depressed karaoke is still karaoke

A week before we met, I got a text from my friend B, and I know these three things simultaneously: she is going to want me to come to something, I would rather die than leave my apartment, and once I go I will have fun. Truly. She is a person who makes plans, and I am a person who fantasizes ways to get out of plans.

C and I drive the hour to this Korean place where we are meeting B, K, O, and his girlfriend M for fried chicken. B knows this place and knows what to order, and I trust her implicitly. We order two full chickens, cut into their respective pieces. We opt for the platter, which means each chicken comes with salad, gizzards, chips and salsa, and that mix of corn, mayonnaise, and cheese that honestly confuses me. I am on board with these sides. Sides are my favorite part of going out to eat. I eat a couple of bites of the gizzards and the corn salad because I want to like them. But I do not.

The chicken is perfect. We all burn our fingers as we trade stories of post-graduation unemployment.  We are too into this chicken to slow down and let it cool or dwell too much in our restlessness and sadness. The skin of the chicken cracks like glass. I bite through bones and can’t distinguish between the crunch of the bone and the crunch of the skin. There are full pieces of fat and skin that are wet with grease without being greasy. Again, the skin of the chicken cracks like glass.  Delicious, delicious glass.  I keep saying how good it is. I try to restrain myself from this annoying habit by promising myself that I can talk about the chicken with C for the whole drive home.

On the way out the door, I knock over a red plastic cup full of chopsticks in the middle of the restaurant. I realize what I’ve done as soon as I hear the sound of two dozen plastic chopsticks hit the floor. My new dress is too short for me to really pick them all up. Plus, my new pantyhose have rolled dangerously low, almost below my buttcheeks. Luckily, my friends and the waitress jump in to help. The waitress is so graceful in a way I envy deeply, especially as I am crouched awkwardly in a too-short dress, full of chicken—perfect chicken—with my pantyhose rolled down low, knowing that everyone in the restaurant in at least aware that I have done something completely understandable and relatable, but still truly embarrassing. The magic of the perfect chicken dissipates.

—-

We make a quick stop at a Korean grocery store to buy soju before we head to the karaoke bar. The last time I was at this store, I searched everywhere for flavored soju but couldn’t find it. B comes here all the time, and I am hoping that she will take us directly to the good shit. Instead, she tells us that it’s against the law to sell flavored varieties in grocery stores because flavored soju is considered hard alcohol, while plain soju is not. Right after she says this, I see a shelf with nearly identical bottles of liquor. But they’re not liquor. Technically. The shelf holds what looks like plastic bottles of easily identifiable rum, vodka, tequila, whiskey, and brandy. Only they all say grape wine in tiny print and proclaim alcohol contents around 22%. We are all confused. I buy the whiskey one for $6.

Later, as I am taking enormous glugs of this stuff, my guess is that it’s just watered down, cheap whiskey. That’s what it tastes like. Half of the people in our group are afraid to drink in the parked car. We wonder aloud about open container laws and joke about how suspicious it must have looked when O and M climbed into the trunk of the SUV we’re sitting in and then our car stayed in its spot. We cut our pregame short, and B puts 2 beers in her purse. I put the quasi-whiskey in mine, alongside a bottle of water I always have within arm’s reach.

My blood warms from the quasi-whiskey halfway up the stairs to the karaoke bar. On the door is an enormous and threatening sign that says that bags will be checked before admittance and there is a $100 fee per bottle found. Like an idiot, I point wildly at the sign and make an uh-oh face (and probably noise). The group pushes inside. We pass a cooler that is full of—what do you know—flavored soju. I look right at it and say too loudly: maybe we should make a quick trip back to the car. I am an idiot, completely without subtlety.

—-

After everything I’ve done to get myself charged for not 1 but 2 bottles, we are led to a room without any problems. The $100/ bottle policy must be more of a deterrence than a reality.
Half of the room is taken up by an enormous 3-sided couch. An enormous TV fills the opposite wall. When I come back from the bathroom, I can hear drunk people just belting their hearts out. I envy their bravery in sneaking in alcohol. I now assume this is what everyone does because there are zero consequences and who wants to do sober karaoke? I also know that I will absolutely not be drinking from the plastic bottle in my bag.

When I re-enter the room, B is already singing and there’s a clock ticking down our time together. B barely has time to explain the control pad to us because she does not want a single second to tick by without someone singing into a microphone. I do not blame her. Both the control panel and the fat book of song titles are mostly in Korean with some English peppered in. B chooses a Korean song and is the only person to sing it because she’s the only one of us who speaks Korean. What a power move, honestly. If it were me, that would 100% have been my move—choose songs only I can sing so that I can monopolize both microphones and really get my money’s worth. I would not hold it against her for a single second if she did this and am in fact jealous that I am unable to.

We have the music cranked up to the max volume, as well as the volume and reverb on the microphones. The timing is weird on the tracking, the way the words light up to let you know what to sing and when. Coupled with the reverb, it is nearly impossible to sing in time, even to songs I have sung a million times before. I put “Bohemian Rhapsody” in the queue (obviously), attempt to find Panic! At the Disco but can’t, and land on “I Will Follow Him” from Sister Act. As soon as that last one starts, I realize I have made a terrible mistake because it turns out I don’t really know this song all that well, I just know that one part, and I am the only one scream-singing into a microphone, off-tempo and off-key, in the dark on an enormous couch. This happens later to O, when he picks an Usher song and realized it wasn’t quite what he wanted and cancels it. I did not think to jump ship at the time of my solo and instead made everyone sit though my singing gospel-sounding music from the Sister Act soundtrack interspersed with me saying alternately: I have made a mistake, and this isn’t the song I thought it was.

—-

Two things surprised me. 1.) When you are singing, weird nature documentary b-roll plays behind the lyrics. For a lot of Smash Mouth’s smash hit “All Star,” there is a close up on a jaguar’s tongue, lolling out of its open mouth. Like you can’t see its eyes or face or body. Just the tongue and mouth. In another, one giant turtle is riding another. I get excited and scream: those turtles are fucking!

2.) C seemed hesitant about the idea of karaoke, which is completely on brand for him. At one point, I offered to be the DD because, of the two of us, I am far more likely to sing karaoke stone-cold sober. He is unlikely to sing in any state. But when we get into the room, he gets into it. He figures out how to add songs to the queue before I do and has the foresight to choose “All Star” for our first ever karaoke duet. At one point, after I volunteer that we will share a microphone to join in on “Take on Me,” C takes the microphone out of my hand and says: I’ll just do it.

Those two hours were totally and wickedly fun. It was the first time we’d seen anyone our age since before the holidays. It’s one of the few times we’ve left our apartment as our job search drags on. We needed it. Everything is up in the air and kind of shitty right now, but karaoke is fucking cool. I realized halfway through our time there that I was screaming instead of singing and that that was making it even harder to sing well. It made my throat hurt. But I loved it. Even though I spent a lot of the time trying to do the math on much it was costing per person or per minute, it was a near-perfect (like the chicken) moment.

On the way home, I fulfill my promise to myself and just let loose about how perfect the Korean fried chicken was. C and I both keep saying that we had so much fun and that  the chicken. Was. Perfect.

We are in love with that night and that chicken. The next day, we will drag ourselves out of our apartment and drive the hour all over again to get more fried chicken for lunch. It was his idea, no lie.