Consider this a note of thanks to Mary’s Bar and Lounge off Interstate 81 in Chenango, just north of Binghamton, for hosting a couple of weary travelers looking for someplace, anyplace, to take a load off for a spell, emphasis on the adult beverages, after white-knuckling a nighttime drive through spitting rain across the Empire State vastness.
No cabernet? No problem. It wasn’t that kind of an evening.
“What have you got on tap?” your faithful correspondent asked.
“Nothing,” was bartender Michelle’s answer.
Bring on the Yuengling in a bottle, and excuse us while we contemplate the happy college kid we’d just left, the deluge back home, and the photo from our oldest showing how a gust brought a junk tree down across our backyard fence in Noyac.
Above the bar, the TV news showed industry leaders of western New York puzzling over the collateral damage from uncalled-for economic warfare against their Canadian friends and trading partners.
And then the karaoke started.
Appearances. They can’t be trusted. Because the hunched gent of a certain age in the fleece-lined jacket and baseball cap and deep in his Bud Light cups hustled right up to the mic to make with banter of dubious veracity but plausible comedy — “Where are all the pretty women? There used to be pretty women here every night!” — before unleashing a creditable rendering of the Commodores’ funk classic “Brick House.” (“The clothes she wears, her sexy ways / Make an old man wish for younger days.”)
A minute later he was back on his barstool as if nothing had happened. They called him Beetle Bob. He was by no means done.
Fall was in the air upstate, and the woolly plaid was out. Which is of note only for two similarly bearded and burly guys who didn’t seem together at first, and one of whom could actually sing, later cutting a rug to D.J. Casper’s “Cha Cha Slide.” As the evening wore on, the two felt a tad more comfortable with subtle displays of affection.
This was a no-judgment zone, singing-wise or otherwise, just a group of locals looking for a little escape, a little fellow-feeling, a little community.
But there’s one in every crowd, you say? Yes, there is. Here that one started bellowing, haunted by some unseen alcohol-conjured antagonist and threatening bodily harm to who knows who, until a guy at the mic had to interrupt his croaking of “Pour Some Sugar on Me” by Def Leppard to remind all listeners of the motto at Mary’s: “Be good or be gone!”
The patron settled up with Michelle, shook off the fugue state enough to apologize to her, and disappeared into the night.
The two travelers tucked into a pile of mozzarella sticks.
