Excerpt from my first novel Singing the Vernacular, in which a lonely widower of 50 spends a couple of hours in a bar, from the chapter entitled His Bearded Cheek:
“You don’t know how lucky you are that your wife died,” Perry said.
I was stunned. I wasn’t certain that I had heard correctly, and then my mouth opened wide with disbelief. Perry apologized, muttering something about not really meaning it, and that it was just his bitterness speaking.
“Oh, don’t mind him. Just because his wife took him for a couple of million, he thinks all marriages have to end the same way.” It was Perry’s friend from Saint Louis offering the excuse.
The three of us occupied a small corner of the bar where we had been corralled by the ever-growing Saturday night crowd. Forced by the herd of gay men to stand closer to each other than I wanted, our breaths collided. I felt the mist of Perry’s spit on my face when he talked to me. I could smell body odor on both men and, to my surprise, I found it wasn’t unpleasant. The milling throng surrounding us had us constantly shifting our positions but no matter how much our trio was jostled about, I nearly always found myself caught in the middle, between Perry and his friend Jack.
Perry craned his neck looking around the room and signaled for a waiter. He was obviously drunk and appeared to have forgotten the remark he had so casually dropped on me. Jack was sober. He was working hard trying to repair the damage caused by his friend.
“Please, don’t pay any attention to Perry,” he whispered in my ear. Pulling me closer, Jack explained that Perry had just wrapped up a bitter divorce. “I don’t know exactly how much money she sucked out of him, but Perry’s very, very wealthy. He still has plenty to spare. He has a thriving real estate business. He’s the one paying all the expenses for this weekend, for all of us. But, whatever the amount they settled on, Perry feels his ex-wife got too much.” Jack’s way of talking, whispering in a conspiratorial way, was annoying. I had to strain in order to hear him over the noise of the crowd. I hesitated to ask him to repeat, fearing he would just get closer.
“Let me buy you guys a drink,” Perry said. He had caught the attention of a waiter. “She told me she’d make me pay dearly and she sure did,” he told us. I was surprised that he had kept up with our conversation. “She just couldn't’t deal with the fact that I liked young boys more than her. I know your situation is totally different, but I can’t help dumping on all women right now, especially that breed called wives. What are you drinking?” Perry said while grabbing the waiter’s arm.
“Scotch. Dewar’s preferably, and on the rocks.”
It was all Jack’s fault. He was the one who had drawn my life’s story out of me with his disarming directness. I had just walked into the bar and had headed straight to the first open space I spotted without noticing who my neighbors were. Jack turned to face me immediately. “Well, hi there!” he said. He elbowed his neighbor to catch his attention. “This is one of the guys we met at the pool this afternoon.” Turning back to me, he extended his hand. “I’m Jack. And this is Perry.”
I quickly paraded the day’s events before me and placed these two among the new faces I had seen at the pool party and later at dinner. Perry was tall, about my age, and very handsome. Jack was even taller and he was sporting a deep tan.
“Sorry, but I just can’t remember your name. I met so many people this afternoon and I’m terrible with names,” Jack said.
“My name’s Marc.”
Grabbing my shoulders with both hands and looking at me straight in the eyes, Jack said, “So, tell me all about Marc.” He accurately read the look of confusion on my face. “I want to know everything about this person Marc who is standing in front of me.”
Flattered by the attention and by his sincerity, I blurted out a capsule description of my life. Jack listened attentively. I thought Perry wasn’t interested; he had his eye on a couple of young pretty boys.
After I was finished, Jack shook my hand in an exaggerated gesture of formality and said, “I am very glad to know you.” Perry simply volunteered that he too was fifty years old. “Fifty, but not dead yet,” he added. Neither offered any other information about themselves, and we drifted into the usual bar banter. That is, until Perry dropped his line about me being so lucky that my wife died.
I scanned the busy room, looking over the heads of the chatting and laughing men, and I suddenly felt a deep gratitude for all the years of my life when I hadn’t had the time or the need for a place like this. Then, the clamor and the throng vanished, and I suffered through a drenching of serious self-pity. Without a word, Perry handed me my drink. I thanked him and emptied nearly half of the Dewar’s in a quick gulp. I noticed Perry was staring at me and I stretched my arm out, holding my glass towards him. He responded and we toasted each other silently, sending the clinking sound of our glasses into space as a testimonial to our shared misery.
Perry turned away from me and was swallowed up by the noisy crowd. I shot a look at Jack who threw back a knowing smile. “Does that all the time...just walks away,” he explained. “Nothing personal. I told you already: don’t mind him.”
“Last call, last call,” a faceless voice invaded the smoky room. “Last call.”
I looked at my watch and was surprised to discover that it was almost 2 o’clock in the morning. My two hours in the bar had evaporated. It worried me that I was developing a fondness for jammed bars. Was I beginning to find, in the crush of people, with all the noise, the music, even the smoke, a haven? Was it that entertaining, or distracting? The one certainty was the exhilaration I felt when I realized I was surrounded, totally and overwhelmingly by gay men – all kinds of gay men, dozens and dozens of gay men, nothing but gay men.
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