it's not something worth doing more than once a year, if that. As a town with a significant Japanese cultural presence and a fair amount of Japanese ex-pats, New York City was also the home to myriad karaoke bars. The only one I really knew of during my years there was in the Cooper Square section of NYC. The name of this establishment escapes me, of course, but I remember where it was and what it looked like so names aren't important here.

The outside was fairly unassuming with a small selection of neon signs out front advertising its Japanese ownership and the fact that it was a karaoke bar. Inside was not designed for public embarrassment but only for embarrassment in front of your friends - or at least the party that you came with. The bar was divided up into two floors with roughly 5-10 individual rooms per floor for karaoke as opposed to a main stage where drunk post-college girls could get up in front of everyone and incoherently scream the lyrics to Jimmy Buffet's "Cheeseburger in Paradise".

I was lucky enough to be in attendance with my friend Jon Franks and a selection of his high school friends from the hamlet of Croton-on-Hudson; Amy, Ivan, Tarran, someone else and a slightly unstable fellow whose name escapes me but whose involvement in this night did not. Our reservation was for Saturday night at 11pm in a downstairs room. By this time, we could tell that people were already having a ball as you could hear the karaoke machines blaring the cheezy sanitized musak-versions of popular songs recognizable only by their basic melody and nothing else accentuated by loud drunken laughter that seemed to come from every room. We were eager to become as stupid as everyone else and given that this was a BYOB establishment there must have been 4 six-packs between the 6 of us.

Tentative at first, we performed most of the "numbers" without much personality. I suppose at this point though, it didn't really matter given how surreal the whole arrangement seemed. To be in a dimly lit room in the basement of a cramped bar in Cooper Square illluminated only by neon light fixtures with drunk twenty-nothings everywhere was not a nightly experience. After slobbering my way through the Rolling Stones' "Get Off of My Cloud" and consuming 3 beers I left our performance space and headed for the bathroom which was right across the hall. But before I could open the door to the bathroom the door itself opened and out came this completely "draked" guy with blooshot eyes who was still in the process of buckling and zippering up his pants. He didn't look directly at me (there's a chance he didn't actually see me even though I was right in front of him) and so instead of looking at him I looked over his shoulder to assess the bathroom and saw the remainder of his diarrehea swooshing away down the toilet. Apparently this guy was in such a rush to get back to the karaoke-ing that he didn' t have time to properly hitch up his pants and wait to see if everything was properly flushed. I entered the bathroom holding my breath and hoping he wouldn't try to come back - forgetting that he had to vomit as well.

Back in our room the group was going strong. Jon was screeching his way through the Who's "My Generation" and he was starting to look a little embarrased. Next up, the slightly unstable friend. The selection was the Sex Pistols' classic "Anarchy in the UK". I was surprised when the unstable friend began strong, sounding suitably angst-ridden, angry and punk. It was a tour-de-force and we cheered him on. As he rounded the bend in the song that leads to it's conclusion he growled into the mic "IIIIIIIIIIIIII wanna beeeee-ahhh An-archiiiiiist, get pissed, destroyyyyyyyyyaaaahhhh" with the Johnny Rotten coughs and hacks to boot and then he dropped the mic on the stained carpet with a thud and bolted out of the room. We laughed and applauded until after a couple minutes Jon astutely observed, "I think he really left!"
"No way,", responded Ivan while leaving the room to go look for him.
"That's so weird, why does he do stuff like that?", added Amy.
But Ivan returned and said, "I can't find him. I guess he left".
That's a hell of a way to end a night and a bit melodramatic. I mean, maybe he had somewhere else that he wanted to be. But, that's I guess the karaoke equivalent of "dine 'n dash" since we hadn't actually paid yet (the room was by the hour). I guess I didn't really care that much since he wasn't my friend but it was kind of funny to see someone do something that unexpected.