Chapter 32
Benji
Adrian had been dancing at Barbacks for three weeks.
The bar now had a waiting list on Saturdays.
A waiting list. At Barbacks. Seriously.
Mark had run the numbers. He’d appeared from his booth with his laptop angled toward Finn like a man presenting evidence to a jury and said, “Saturday revenue is up forty-three percent since the themed nights launched. The per-customer spend has increased by eleven dollars, driven primarily by cocktail orders and Rod’s menu.
Adrian’s social media presence is generating organic traffic that I haven’t had to pay for, which is the best kind of traffic, because it’s free. ”
“Free is my favorite four-letter F-word,” Finn quipped.
“Don’t let Chase hear you say that!” I said because I couldn’t stop myself.
Mark grunted. I interpreted that as a chuckle.
“Free traffic,” Mark continued. “His following shows up every Saturday. They bring friends. The friends become regulars. The regulars bring more friends. It’s a compound growth model, and Adrian is the catalyst.”
“The catalyst,” Adrian said from the bar, where he was stretching before his shift. “Tell my abuela I’m a catalyst. She’ll name a new baked good ‘The Catalyst’ or add it to her Christmas card like another family member.”
Finn smiled at that.
Finn never smiled during revenue discussions, because Finn treated revenue with the solemnity that other people reserved for religion.
But he’d smiled, and Chase had noticed, and Chase had put his hand on Finn’s shoulder in the way that meant, “See, it’s working.
The thing you built is working.” Finn leaned into the touch for approximately half a second before returning to operational mode, which was his version of a standing ovation.
Tonight was Adrian’s fourth Saturday.
He arrived at 3:45 carrying his customary two bakery boxes, because his grandmother had decided that Barbacks was an extension of her kitchen and that feeding its staff was a non-negotiable element of the arrangement.
Rod had stopped pretending he wasn’t waiting for the boxes.
He appeared in the pass-through within thirty seconds of Adrian’s arrival, assessed the contents with a single glance, and took the guava and cream cheese box to the kitchen without comment, which was Rod’s version of a Michelin review with all the stars.
“Your cook took my abuela’s pastries again,” Adrian said.
“Rod,” I said. “His name is Rod.”
“Rod took my abuela’s pastries again. She’s going to start charging him.”
“Rod doesn’t pay for things. Rod accepts offerings.”
“My abuela doesn’t make offerings. She makes investments. She’s already asked me if the cook is single.”
“Rod is married to Ruthie. They’re very happy.”
“She’s not asking for romantic purposes.
She’s asking because she wants to know if he’ll come to Sunday dinner and teach her his mole recipe.
She tasted the mole sauce on the short rib plate and called me at 6 a.m. to say, and I’m translating loosely here, ‘The cook at your bar understands mole at a spiritual level, and I need to speak with him directly.’”
“Tell your abuela that Rod would probably come to Sunday dinner but that getting the mole recipe out of him would require an act of God.”
“My abuela is an act of God. She’ll manage.”
By 8 p.m., the bar was full in the way that had become the new Saturday normal.
Bodies packed shoulder to shoulder, and the noise level hovered where you had to lean in to hear someone and where the leaning in became part of the atmosphere.
All this forced intimacy turned strangers into conspirators.
Jacks was behind the bar with me. We’d found the rhythm that years of working together had produced, the fluid, wordless coordination of two people who could anticipate each other’s needs without looking.
He cleared the space; I reached for the bourbon.
I grabbed the shaker; he slid the ice.
We moved around each other with the kind of grace that dancers would recognize and that bartenders understood was its own form of choreography.
Between orders, Jacks glanced at the door.
“He’s coming,” I said.
“Who’s coming?”
“Skyler. You know, your husband, the NHL captain you keep checking the door for.”
“I’m not checking the door,” Jacks said, sounding more like a pouty preteen than a former All-American football star.
“You’ve looked at the door seven times in the last ten minutes. I count things now. Peter’s ruined me.”
Jacks shook his head, but the corner of his mouth did a thing. Two minutes later, the door opened and Skyler Shaw walked in.
I’d gotten used to Skyler at Barbacks over the past year or so, but the sight of him still recalibrated the room.
He was six-foot-three, built in the way that professional hockey players are built, and moved through the crowd with the awareness of someone who had spent his adult life being the largest person in most rooms. People parted for him without being asked, the instinctive accommodation that large, gentle men generated in crowded spaces.
He was also, every single time, visibly nervous walking in. Skyler Shaw, who performed in front of twenty thousand screaming people and millions more on television, got nervous walking into the bar where his husband worked.
Jacks came out from behind the bar.
This was a thing he did now, Jacks leaving his post to meet Skyler at the door, exchanging a brief contact and a few quiet words, then leading him to the stool at the end of the bar where the lighting was softer.
“Hey,” Skyler said.
“Hey,” Jacks said.
“Full house.”
“Adrian’s following keeps growing. Mark’s beside himself.”
“Mark’s beside himself,” Skyler repeated, looking at Mark’s booth. “Is that what that expression is? I thought he was just doing math.”
“For Mark, being beside himself is doing math. The math is just happier.”
Skyler sat on his stool and looked around the room, taking it in slowly and with respect.
His eyes stopped on the back wall, where Finn had hung framed photos from the bar’s first year.
There were images of opening night, the Paws and Pours event, the staff in their aprons doing whatever the staff did, and a candid of Jacks behind the bar that Chase had taken.
That one photo captured the particular quality of Jacks in his element, steady and warm and entirely himself.
“That photo,” Skyler said.
“Chase took it.”
“It’s exactly right. It’s exactly you.”
Jacks smiled and went back behind the bar. Skyler watched him go the way he always watched him go, with wonder and the quiet acknowledgment that something extraordinary was happening and that the best thing to do was simply witness it.
Adrian hopped atop the bar at nine for his second set.
He’d already done a warm-up at eight, a shorter, lower-energy performance that served as an invitation rather than a main event, getting the room’s temperature up without burning through his best material.
It was smart pacing, the kind of instinct that separated working performers from weekend hobbyists.
Adrian understood that a night was a narrative and that narratives required structure.
His following had clustered near the center of the bar, a group of about fifteen regulars who showed up every Saturday and had developed their own rituals around his performances.
There were specific spots they claimed, even more specific drinks they ordered, and a particular cheer they gave when he first climbed up.
They weren’t groupies.
They were fans in the original sense, people who had found an artist they connected with.
They came back because the connection was real.
Adrian fed off them, though not in the extractive way that some performers feed off crowds, draining energy to fuel ego.
He did so in a generous way, the way real performers operate, taking the energy and multiplying it and sending it back amplified so the exchange left everyone with more than they’d started with.
Jacks cued the track.
Adrian’s body found the beat.
And then he was moving.
The room reorganized itself around him the way rooms do when someone is doing the thing they were built for. In a gay bar, this was especially true when that guy was nearly naked and built like a magazine cover model.
I watched him from the well, watched the way his body articulated the music with an honest, full-bodied joy I recognized from the best version of myself, the version that had existed on a stage in New York before the knee injury.
Adrian had said something to me last week, during a break between sets. I’d been sorting out the well and my body had been doing the thing it did when Adrian danced, the unconscious tracking, the shoulders adjusting to the beat, the weight shifting.
He’d noticed.
“You should dance again,” he’d said. It wasn’t advice, merely an observation.
“My knee—”
“I’m not talking about the career; I’m talking about the dancing. They’re not the same thing. The career needs the knee. The dancing just needs you.”
I hadn’t answered at the time. I hadn’t known what to say.
I’d filed it in the drawer where I kept things that were too true for the moment.
Tonight, though, watching him from behind the bar, I let the drawer open a crack.
Peter arrived at ten.
I saw him before he saw me, the way I always saw him first. His was the gravitational pull of a person whose presence changed any room simply by entering it.
He was wearing the blue shirt.
It wasn’t the first time he’d worn it. He’d worn it the previous Saturday, too, and the Wednesday before that when we’d gone to dinner at a place that wasn’t a zoo café.
We’d gone to a real restaurant with real menus where he’d ordered fish and I’d ordered something with a name I couldn’t pronounce.
We’d held hands across the table like two people on a date, which we were, which still amazed me.
But the blue shirt still stopped me every time.
It was the color of a mug on a shelf.