Tomorrow, They'll Be Anonymity

Going out to bars when out of town can be so liberating….

I was in Rhode Island last week for work. It was a long, hard week. Friday night I was wiped and it was frigid outside and I almost just went to bed early, but I’m so glad I didn’t! I decided to go to this leather bar, called the Eagle in downtown Providence, just blocks from my hotel. I had researched it and actually brought my leather vest – ‘just in case’. (The website said you got in free if you wore leather.) I walk the 6 blocks there in 9 degree weather, all bundled up. I get to the address, but I’m confused. It says it is called “Fitzgerald’s” or something. I go in and find myself in a plush piano bar, with some drunk guy singing at the mic. A quick scan of the crowd confirms that at least I’m in a gay bar. Five dollar cover is demanded.
“Uhm…Ok. Uh….Where’s the eagle?”. (and all the other people in leather so I don’t look like a fool…..)
It is next door, I’m informed. The bars are connected. Cover gets both.

Doorman doesn’t see my leather beneath my coat and scarf. I forget in the confusion to ask for the discount and just give him the five spot. I go thru to the leather bar where the coat check is and shed my outer garments. This crowd is a bit different from the guys in the piano bar. I do see quite a few leather outfits, and metal armbands and shaved heads and bared tattoos. They also have the heat blasting and I immediately begin to sweat. Nine outside, 89 inside. I scan the dark corners for a 69. (kidding) I do notice that many of the guys are going shirtless.

After 1.5 beers, I’m feeling a little loose and enjoying being the new stranger in the bar. (You get lots of attention, if you didn’t know. Fresh-meat syndrome.) With sweat rings growing out of my pits, I decide “What the hell! I’ll never see these people again. I might as well take off my 4 t-shirts” (IT WAS COLD OUTSIDE!!) and check them with my coat. Besides, what’s the point of having a nipple ring if you can’t show it off in a leather bar? J I’m now in jeans, and a leather vest and a black ball cap, and on high flab alert, belly sucked in tight.

I meet Kirk, an older gentleman who wanted to take me home and give me cocaine and do all sorts of sexual things to me. He was very explicit. He bought me a beer and a teqwilla shot. When he then pressed me for an answer on what I would do with him, (“Will you bareback?”), I had to tell him I wasn’t interested. I went back to playing my video game. He left me, limping off (I think he had gout) to talk to some other guy.

After my 3 beers and tequila, I had to pee. I go to the restroom, located between the two bars. As I’m leaving the bathroom, feeling studly and manly in my leather vest, and chest hair blowing in the heat vents, I hear the piano pounding out a rousing show tune in the other bar. I forget that there are no other leather-ites in the piano bar (are they segregated?) and go thru the doors to get a better listen. I think the piano man was singing “MAME!” I’m standing just to the side of the piano, staying close to the door for a quick exit back into the leather sanctuary.

However, when the piano man finished and looked at me and said “You wanna sing something?” , being a bit tipsy, I said ‘Yes’ and I’m sure I sounded stone-cold sober. I suggest ‘Anthem’ from Chess, since I recently had sung this at karaoke (also out of town in Ohio). He has the sheet music, and away I go, belting my little heart out in my leather vest and nothing else to a room full of Izod, Kenneth Cole and Perry Ellis.

I guess I passed muster, cuz as soon as I was done, the piano man asked me to sing another one. “No, no, I can’t…. Like what?” The duet from ‘Chess’? “No, No, I don’t know it well enough. No, I couldn’t sing another anyway. …What else?” He named something I didn’t recognize. “No, don’t know it. I really shouldn’t sing. I shouldn’t even be in this bar in my little leather vest. Surely this is odd.”
And then, I remember the song I had practiced in the shower for a month, that I had planned on doing at karaoke competition in Marietta ($50 prize), but never got around to it. A surge of evil tequila courses thru my veins to my head and I think, “You know….I’m gonna do it, just cuz it is so crazy and stupid and I can have a story to tell.”

I whisper the title to the piano man. He stares, slack-jawed, for a moment. “Really?” A glance at my nipple ring with a heavy silver skull dangling from it. “....Uhm….OK”. He finds the music, I take the mic from the stand, and he starts the intro. I scan the crowd with a serious expression - a hard, stern glance. I raise the mic to my mouth, fix the kissing lesbians in the back with my mean-man-in-leather stare, and begin to sing, as sincerely as I can. The front door opens, letting in a blast of cold air, making my nipples stand at attention, my jewelry swinging. The piano plays in a key a third too low, but it helps me sound manly. Deep breath, ..but don’t’ expand the tummy too much. The words, heart-felt and poignant, come soaring out across the room. “The sun’ll come out/ Tomorrow/ Bet yer bottom dollar that tomorrow they’ll be sun/ Just thinking about/ Tomorrow/ Clears away the cobwebs and the sorrow/ till there’s none.”

I made my way back to the hotel, laughing at the absurdity of it all. I wonder if anyone in Providence is telling this story today, about the silly leather queen who sang ‘Annie’. But can’t we all relate to little orphan Annie? Aren’t we all orphans, in one way or another?