Another Night in Billyburg

On Saturday night, I made my way to Williamsburg a little after midnight. One of my brother's friends from college, who I had met in the days when Roy would recruit me to work on the sets of his student films, was there celebrating her first birthday as a New Yorker. We met up with her and her assembled potluck of friends and friends-of-friends at the unapologetically-named Trash Bar, where late night karaoke in a back room was promised.

In keeping with the forcefully indifferent griminess that is a keystone of Williamsburg hipster culture, the bar was dark and sticky, and the familiar pungency of peat swirled with potentially imagined traces of piss and unwashed hair. Behind a heavily graffitied but otherwise unlabeled door downstairs, a pool of liquid gathered in a poorly-lit corner of the bathroom. Band stickers and fliers covered the walls by the entrance to the bar, and it was here that we chatted with Annelise, catching each other up on the little and big ways our lives had changed since we last saw each other, a year ago at Swingers in Los Angeles. She introduced us to her boyfriend Dennis, and we remarked how none of us had ever crossed paths with him before, even though he had apparently gone to school with Roy and Annelise, a year behind them in the film program. A band played in the back room, holding it hostage from the increasingly restless crowd waiting for 1 o'clock, when karaoke was designated to begin.

Though I can't say I know her well, Annelise always struck me as someone who could effortlessly step into and blend with the larger tableaux of Brooklyn. And so it seems she has, her sarcastic wit and blase-yet-charmed self-awareness swaying comfortably in a chamois-colored dress and ironically-unironic tiara as she spontaneously climbed on stage later in the night to pantomime some guy's rendition of some song (the night, and the drinks, took the other details). Earlier, the KJ (which, I only just learned, is a thing) had introduced her while insisting she was celebrating her 21st birthday, perhaps a result of his third or fourth drink and her pretty, pixie-like affect. She sang TLC's "Unpretty," which I remember being rather fond of when FanMail first came out in 8th grade.

Karaoke's a funny thing to witness. An unspoken contract is inexplicably struck between complete strangers in dark places as long as alcohol, a stage, and a microphone are provided. Terrible, shrill warbling is tolerated, song choice is quietly judged but openly accepted, and people are mostly enthusiastic. In the back room of a place called Trash Bar, in Williamsburg, in the early hours of morning, the usual strangeness of karaoke remains, although not without its own twist of flavor.

Towards the beginning of the night, a white girl with dreads stumbled on stage and repeatedly asked "What the fuck?" during the parts she didn't know, but gave an otherwise stirring take on Erykah Badu's "Call Tyrone." Dennis, clad in a skinny red tie, sneakers, and black-framed glasses, led the crowd in an energetic sing-along of Usher's "Love In This Club," and gamely rapped the second half of Young Jeezy's verse a capella when the machine cut off early. Later, as the KJ danced and sang to his second Prince song of the night, the girl with the dreads got on stage and danced up to him from behind, reached around, and grabbed a handful of his jeans. "That's my dick!" the KJ narrated with a smile, helpful, bemused. Three girls -- one of them may have been Annelise -- belted out some Dusty Springfield. A youngish black man opted for a very competent rendition of The Backstreet Boys' "I Want It That Way," a song that was huge in its time but also one I never suspected would have any lasting impact. The way the whole room knew all the words and made valiant attempts at the high notes, however, seems to prove me wrong. Suburban kids who grew up in the 90's just have certain bonds you can't anticipate.

The night ended with two girls, puzzlingly barefoot and clad in matching maroon dresses, gyrating and slithering and folding themselves onto the floor of the stage as they moaned out, appropriately enough, their take on "The Dope Show." If they even knew the rest of the room was there -- some mystified, some singing along, all inebriated -- I'll never know. After the lights came up, they quietly stepped off stage, put their shoes and coats back on, and shuffled toward the front of the bar with the rest of the crowd. As we stepped out from behind the curtain divider, the thick smell of gasoline filled the air. Someone had ridden a motorcycle into the middle of the bar. Nobody really thought twice about it; nobody asks those kinds of questions at 4 AM in a bar called Trash. We brushed past and spilled out onto the street, each pocket of revelers laughing amongst themselves, each excited about something going on in their own lives, each calling out goodbyes as they walked toward whatever that something was.