That time in Seattle when we played pool, went to a punk concert, sang karaoke, and danced in rooms with beautiful strangers

The last night was full of absences. We walked into the college neighborhood near University of Washington with the strange feeling of people missing, no J yelling about getting drunk or pulling you aside to say that he loved you. No M standing with a backwards hat, surveying the scene like a football coach before offering some funny remark. No S surveying the room from underneath his hat, with an almost unwavering affability. And yet the rest of us were gathered in Seattle to make something of our last night. We were going to do everything. 

The first place, Dominick’s had a nice set of pool tables and college kids wearing UW shirts that we’d seen at the game. They wandered in and out, young and boisterous, and I’d say stupid, but I’d be lying. They probably knew way more about Sophocles, statistics 101 and basic human anatomy than they’d ever again know in their lives, stopping over as they were, in that isthmus of knowledge that college provides. 

We picked a pool table in the corner and started playing cut throat. The problem with playing cut throat when you have five people is that you often get knocked out after taking roughly one shot. I didn’t notice at first because through the luck of the draw I kept winding up in the final two. I’m not good at pool because I’m impatient. I’m also not good at pool because the angles leave me. Often, when I haven’t played in a while, I go in a fantastic run to start with, placing the queue ball perfectly in corners, grazing the edge of the other balls with grace. And then, like everything else in life, it suddenly goes away. Suddenly you’ve lost it. The girl you’ve been talking to suddenly crosses the room and hugs her handsome boyfriend or the drinks wear off and you realize you’re still trapped in the sad shell of a self that you’ve always had. Soon enough I’m looking at easy shots and flubbing them like someone who has never picked up a pool stick in his life. Soon enough my friends realize that I’m not all that good at pool, just lucky. 

In the meantime my friends have identified a group of college guys playing at the table next to us. One of them is wearing salmon colored shorts--Shorts that are a near mirror of my own. And soon they are saying things like, “Look at Andrew #2 over there.”

“He looks like a nice guy.”

“He looks just like you.”

“Look at all of his friends laughing at his jokes. I kind of like him more than you.” 

For the record, I was happy with Andrew #2. He was a kind hearted sort of guy, playing pool and laughing with his friends. I wanted to pull him aside to let him know that he should enjoy college while he had the chance, but I didn’t know if he’d understand that I was a version of him in the future. I figured it would take too long to explain, so I just watched him like a stalker from across the bar that handsome bastard. (What I’ve done here is a rhetorical trick, by comparing myself to someone who is handsome and implying that we are similar I’m also implying that I’m handsome. I’ve been told that jokes are best when explained. Soon enough, between cursing the luck of the pool game we identified other carbon copies. I think I came out ahead as my friend N wound up being cast as a belligerent guy who kept smacking everyone in the back and who was really only my friend N at his most boisterous. As really, N is rather kind and not the sort to run around pounding his friends on the back in a threatening way in less he has just struck out in a game of whiffle ball and then it’s kind of hide the women and children territory as this is a person who once made himself throw up to eat more at a Sizzler all you can eat buffet. 

We could have stayed there all night, sipping drinks, dropping quarters into the machine and watching the college crowd pour in and out. We could have watched younger, though clearly less handsome, versions of ourselves knocking around pool balls and patting one another on the back, but it was time to go. This place is dead anyway. The grass is always greener. We walked out into the night, chrome colored streetlights feathering the ground with light, a cool breeze off the sound passing over our skin like the voice of a muse. Though perhaps I’ve overwritten that particular part. It was kinda cold. 

We were using Yelp to find the next bar. Is there a better way to find bars in Seattle? If so, someone should have told us because we were going off scant reviews, and as we wandered away from the main drag of University things started to look a little dicey. For some reason the streetlights started to disappear, and we walked in whole blocks swathed in darkness, past abandoned and shoddy looking store fronts, past people walking through those same pockets of darkness, though they seemed to be more inhabiting them than passing through them. Perhaps they had the same sense about us. Who knows what’s hidden behind the walls of any mind? We talked about stopping off to do karaoke but decided that was an activity for later in the night after we’d tied on a few more to warm up our voices. 

“Should we turn around?” one of my friends asked. “I want to have a good time, but I also don’t want to die.” It was the sort of street where you thought that you might die, but I still felt like the night could use some Fireball, so I stopped by a corner store that was manned by a clerk, who you just knew was stowing a shotgun or something behind the newspaper that he read as we walked around looking for something good. Beer and wine-- story of Seattle. We walked back out onto the street hoping our friends were still alive.

“Should we turn around?” J asked.

“We’re five big guys. I think we can handle ourselves our here,” said my friend T, who is 6’5.

“Speak for yourself,” J, who is 5’7 answered. 

Eventually the long chain link fences ended, and we found ourselves next to a bar, which was pretty much the first establishment that didn’t look like a flop house for a few blocks. We hightailed it inside, passing a small stage where one sound guy was setting up, and reaching a small rectangular bar, tucked into the corner. The thing about this bar is that everyone in the bar had at least five to seven visible tattoos plus one to two piercings. My friends are non-judgmental and loving folks, however, except M, who can probably fit in anywhere, we were kind of in the wrong scene. Being in the punk bar made me feel like I was back in junior high, when you’re distinctly aware of every movement that you’re making and how wrong it is, how out of touch with everyone else. This feeling goes away in adulthood and only returns at odd times, like in punk bars in cities where you’ve never been. Needless to say I got a tattoo. 

We got some drinks and headed over to the arcade. A girl with her head shaved on the left side and a bull ring through her nose was playing Super Mario Brothers on the arcade. We crowded around her, peeking excitedly over her shoulder at the Koopa Troopas, thinking back on the hours and weeks we’d spent hunched in front of our television screens trying to figure out how to beat the Hammer Brothers. We never did and maybe Super Mario Bros. was just teaching a lesson about life that we were too young to understand. You can’t beat the game, but you can play it and keep trying. Or maybe it was just a video game. 

The girl moved after a moment, clearly feeling us breathing down her neck. We popped a quarter in and immediately began, well, kind of sucking at the game. Like most things between old friends we tended to think we knew the best way to play the game and weren’t shy about telling the person playing the variety of ways in which they were failing. You have to get coins. Are you skipping that warp? Did you just forget about the extra guy? The truth of the matter is that we all sucked at the game in very unique ways. I had a tendency to jump into enemies for no apparent reason. My friend T couldn’t warp for the life of him, leaving us stranded on that level where the cloud just drops porcupines for days; which I’m pretty sure I’ve had nightmares about ever since. My friend M found ways to kind of suck at both, while actually being a better all –around player. It’s best not to think on the number of hours you’ve wasted in your life that let you remember, 15 to 20 years later, exactly which brick you need to break in order to get extra coins. This is the sort of thing that will depress philosophers of the future. 

This went on for a while. We formed our own little environment in that small wing of the bar, free from the punk scene to tell our own inside jokes, and denigrate one another’s inability to do a proper jump over a koopa troop and onto an elevator, so we could warp to level 8. And then my friend M noticed the game next to Mario Brothers. An old game called submarine that had the character of the machine that grants Tom Hank’s wish in Big. This machine was old and clearly hadn’t been used in about ten years. The gist of the game was that a small submarine would go across the screen, and you would fire a bullet at it, needing it to intercept the sub at the exact right time in order to sink it. The submarine looked far less like a video game and more like something constructed from paper that was, to my mind, being pushed across the screen from someone behind a curtain. I shit you not. These graphics were somehow beneath pong and you just knew that someone was employed to push the submarine across the blank black stage. In presentation, it might have been the worst game I’d ever seen, so naturally we tried it out. 

The thing about playing a game that leaves you wondering whether it’s really a game or a crappily constructed diorama is that at least a couple of punk kids in the bar are going to kind of also find the fact that this game exists awesome. And a brief camaraderie develops between your friends and this couple, which is really just the sort of amazement that the wise men felt at seeing an angel, watching this sub putter across the screen while a very old man pushed it from behind a curtain. And for this brief moment the number of tattoos and piercings and leather don’t really matter. It’s like the over effect except it’s caused by a video game. We were all here but a brief moment, let us burn brightly. Or something like that. 

The moment eventually passes, and we finish our drinks and make plans to slip out into the night. It’s only 9, and the band is starting to get up on stage. A group of 20 or so punk kids wait expectantly, mohawks, piercings and tattoos on display, but still wearing that exact same expression of excitement that I might feel if Counting Crows was warming up. We are all the same here. 

The next bar was supposed to be a place with nice pool tables and a dance floor. Maybe a place we could stop for the rest of the night. First, we had to find it. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the easiest thing in the world, and we wandered through some neighborhoods. Quiet streets, quiet houses, people sleeping on a normal Saturday night—people who live in Seattle and aren’t just visiting for a weekend of chicanery. We threw the football around in the dark. Everyone trying to not so secretly show off that they still had an arm, a front porch light flicked on, some young people stepped out onto their stoop having beers, and we were just some silly people in the distance throwing a football.

It’s weird to think of yourself in this way, a sidebar in the drama of someone else’s life. That’s why we hold on so intently to deep love, to good friendship. It reassures us that we are not acting in a poorly directed off Broadway production that our lives are, if not central, at least important to those people around us, these blips of light in an otherwise dark universe of people. Even the small bit who are alive now, who do not know, and will never even know that we existed throwing the football through acres of darkness on a street in a foreign city. 

Back on the street we wandered through portals of light, down side streets until we reached a slightly less well lit and sketchier bar scene. “I think we’re walking the wrong direction.” “Yes, we absolutely are, but at least we’re doing it together.” 

The bouncer at the door, a thickly muscled man is wearing a shirt that says cocaine and strippers. “Cocaine and strippers, eh” my friend says, and the bouncer nods in the affirmative. The place, Dominick’s is jubilantly large. A sort of quintessentially cool bar with pool tables, a wide dance floor, with incredibly long oak tables, boards that wood enthusiasts would go wild over all congregated near a fire place that is peacefully glowing. The only problem is that the place is nearly empty. It looks like the capacity could be around 250 or more, but we’re five of about ten people in the bar.

The bar tender is a girl who is in her mid-twenties with a black mid-riff shirt and the expression in her eyes of a woman who has worked in a factory for thirty years and seen six friends get arms and legs taken off by the machines. One of my friends chats to her for a bit, getting the low down on the bar. Her basic take on the bar is that it is a crappy place that people don’t really come to. The rum and cokes are cheap though, and she’s nice enough for someone for whom the world has become something to be endured rather than enjoyed. The tables really are magnificent, and we sit and talk about kosher and not kosher things, finding a quiet space to trade stories and cell phones, bull shits and real questions. 

The downstairs dance floor is empty. A group of five other guys who probably read the same Yelp review are playing a game of pool. Upstairs, the bouncer is talking to a guy in a UW shirt who has been dropped off at the bar in a drunken state. He chats with him about his shirt and gets a nice high five on his way out the door and into an Uber; a drunken reveler playing a minor role in the movie of my life. 

We head back to the streets and wander back towards the main part of town, or as I like to call it, the place where we don’t feel like we’re going to get murdered. We pass a small ice cream shop on the way and my friend T, who is always, relentlessly hungry, stops to grab some ice cream. In the meantime, the rest of us try and jump and touch a road sign that is just out of our reach. I’m 5’11 and have just started exercising again after a prolonged knee injury. My friend M is taller, but he’s still recovering from a near death scooter accident, the other two are short. I kept thinking that I would be able to reach it, but gravity, age, a drink or two, were denying me. 

My friend T strolled by, ice cream in hand, in okay shape, though not doing Crossift and eating Paleo, and, with an ice cream in hand jumped up casually to smack the sign with his hand without losing the spoon. I just want that tall bastard to know that the meek shall inherit the earth.

On our way back into the main drag we passed that row of darkened buildings again, a chain link fence guarding an alley off to our side. We looked across the street and J said, “That’s star karaoke. Should we?” I suggested that we just keep moving, that we’d spent enough time wandering around the mean streets of Seattle, but just like at nearly every other stop that night someone said, “let’s do it.” Basically, the evening was an improv class come to life. 

And so we crossed the street and climbed up a flight of stairs, stairs that were covered in cardboard mind you, and stair wells that had cameras, and also an ear piercing alarm was flashing as we walked up the stairs. It reminded me of nothing so much as a crack house that I’d seen on the television show The Wire. Luckily, we were not mugged on our way up to the karaoke place. We paid for half an hour and headed straight into the hits. I don’t remember exactly what we sang, but we sang it well and boisterously. The karaoke place had a rating system after every song, and we started out with an 88 before climbing up with each successive song, like one of those people trailing after a Sherpa on the way to the top of Everest. We took out iPhones and recorded songs. We sent Snap chats to our absent friends and basically killed it like a 1980’s hair band.

 Finally, after belting out our next to last song, with J claiming that his voice was failing him, and assuring me that the next time I stopped by his house in Chico I could sing all the Counting Crows I wanted because his family had it on their karaoke machine, my friend N, a quiet type, broke into a Bob Dylan style rendition of a song that was incredible. We were all amazed, iPhones were once again broken out to record the moment. The score came up for N’s song; he’d received a perfect 100. We wandered back out into the night knowing for a moment that we were perfect. Not fallen angels, but risen ones. 

We got to one last bar, talking briefly with the bar tender about where we were from before heading out to catch an Uber to a neighborhood we hadn’t visited yet. The hope was for dancing. Though for T it was probably a food truck, for N a quiet place with a beer, and for M somewhere to ease his pain, and for J somewhere to get me to shut up about never getting to dance. On the way, N pulled out his recording of our song. “We sound awful,” he pronounced. And he was right. The machine had lied. We were terrible.

We arrived in this new neighborhood on our last night, still with enough energy to have something magical happen. I was the first one to step out of the Uber; there was a line of pretty people at the door and Taylor Swift’s “Shake it Off” was playing. I knew we were in a good place. As we waited to get in, a pretty girl, late twenties, dark hair, stood up from a table with her friends and started dancing in an extremely silly but also very cool way and the bouncer jumped in as she did the Roger Rabbit and the Running Man and smiled and laughed through the whole thing. Essentially, she was following all the rules of dancing, which are basically just one rule: have fun. 

Inside, you discovered where all the pretty people in Seattle were. They had congregated in this bar. Most of my friends don’t dance, but M and I took to the floor. There were strobe lights, a checkered floor, a stage with a pole, and a window that made the dance floor appear bigger. For the first few songs it was one of those beautiful moments in life when everything almost stands still, M and I looking at one another, separated by the crowd, but still close, starting to sweat and bounce to the music with all the beautiful people in Seattle bathed in light around us. 

The great thing about this particular bar in Seattle is that all of the guys were dancing like crazy. Guys up on stages, guys in groups of girls strutting their stuff. The place was chalk full of women who usually dance by themselves and look disdainfully at everyone else who dares to enter the bar. Not at this place, at this place the guys were having as much fun as the girls. Eventually we wound up coaxing our reticent friends out onto the dance floor, and we cordoned off an area to dance the night away, just five guys having the time of their life in the corner of a small stage in a sea of strangers.

The other strange thing about this particular bar though is that everyone started coupling off. I’ve never been in a bar where everyone so glowingly decided that they’d rather not be dancing by themselves and found themselves a nice partner to dance the night away with, which means we wound up being the last five guys on the dance floor dancing without someone, but we still had a really great circle, and I bet most of those guys dancing with girls were secretly envious of our male camaraderie and willingness to spend time together being fools in a bar. 

We stepped outside to let the sweat dry from our bodies. In the street, a fight broke out and a guy was lying on the street with his head tilted back, waiting for an ambulance to arrive. My friend N, a new emergency doc broke into a livid rant about how stupid it was that the guy was receiving any medical attention at all. He said that he clearly had a broken nose and that he’d just be taking up space and time in emergency, including having an ambulance book across town all just because he got his nose broken for being an idiot. “I’m sorry I sound crazy,” he said, before launching back into the rant with renewed vigor, claiming that he wouldn’t move aside for an ambulance if it was bringing this guy into the emergency room. It was lovely. 

All nights must come to an end though. And this one was no different. We attach ourselves sometimes to evenings, to weekends, to friends as if they will last forever. But we are forever trapped in time, curled shapes at the foot of Vesuvius. Of course, the analogy fails because we are also constantly propelled forward, even if we don’t want to be. It is this doubleness, wanting to escape time, slow it down, speed it up, rewind it, which makes all thinking about time futile. It just is. I feel like I should go around pinching myself and everyone around me, saying, “Here we are.”

The streetlights detached themselves from other forms of artificial light, looking like the head of a Brontosaurus, which is a dinosaur that never existed, but was only constructed by accident, which makes my time spent learning the Brontosaurus both an event in time and an accident of time. And though the Brontosaurus never existed in real time, for decades it existed in books and in the minds of children. Thus becoming, for a time, real. This is neither here nor there. In the distance, a gaggle of pretty girls were gathered around the guy with the broken nose. Once, when I was a child, I feigned a stomach ache at N’s suggestion to get a girl’s attention. She has the same name as my life. That time, it worked. 

We caught a cab and talked about how terrible it was that Uber was infringing on their space. M and the driver discussed how Uber drivers were amateurs, not batting an eye at the fact that we’d already used Uber three times that day. That was then and this was now. We were changed men by the end of the night--our past selves phantasms that shook themselves free like shadows on vacation when we danced and sweated on the floor. 

We arrived home at 2 AM. The Canadians upstairs who invited us to party with them the first night were still out on the town, still chasing the night. We might have known them too, if we’d had the time. I said goodbye to my friends, giving full and straight forward hugs, which are really the only kind to give, not one of those hugs where you both slide your torsos back as if touching someone else might make you dissolve. I’m shy and sometimes hug that way, but I never mean to. I like to hug people fiercely because sometimes it’s good to be reminded that we must be fierce in this world if we are to hold on to anything--Like sand in an hour glass, our lives. And so we hugged tightly and sweatily and everyone dropped off to sleep while I packed up and got in the shower, ready to take my shuttle when it arrived at 3 AM. 

There are no rules in travel, but might I suggest that you sleep a few hours before you board the flight home? Scratch that, I slept like a baby through hour after hour of flights that usually lead me to contemplate my mortality. The problem was as I stood on the porch of our shoddy VRBO, looking out into the night, the magic and the mystery of the weekend had begun to wear off. It turns out that at 1 AM everyone on the dance floor can be beautiful, at 3, they are all assholes keeping you from sleep. 

I hopped onto the Super Shuttle, and the driver took care of my bags, one after another, making polite conversation. He had a white mustache, and he was wearing a black hat with the name of his company emblazoned on it. He asked me a couple of questions while I tried to get one to two minutes of sleep. I didn’t care about the moss on the steps, or the fluffy dogs that might be out. I didn’t care about the places to eat or what neighborhoods had good bars. All I wanted was tender, precious sleep.

He had picked up a woman before me and the two of them engaged in the politest and most mind numbing conversation I’ve ever heard. This is an uncharitable way to end the trip, but mind you, I hadn’t slept in days. The two of them talked and laughed about his shuttle job, how long he usually waited and what his shifts were like. All his answers were polite or peppered with offense less jokes. It was like listening to two robots imitating what it’s like to be nice to one another based on tapes from old television shows. I wanted to stab them both with forks. 

Finally, I slept and dreamed.

I dreamed of some distant city where the lights are strung out like clothes on a line. A city that you visit in the dead of night, in the dead of winter, where people are always asleep or quietly staring out their windows at the snow, a city where people are dancing and sweating and talking all night. A city where one day we’ll all meet again.