Tequila at Estelle’s

I don’t drink tequila myself. Well, sometimes I have a margarita, tis true, tis true. But tequila shots are another story.

Tequila Memory Lane

The last time I drank a succession of tequila shots was in 1992, I think in April or May, a rainy night, at a once-upon-a-time strip club called Estelle’s in Chicago. In 1992, it was a grungy dirty dive, located beneath the L tracks. A hang-out for off-duty firemen, raging alcoholics and improv comedians . The bartender there was a fabulous woman named Carla. I was in a band with her. Briefly. My friend Jackie and I had a regular gig singing at Estelle’s. Because it was once a strip-club, in long-ago days, there is a stage behind the bar, which is where we stood to sing.

People loved us. People came to see us, specifically. We had a small following.

One night I did some tequila shots. And later that night, I was involved in my one and only “bar fight”, with a crazy woman named Caroline, who wore a bandana as a headband (a la Jon Bon Jovi in circa 1986), tall white boots, and who was incredibly disturbed and angered by the presence of Jackie and myself. She began to heckle us. Loudly. Screaming inappropriate things up at us. At one point, she began to weep. Uncontrollably. Sitting at the end of the bar, sobbing like a banshee. Jackie and I kept trying to make our way through our set, with random shrieked interjections from the miserable Caroline: “Take your pants off, you bitches!” (Jackie burst out laughing at that one … and then tried to keep going.) “Ahhhh, this is BULL shit!!” moaned Caroline.

Later, Jackie and I came up with the theory that Caroline was an in-the-closet lesbian and somehow took out all of her latent aggressions on the two singing straight girls wearing lipstick and getting male attention up on the stage. Who knows what was actually going on. Kindly firemen tried to shut Caroline up, which pushed her over the edge even more.

To make a long story … well, longer … Caroline ended up locking herself in the bathroom and smashing all the mirrors. Jackie and I were perched up on the stripper’s stage, singing along, hearing these wild CRASHES coming from behind the locked door. Occasionally, a howl of agony from the distraught Caroline would make it to our ears. I cannot describe how challenging it was to keep singing, when all we wanted to do was break down and LAUGH.

At one point (and this was the major error of the evening), Jackie, a gorgeous blonde, one of my dearest friends in the world, leaned into the microphone, while Caroline was mirror-smashing her way into oblivion, and said in a sweet sugary voice, “Come on out of the bathroom, Caroline … Everybody loves you … Come on out … ”

Caroline, in the middle of her nervous breakdown, obviously heard this and thought (rightly) that everyone out in the bar was making fun of her. Rage began to smoulder beneath that headband. Grief and loss bubbled up in her latent heart. All of her problems in life, all of the people who had ever rejected her, became embodied by me and Jackie. We were her problem.

Our set ended … finally, management got Caroline out of the bathroom … but they did not throw her out, for an inconceivable reason. She was still sizzling with rage, waiting for her moment.

I had just gotten new headshots done, so Jackie and I went into the now-cleaned-up and mirror-less bathroom to look them over. We huddled over the contact sheet, talking. Then – suddenly – BOOM. The door to the bathroom slammed open and there stood Caroline. Blocking our exit. Jackie and I stood frozen, petrified, trapped. We felt guilty. For some reason. She glared at us. We were her nemesis. (Nemesees? Nemesei?)

I decided to make a break for it. I grabbed Jackie’s hand and shoved my way past Caroline. We literally had to push her out of the way to escape the dreaded bathroom where Caroline was about to kick our asses.

Our autonomy, our independence, our unconcern for her rage (we could not take her pain away) caused a crack to open up in Caroline’s psyche. And she smashed her pool cue against my back, cracking it in two.

I have never been attacked in my life. I felt no pain. Adrenaline raced in and covered up any physical agony. I turned on Caroline and pushed her up against the wall, screaming in her face, “Don’t you EVER friggin’ touch me again, bitch — you hear me? Don’t you EVER lay a hand on me again! You freakin’ crazy BITCH!” (You get the idea. It was a rant along those lines.) The firemen playing pool raced over and pulled me off of her, and at that moment Caroline started freaking out, trying to punch me, reaching out to pull my hair … The firemen had to restrain her. I continued to scream throughout all of this. “You’re CRAZY, woman. You’re CRAZY! You don’t TOUCH ME. You got that? YOU. DON’T. TOUCH. ME.”

Caroline, being held back by the firemen, did a karate kick at me, with her big white 1986 boots.

And it was then, finally, that Caroline was kicked out of Estelle’s. After she had relentlessly heckled the entertainment, ruined their bathroom, attacked an entertainer, broke a pool cue … Hmmm. What’s your clue that this woman needs to be shown the door?

I stood, surrounded by concerned firemen, my heart pounding through my body, my hands trembling. The firemen took care of me. They made me sit down. They sat with me until I calmed down. Firemen. Salt of the earth, I tell ya.

The last I ever saw of Caroline was 20 minutes later. She stood in the middle of North Ave, in the pouring rain, trying to call a cab, in a state of frenzied rage and grief. Occasionally she would turn and scream at the top of her lungs in the general direction of Estelle’s.

What?

What the hell was going on with that woman? She hated us SO MUCH that her personality (if she ever had one) appeared to dissolve in a 40-minute time period.

The next day my friend Jackie, quite a funny cartoonist, drew a caricature of Caroline, with the headband, the boots, a cigarette in one hand, a beer in the other, with glowering furious eyes, and FAXED it to me at my temp job. Unfortunately, the boss got to the Fax before I did, and watched the drawing emerge from the Fax machine. He placed it on my desk with a note, the epitome of understatement: “I think this is yours.”

Anyway. I was drinking tequila shots on that memorable evening. Even though I do feel somewhat blameless about what happened, that somehow Caroline projected onto Jackie and I her own disappointments in her life, I associate that evening with doing tequila shots, and so I have stayed away from the stuff ever since.