graphic by brian jean
At the dive bar I sling a quick gun, pinging across the room shooting each middle aged drunk, with no time to look over my shoulder and watch one die before moving on to the next. As I walk in, shooter in holster, karaoke mics waiting, I see old artistic pipe dreams hung up on the rack, kept company with jackets and hats. These people that once dreamt of performing, painting and poetry, now seem to be in a constant state of mourning. Each night, after spending the day at another funeral, they ask for a double whiskey.
Tucked in on a busy street, across from a Panda Express, next door to a nail salon and the Islamic Resource Center, is Ernie’s. A tiny hole in the wall with a seventy year old bartender named Nick that karaokes Al Green songs from behind the bar. Ernie’s on holidays is packed, every bar stool is taken not only by the people using them, but also those hovering from behind like a cheetah stalking their prey, ready to leap towards an empty seat at any sign of movement. The row of tables against the wall fills with groups of moms or some twenty eight year old grad students who didn’t want to spend another holiday with their parents.
When I got home from the bar on New Year’s Eve, my pistol was boiling hot with steam coming off the barrel I could hear it huffing out of breath as I tucked it into its drawer. That night I was supposed to be at a three day rave in the city, but I decided to cancel on account of COVID and feeling like a loser. Instead, I reigned in a new year at Ernie’s. The first victim I hit was a regular named Bob, around 68 years old, who insulted me with the ferocity little boys have while hanging from monkey bars and rolling around in sand boxes.
“I guess a good thing about your body is that you wouldn’t look all that different if you were pregnant, so it wouldn’t scare you.” He said.
“I think a good thing about being a drunk, like you, is that it wouldn’t be that hard to fake your own death.” I replied.
After Bob walked away from me, muttering that I ruined his fun, I looked around ready for the next. My finger teasing the trigger as Marcus, a man in the midst of a midlife crisis, sat beside me. His wife is a teacher in Dixon, a small town known for its republicans and dairy farming. He was once a writer; now he works in marketing for a car rental company in Davis, a different small town known for its bikes and cows. As I downed my second tequila sunrise, he asked me if I am looking forward to the new year. I said no, but would if he sang. Through my insistence that by singing he’d bring everyone in the bar a good omen, he agreed. Following a rendition of “Light my Fire” by The Doors, in which Marcus forgot entire verses and turned red, humming hesitantly while the DJ tried to encourage him, he came back upset.
“That was your fucking fault.” He said.
With the toll for the evening so far being only two, I scanned the bar hoping to find the next poor soul. The second I made eye contact with Chris, he put his drink down and sauntered over to the just free stool next to me. In less than a minute, he tells me of the record contract he once was offered but refused to sign. The former musicians I meet at Ernie’s enthrall me while they rant about the art they could make that the world doesn’t deserve to hear. My mouth salivates as they insist, to no one in particular, that being penniless and unknown is the penultimate sign of true artistry.
“No, I am absolutely not going to fucking sing. It’s for me, I don’t need to share it. Why would I do that? Like who are you?” He said.
“Well if you’re so good that even singing karaoke is art, then you’re right you probably shouldn’t give it away for free.” I answered.
We talked back and forth for a while, mostly about the label that fucked him, and every question of mine he dodged was made up for by offering to buy me a drink.
“But you know what I mean though, right? It was like they were robbing me. It’s like all I have is integrity, that’s it, and that’s good with me.” He said.
“Sure, so, where are you from?” I asked.
“Around.”
Then, without notice, Chris showed a pistol of his own.
“It would be nice to get to know you. But I’m a different kind of person. Different.” He said.
“Okay. I’m a leo.” I said, strategically moving my coat to show my iron.
“I am telling you, I’m just different. Can I have your number?” He said.
I gave it to him and he asked me to pull my phone out so that he could be sure I hadn’t given him a fake number. When my phone lit up from his call, he leashed his gun back into his belt, cooing softly to it. Just as it seemed I was fucked and couldn’t get away from him, fate struck. We both stood for a cigarette at the same time, and quickly saw each other’s heights. I was thrilled when he looked up at me in terror, giving me the perfect opportunity to shoot and run. He left swiftly with his hands holding the two bullet wounds in his shoulders.
After Chris left the bar, someone shot me with a gun that could leave even the thickest, most callused skin branded by its touch. I had just finished singing ‘Wonderwall’ when I met Virginia. I recognized her from the liquor store near my house where I would see her, skateboard in one hand and freshly bought swishers in the other. When I sat down next to her, she immediately told me she was twenty-four and living in a friend’s garage.
“Guess what I majored in, biiiitch.”
“Ummm, gender studies?” I said.
“History, you bitch.” She laughed then, with just a few inches between our faces, said, “You should know…I would never think you were anything but straight.” Her gun came out fast and red hot.
“Alright, well now I know who to make my suicide note out to.” I told her, dryly. We laughed, and she walked outside to throw up.
For the next thirty minutes I was glued to my chair while my teeth ripped the straws of my drinks, and my fingers dug holes into the torn leather of the bar stool. I forgot all about the gun in my belt and could barely feel the difference between my skin and its cold steel. Virginia’s words were haunting me, felt like a threat. I sat there, looking around, wondering if everyone could see my exposed wound bleeding out onto the floor. It was now 2024 and I was still accidentally tricking people into thinking I’m straight. Another year of forgetting I’m supposed to be out of the closet. Another year marked by insomnia driven nights in which I stay up wondering if God thinks I’m straight, if I have fooled not just people, but divine entities like Earth, the moon, and Mary Magdalene. It suddenly felt as if Jesus Christ himself briefly possessed Virginia’s body to tell me that I am at risk of becoming a lost cause closet case.
With the hole in my skin, caused by Virginia’s bullets, I went to gather myself in the bathroom. As I stood up, a seventy year old regular named Quincy began scouting for the woman to serenade with his rendition of ‘It was a very good year’ by Frank Sinatra. I watched him pick out a small old woman who started dancing the second the music started. When I got into the bathroom I began spiraling, induced by too many tequila sunrises and Quincy’s singing, muffled through the walls, which suddenly sounded as though it was being played directly into my ears. What shot through me about Virginia’s words was that she knew the two versions of myself, the ultra-straight-always-pretending-to-know-what-cum-tastes-like and the closeted-rug-muncher, who coexisted for so long that I no longer had control over them. The straight version of me is so cemented that I sometimes feel too lazy to leave the closet, and Virginia could see that. It terrified me that everyone knew I was pretending, and that I didn’t have the energy to stop.
While having these thoughts I fixed my top, organized my purse, and dug through the mysterious silver cabinet on the right side of the toilet which contained a single curling iron, cleaning products, and matches. Things raced in my mind as quickly as I lit and blew out each of the matches in the cupboard. Is this a sign that I need to leave the closet or that it’s now too late to do so? If I died tomorrow, my parents would watch their heterosexual daughter go into the ground, and I would spend eternity screaming to no one, through a mouth full of dirt, that I’m a lesbian. My last thought before leaving the bathroom was to cover all the matches I tossed in the trash can with toilet paper so that no one would think I was setting the place on fire.
Virginia was now slumped over on the bar with her gun and skateboard resting on her lap, and somehow looking just as tired as she did. With her in no position for a shoot out, I needed another target, fast, before I made my way home. Luck fell upon me when I opened the blue door that leads to a small smoking patio. Walking out of Ernie’s, with its Christmas lights that stay up year round, feels like being spit out into the cold harsh fluorescent light of modern day after traveling back to the nostalgic warmth of years past. As my eyes adjusted from the cozy dive to the parking lot, a man offered me a cigarette. Perfect target. As I took the lighter out of his hands, I felt my gun clench in anticipation of the fight I was itching to start. His name was Luke, a man in his mid 40’s that instantly showed me pictures of his eight year old daughter.
“She is so creative. She is who I could be if I never met my ex wife.” He said.
His phone was at my eye level for about three minutes: his daughter’s artwork, her watching TV, doing homework. I started to get irritated when he quickly closed his photo app and opened his contacts, ready to get my number without saying a word. As if his daughter was some kind of assumed aphrodisiac for random girls he picked up at bars.
“I have to go home, sorry.” I said putting out my cigarette with one hand, grabbing my pistol with the other. “If I wanted to talk to an every-other-weekend dad, I’d spend time at home.” He tried to get away but not before I got a shot in between the eyes, clean and easy. He went down swiftly, without a sound.
After tucking my gun back into my belt, listening to its heavy breath, I headed home. The uber driver chatted politely about his resolutions and the junkies he had just dropped off, but I wasn’t listening. As I picked off the dried blood on my shirt from Virginia’s bullets, I felt ashamed that me and the middle aged drunks are one in the same. Scoundrels that follow anyone with a heavy pour and people who bring their abandoned dreams with them to dive bars. Maybe mine is my sexuality. Maybe I cart it around in my pocket, and in a few decades it’ll be nothing more than an old ghost story I tell to twenty somethings just bored enough to listen to me.