Chapter 20 #2
Emma, Candor, and I sat in the truck bed like we had when we were kids.
The wind rushed over my hair, stripping the lingering smell away, as I sat with my back against the cab and kept my eyes on the blue sky.
None of us talked, other than Candor advising Emma to shift her baseball cap over her pinking face.
My friends seemed to understand I didn’t want words right now.
As the truck rolled up to the bar, I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed for the courage to look upon the site.
I am gay … I am here … I am gay … I am still here.
The sounds reached me with my eyes still closed: noises of scraping and shoveling and tossing, but more than anything, the voices. There were so many voices.
I opened my eyes and turned around.
Dozens of people were toiling on the land where the Frisky Cricket had once stood.
For a moment, that’s all I allowed myself to see: living bodies tending to our dying home.
The sight of it put a rock in my throat.
I felt the totality of our loss, the weight of our communal grief.
I felt the tenderness of our compassionate hearts.
The bar was a shell of itself, a corpse mangled and marred by fire.
The entire front side of the building was destroyed, along with most of the left side where the bar top had been.
Almost all of the roof was gone, having collapsed in on itself; a few remains hung on like gnarled, blackened tree limbs.
White smoke rose up from the ruins, billowing like mist around our former patrons’ feet.
I slipped out of the truck and forced myself to confront reality. Candor and Emma stood on either side of me, squaring up to face the wreckage. Emma was the one to start crying this time. Candor squeezed my fingers.
Someone approached us. It was Claudia’s wife, Melanie, wearing a face mask. She handed us a package with more masks, and wordlessly, the three of us took them and snapped them on. We nodded our thanks. We stepped forward into the ruins.
I am gay. I am here. I am here. I am here.
A few embers were still smoldering where the porch had been.
One of the neon beer signs lay flat in the dirt, covered in gray ash.
The area beneath the porch was now exposed, revealing RuPaw’s old hideout, the burnt husks of cigarettes and weeds.
I walked along the right side of the building and found Claudia and Hannah, both wearing masks, pulling damaged picture frames off the crumbling wall.
Claudia had on work boots and gloves. She gave me a chin nod and kept working.
Hannah stepped over the rubble to give me a hug. She pushed my hair back from my forehead like my mom sometimes did, like that might help her get a better sense of my well-being.
“You look okay,” she muttered through the mask.
I nodded. “Did Baker find Ru?”
“Yeah. She slept at our house last night. On our bed, in a blanket nest, while Baker sang lullabies to her.” Hannah gave me a wry smile. “Baker did her blood work and vitals first thing this morning. She suffered the indignity of having a bath, but she’s otherwise thriving.”
I nodded. “Hannah…”
She put a hand on my arm to stop me. It was soft, not dismissive. “Later,” she promised.
I grabbed a trash bag from the box at her feet and kept walking.
I found Midas at the back of the building where the delivery door had been, sorting through the utility hallway to see what was salvageable.
His eyes were red-rimmed, his hair flat and unwashed.
Rook was with him, lugging items out of the way, wearing a mask they had clearly thought to bring themself based on the cartoon pattern.
I was slightly cheered to notice they were still wearing a cape.
Midas yanked me into a hug, beating his fists against my back. “This is fucked-up,” he said in a strangled voice.
“Understatement,” I said croakily.
“I heard Hatch saved your ass.”
I laughed unexpectedly. “I saved Hatch’s ass.”
He shook his head against mine. “I don’t want to think about Hatch’s ass.”
I walked on. More of our patrons could be found sifting through the ashes.
Brooke and Maria Paula were photographing everything—“for insurance purposes,” Maria Paula assured me, “but also because I’m useless in a crisis”—Marc and Joe were hauling trash bags to the dumpster, and a group of Rustin undergrads was handing out water.
Edge was there in his standard bow tie, but he’d traded his dress shoes for Reeboks; he shook my hand and told me I was looking well, but his throat bobbed with emotion.
Even the guy who’d been a douchebag that time I hadn’t served his drinks fast enough came up to me, wrapped me in a hug, and thanked me for everything.
I didn’t have the heart to ask him what “everything” was.
My dad joined me right as I got to the bar top.
What remained of it was covered in plaster, ash, and debris.
I set my hand along the remains as dozens of memories flashed through my mind.
Midas serving me beer that first night. Hannah snarking about my fake ID.
Otis Penny blithely asking for a Mule while steam poured out of Hatch’s ears.
Hatch himself complimenting me on a job well done, then offering me a lemon drop shot.
A blackened metal sign lay helpless on the floor, its edges curled and disfigured. I could just make out the words:
GAY OWNED
GAY OPERATED
SO HAVE A GAY OLE TIME!!!
Dad saw me staring at it. He picked it up and gave me a sympathetic look. “You should keep it,” he said, handing it to me.
I cradled it to my chest and burst into sobs.
It was around midday when a series of honks made everyone look up.
A white catering van was pulling up to the edge of the parking lot, and none other than Otis Penny was behind the wheel.
He flashed a grin that was entirely inapt for the situation and jerked his thumb at the van’s logo: TAMbrIE’S CAFé.
A collective cheer went up, feeble but nonetheless genuine, at the thought of fresh home cooking.
“What on earth, Otis?” Hannah asked, leading the charge toward the van.
Otis hopped out of the cab and spread his arms wide like he was putting on a show. “Tambrie’s!” he said unhelpfully.
“What, did you rob them?” Midas asked.
“Ditty’s an old friend of mine. She’ll be along in a minute. Go on and line everybody up now, Milo.”
Midas rolled his eyes but did as he was directed. My dad handed out paper plates and silverware while Hannah moved down the line with a jug of sweet tea. Ms. Tambrie showed up in her tiny sedan, carrying two foil-wrapped containers of banana pudding that earned another cheer.
“Hey, make mine a double, Hannah!” Claudia joked as Hannah poured her sweet tea. A chortle of laughter ran through the group.
“I’ll take mine on the rocks,” Marc called.
“We need a tip jar!” someone else chuckled.
“A biiiiiig tip jar.”
“Keep your fantasies to yourself, Marc!” Melanie yelled, and the whole group broke up laughing. It was a loosening, a reclaiming. It was a refusal to stop being ourselves.
We spread out to eat, some people venturing back to the tree line, others sitting right there among the ruins.
Otis Penny ate standing up, using the catering van’s hood as his table.
Rook untied their cape and spread it like a picnic blanket in a manner that suggested this wasn’t their first rodeo.
Emma and Candor sat with me in Dad’s truck bed, all three of us stretching our legs out, our sneakers covered in dust.
By late afternoon, our numbers had swelled another twenty people.
They trickled in the same way they had when the bar was standing: on their own terms, when they were ready, bringing their stories to share.
Someone showed up with a GET WELL SOON balloon and tied it to the mailbox.
The champagne server from the summer banquet brought his mom and sister to help.
A news crew arrived and interviewed Maria Paula, who gave a moving eulogy of the bar while blowing vape smoke into the reporter’s face.
The sun’s heat died away, but the smell of smoke increased in its absence.
Soon enough, we were just a skeleton crew.
Emma and Candor got a ride home from Ms. Tambrie.
Most of the regulars left. Then it was Dad, Hannah, Baker, and me, half-heartedly lugging the trash bags to the dumpster.
When Baker excused herself to go feed Jolene, my dad squeezed my shoulder, looked meaningfully at Hannah, and said he would wait by the truck.
Hannah sat down in one of the folding lawn chairs the college students had brought. She patted the one next to her and I sank into it, exhausted, rubbing a blister on my ankle. For a minute, we simply sat there and gazed upon the debris. I wondered if she was cycling through memories like I was.
“I’m still mad at you,” Hannah said eventually.
“I know,” I replied. “I would be, too.”
“But I get it. I understand where you’re coming from.”
“Because I’m young?”
“No, because you’re human.” She turned toward me, her head lolling on the back of the chair. “And because I wanted to say the same thing many, many times. Shout it from the rooftops until everyone finally accepted it. And maybe that’s wrong, maybe it’s murky, but it’s how I feel.”
I steeled myself to say what I was too embarrassed to tell anyone else.
“I miss him. I realize that I never fully knew him, but that makes me miss him even more. All I want is to have one final conversation with him. Something that actually counts. Something where I could say, Thank you and I’m mad at you and Why did you never tell me? ”
“I think that makes sense.”
I lowered my eyes. “It’s hard to realize you feel anything but grief for a dead person.”