A tired and frayed crap-hole of epic proportion; a shuffling, comatose parade of allegedly “human” wreckage; rumpled, unraveled drunks breathlessly competing with the seriously over-loud vomitus exploding out of an irritatingly ugly jukebox; a band of bleached middle-aged hacks, sporting dynamic bowling-pin physiques, sets up on the green-stamp sized stage, prepatory to launching a spineless assault of sadly mediocre blues songs rendered with as much superficial sincerity as possible; cigarette smoke wafts relentlessly through the two glassless, metal-slab windows, chimneyed from the dubious depths and diseased internal organs of what appear to be skinhead bikers just released on their own recognizance; the band begins to play -- I’m already bored; the bartender, with all her hard-to-ignore over-abundance of womanly curves, for some reason is sporting an inexplicable, Ingrid-Bergman-after-shacking-up-with-Roberto-Rossellini hairdo, the sort of bobbed frowse you might’ve seen in a dilapidated Roman pasta shack, circa 1948; puzzled suburbanites start to straggle in, perhaps thinking this might be the Church of Scientology which is actually located just down the street; the inebriates clap, as if the band is committing something on stage that deserves positive acknowledgement ...I could go on and on, but to what purpose? It’s merely a normal “open mike blues jam” at The Torch Club, a downtown Sacramento institution that’s been destroying livers and wrecking ear drums for the past sixty or seventy years.
I’ve momentarily forgotten what the true purpose of this blog is supposed to be. Please excuse me.
Oh no -- they just dragged what appears to be some poor old homeless dude up there, to sing a song ... I’m outa here.
2 comments:
Sounds like quite a night.
This is pretty much what happens when I actually drag a notebook to a real, honest-to-Buddha bar; I actually like this funky old place, but Sunday afternoons are, well, problematic. Sounds like life itself, I suppose.
*Sigh*
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