That I couldn't even read a street sign.........I didn't really, I just think the whole glue sniffing thing is hilarious. And Portland seemed like a glue sniffing town for some reason. I think I associate cloudy northwestern cities with glue sniffing....... I couldn't tell you why.
What I can tell you is that Sunday night in Portland was highly entertaining. We went to this place across from the Doug Fir called Galaxy, that was this karaoke restaurant lounge type place. We were all still reeling a little from the night before and the bloody mary's @ lunch didn't seem to take the bite off instead they tend to make me feel a little worse and succeeds in starting the tear pretty early on, which more often than not ends badly.
So @ five we headed across to Galaxy to sing and drink, and the place was deserted. Totally deserted except for the bartender Jamie, and two video poker vampires who never once looked up from their screens. Well man, we were really ready for karaoke but Jamie said we had to wait " until the Wolf gets here". I was like "the who"? She then silently pointed to a little ghetto placard that was on one of the tables that had a picture on one side of a heavy bearded fellow with a giant mexican sombrero and a pair of maracas in his hairy pale hands. The photo was clearly taken with a polaroid. You could see the blurry edges and the red in his glassed over eyes from when the flash went off. This, ladies and gentleman, was the Wolf. On the other side of the card was the other guy that hosted Karaoke there, he was named...I'm totally serious here.....the Leprechaun!!!. The Leprechaun took his whole set-up a lot farther, (further?) than the Wolf's half-assed presentation. Here was a picture ofa guy standing outside in full Leprechaun regalia, little red beard, buckle shoes, little green knickers, all capped with a little green pipe to boot. We all shook with laughter. Here was a guy who said "when I grow up I want to be a Leprechaun". I guess job options are limited so I really any job that doesn't give you shit about looking that way or packs you off to the fucking nuthouse is a no brainer. Needless to say, we were already regretting that the Leprechaun had the night off.
Since it was only like six by this point we decided to get some food and wait for this Wolf slob to show up.. Now here is a funny thing about the Galaxy, they have a full on chinese food menu alongside burgers,fries and chicken fingers. Never passing up a chance to play with fire or say poo, James and I split the little poo poo sample platter with the little grill on it. Yeah I know, you're all jealous because just thinking about it makes you get all nostalgic for that time in your life when you were a kid and your parents still spoke to each other and weren't divorced and all of you would go out to eat chinese and it was actually fun..no yelling or uncomfortable silences. Well, anyway, we ate and waited. At 8 the Wolf showed up looking like he just crawled off of his sofa bed and entered the restaurant carrying this sad little Wendy's meal which he proceeded to extract from the bag and put on a plate and eat @ the bar. He ate in silence , much how I pictured old Ebenezer Scrooge eating his gruel before being visited by the ghosts.
While this solitary fast food meal at an empty bar may seem kind of sad, it made James and I roar with laughter later when we were recapping the night.
At the time we all were already three quarters of the way into the proverbial bag and one of our crew goes up to the Wolf and asks if he could start up the Karaoke fifteen minutes early since we were the only people in the bar and we were super excited to sing. "Karaoke starts @ nine" he barked. Alright, first of all I could see if we interruped his pathetic little supper, but he was done eating, not even drinking just sitting there doing nothing. I hate (notice I am using the word hate here) that! Here's a guy who has probably mad bad adult decisions for the entirety of his adult life thereby leaving him with little to no control. One of those people that were cowed by the new young soar-through-the-ranks punk @ the office into just slipping through the cracks, and here, @ Galaxy, where we were the sole customers at quarter 'til nine, he was king. He called all the shots. You were in his world. I could just see how happy it made him too shut someone down. It came running down his fat forehead in little sweaty rivulets of glee.
At nine (on the nose) he turned on the machine and the first one of our group walked up onto the stage with a beer only to be told by the Wolf, that beer was not aloud on the stage while singing.Who ever heard of that!!! Its fucking karaoke, not surgery, I wouldn't have been surprised if the Wolf asked us to scrub in before we handled his precious Sears Microphone.
But you know, we're reasonable people and we were just there to have a good time so you know, fuck it, no drinking on stage, fine. Well, as soon as the first one of us started singing we all started dancing and singing along on the little dancefloor and here comes the Wolf again: no drinking while dancing...oh yeah and no swearing, no swearing? What the fuck? Was this like Footloose or something? We are in a bar, we are all adults.......no swearing.
By the time we reached "25 or 6 to 4" by Chicago, we were pretty wasted and James had totally had it with the Wolf. See, James was ignoring the guidelines that the Wolf had set forth, forget that we were the only people there and everyone was having a pretty tame good time. But James was shaking the foundations of the Wolfs belief system,dancing with beer on the dance floor,and bringing beer to the stage, the Wolf kept kind of pushing James off of the floor. He also wouldn't let more than one person sing @ a time. He neglected to tell me that when I turned in like five group sing-a-long songs only to wonder why my songs were getting skipped. Fed up, we all finally left. Outside of Galaxy you could see James pointing @ the Wolf and giving the thumbs down sign. It was pretty funny.
On my way out, I went up to the cocktail waitress to settle my tab and said "The Wolf's a fucking dick." Sadly, she nodded her head and with a sigh all she said was "We get a lot of complaints about the Wolf." So everybody, the moral of the story is make sure you get the Leprechauns' shift..........mike