Femme (10 page)

Chapter Fourteen

There’s a bus that goes down Fourth Street, so I only had to shamble a single block to catch it, then another block from the bus stop to V-Bar. Since I was in my heterosexual disguise (i.e., khakis and a black T-shirt), I only got three or four murderous glares. I arrived just before ten. The bar opened at eleven. When I walked in, all the lights were on and I got to see what the place was like under its normal veneer of casual seediness. And, believe me, it wasn’t pretty.

For one thing, the walls were actually army green, except there were places that had been touched up in an army green that didn’t quite match the first army green. Through the peanut shells on the floor, I could see there was a scratched and dinged hardwood floor. The bar itself, which was tiled in a forest green tile that, while in the same color family, clashed jarringly with the walls, was surrounded by stools that looked, well, sticky. They weren’t. They just looked that way. Like they’d been used for so long it was now impossible to get them truly clean.

“Hey Leo, how’s it hanging?” Pepper said when I walked in.

I almost looked over my shoulder to see who she was talking to. But then I caught myself and said, “Hey, Pepper. It’s hanging.” I cringed. Is that how straight guys responded to
How’s it hanging?
I mean, I wanted to say,
Fine, thank you
, but that seemed weird. And kind of gay.

In the harsh fluorescent light, Pepper looked a good deal older than I’d thought she was. She had to be pushing fifty. Her long hair was dyed black and cut with bangs across her forehead, like a nineteen-sixties Cher. She wore a lot of makeup, never a good look in natural light. That morning she was wearing a flannel shirt over a lacy bustier. She curved in all the places a woman is supposed to, so my bet was she could get any straight guy she wanted from twenty-one to eighty-one.

“What’d you do to your foot?” she asked when I got behind the bar.

“Kicked something I shouldn’t have.”

“Something or someone?”

I didn’t answer. I figured her imagination was a lot tougher than I was. Right away she jumped into training me. Showed me where everything was. Gave me a mini lesson in how to operate the cash register. While doing all that she’d ask the occasional question about my background, to which I gave monosyllabic answers. I wanted to distract her by asking a question, get her to talk about herself and not me. But it was hard to be preverbal and ask questions at the same time. Finally, I went with “Nice place. Yours?” which was straight for
Oh my Gawd, the bar is fabulous, how long have you owned it?

“There was a real-estate slump in the mid-nineties, right after the Northridge quake. No one wanted to live in Southern California, so everything got very cheap, very fast. I was working as a paralegal then, so I bought a couple of properties, condos that were practically free and this place. At first there was a bar in here called O’Malley’s. Irish pub kind of joint.”

That explained the myriad greens
, I thought. Though it didn’t explain why she hadn’t redecorated.

“O’Malley retired around Y2K. I tried to find a tenant for a while, then I realized I was tired of lawyers—for some reason they think they’re immune to sexual harassment laws—and so I decided to run the bar myself. It’s a bit more money, and if someone sexually harasses me I sexually harass them back or throw them out. My choice.”

“Uh-huh.”

My shift went until seven. Pepper explained that most days there was a little rush between five and seven as people got off their day jobs. The quietest time was from two to five. That’s when I was supposed to restock. Just off the bar was a small storage room where the extra booze was kept. Everything I took out of there had to be written down on a clipboard. She kept a running inventory, which she double-checked every three months.

At eleven o’clock we opened the bar. Surprisingly, or at least surprisingly to me, there were a few people waiting for us to unlock the door. Pepper explained that a lot of the people who came in to V-Bar first thing in the morning had jobs where they worked all night. This was their 11 p.m., rather than their 11 a.m. Most of them would be gone by two o’clock, just as if she’d called last call.

Pepper introduced me to Bobby G., Tran and Connie. Without asking for orders, she started to build their drinks: Smirnov and Coke, house white on the rocks, and a mandarin vodka and cran.

“It’s more important to learn people’s drinks than their names,” Pepper whispered to me as she poured. She had me put the drinks in front of them while she picked up the money they put down and cashed them out.

“I don’t let people run tabs in the daytime. They tend to wander out, and when they wander back in the next day they try to say they paid. Honestly, I don’t think they remember. It’s safer to collect when the drinks are ordered.”

Bobby G. and Tran spent most of their time sullenly staring at the two TVs that sat on shelves up by the ceiling. Each was tuned to a different iteration of ESPN. One played soccer, the other classic football games. Connie, though, was a talker. If I got within three feet of her, she’d start.

She didn’t seem so bad. In fact, I kind of felt sorry for her. She worked the night shift at an all-night diner. In fact, she still wore her uniform, though on top of it she wore a cardigan with a sprinkling of sequins. She worked from midnight through eight in the morning. “They call it graveyard, but we get a good crowd. We’re one of the only places in town open all night, so we get a decent rush after the bars close and then that blends right into the pre-work crowd. It’s a better gig than you’d think.”

Connie was in her mid-thirties and I figured she was lying about the job. It sounded dreadful. She wore a lot of perfume—one with too much lemon, I think—but when I’d set down her drinks, I could also smell pancakes and whatever it was she’d been drinking between the time she got off work and the time we opened. She’d probably been drop-dead gorgeous when she was younger, and had made the mistake of thinking she could get by forever on her looks. Now she looked worn and puffy from too much drinking.

Around one, Pepper sent me to lunch. “Normally you’ll be alone, so you either need to bring your lunch or order in. You can eat behind the bar. Do you smoke?”

“No.” I really was trying to quit. I hadn’t had a cigarette in nearly three days. So it was sort of true. And if I could pretend to be straight at work, I could pretend to be a nonsmoker.

“Good. I hate it when bartenders spend half their time out on the sidewalk. Do you drink?”

“Sometimes.”

“The regulars are going to try to buy you drinks instead of tipping you. Not a great idea. You can drink if you want to, but if I come in here and find you shit-faced we’ll have a problem.”

I nodded. I really didn’t plan to drink during the day. I had to leave myself something to do in the evening.

“Keep the comps to a minimum. If you think someone’s new, you can comp them a drink. If your friends come in, comp them one drink the first time and then throw them a drink every other time they come in.”

“Don’t have a lot of friends.”

“Well, now that you’re a bartender you will.” She lowered her voice. “Don’t comp the regulars unless it’s their birthday. And even then check their ID to make sure they’re not lying. Otherwise they’ll have six birthdays a year. Bottom line, they’re going to try to squeeze drinks out of you at every opportunity. Don’t let them con you.”

She turned and smiled at the regulars as though she’d just been whispering sweet nothings about them.

“Go have lunch. There’s a Mexican place three doors down. You should try it, it’s pretty good.”

I took her advice, and half an hour later I’d finished three street tacos and an iced tea. I took four ibuprofen, and tried to keep my foot elevated on the chair across from me through the whole lunch hour. Before I went back down to V-Bar, I called Carlos.

“Oh my Gawd, Carlotta, I’m in the closet!”

“Lynette, that’s what pretending to be straight is. Didn’t you know?”

“But I’ve never really been in the closet. I didn’t even think I
could
be in the closet.”

“Straight people always think someone’s straight until you tell them. You could have a dick in your mouth and a butt plug up your ass, and a straight person would say, ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’”

“No one’s asked me that yet.”

“When they do, tell them your heart is broken. That way you don’t have to produce a girl for months.”

“Can I do this for months?”

“Of course you can, you’re the Meryl Streep of closet cases.”

“Do I
want
to do this for months?”

###

I didn’t stay at Lionel’s long after I said that I liked him anyway. He didn’t want to talk about it anymore and it didn’t seem like he wanted to talk about anything else, so I left. Besides, sometimes it’s better if I think about things for a while. I’m not always that quick. I mean, I kinda didn’t get what the big deal was, and if I was going to apologize for it the right way I needed time to figure it out.

When I got home I checked my email. I’d been avoiding it since I sent out my resignation from the team. I’d also been avoiding my voicemail or even thinking about it. That’s why I didn’t tell Lionel I’d quit the team, because I didn’t want to think about it. Plus, I didn’t want him to feel guilty.

I opened my inbox and was kind of surprised there was only one email. I guess I shouldn’t have been, though. The one and only email I got was from Chuckie. It said, “Fuck you.” He’d hit reply all. No one had the guts to say anything after that. Of course, they could have sent me an email meant just for me. They didn’t have to hit reply all. Oh well. Crap.

I did have a voicemail from Fetch that had come in while I was at work on Monday a couple of hours after I’d sent the email.

“Hey dude, you working tomorrow? I think you sometimes have Tuesday’s off. Let me know. Tim and I were thinking we could have lunch or something. Call me back.”

I did have the day off, though I was surprised Fetch figured out my schedule. I worked a weird, four days on two days off schedule that I ended up having to trade around so I could get every Sunday off. I called Fetch and set a time to have lunch with the two of them at Nectar, a place with terrible food but a nice garden courtyard.

Tim and Fetch were already there when I arrived. They had a pitcher of mimosas on the table. Tim worked at home doing some kind of computer thing and Fetch managed a bookstore—though he said he hated reading—and usually worked during the week.

“Why are you off today?” I asked, when I sat down.

“Called in sick.” Which gave me some idea that this was important.

After the waiter brought me a glass so I could share in the mimosas, we ordered. Hamburgers all around—really the only thing at Nectar that was decent. Then Tim got down to business. “So you quit the team but you’re still going to play, right?”

“You’re signing up as a free agent, right?” Fetch echoed.

“I haven’t thought about it much.”

It was a casual league, which meant that some Sundays not many people showed up. You had to have nine players to field a team. Free agents were around to keep a team from having to forfeit. I really hadn’t thought about it, but now that Fetch and Tim mentioned it, I might do it.

“Do you think Chuckie will try to trash me with the other captains if I sign up to be a free agent?”

“Chuckie is an asshole,” Tim said, surprising me. “The other teams don’t have any reason to put up with him.”

“So it doesn’t matter what he says about you,” Fetch said. “And, yeah, he’s an asshole.”

“Why
do
we put up with him?” I asked. I had some idea, of course. Chuckie was really social. He knew everyone. He was involved in a bunch of charities. Gave enormous parties. He was popular. And if you didn’t get to know him, he was really likeable.

“I think it’s Bob,” Fetch said.

Tim continued, “Chuckie makes a big deal about Bob liking him, so the guys think no Chuckie, no sponsor for the team.”

“Didn’t Lionel say something about Bob not really liking him?” I asked.

“Yeah, but that’s probably bullshit,” Fetch said. “I mean, I don’t think Lionel should have gotten fired, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t do anything wrong.”

“He didn’t do anything wrong. Chuckie called him a name. Just because he’s a waiter doesn’t mean he has to put up with that kinda thing.”

“Lionel does provoke people, though,” Tim said. “Look at what happened on Sunday.”

“You mean when Chuckie shoved Lionel and he sprained his ankle.”

“Well...look at the shoes he was wearing,” Fetch said.

“Wait, are you friends with Lionel?” Tim asked.

“Yeah, kind of,” I said. Part of me was tempted to say no and I really hated that part of me.

“Are you more than friends?”

“Yeah.”

They both said, “Oh.”

I could tell they were trying to figure out if that changed things at all, so I decided to move on. “Look, life would be a lot easier if Chuckie weren’t the asshole in all of this. But he is. And if you guys want to keep putting up with him, that’s your business.”

“No, we already decided to feel out the rest of the team about getting rid of him.”

“We did?” Fetch asked.

“Yes, we did.”

“Oh. Okay. I guess we did.”

They didn’t say anything for a minute. The waiter brought our hamburgers and we waited while he spread them out in front of us. I was about to bite into my burger when Fetch asked, “So, is that your type? Girly boys?”

“No. I mean, I’m not sure I have a type.”

“Mmmmmhhhhhhmmm…We’ve heard that one before.”

Chapter Fifteen

After my first full day at V-Bar, I wasn’t sure whether to be proud of myself or suicidal. I was passing for straight, something I’d never thought I could do. Before she left, Connie even asked if I had a girlfriend. I just shook my head and mumbled, “Dating sucks.” On the other hand, I was passing as straight so I was denying the person I’d been all my life. I felt like I was putting more value on the fake me than I gave the real me, and that felt very, very wrong.

I’d barely gotten onto the sidewalk outside V-Bar when I heard honking. I looked around and there was Dog in his truck. I limped over. The window on the passenger side rolled down and he said, “Get in.”

I didn’t.

“I gave you my phone number. You could have called me.”

“I wanted to see you. And I didn’t want you walking home. How’s your ankle?”

“Sore. I wasn’t going to walk home. I was going to take the bus.”

“Okay. Do you want to take the bus?”

The odds of being in a knife fight were much lower in Dog’s truck. “No, I suppose not.”

“Great. Get in.”

I climbed into the truck, being careful not to jostle my ankle too much. I’d checked it in the men’s room. It was swollen and a tad chartreuse after standing on it all day. I was going to have to spend the whole night with my foot in the air.

“How was your first day at work?”

“There are a few words I have to say before I spontaneously combust: Oh my Gawd! Fabulous! Sweetheart, darling, lovey. Well excuse the fuck out of me. You go girl! Lady Gaga, Brittany, Beyoncé, beotch. Sashay away.”

He gave me the side eye. “Did you get that out of your system?”

“I’ve spent the whole day trying to only say ‘yup,’ ‘nope’ and ‘I hear ya, man.’ It was exhausting. I don’t know how you do it.”

“I say more than three things.”

“You understand what I’m saying, though.”

He shrugged. “I just do what comes naturally.”

“Well, it’s not natural to me, that’s for sure. Ugh, and straight people are really boring.”

“You may not find a good sampling working the dayshift at V-Bar.”

“No you’re right. I’m sure the
interesting
straight people, the bikers and the meth heads, come out at night.”

He didn’t outright laugh at that but he did kind of smirk. I liked that. Making him smirk. Making him outright laugh would be even better, but I’d settle for what I could get. I knew I should still be angry at him, but I was having a hard time of it. What he said mattered. But I also knew he hadn’t meant anything bad by what he—

“So, I was thinking about what I said…”

Excellent. He was going to apologize and that whole thing would be over and I could concentrate on making him laugh. Actually, I wanted to concentrate on making him laugh while he was nak—

“…and I want to say that I like you
anyway
.”

“Wait. That’s the same thing you said before.” Seriously? He was doubling down?

“It is.”

“So you’re sticking with that.”

“I am.”

“You don’t see that it’s a little insulting?”

“If you asked me a month ago if I wanted to hook up with someone as femme as you are, I would have said no. I didn’t. But I did hook up with you. And what I found out is that I like you. I like you a lot.”

“Anyway.”

“Yes, anyway. Look, you know Fetch and Tim. Well, Fetch only goes out with Latino guys and Tim only goes out with Asian guys. If you spend five minutes with the two of them, you can figure out that they should be going out with each other, but neither one of them can see past what they think they like.”

“So I’m not your type, but you like me.”

“Yes. Am I your type? Do you always go out with bears?”

“You’re more a cub actually. Bears are usually fa—heavier. You’re husky.”

“Are cubs your type?”

They weren’t, actually, but I didn’t want to admit it. I liked him and I guess I liked him in spite of the fact that he wasn’t exactly my type. Actually, if I’m honest, my type had always been “willing,” and certainly Dog had been that the night we hooked up. But I also didn’t want to tell him that. Instead, I said, “I’ve always had a soft spot for baby animals—cubs, kittens, puppies.”

The look on his face told me that he knew I was avoiding capitulation, and he didn’t mind. And that was kind of interesting. He didn’t have to make me wrong for him to be right. I couldn’t remember another time where I’d fought with someone and it was okay to be right and wrong at the same time. I wondered what that meant?

“Should we get a pizza or something?” I asked.

“I promised I’d go over to my sister’s. She wants to meet you, by the way.”

“Oh my Gawd! How on earth does she even know about me?”

“I quit the Birdmen. I had her help me with my resignation email. She’s better with words than I am.”

“And my name came up?”

“It is kind of about you.”

“Wait. You gave up softball for me?”

“Not exactly. I’m going to be what’s called a free agent for a while. I’ll play with any team that is short on players.”

That didn’t make a lot of sense. I mean, wasn’t one of the basics of being good at sports that you actually had to show up? I decided to ignore his explanation completely, and said, again, with a ridiculous amount of pleasure, “You gave up softball for me.”

###

We sat in front of Lionel’s apartment, double-parked, making out for a good twenty minutes. It wasn’t what you’d call comfortable. I’d gotten the 40/20/40 seats, so there wasn’t a console in the way, but I did make Lionel elevate his foot on the dashboard, which kinda put him in my lap so I had to bend over to kiss him. By the time we were finished we each had a good case of razor burn. His lips and the skin around them were all pink, and that was kind of appealing so I just wanted to keep kissing him.

“What’s this?” I asked, pointing at a small scar that crossed his upper lip.

“You can see that?” he said, sounding surprised.

“When I’m this close.”

“No biggie. I got into a fight with a couple of guys when I was in ninth grade.”

It took me a moment to translate that. I imagined fifteen-year-old Lionel with flitty hands and an attitude picking a fight with a couple of guys. Nope, that didn’t work. A couple of assholes ganging up on him made more sense.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry that happened to you.”

He shrugged and said, “Shit happens.”

I kissed his scar and kept kissing him. A minute or so later, he pushed me away. “Either you stop or you come inside.”

I was tempted to blow off my sister, but she’d said she had a letter from my dad and that was progress. I should at least go find out what it said. I wasn’t expecting it to be easy to read, but the fact that he’d written anything at all was a good sign. Or at least I hoped it was.

“All right. I’m going.”

He sat up, carefully lifting his leg off the dash. “Call me. I mean, if you want to.”

“I’ll call you,” I promised. Then I watched him get out of the truck and hobble into his apartment complex. Just before he went in he turned and waved at me.

Twenty minutes later, I pulled into my sister’s driveway. Arthur opened the door. “She’s in the kitchen with some W-I-N-E. Make sure she drinks the whole bottle. She’s easier to deal with when she’s D-R-U-N-K.”

I nodded, said, “Nice to see you, Arthur,” then hurried though the house before he could spell anything else. When I got into the kitchen, Maddy was sitting next to an open bottle of red wine. The minute she saw me she said, “I’m sorry. I did not want to give this to you, but Dad made me.”

I almost asked,
Are you twelve?
but the distressed look on her face made me want to be nice to her. She held out a single piece of paper. I took it and glanced at it. There wasn’t much on it.

“The isn’t a letter. It’s a note.”

“He called it a letter. I was too traumatized to argue.”

I read the note:

Doug—

I’ve been thinking this through and I want to ask you a question. And I want you to answer honestly. You went through a bad patch where you drank too much and got into some trouble. Is this like that? Is this just a bad patch? Think about it.

Your father

“Oh, that’s nice,” I said. “He thinks being gay is like drinking too much. Wow.”

Maddy shrugged and said, “I’m sorry. I’d offer you a beer, but that would make me an enabler.”

I ignored her and went over to her fridge and got out a PBR. “You better watch out. If you finish that whole bottle, you’ll turn lesbian.”

She smiled at me. “Oh, Arthur would like that. He’d want to watch.”

“Yeah, I don’t think lesbians are big on having straight guys watch. You know?”

“You’re probably right. If I drink half the bottle, will I be bi?”

That made us laugh.

“Did Mom have anything to say about this? I assume you’ve talked to her.”

“She just keeps saying she’s working on him. I don’t know what that means, though, other than they’re quoting the Bible at each other a lot.”

“Oh crap.”

“He keeps quoting the Old Testament; she keeps quoting the New. He wants to call his new minister to talk to you; she wants to call the minister from our old church.”

“The one they stopped going to because it’s too liberal?”

“That’s the one. They’ve each accused the other of stacking the deck a couple of times.”

“Poor mom. Poor both of them.”

“I don’t feel sorry for them. It’s not the Dark Ages. It’s not like the issue isn’t on the news all the time.” Maddy finished her glass of wine and poured another.

“They never thought it had anything to do with them.”

“I don’t know how they can think that. Ever since I had kids, everything has to do with me as a parent. What kind of world is it going to be for them? Is the world even going to be there when they grow up? Who are they going to be?”

“You might be biting off more than you can chew.”

She gasped a little. “Oh shit. I just realized something. My children have a gay uncle. That’s amazing.”

“Why is that amazing?”

“Because if one of them happens to be gay, they’ll have someone to help them through it.”

“You could help them through it.”

“But you have insight. You know all the secrets.”

“There are no secrets. We don’t meet at midnight and practice ancient rituals.”

“Um, excuse me, what do you think a gay bar is?”