Bars of Yore: Stations of the Cross on East Colfax

Author’s Note: Seamus and Peony have actually had a chance to spend some time together this week, interrupting our usual theme. If we had any readers, we’d ask their indulgence as we fill in the gap with a few ruminations on bartimes past.

For whatever reason I never got around to asking the businessman how somebody like him came to be in that bar at all. It stood on a drear but colorful stretch of East Colfax, which Playboy magazine had long ago famously called the longest and wickedest street in America, and when I met the man it was two in the afternoon. It was perfectly clear why I was there, but he was a whole different animal. Well dressed, for one thing, clothes that cost money, shirt tucked in, proper business attire. And he was a big, handsome guy, athletic, broad shouldered, conservative haircut – everything that little corner of paradise didn’t usually see in a patron. And, of course, by the time I met him he was a few sheets to the wind and sailing well.

The crowd was thin as befit the time of day. The bartender was a young woman, maybe in her mid-twenties, very beautiful and very hard. She was tall and athletic and she did not smile and she did her business with brusque efficiency and she was, I suspect, well tipped in spite of that. Other than myself and the businessman the only other trade were a few oldsters, but to a man they gazed at her as she worked, peering out from somewhere within their own distant and receding dreams.

After a while the businessman, who was seated on my right and to whom I hadn’t really been talking, nudged me and said in a stage whisper, “you see that girl?” There was no other girl to see, so I nodded. He nodded too. “She’s beautiful!” I allowed that she was. “I’m going to talk to her.”

“Well,” I said, “she is the bartender, so I guess you can.”

“Yeah! I am.” A few minutes passed. The businessman’s beer was empty and eventually she swung by and asked if he wanted another. He said yes, and began to lean forward, chin raised, preparing something else to say. She was gone though, having whisked away his empty glass. She dropped a fresh beer by and once more a kind of tremor went through him but again, too quickly, she was gone. He stared into the middle distance a moment, then he nodded to himself. “Going to talk to her. She’s busy is all.”

Getting fed, up, I hitched around toward him on my stool. “Look, partner, she’s not that busy. There’s three old men in here all of whom’ll likely be dead inside the hour. Now I’m not trying to tell you one way or another what you should do here. But just keep in mind, I mean, let’s say you talk to her, and let’s say she’s nice to you. Now you know, even if she did that, and I’m not saying she’s going to, but even if she did, that’s kind of her job. I mean tips and all that, you know? You’re gonna have to make a determination, even if that happens, whether it’s got anything to do with you in the first place. You understand that and everything, right?”

The businessman looked a little indignant. “Yes but, I mean, that’s not her fault! You know? You can’t, I mean you can’t blame her for that, you know?”

I hitched back around in my seat. It was clear that his mind had already far outrun East Colfax. In his world, parallel to but very distant from this one, they were already picking out drapes, and the drapes were beautiful and he could afford them easily, and nobody would ever set fire to them ever. There’s no point trying to pluck a guy back from a place like that.

After some time she came back along the bar with a rag, cleaning quickly around us like were a couple of pieces of furniture. The businessman looked at his hands.

The funny thing about it is they would have made a handsome couple. It’s funny how things just don’t work out.

***

The fellow sat next to me on my left and we’d been chatting away a good part of the afternoon. He was some kind of aging 1980s hipster gone to seed, long hair receding quite a bit and heading for gray. He had glasses on and looked a little like Warren Zevon probably looked right towards the end. He was smoking GPCs and wore a black western shirt that was too short for his lanky arms. He had the cuffs unbuttoned and a couple of old rings on. He was also, of course, pretty drunk, but you got the idea that he’d been drunk since morning and likely drunk the day before, so while it was definitely a kind of problem for him it didn’t make him a problem to hang out with, and he was a nice guy and we were trading stories.

As it happened I had a little work going in a couple of bands and I mentioned that – nothing great but I was getting out and making a couple bucks here and there. The man kind of sat up and got a little bit alert. “Hey, man, you know what? That’s great! See I’m a sax player myself.”

“No kidding.”

“Yeah! Oh yeah. Hey, y’all should let me come sit in sometime.”

“Sure,” I said, not meaning it at all, “though we’re playing mostly up in Boulder nowadays. Better pay, you know.”

“Ah yeah, that’s a bummer. No car, you know. Bummer.” He was thoughtful for a minute. “And actually I pawned my horn. I mean you know how it is.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Yeah. Say, you don’t have a horn player, do you? I mean, well wait…” He gave it some thought. “Nah, I guess that wouldn’t work anyway. See what I was gonna say is, if you had a horn player, I could maybe borrow his horn, but then I thought, if you already had one – that is to say a horn player – you probably wouldn’t need me anyway, so…”

I nodded sympathetically. “Then there’s reeds,” I said. “You gotta have your own reeds. Gross otherwise.”

He nodded. “I’d want my whole own mouthpiece. And I guess at that point…hey!” He was staring at my wrist. I had a fancy watch on – nothing expensive but it was a square face with silver roman numerals and all. “Man, that’s a really nice watch.” I thanked him, and told him it wasn’t anything too special but I liked it.

“Yeah,” he said, squinting off into the distance, “I never quite had the balls to wear a watch like that.” He took a thoughtful drag on his cigarette. “Which is a shame, you think about it. Might have made the difference in my musical career.” I squinted off with him into the same distance, and we nodded together.

***

It was late and it was loud. I had my hair in a greasy pompadour and was in the bar with Chuck and Jefe and we’d been drinking pretty good and there was a rockabilly band playing. No chance of a seat at the bar, and the boys and I had gotten separated. The band was on the opposite side of the room on the makeshift stage that seemed always to have been cobbled together in a different place every time they had a show there. I was standing behind an old man who had a seat and I suspected he’d probably taken it that afternoon and just never gotten up. Certainly he stood out from the by-now much younger crowd. I had to lean in on him a little bit to get a beer and he tapped my arm. I leaned in further so he could speak into my ear.

“I’m young again!”

“Come again, sir?”

He leaned in on me. “I’m feeling young again! You fellas look like I looked. This is my kind of music. I’m pretending,” he said, “that it’s 1954!”

I looked at him, and he was grinning widely. I had to grin too, and slapped his shoulder. “Well daddio, I guess it is.”

Now as all this was happening I’d become aware that Chuck had been making his way methodically down the other end of the bar, going from person to person and engaging each. Most had laughed, or shaken their heads, but as the old man and I talked a big guy stood up abruptly in Chuck’s face and a couple of glasses went over on the bar. Before I could do much about it, somebody grabbed me the shoulder and shoved me hard toward the door. I wheeled around and saw my friend Jefe – a big guy in own right and now moving with a lot of momentum. He had a look on his face that said “don’t ask, just go.” I turned back around and we both grabbed Chuck, who was grinning glassily up into the face of a much bigger man who in turn was not grinning at all. Barreling through the crowd we made the last ten feet to the door and burst out onto the sidewalk just as a sort of roar began to go up from the back of the bar. Outside, we did some kind of three stooges grab-ass shuffle, not knowing which way to go, and then by some consensus took off westbound down Colfax, turning on Race street and then down an alley until we felt reasonably certain that nobody had given chase.

Catching our breath in the alley, I asked my friends to kindly explain what the fuck. As far I could reconstruct, what had taken place was essentially this: Chuck, to begin with, having become separated from the group and bored by the band, had decided that a fight was in order. Having no real target for his ire, however, and not necessarily just wanting to attack somebody for no good reason, he had hatched a cunning plan to go down the bar from one end to the other and ask each man he met whether or not he was a faggot. He got no takers, however, until the big guy, which even Chuck was prepared to admit wasn’t quite the outcome he had hoped for.

Meanwhile Jefe, having had quite a bit to drink early on, had staggered into the men’s room with no more sinister purpose than to relieve himself. Being a bit the worse for drink, however, and wearing very tight trousers, he had fouled his penis in the zipper and, enraged, kicked the toilet. Now being as I mentioned a rather big man, and wearing as he was a pair of steel-toed boots, this kick was perhaps a bit more effective than he’d anticipated. The side of the toilet shattered, and pee water gushed out in a torrent and began rapidly streaming out of the bathroom and spreading across the barroom floor. Deciding that getting the fuck out of Dodge was the better part of valor, he’d come bursting out and grabbed us both, doing Chuck a pretty considerable favor in the process.

The funny thing is, years later I got to be friends with the guy who owned that bar – a skilled contractor who did a lot of work on a house I later owned. I always wanted to ask him about the night some jackass kicked his toilet in, and Jefe’s been dead these nineteen years so I guess it wouldn’t have been any harm. I never did though.

Bars of Yore: The Underwold

The bar had two entrances – one on the street, which was a pedestrian mall now, and one on the alley behind. Both had long straight stares that went down into the fermented dark, so that one had the sense of being in a sort of permanent trough between waves of regular life. Inside was a cavernous and dingy room which was usually bustling with whatever volatile mix of college kids and street denizens had decided to convene there whenever you happened to show up.

***

The weather is warm and the girl I’m with isn’t Peony, this being somewhere in the first half of our 25-year interregnum. I’ve got a black suit on, sharp, and she’s wearing a short red dress made of that shiny Madam Butterfly stuff, even though she’s Italian. In heels she’s my height and we draw stares. It’s got to be a Saturday night – the whole town is out and there’s an urgency in the air like you get on a real summer night around here. Turning into the alley I can already see that the bar will be a scene. You could smoke inside back then but people had spilled out into the alley anyway and were perched up and down the stairs and on the railings. As we walked up she turned to me and said, “Let’s pretend.”

“Pretend what?”

“Pretend this is like, a busy, kind of dangerous port town, and this is a cutthroat sailor’s bar, and you’re a mysterious traveler and I’m a lady of the night.”

Damned if her eyes weren’t sparkling then. And I found that I could do it. I couldn’t do it now but we were still mostly just kids and I could do it then. The ocean seemed somewhere just beyond the buildings and the air was shifted. Walking down the stairs to the smoke and smell and noise of the bar, some bearded kid, now one of our sailors, on the stairs said, “You can’t come in here. You guys look too nice to come in here.”

“Watch” I growled.

***

Another night: I’m peeling the paper labels off bottles of Budweiser one by one, very carefully and with a great deal of concentration. It’s late and the night and the drinking have smoothed out together, consciousness diffusing out into the general hum and motion of the bar. The place is full but not packed. The waitress stops for a shot at the next table over and one of my drinking partners gets lost in the tattoo that covers most of her visible back. He stares a long time but he doesn’t say a word. Every table has an ash can with a “no smoking” sticker on it and I light a cigarette. There are several empty shot glasses on the table and I’m right where I want to be – I don’t want or need anything more than what I’ve got. I could go home, I could stay. It’s not up to me. It’s up to the collective hum and buzz. Seems like I’ve been peeling those labels for a long time.

As I’m considering this, a rhythmic thumping starts up at a table over my shoulder. Not gradually, but all at once, just “bang” and then a sort of complex beat, hands on a table top, glasses shaking a little. Not violent, but deliberate and sustained. There’s a shot-down looking group of five or six native guys sitting there, men of no particular age, seeming to be deep in an impenetrable conversation that didn’t necessarily involve speech. But by some sort of agreement they had now begun to sing, or chant or whatever it is, in their nearly-dead language. And the hum in the bar, it doesn’t stop so much as coalesce around this. Like they’ve just picked up the fabric being woven in the big, dark, subterranean room and decided to stitch their own story into it for a minute.

When they stop, as abruptly as they started, they neither move nor look around, and a little wave goes through the room. Maybe somebody claps, but that doesn’t catch, and some jackass war-whoops and gets shut down, and then there’s a kind of trough in the hum, and then it rises back up and smooths out again and I fall back into it. And nothing else happens because nothing else needs to.

***

Another night: it’s me and a good crew, a fine body of men and women, and we’ve got a pool table and though only a couple of us are competent players we’re still holding off challengers and we’ve got a stack of quarters and everybody’s getting loose in the right way. A good brother of mine is there, good guy – let’s call him Big John. A musician, former bodybuilder, heart big as the rest of him. And we’re talking – because of course we are – about one or another of the infinite permutations of dick. I crack a joke and he laughs hard, and he’s a guy with a loud falsetto laugh that cuts through the room. As he does so, a guy nearby imitates it, louder and in a way I don’t like one bit. Now me, I’m a little shit at this point in my life, not big, but I’m mean and I’m dumb, so I get set to harden up. But my brother, he sees more than I do. Ignoring my bullshit he approaches the guy with only the slightest narrowing of his eyes. The guy in questions is another big fella, with some kind of strange mullet-mohawk thing going on.

“Dude!” says my friend. “You’re doing my laugh!”

“I am!” says the guy. “I’m…I’m doing your laugh man.”

Now my friend in his own right isn’t a guy to be fucked with, but he sees something in this man’s eyes, and instead of posting up, he goes suddenly gentle. He laughs a little, but kindly. “What’s up with that, man?”

Our new friend looks at my buddy for a minute, and his eyes start to well. “Can I tell you a secret, man? You can’t tell any cops, is the thing.”

“We don’t truck with cops here. What’s going on?”

“Man…I’m tripping balls, man! I ate these mushrooms, and it’s out of hand, you know? It’s like, it’s out of hand, and…”

Ah. So just that simple, we’re all good friends again. Our mullet buddy is a kid in need of care, that’s all – second childhood by way of psilocybin. Big John puts a heavy arm, the arm of a bear, around our friend and talks him through the maze, helps him find an exit out of the fear corner he got stuck in, so he can journey on. Mullet man relaxes and goes cosmic. His trip comes back around for him and we realize we’ve got him with us for the night, but it’s okay.

Somebody’s messing around with the Jukebox and Willie Nelson comes on, doing “Always on My Mind”. I see some people giggling behind their hands and pointing, and I look over to see a One-Percenter-looking biker guy, bandana around his head, leather vest (though no patch I recognize), ancient tats, those heavy rings you don’t want to get hit with, all that, on his knees before the lighted Jukebox for all the world like one before an altar. His arms are held high and tears stream down his cheeks. But his own crew is with him. They watch over him and that’s okay too. This is permitted. For one evening at least we’ll all take care of each other, down here in the underworld, and we’ll get through another night in a long-gone version of Boulder.

It takes a Village Coffee Shop

Does a diner counter count as a bar? Well it looks like a bar, and it’s got bar stools. Just because I’m not drinking alcohol at it…actually coffee is an equally important drug in my world as alcohol. More important, even. I can function perfectly well without alcohol, but sans coffee? Not much happens, besides headache complaints.

I walked down the block and around the corner to the Village coffee shop late this morning. One of those classic greasy spoons with very little seating, a lunch counter at which you can watch the line cooks spread volumes of shredded hash browns across the flat-top grill, but not the kind of place where you really want to watch them do so very closely. The bar was wiped down as I sat, like a red carpet, and the server who asked if I wanted coffee and called me sweetie looked to be at least as old as my parents, if not older. I told her yes, and as I poured the correct amount of half and half and white sugar into the watery stuff in the white ceramic cup, I wondered if Seamus used to frequent this place too.

I used to come here all the time as a young adult, as the food was greasy and cheap, perfect for a heavy drinker. Still is, too: my two eggs, mass of shredded potato, and two whole slices of toast was only five bucks. This place hasn’t changed. When I came here as a kid, I’d always order those single-serve breakfast cereals, always of a sugary variety I’d never be allowed to eat at home. But I no longer crave sweets.

There’s a tradition here that I had forgotten about: the Village Virgin cheer. Anyone coming to the diner for the first time gets announced loudly as a Village Virgin, and the whole packed, bustling place cheers and applauds. I’m very much not a Village virgin, though this morning in particular I was feeling almost like one.

Living alone for the first time, and so close to the busiest part of town, I’m a bit taken aback by how strange my hometown feels to me now. Even little things like making my own decisions about what to do with my day are completely foreign to me. Every little thing, from what time I wake up in the morning to my day plans, and everything in between has been dictated by cohabiting with my husband. Now, walking down to the diner, or to my fave pub, I’m timid and full of wonder, naive at the familiar.

I’ve been to the Village Coffee Shop so many times, but haven’t been in a long time, adhering to the rather enforced healthy eating habits my husband (and therefore I) cultivated in recent months especially. None of these eggs are locally farmed, I’m sure, and I doubt any of the meat is grass fed. The toast, though wheat, is of the cheapest variety, and the coffee is terrible. As it should be. For all Seamus’ gentle mockery of me still living here, I know it’s not unmixed with a deep nostalgia of his own. I find myself similarly both nostalgic and exploring my childhood home anew. A fresh start, and I feel newly born.

The correct way to have the diner breakfast is: over-easy eggs, add salt and pepper. The hash browns, leaking butter, require ketchup. The toast needs must have jam added to the already-buttered centers, the crusts used for the egg yolk. This may not be healthy, or even good, but it is the correct way. And it is in fact tasty, and filling.

The correct way to have diner coffee is: two creams, one sugar. Never mind that I have been taking my organic coffee black for a good long while now, and especially never mind the bulletproof coffee my ex-husband has gotten me addicted to, that I’ve been drinking at that home. Nope. Diner coffee requires these things, and it is best.

Coffee was a big part of our teen culture here in Boulder, as it’s a college and an otherwise young party town, which of course means at night there’s nothing social to do but alcohol. When one cannot legally do so, and it’s midnight? Well, we’d go to Denny’s. Two creams, one sugar. All night. We’d also go there very early in the morning, before jazz choir. At prom, we promised each other (the whole group of friends) that we would NOT, repeat, NOT end up at Denny’s. It was a matter of principle, dammit. But then when after-prom was over and it was three o’clock in the morning, guess where we ended up? Of course.

Denny’s is closed now. As is the L.A. Diner, which Seamus and I were reminiscing about the other day. I remember the servers wore roller skates and a bunch of us once got kicked out for having ice and drinking straw fights between booths. I also remember they had a photo booth.

As I watch the busser wipe down the counter after my meal, I find myself not worrying about the cleanliness here. Greasy spoon, indeed, after all and my own new little place is a little grimy too, for all that I went over its surfaces with bleach wipes a few times. Not that it, as an old apartment, is any grimier than my home w the ex. Less so, probably. It’s just that it’s not my grime, yet. I feel like a guest though I have paid rent. Takes time, I suppose.

I have seasoned this place with some of my salt already though. Besides sex, I mean (Seamus and I did test out the durability of my new bed). No, it’s last night: I slipped on the unaccustomed smooth fake wood floors and landed with my face on the edge of the desk. No sign of this injury shows today, other than a slight swelling and a more than slight ache. I flex my jaw, testing that pain, and decide that I need a better cup of coffee from the place across the street, for my walk home in the light rain.

I am only a Boulderite, after all.

Beautiful Ladies Behind Glass

The booths ringed a catwalk that went down the center of the long room. Anywhere you sat, the dancer on the catwalk could come within easy touching distance. The room was part bar, part restaurant, and a well-regarded steakhouse at that. The cheapest glass of wine was $18, and I wasn’t there to buy the cheapest glass.

The maitre d’ was an extra from a 70’s porno, complete with feathered hair, brisk beard and tinted aviators, even at midnight. But as a server and host he was flawless, and he smelled money on me. Steak tartare, a ten-ounce pour of exceptional cabernet, and I began to allow myself to ease into the atmosphere. The comfortable leather booth embraced me as my then-wife and I took in the entertainment. A buxom blond girl worked her way down the catwalk, wearing little but heels and heart-shaped sunglasses (her privacy and armor). She periodically inhaled and blew gigantic plumes of steam-smoke from a handheld vape. Perhaps noting my attention to this, the host was soon at my elbow with burled-wood humidor full of slightly dry but still inviting cigars, and he cut a thick, black maduro for me and lit it with a torch that could have done duty on a welding site.

The blonde girl was distant, but her replacement was intimate and friendly – a diminutive black girl with pert breasts and a brilliant smile. My the-wife took to her immediately, as I struck up conversation with another couple down the catwalk – a cholo businessman, tattooed to his fingertips, and his friendly, zaftig wife. Within a minute we were all fast friends, and soon my then-wife was teaching the dancer how to drop a folded dollar from between her tits into her g-string (this being a matter of flexing the stomach just so).

The rest of that evening blurs into vignettes. Wandering into the main club, unable to find good seats we said fuck it and got table service. This sent up an invisible flare to the girls working the floor, two of whom were soon in my lap while the rest of our party wandered off to partake of other pleasures. I turned the girls loose and manned my table solo for a long while, buying girls drinks and declining lap dances, smoking a series of excellent cigars and letting the money flow out of me like my very breath.

Eventually the evening and the chilled vodka got away from me, and at some point in the very wee hours I found myself upstairs in the after-hours club, a completely naked girl inviting me to investigate her person in terms far more detailed than those on offer earlier in the evening. For her scent on me (and I don’t mean her perfume) I paid, as I recall, $200, which she very intently helped me to withdraw from one of a line of ATMs that stood in the darkened hallway like slot machines.

So, where am I going with all this? Peony had some interesting observations about the feminist strip club, which I appreciated. But I’ll gently differ. Consent, interaction, and invitation? Okay, not wrong, necessarily. But based on my experience, it’s far more straightforward than that. Simply put, and in general terms, a burlesque girl isn’t paying rent and putting food on her table with what she does. A stripper is – full stop. One is about performance, identity, theory and, potentially, fun. One is about survival. And these, gentle reader, are very different things.

That night I wrote about above? That was a four-figure investment, and while I’m in no hurry to repeat it, I don’t resent the girls who so deftly parted me from my money. Survivors each, and they did their jobs. They also did so with a cool, cutthroat efficiency unknown to Peony’s dear burley-que darlings. The club in question is the top-tier establishment hereabouts; they say that the girls can pull down six-figure earnings and I hope its true.

Thing is, I don’t mean to diminish either tribe. And I’m not about to weigh in on the feminist implications of either thing. I’m not sure that I understand what feminism is after in 2017, nor am I sure that I have standing to have an opinion even if I did. What I know – all I know – is that I’ve encountered a lot of strong women in four and a half decades in this world. If a few of them made it through by taking cash off of a few tipsy guys like me, I’m not going to be the one drawing academic conclusions about the metaphysics of the whole affair. I know Peony’s not either. All I mean to say is that the world’s rougher and vicious-er than some of the gentle woodland folk of Boulder tend to give it credit for. Theory is privilege, you want to get right down to it. Most sex workers in this world don’t have the luxury of situating their narrative within a fucking gestalt.

Shit. I’m getting grumpy. I’m not trying to do that. Let me end this with a different story. Used to there was a place down 20th street called Diamond Lil’s. The story was that in olde Denver it had been a famous whorehouse. In the mid-90’s, it was a porn shop and peep show, with a dingy marquee sign out front that said “Beautiful Ladies Behind Glass.” You could go in there and for a few bucks, sit in a booth while a girl you couldn’t touch would do what you asked on the other side of a stained pain of glass. The clientele, I’m told, tended toward the lower ebb of our collective social strata.

Anyway, I met a tall blonde one night at a different club across the street from my house (we’ll learn more about that joint in these pages, eventually). She was hosting a brit-pop night and I was really just there to dance. For a moment we hit it off and dated for a few weeks, but she had mixed feelings about me. I had a job, an apartment and a car, so she was eager for me to meet her folks, but I wasn’t really her type. Anyway, point is, she was one of those there Beautiful Ladies Behind Glass. Sometimes 10 hours a day, doing very private things to herself for the viewing pleasure of some not-very-nice people.

What happened though, I did meet her son one night. He was two. Tiny, blonde, wicked clever with an early skepticism behind blue eyes that already spoke of oceans. I was new to kids then, but I played with him anyway, goofing around and rolling on the floor while he kicked and laughed and climbed on me. Hell, I was a 23 year-old sickboy, hair slicked back, half drunk all the time, reeking of smoke, furthest thing from a dad. But the little guy, he was cool with me. Neither of us knew what was going on, neither of us knew what to make of mom. But we had fun and I kissed his sweaty little forehead at bedtime, which as I recall was something like 11pm. In some weird way it was probably one of a dozen experiences that put me on the trail to eventual parenthood, which I love with my whole self. And that kid, he’s 22 now, someplace.

Point of all this is, when I think of sex work, I think of him. I don’t mean that to sound fucked up, but that’s how I came to understand that whole world. This pretty mixed up, honestly sub-literate girl, a disgraced Mormon, trying to feed this little guy. That’s the sex industry. Not so much about ideas as about getting a tough job done in whatever way you can.

Yeah. Well, God bless America, anyway. When it’s all said and done my hope is that we can all worry a lot less about the semiotics of somebody picking up a dollar with their ass cheeks. I’m gonna campaign on that slogan, someday.

Tit for Tat

The bar was clear glass, with thick chrome piping bordering its sides. A couple smudges here and there marred the glass where patrons put their drinks down, and the performers put various body parts down. The place was low-ceilinged, lit with black light, and had that particular scent that it’s always had each time I’ve ventured down the blacklit stairs into its illicit, yet perfectly legal, depths. I actually asked one of the ladies, later, if they all wore the same perfume or if it was something piped in to the room. She averred they all wore different scents, but having had her boobs thwapping me in the face later made me doubt it.

The bar is called Nitro, and it’s a little glow-in-the dark cave of lascivious delights, the entrance of which is located in the back alley of the pedestrian mall, tucked in between a bar that’s been there forever and some rich-old-lady fashion boutique. I had just been chatting with The Dominoes Boys over at my fave pub, discussing the impropriety of burlesque dancing, the fact that it is a form of legal sex work, and the difference between it and stripping, when the invite for Feminist Strip Club Night popped up in my feed. Since now I live alone, and within walking distance, I decided to make a spontaneous appearance. (And a luminous appearance it also was, as I just happened to be wearing a wife beater shirt that night. And though it’s an unfortunate moniker for that particular piece of clothing, now you have the image in your head. And that’s more to add to the discussion of female objectification. But I digress. Sorta.)

The conclusion I had come to with The Dominoes Boys was that there was one distinct, very important difference between watching a burlesque performance and a stripper. That difference lies in consent, interaction, and invitation.

As I’ve mentioned before, my strip club experiences (albeit limited) left me with the impression that nobody really wants to be there. Money can be exchanged for goods and services, and in a strip club, it’s kinda both at once. But the glazed, dead-eyed thing to which Seamus refers in a previous post is an effect of setting up voyeurism. The strippers don’t engage with the patrons, even if they’re right up on the bar in your face. They’re offering themselves up to be looked at, and that’s what you give your single for. The legal right to ogle.

Burlesque pieces, however, beyond being actually choreographed dances and much more about the tease, are an interaction. A burlesque dancer doesn’t just look away and offer him or herself up as an object you can pay to look at, but actually is part of the experience with the audience. Yes, a burlesque dancer says, check me out. Isn’t this great? I’m so enjoying myself, aren’t you?

I had this conversation with a fellow burlesque dancer, sitting there at what I call the titty bar, watching a generously curvy woman do things with her buttocks that I still do not understand the physics of; my dancer friend (a crunchy hippie type) wanted to put the money in the performer’s hand, not her g-string. She remarked at how objectifying it seemed. I reiterated the above conclusion, and we agreed, even as the voluptuous twerker picked up one of my singles from the bar surface with her ass cheeks, to our head-shaking admiration.

Another conclusion? I didn’t find anything particularly feminist about Feminist Strip Club night, other than that conversation. A few of the strippers were more interactive with us than I’ve seen before, too, which was a lot more fun to watch. I heard most of them ask for consent before touching their customers, which I thought unheard of but rather refreshing.

I also had a conversation with My Burlesque Groupie And Biggest Fan (the one who had invited me to the event), about how angry and yet exhausted she is as a trans woman in this country today. Also that she admires my transition to monogamy. It must be love, she commented. Oh it is, I replied. It is.

What the Frogs Know

Oh, I know that pond.

It’s a sprawling area north of town that is, or at least used to be called, Gunbarrel. I don’t know why. In the 60s somebody went out there and built a sprawling housing division and some apartments, anchored around a small shopping center. Which was strange, because it was really in the middle of nowhere. Over time some apartments and a handful of office buildings sprung up and it became sort of a bedroom community close to, but separate from, the more expensive Boulder. Being cheap and sort of lowbrow, it should go without saying that it’s one of the places I lived as a kid. More than once.

It was also a wetland – basically a swamp – and at one time an ecologically important one. Had anything like environmental impact assessments existed back when they built it the powers would have blocked it cold, but as it was they drained and filled in most of the waterways. Still, all around the place were these very old ponds, creeks and marshes, ringed by ancient cottonwoods. Old, old, and with a strange atmosphere. As a kid I was afraid of the water out there. There always seemed to be a heaviness in the air, sort of a humid weight, watchful stillness, and a subsonic buzz. And strange occurrences too: one time my friend and I were walking near that pond, and he stepped on a pile of leaves. A huge nail, driven through a board and hidden, business end up, underneath the foliage (deliberately?) went right through his foot and came out the top. Blood came up around it through the top of his shoe and I thought, ridiculously, of an oil strike from those old movies. Another time I spotted a long, straight branch laying on the bank with its tip in the water and picked it up, surprised to find a live fish on a length of line tied to its end. Then for a while in the 80s someone was killing dogs. Whoever it was made the news for leaving chopped-up dog bodies in plastic bags around the area. So we messed around down there but even we, wild kids though we were, didn’t like it too much. You’d be playing, and a pause would come over everyone, and an eerie silence that didn’t feel right. It was like, if you were going to run into a serial killer – and we were starting to figure out that there were such things – it seemed like that would be the place.

Now there’s very little of the water left. The ponds are mostly filled in, and Peony’s frog pond is ringed by development and has a pleasant footpath around it. It has an air of mystery to it still, but I can’t sense anything malevolent about it. But what Peony said? That happened. And I’m not much of a mystic. Maybe there was some ancient curse and somebody paved over it and built a bar. Maybe the angry spirits had a beer and just gave up, like eventually we all do. But if there’s magic, and I’m not saying there is (because I’m pretty sure there’s not), a little bit of it still hangs around that place.

There’s a whole other piece to be written about Peony, my Virgil, taking me on this continuing tour of my own childhood. What to think of this? But I’ve poured my Friday whiskey, and I’ll leave that for another day.

Plus ca change…

The blonde wood of the bar is still a little sticky from the person who sat here last. My skirt is short enough that I in turn stick to the vinyl of the bar stool just a little, causing me to shift. I’m sitting in the same exact seat wherein I wrote that first text message to Seamus, which became the beginning of the Parallel Bars blog that was. That one never got off the ground past that first post, as The Period Of Exile began shortly after its creation.

The first iteration of the blog was much more anonymous than this reboot. We were The Man and The Woman, not even pen names. I seem to recall Seamus’ post that never posted mentioned something about the shoulder massage I had given him the night before, which means it was written just after we shared our bodies with each other for the first time. It feels like so long ago. We have both been on such long terrible journeys since then, both together and apart.

There’s a little gravelly path encircling a pond just past the parking lot of this giant, cavernous brewery whose IPA I like nearly as much as the FYIPA at the other place. This bar is just as bustling and busy and loud as the other, too, at all times. I wonder what it is about loud busy places that appeals to me so much? Maybe it’s my intensely introspective, quiet ways when I’m home that makes me need the sorbet. Even more now, as I’m about to live alone. I spent the night in my own place, alone, last night for the first time, and busy street outside notwithstanding, it was so so still, and quiet.
Seamus says I have a way of gathering stillness around me. Maybe it’s that.

Anyway, about this pond. Way back when Seamus and I were just teetering on the dangerous edge of the precipice that is our love, we took a tipsy walk down the first stretch of said gravelly path. It was late spring, and there was a cacophony of frogs singing an oddly harmonious hallelujah chorus over in the pond. It was that night that we experienced a strange union, then long ago when we hadn’t done anything physically more than kiss, suddenly we were pledged to each other, the frogs as our celebrant and witness. I can’t explain this any clearer than that, reader, and yes, it was that weird and that magical and that true. The wreckage of our lives in the wake of that union is testament to its truth.

Holy shit, that must have been a year ago! It’s spring now, again, isn’t it? And here I sit, at the same seat in the same brewery with the same favorite IPA that actually tastes a little more bitter today than normal.

The more things change and all that.

About Those Tits…

The bar, in this instance, was a folding table, the bartender an enthusiastically bearded young man who, when I asked for two glasses of red wine, poured me two 16-oz pints of same. Now I like a bartender like that, and on most of my days I would have considered that a kindness, but with a long, late drive ahead, my appreciation was lukewarm.

The event was a performance by Peony’s burlesque troupe, in a nice enough dance studio tucked in an out-of-the-way strip mall in a part of Boulder that seems to consist entirely of semi-derelict 60’s era strip malls, all cocked at odd angles to one another along a long, dusty stretch of 30th street. Peony grew up a few blocks away, and a couple of blocks further than that are the shitty apartments – still standing – in which my mom and her first boyfriend after my dad first landed and lived for a while in boozy, smoky squalor. But those are all stories for another day.

I was one of the first people to arrive and no one seemed quite sure what to do with me, which right away hints at the complexities. The theme of the burlesque was political – a feminist reaction to recent events, if some months delayed. But the tricky bits were there right away. As a 40-something guy, the young bodies I was about to be looking at would not normally welcome my gaze. That night they would, sort of, in a certain context that was to be rendered okay by them being in control, and by the whole thing being a venue for the expression of their ideas. All of which is fine, but none of which meant that a somewhat scruffy, middle-aged guy walking in the door by himself was necessarily good news. All I could do was pay, shrug, and find my seat.

Little by little the place filled up. Nearly everyone was young, in varying degrees of what I suppose to be contemporary hipness. This took a while, and it was clear that everyone knew everyone except me. And eventually they set up the bar and eventually they got around to starting the show.

Now, I get the politics and I’m basically onboard, though exactly what this sort of fervent preaching to the choir is supposed to achieve (beyond the ever-present and ever-vague notion of “empowerment”) I’m still not sure. I know Peony had the same basic doubts, but whatever. That’s what the kids wanted to do, so we’re happy to support. One by one the young women came out and flailed around in their drawers and I guess it was nice.

I suppose the question is, was any of it sexy? Peony’s act was sexy, but let’s be honest: she could have gotten up there and made a ham sandwich and I would have thought it was sexy. But for the rest of it, I don’t know. That kind of performative sexuality has always been pretty much lost on me. It’s distinct from the transactional sexuality of your regular strip club, which isn’t too sexy either but is what it is and the dynamic either works for you or it doesn’t. And I guess on some intellectual level I can envision how somebody could find somebody else’s declared sexy dance to be a turn-on but I’ve never necessarily gotten it.

No, all-in I enjoyed what Peony did less because it was sexy, which it was going to be no matter what, but because it was good. She’s a veteran dancer and movement artist and the girl can hold a room in the palm of her hand. The twee little things before and after her shaking their grapefruit-sized asses with glazed and distant smiles on their faces, they didn’t offer that. I enjoyed what Peony did up there because I can enjoy watching a master of their craft doing what they do well. And I guess if everyone else went home at the end of the night feeling a little better about the world and their place in it then I’m in no position to complain, and if I got a couple pints of wine to tide me through then so much the better. And perhaps this is how the world is indeed to be saved. It’s not obvious to me how that’s going to work but hell, I’ve been wrong before. Most days, in fact.

Doctor Popcorn

I write this entry, not from a bar, but from a bed. The bed I shared with my husband for nigh two decades. I share it now, not with him, but with two of the three cats of this household that I am going to sorely miss. One is named Shichimi, and she is a lump draped over my ankles. Her weight and warmth soothe the pain in those joints, gotten from walking and especially dancing in heels the past 72 hours.
The other cat has awoken, and she walks up onto my chest, peers directly into my face with her owl’s eyes, and sings opera. She’s a soprano.

Her name is Popcorn (aka The Pound Cake), and, besides me, she is the intellectual of the house. I swear, watching her figure things out, seeing what she understands etc. sometimes I can see a palpable frustration in her expressive face that she has no opposable thumbs.

When I applied for the PhD program over at CU, it was just then that the divorce was loudly proclaimed. And shortly thereafter, a similarly torrential breakup with The Sociopath. Both splits took a while–The Sociopath and I had a stressful mostly off-again thing for a little while longer, and since the husband despised the Socipath as the man who stole me away from him, it turned into a weird tug of war. All very proprietary of both of them, and a big reason why I left both men. Everyone sing with me: “You don’t own me…”
And the divorce is still in process, almost three years later.

The PhD people loved me, and my application was successful except for the fact that I needed to take the stupid GRE test. I had already taken it for to apply to UW in Seattle, (back in ’96 in fact), but they needed a new test score in order to process me.
This still rankles, for a couple reasons: one, I was a poor academic, having been an adjunct prof since 2001. I had just had a divorce crash down on me so a couple hundred extra bucks, to take a standardized test I had already taken, I did not have. Plus, there in the online application, my scores from 1996 were floating there. They were in the application, and yet not acceptable? How much better did they think I’d score now, compared to freshly baked out of college? So I let it go. They did ask me to reapply, and I might, but.
Adjunct faculty with (even multiple) PhDs are like prey animals, rodents: small, fast, and many. And expendable. Even if I could muster the dough, would it be worth it?

But the whole reason I applied in the first place is that need for brain food, as Seamus mentions. Working with other people’s writing so many hours, so many years, I find my own fine tuned intellect beginning, like my hair, to gray. The writing I read the other day is from before the husband, and the last time I worked on it was in school for my MFA (a terminal degree, they say: ha!) and my intellect, especially my creative intellect, has lost its shine since then.

Seamus self deprecates, but the tone is similar to this problem I see nagging all American (especially higher) education: that there are two types of smart: intellectual and non-intellectual. But just the fact that he enjoys those lectures (and gets them, and spins more thought about them) shows how well he would in fact do in an academic surrounding. It’s only a different set of jargon.

As all universities are now functioning like trade schools, i.e. degree = job, the intellect who enjoys and masters something like literary theory has become a joke at best, and is certainly deemed supernumerary to the world these days. Though humans always have and always will need and love good art, methinks nobody wants to admit it anymore for fear of appearing like an elitist and getting lynched by a Trumpian mob.

There are some heroes of the intellect left in the world, true, but they seem to be in the sciences. Neil DeGrasse Tyson is one. Artists who are at all looked at with a modicum of respect are pop stars or Hollywood actors. Not that there aren’t real intellects amongst that population, but they don’t stand out.

But Seamus promised tits in the next post and as I’m dancing burlesque as my theatrical hobby these days, methinks the tits are my responsibility.

There’s a new selfie of he and I together, that’s my new favorite picture of us. In fact, during the Exile, I got rid of many pics that were erstwhile favorites and now we are starting again, in many ways, so I guess for me it’s my only picture of us together. I won’t post it here, as we must keep things a family show. Or, do we? Is this a family show?

Seamus took the pic of us as we got ready to go for a bite before my burlesque show that evening. It is a mirror selfie, just post-coitus. Seamus is wickedly smiling with one corner of his mouth, smoldering at you in his dark shirt, half hidden by his phone, and I have nothing on but electrical tape Xes over my nipples (legal burlesque garb), and a giant goofy blissful grin on my face. That pretty much sums it up.

The Cartesian Cocktail

Peony, in her infinite generosity of spirit, found and connected me to a series of open lectures that the good white people up at Yale have put on line, one of which is a 26-part lecture series on literary theory, which I had the very great pleasure to begin watching tonight. In the introductory session, the excellent Dr. Paul Fry introduces the notion of intellectual modernity having been kicked off, at least in a certain sense, with the roughly contemporaneous advent of Shakespeare, Cervantes and Descartes, all of whom were deeply concerned with the basic question of whether we’re all just fucking nuts. Which is to say, for all this thinking that we do, who’s the thinker? And do we have standing to do it? We acknowledge a separation of the knower from the known, but what is the nature of that distance? What takes place in that in-between, and what can you really say about whatever it is you’re left with after?

It still matters. What do you actually know about what you’ve chosen to do? What was the “you” that chose it? I barely have any handle on those things at all, for myself. I make all my decisions by committee. Angels and devils and traumas and ego and half-baked ambition all vying for the final say. Economists like the idea of the rational actor, but it’s as theoretical as any other economic model – not without utility but utterly without truth.

Still, Peony offers some food for the mind, which is nurturing indeed, and I accept it as one starving. Now you, gentle reader? You may be with me on this in which case know that I hold you dear. But the odds are you don’t think it’s useful, literary theory, if you have any idea about it at all. But the question is, why exactly do you think that? Because it has a specialist vocabulary and that’s easy to make fun of, I suppose, and probably more broadly because other people have made fun of it already and they’re easier to understand than the discipline is. And that’s an inviting shortcut, isn’t it? You can hop on the bandwagon of ridicule without doing any work, and a few pretty people will nod along with you when you archly dismiss what you’ve invested nothing to understand. I get it. I almost sympathize. There’s just one thing: fuck you.

The truth is I don’t get to hang out with academics that much and I couldn’t hack it if I did. If the great world of intellectual and literary pursuit were a ballgame I’d be the guy in the nosebleed seats, clutching my cold hot dog and my dime-store master’s degree and just happy to be there, however great the remove. It wasn’t given to me to pursue that life – I chose to make a living instead. But like I said, who did the choosing? There’s a rich field of inquiry there, but I’ll always have that one wine too many and lose the thread. So be it. Peony understands.

Anyway, thank you for bearing with me on this, whoever you are. I promise my next post’ll have tits in it.