TALES FROM THE DIVE BAR – Chapter 2

Marge has been running the dive bar since the 1970s. She was a cocktail waitress-turned manager at the old playboy club when a rival bar owner noticed something special about her. It wasn’t her looks, which were spectacular. It was was her savvy.

The bossman used to call her Savvy Marge. She thought it was a stupid nickname. Seemed a little obvious, but it was instructive, and she liked that. And it was much better than being called Toots all the time.

Marge has let her history chisel her into a powerful and statuesque figure in the community. She was a full participant in her own history, but she knew how to use the balance of power between the sexes to her advantage. She “let” the men do a lot of things. She let them feel powerful. They weren’t. She let believe they came up with the great ideas she had been seeding into their tiny man-brains for weeks before it spontaneously “occurred” to them.

Marge wasn’t manipulative with men. She just knew how to get what she needed from them. She understood the battle of the sexes to be more of a cooperative game. Sure, not everyone plays fair, but she could spot a shyster from a mile away, and she knew how to deal with them. Sometimes they required a soft touch, and sometimes they required a disciplined motherly approach to wring the best from them. And that was always her goal – get the men to do her hard work by lifting them up and making them believe in themselves, even when the confidence was truly unearned.

For you see, a man who believes in himself can do anything. And a man who knows someone else believes in him will do anything for his believers. So Marge became skilled in using that to her advantage, over the years, nay, decades. But some men were an enigma to her at first. Feminine wiles amused them but didn’t attract them in the same way.

Marge had never had many close female friends back in her youth. She was too loud for the girls in her neighborhood. She was brash, often crossing the line beyond assertive to aggressive. This earned her an unfair reputation: a tomboy. That trope wasn’t quite right to fit her, though. She was tough, even when she was in a prom attire. She didn’t have a lesbian thought in her head; she just identified with the boys’ active interests. She didn’t want to play with dolls. That sort of effort did not promote the qualities in herself that she wanted developed. What she really wanted was to be a superhero. She dreamed of leaping over buildings and flying through the air, and the comics visually informed her that muscle mass was required for that sort of activity.

So Marge transitioned from the softball field to the much more exciting baseball diamond. And in high school, when the administration told her she wasn’t allowed to play football, she snuck in to the first summer practice, proved her mettle and then proved her sex. She kicked the ball further than any of the boys by at least five yards. Of course Coach Calhoun would figure out a way to get her on the team.

Those five yards would come in handy if they made it to the state championship, he thought. And he was right. In her freshman year, she kicked the state-championship winning field goal in the final seconds.

She never repeat that feat, however, much to Calhoun’s dismay. Being a kicker wasn’t active enough for her, so she joined the soccer team, where she was nearly assured of 60 solid minutes of running and kicking. The school had made an issue of her sex and insisted that if she play, it must be on the girls team. Football was different because powder-puff football wasn’t available except for the annual exhibition game between class cohorts.

Marge felt as though she never fit in on the girls’ team, and she grew cold and hateful of the girls’ team coach. During breaks, she’d hang with her football bros instead of her soccer sisters. She always assumed they were making up rumors about her, but the truth was that generally, she was inspirational to the other girls on the team. Sure there were a couple petty jealousy issues, but the girls overwhelmingly loved her.

The toughness she developed back then would serve her well in her old age. The first time she kicked someone out of a bar, she refused to let the bouncer assist. The offender was a burly drunk with a grizzly voice. And after that night, he had a scar on his chin from her dropping him on the sidewalk. If that had happened today, the bar surely would be sued into oblivion.

Marge had seen a lot over the years slinging drinks. She saw that her bar attracted a certain, familiar type of men. She saw those men build a community of family outside of family. She saw them at their best and their worst. She saw them begin to whisper. She noticed her little community change with whispers, as fear gripped them. She learned why. She saw her little community host what they called a Celebration of Life. That wasn’t something she had encountered in her Catholic upbringing; this gay Mass had much more wine.

She noticed her first pinch of sciatica in her back as the funerary celebrations began to pick up pace. The first handful were people she either did not know or were people that she had only met one or two times. The first one that hit hard was Naked Allen.

Naked Allen was not his birth name, obviously. That was the name that Marge had given him after learning he had attended a nudist event. His friends were a bit prudish, and she caught the gossip. She was so scandalized by the thought of a nudist colony that she made it his whole identity, even though he only went that one time to check it out.

It was difficult, of course, for her to celebrate the passing of friends. It was difficult for everyone who was in the know among the queer communities. She had a front-row seat to discussions that led to the development of the Phoenix Society, ACT UP and other revolutionary organizations that led to queer liberation.

But that wasn’t her story. She was later labeled as an ally and even later informed that her sort of community support was given a letter in the ever-expanding LGBTQIA acronym. At first she didn’t like that she was given a seat at the table. She loved these people and supported them unconditionally, but she felt the table was theirs, until one of her favorite customers – a florist – created a one-night council for a dinner party, where he invited one individual from each letter to his home for an old-timey salon event.

Everyone told their stories. The lesbian. The gay florist. The florist’s husband who claimed he was bisexual because he accidentally brushed up against a naked boob at a disco. Marge was very confused by nearly everything about the trans person, but they knew how to make each other laugh. They told Marge that the Q stood for either Queer or Questioning, and so they brought a slender young man who had clearly done more than just question his identity. But who was Marge to out him to himself? Sadly, they could not find someone who was intersex, so they included a drag queen who had installed real-life fake tits. Marge didn’t care for the queen’s attitude after Ms. Shae Monieux revealed she had never set foot in Marge’s bar and considered her openly gay bar to be far superior, just based on rumors he – she? – had heard. Marge was still learning. The queen was in drag, so we call her she. When she’s dressed as a boy, it seems that anything goes.

Anyhow, Marge was the A. She was the ally, a title she shunned as much as possible until the night that they called her in and made her an official and important member of their LGBTQIA dinner council, which became the stuff of secretive legend.

Larry (the florist) could barely squeeze the eight people in his midtown apartment dining nook, and he only acquired the eight-piece silver service setting by pocketing the items piece by piece whenever he convinced an older gentleman to take him to his favorite steakhouse. Eight dinner forks, eight salad forks, eight teaspoons, eight soup spoons and eight butter knives equaled forty dates where some wealthy older man paid for his prime rib dinner, while he slipped a utensil into his pocket.

Larry had worked as a dishwasher in the restaurant and had been fired after being accused of stealing silverware. It was an untrue accusation, so he vowed to do two things: never give them another dime, himself, and to take what he had already been accused of taking. In the three years it took him to acquire his complete collection, which he considered more retribution than crime, management changed, and he became known as a beloved regular as the restaurant’s institutional knowledge all but forgot about him and his dismissal.

Larry came up with his dinner council on the night that he collected his final piece: the eighth salad fork.

After the first meeting and after truly listening to everyone’s stories – outside of the bar noise and hubbub – she finally understood what an integral piece to this community she was. The kind words they said about her and her support of them brought her to tears at least four times. It was an emotionally powerful evening that bonded that little tribe for good.

Marge never fully understood all the perspectives, but she remained curious and respectful, which earned her the reputation as the most trusted bartending confidante in town.

TALES FROM A DIVE BAR

“Just the facts,” said the officer.

“The fact is,” said the barkeep,” that this man is no longer welcome here.”

“Ze fact is not,” said the drunkard, “Fair Orafice Sir, that that ze fact is that that this woman is not welcoming to this man.”

Silence enrobed the trio as ol’ Pitch stood in the glorious afterglow of a point nearly made. The snow fell over their cone of silence as Marge and Orafice Sir Handyman tried to make out what he had said. And because they were thoughtful people, they tried to make out what he meant.

“On what grounds?” asked ol’ Pitch.

“On the grounds,” Marge said, that you’re my best customer,”

“Yeah”

“And that’s bad for business.

“Oh, I’m the show, you bog witch,” Pitch asserted. “They come to hear the piano man, but we all know that I’m the show.”

“Sure thing, Pitch. Officer Handyman, show him out.”

And the officer did. He took Michael Pitchfork to a holding cell to sleep off the night’s imbibed brews. But the night wasn’t over for Marge. There was blood to clean up. Customers to entertain. False memories to implant.

Keep ’em drunk enough, and you can get away with anything, she thought.

Deep in her mind, though, anxiety nagged. What if Open Mic was right. What if he really was the draw. He sure knew how to make them laugh, putting down every musician she spent more than five hundred dollars on.

The crowd would laugh and laugh.

But they came for the jazz, right?

Suddenly Marge wasn’t so sure