The Vast Fields of Ordinary (13 page)

“Am I gonna like this?”

“Yes. I promise. See you in ten.”

I found the T-shirt Lucy had mentioned (red with a hole on the left shoulder, a thrift store purchase advertising a pizza joint in Lansing, Michigan) and put it on inside out. I put on one of the new pairs of jeans I had bought along with a pair of black boots that I hadn’t worn since my punk phase two winters ago, the one that ended two days before Christmas when my father told me to get my hair back to its normal color or I was going to spend Christmas wandering the streets of downtown Cedarville, a barefoot blue-haired boy in a Sex Pistols shirt asking strangers for change.

Lucy was already waiting for me on the porch when I went down. June bugs spun around the porch light like little manifestations of panic. Whenever we met again I was struck by how pretty she was. That night she was wearing pastel-colored barrettes that she’d bought at the drugstore and light blue eyeliner, both sarcastic nods to the institutions of femininity that she often declared pointless and disposable.

“We’re going to Cherry’s,” was the first thing she said.

“What’s Cherry’s?”

She bounced excitedly up and down on her toes. “It’s a gay bar.”

“You’re shitting me. Where?”

“Here in town,” she said.

“There aren’t any gay bars in Cedarville.”

“Yeah, there are,” she said. “And we’re going.”

The idea of going to a gay bar made me nervous. I pictured the bar as being filled with insanely attractive men, all taller and more muscular and more confident than me. Being rejected by people I had nothing in common with was bad enough, but I wasn’t sure if I was ready to be rejected by the very group to which I thought I belonged.

“How are we getting in?” I asked. “I’m assuming you took into consideration the fact that neither of us are twenty-one?”

“Of course. I’m not an idiot.”

She pulled two licenses from her back pocket. Both were California state. Hers was Esther Rodriguez and the other belonged to someone named Teddy Baron. The photo on Lucy’s ID was actually her, but the picture on the other one was of a blank-faced skinhead with a constellation of zits on each cheek. His lips were slightly opened, as if he was about to ask a desperately moronic question, the kind of question you can only answer with baffled silence.

“Who is this tool?” I asked.

“That tool is you. Teddy’s the floater ID from my group of friends back in California. We all have our own, but there’s always that out-of-towner or random someone who needs one. I had a friend mail it out to me. It just arrived. I noticed the envelope on the kitchen counter and I called you immediately. I couldn’t wait. Your first visit to a gay bar is a major rite of passage, my friend. Maybe we’ll get lucky and you’ll get drunk and dance on a box with some hot go-go boy.”

“Um, I think your definition of lucky differs from mine.”

She laughed. “Well, see where the night takes us. Oh, and by the way, this one is boys only, so my chances of meeting anyone are pretty much nada, so expect a visit to the Kitty Klub over in Warwick County before the summer is done whether you like it or not.”

We drove there with the windows down, the AC on. She plugged her MP3 player into my stereo and put on some psychedelic pop by some Swedish band with a name I didn’t catch any of the four times she said it. I laughed as she attempted to sing along with the nonsense lyrics. I ran a red light and didn’t notice until Lucy pointed it out, but there were no other cars on First Avenue so it didn’t matter. We passed First Cedarville Bank on Trust with its scrolling that alternated between the time, temperature, and lame jokes.

I couldn’t help but look over my shoulder as we drove by.

“Eyes on the road, Teddy,” she said. “You’re going to get us both killed.”

A few minutes later we came around a bend in the road and the Hamilton Luxury Motors sign came into view.

“Hey, we’re coming up on my dad’s dealership.”

“Awesome,” she said. “Will he give me a Porsche?”

“I’m sure he could. I’ll call and ask him now.”

“Look at all those cars,” she said as we passed. “And look at that guy.”

The lot was flooded with light and the cars all shined like big pieces of expensive candy. It took me a second to notice the homeless man standing on the sidewalk staring at the sea of vehicles. He stood there motionless in a ragged overcoat. In the blur of passing, I thought I noticed his mouth hanging open in awe. I glanced in the rearview mirror, half expecting him to have disappeared, but he was still standing there, as motionless as a statue.

“That was weird,” she said.

“Totally,” I said.

When Lucy told me that Cherry’s was located in downtown Cedarville, I almost didn’t believe her. Downtown Cedarville was deserted at night. Every now and then a taxi or police car would creep down the street, but even that was rare. For the most part, downtown became a ghost town after nine p.m. Lucy had me stop the car at the mouth of an alley located between a jewelry store and a used bookshop.

“I think it’s down there,” she said.

The steam in the alley looked like a cumulus cloud hiding in a maze of buildings. From somewhere farther down the alley, a golden streetlight illuminated the steam cloud’s lethargic ascent to the sky. I pulled the car into a parking spot in front of the bank and then shut off the engine. Lucy checked her makeup in the visor mirror while I scrounged for a piece of gum in the glove compartment. I finally found one at the very bottom. God knows how long it had been there.

“Are you nervous?” Lucy asked.

“I forgot to brush my teeth,” I said, working on chewing the tough old piece of gum to a manageable wad. “But yeah, a little. What if they realize our IDs are fake and they call the cops?”

“They won’t do that.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes I do,” she said. “I know everything. And besides, we can’t bail now. We’ve come too far. So let’s go. Rite of passage
.
Just keep saying that in your head.”

We got out and walked into the alley. About fifty feet on we came to a black door with a neon cherry over it. A man in a green track jacket was leaning against the building and talking softly into his cell phone. He was dark and balding, maybe my dad’s age. Lucy opened the door to the bar, letting out a rush of hyper dance music. I followed her, but not before letting my gaze linger on the man for a second. He wasn’t all that attractive, but I couldn’t stop staring at him for some reason. I wanted to know who he was talking to, what he was talking about. It was like knowing these things might help me figure out how to be more myself. He noticed me looking and gave me a friendly smile and a wink. I gave a tight smile and a little wave and then hurried into the bar behind Lucy.

The place was a perfect square with a circular bar in the middle of the room and a bunch of small booths on the darker perimeter of the room. About a dozen men were sitting at the bar, all spotlit almost to the point of being washed out by the bright light coming from fixtures over their heads. The men there were nothing like I thought they’d be. There were no supermodels or Johnny Morgan look-alikes. They were all just regular guys in their thirties and forties. There was an Asian guy in an expensive-looking suit sitting at the bar and drinking a yellow liquid out of a martini glass, but everyone else was just wearing boring T-shirts and khakis that they’d probably purchased at some lame store at the Cedarville Mall that I refused to step foot in. The beautiful, well-dressed men that I thought would be here turned out to only exist in the gay bar of my imagination.

Almost everyone looked up at us as we walked in and I suddenly wanted to disappear. Lucy, however, didn’t seem to mind or notice. She just looked around, trying to figure out where we should sit. There was a plump redheaded woman tending bar. She was wearing thick green eye shadow and chewing gum.

“You two’d better show me your IDs before you even think about taking a seat,” she said.

We walked over to the bar and handed her our false documents. Her eyes bounced between our faces and Teddy’s and Esther’s photos. I looked down to avoid her glare. There were peanut shells strewn about the hardwood floor, and in the corner of my eye I spotted a shimmering green needle of glass from some probably long-ago broken bottle.

“Sit in the back,” the woman said when she laid the cards down on the bar. “No hard stuff. Just beer. And I can kick you out whenever I feel like it.”

“O-kay.” Lucy drew out the syllables as if she was confused by the response. “Two beers then. Teddy, go grab us a table.”

I took a seat at a circular table in the rear corner of the bar. The table wobbled horribly when I rested my elbows on it, and the banged-up tin ashtray in the center looked like it’d seen an entire cancer case worth of cigarettes. There was a jukebox a few feet to my left, where a man in cowboy boots and a cowboy hat stood flipping through the selections at a slow, almost disabled pace. Right next to him was a hallway leading back to the restrooms. A few of the men around the bar were looking back over their shoulders at me. I was scared to return their glances, so I looked up at the rafters as if I were an architect planning on rebuilding this place the next day by memory.

“That was cool of her to let us stay,” I said when Lucy sat down.

“Are you kidding? She was totally hostile. She probably just wants the tips.” She took a swig of Corona and looked around the bar. “Not a huge selection of men, but better than nothing. It must feel nice to know there are at least”—she took a quick count—“eleven other gay men in Cedarville, right?”

“The Asian guy looks like he’s here on a business trip.”

“Fine. Ten. Well, eleven still. That’s including you.”

We went quiet for a bit. I wondered what was supposed to happen next. Would someone talk to me? Should I approach one of them? I thought of Alex with his shaggy hair and dirty boots, his overall aura of danger. There was no one like that here.

“When did you know you were a lesbian?”

“I don’t know. For forever. I remember I wanted to marry my friend Teresa when I was seven. I wanted to have a wedding and everything, but Teresa’s mom said no way. It was only going to be a pretend wedding in my backyard with a few stuffed animals making up the wedding party. I don’t see what the big deal was, even now. But we did it anyway, in secret. We had a pretend wedding in my garage. Tina the Blue Rabbit was my maid of honor.”

“What happened to her?”

“Tina the Blue Rabbit? She’s back in California. She is now my mother’s dog’s chew toy. She’s seen better days.”

I laughed. “No. To Teresa.”

“Oh God, I don’t know. I haven’t thought about her in years. She moved just after that. I probably wouldn’t even recognize her if I passed her on the street. It was so long ago.”

A twangy country ballad came on the jukebox and shocked the bar out of its dance music daze, some sad-voiced woman singing against a backdrop of steel guitar and trotting upright bass. The guy in the boots and hat swayed across the bar, lipsynching the lyrics into the neck of his Bud Light. He went up to the Asian businessman and pulled him by the arm. The businessman looked down at his lap and tried to wave him away, but the cowboy wasn’t giving up. The bartender let out a high-pitched whistle and the businessman let the cowboy pull him from his stool. They danced slowly into the middle of the bar and then anchored themselves there.

“This is hysterical,” Lucy said.

It only took a few seconds for the businessman’s awkwardness to subside, for his body to relax and succumb to the cowboy’s lead, and suddenly they seemed like the most natural pair in the world. The bartender reached under the bar and flipped a switch, and a disco ball that had been hibernating in the darkness up near the ceiling came to life and sent a thousand little points of light gliding around the room. A guy in stonewashed jeans and a flannel shirt sang along drunkenly from his barstool.

Lucy said, “If you would’ve told that guy this morning that by the end of the day he’d be dancing with a cowboy in a gay bar in Iowa, he probably would’ve looked at you like you lost your mind.”

We watched them dance until the song ended and something else came on, some synthesizer-heavy dance number from the eighties. The cowboy left the businessman to his loneliness and his yellow martini. There was scattered applause. I clapped along, weirdly honored that I was there to witness it. The cowboy gave his reluctant dance partner a slap on the back and then took his place a few stools down.

“Are you having fun?” Lucy asked.

“Yeah. I’m having a real good time.”

The door to the bar swung open and like everyone else I looked up. An athletic guy in a long-sleeved black shirt and an olive green baseball cap walked in. All the other patrons went back to their drinks after a momentary glance, but I kept watching. There was something about the way the guy sauntered slowly over to the bar that made me think I knew him from somewhere. He leaned into the light to order a drink and everything clicked into place.