I Thought They Knew It Was A Gay Bar By Josh Mahan

Roselle was only a third of the way into his second drink at AmVet’s last night when the woman running the karaoke machine called his name. Mike had been at the bar talking to a genuine gay Missoula Lowbagger reader for some time and hadn’t noticed that his number was up. He had been rambling on all night about gay this and gay that in a loud voice. Each time he dropped the G-Bomb, the older and weathered crowd of twenty people sitting in this famed gay bar looked nervously over at our small circle. Later in the night, as he nursed a bum knee in the Golden Rose, Mike would proclaim to all, “Didn’t they know it was a gay bar?”

For the time, though, the karaoke announcer was insistent upon finding out who wanted to croon Merle Haggard.   

“Mike….Mike,” the woman repeated a few times.

She finally broke through his fog, and Roselle made for the stage. He grabbed the mike without fear, and began singing to an audience of seven, scattered across a 150-person capacity dance floor. He trailed the music for a bit with his singing, then regrouped and put his heart into it, swinging his arms and swiveling his hips as he howled “We still wave old glory down at the courthouse.”

From my vantage I didn’t see what happened next, but there was the type of crash that you only hear when a 230-pound mammal crashes into a wall with a microphone and falls limp to the floor. The crowd couldn’t believe it and nobody really moved, including Roselle, until the karaoke maestro requested assistance. Mike was on the ground, screaming something about pulling a Sandlin, and freaking out Ms. Karaoke to the point that she had to request and then withdraw her request for a “911” call.

Roselle says his knee (wounded at the 2003 Bitterroot Ruckus Camp) gave out, leading to the crash and burn. But we’ll never really know. All I know is he was on the ground crying for an ambulance, while the gay guys taunted him with talk of a whhaaambulance. 

Back at the wooden bar, Doug the bartender looked incredulously at Craig, the bona fide Lowbagger reader, and the only reason Roselle wasn’t being drug up the steps by angry lesbians and deposited back on street level.  

I got him out of there somehow without any large, hairy cooks getting the best of him. Though I will say he was in sorry shape, and I see how such a situation could have taken place.