Rank

by Richard Compson Sater

  Before getting involved with my English professor during junior year, I’d been a very “out” undergraduate. I and similarly gay friends had spent a lot of evenings and weekends in the place, and we’d found a warm welcome. At one time, such a place seemed bright and full of potential. Now? Inwardly, I shrugged.

  I glanced at the clientele, mixed in age as well as attire, and assumed the general and I wouldn’t be out of place, even with our conspicuous age difference. I felt no antagonism from the others, just friendly curiosity. One man in particular gave me the eye, though I got the distinct impression he liked me as much as he heartily disapproved of my companion.

  I didn’t expect to see anyone familiar, so I was quite startled to discover a portly, balding man in a bright orange shirt with a blue cravat, inspecting us with eager intent. I remembered his name instantly: Terry Barksdale. Clearly, he remembered me, too. His eyes lit up. He leaped from his seat and rushed over to us.

  “Harris Mitchell! Imagine seeing you here again!” He crushed me against him in a bear hug and kissed me full on the lips. “You darling boy! How long has it been?”

  Who could forget Terry? He was probably in his fifties when my friends and I used to see him here a decade ago, when we’d bookmarked him as the stereotypical, sad old queen, a catalogue of every gay cliché. He had them all: an absurdly flamboyant fashion sense, mincing gestures, a girlish giggle, even a faint lisp. We poked fun at his terminally hopeful outlook as he eagerly made passes at everyone. He was always good for a round or two of drinks, and thus always surrounded by hangers-on who gladly took advantage of his generosity. I couldn’t remember visiting the bar even once when he wasn’t holding court.

  I had less compassion then. Now I felt sorry for him and wished I could make up for my rude dismissals of his harmless flirtations with me. But if he remembered, he didn’t seem to mind, or else he’d long since forgiven me.

  “It’s so good to see someone from the old crowd again,” he said. “Most of those girls are so long gone.”

  “Do you still come here every night, Terry?” I said.

  “But of course! What would they do without me? I keep this place in business single-handedly!”

  The bartender laughed. “You got that right, Terry,” he said.

  “Don’t you get tired of the same old scene?” I said.

  “You know me. Hope springs eternal.” In a stage whisper, he added, “I wish I could say the same for my dick. Thank God for that magical blue pill!”

  I laughed with him. The general was thoroughly dismayed. More so when Terry turned his eager attention to my companion. Clearly, Terry liked what he saw.

  “And what have we here?” he said.

  “Terry, this is—”

  The general cut in. “Seamus O’Neill.” He offered Terry a short, businesslike handshake.

  “Ooh, Irish! And so strong! Where did you ever find this sexy hunk, Harris? Oh, my. I’d ride that mustache of his anytime. He’s just too damn hot.”

  I certainly agreed. I’d told the general as much on many occasions, but the compliment sounded strange coming from another man, and a relative stranger at that. When Terry took the unexpected liberty of squeezing the general on his backside, he jumped and sloshed beer down the front of his shirt.

  He protested. “Hey!”

  Terry noticed his discomfort, too. “Don’t you mind me, Seamus,” he said. “I just can’t keep my hands to myself when there’s a sexy ass within reach.”

  The general coughed, and even in the dim light, I could tell he’d turned red. He was out of his element, and I think he knew it. Sans uniform, in a world far away from a military base, he was certainly at a disadvantage. Generals have no power in places like this, where rank holds no currency. Nothing can cover lack of experience in the practical aspects of navigating a gay bar.

  Terry chattered on, filling me in about others from the old days, some of whom I recalled and most whose names meant nothing. At the end of his monologue, he began grilling me. How long since I’d been home? Where was I living now? What was I doing with myself these days?

  Without hesitation, I gave him a quick rundown of my life since he’d seen me last. I stopped short of explaining that I was now the aide-de-camp of the man standing right next to me. That information, I decided, would be the general’s to reveal if he chose.

  At the end of my brief recitation, Terry asked the question I’d been dreading. “So, what line of work are you in, Seamus?”

  Would he offer the truth, however awkward, or an outright lie?

  The general cleared his throat. I could almost see his mind working, frantically, trying to devise the best response. Finally, he said, “I’m a pilot.”

  “Ooh! You’re a lucky man, Harris. Seamus could fly me around the world or anyplace else he wanted to go.”

  Terry didn’t ask any more questions. I was surprised he didn’t inquire about the airline the general worked for. But I was thankful that Terry prodded no more deeply into the relationship between the general and me.

  At last, with nothing more to discuss, Terry said, “Well, I’ll let you two lovebirds enjoy yourselves,” he said. “I’m working my magic on that young fellow over there, and I must get back. He’ll think I’ve abandoned him, and he’ll go home with somebody else tonight.” I looked across the bar where a bored young man sat by with three empty cocktail glasses in front of him. I suspected the success of Terry’s abracadabra would be proportional to the quantity of alcohol consumed by his intended.

  He kissed me good-bye on the lips, and the general, too. “Harris, if you ever get tired of this man, you just give me a call, and I’ll take him off your hands in a heartbeat,” Terry said.

  As he scurried back to his seat, the general muttered under his breath, “The hell you will.” He wiped his mouth with a napkin as if he were removing some unpleasant taste.

  “Be nice,” I said. “He’s just being sociable. Every time I came here with my friends, Terry was sitting in that same seat. I’d forgotten all about him. I certainly never expected to bump into him again.”

  “Your lucky night,” the general said. I knew he was displeased. “I’m all wet, and I smell like a brewery,” he said. “My shirt is probably ruined.”

  “It’s beer, not paint, Traveler. Besides,” I said, “you spilled it yourself.”

  “Right,” he said. “How clumsy of me. Where’s the men’s room? I’ll see if I can rinse it out.”

  I pointed, and off he went. He’d find out soon enough that the restroom featured a trough urinal, and he’d likely attract an observer or two while he was in there. I feared it would only fuel his sour mood.

  As soon as the general was out of sight, the man who’d been giving me the eye slipped into the seat next to mine. He put an arm around my shoulder, familiarly. “So what are your plans for the evening?”

  “I’ve already got company,” I said, “in case you haven’t noticed.”

  “Yeah, I noticed,” he said. “Suppose you ditch Grandpa and come with me?”

  I removed his arm from my shoulder. “I choose my own friends, thank you.”

  “Oh, come on.” He groped himself suggestively. “I got ten inches, rock hard, and I could give you the ride of your life. You’ll be begging for more.”

  I doubted each aspect of his claims.

  He persisted. “If you’re a top man, that’s okay, too. I’m versatile, whichever you want.”

  “Actually,” I said, “what I want is for you to leave me alone. If I wasn’t so afraid of offending you, I’d tell you to go to hell, but since I was raised to be polite, I’ll just say no, thanks.”

  The smile drained from his face immediately. “Bitch,” he said. He left me to my thoughts, and I wondered again how smart this whole idea had been. I wasn’t sure what I expected to gain from the general’s first visit to a gay bar. I’d hoped, I guess, that we could relax for once in a safe public place.

  The jukebox faded from a Motown oldie into Bruce Springs
teen. I watched Terry, his arm around the waist of his quarry, who seemed monumentally bored but perhaps a little too inebriated to do much about it. I sighed and emptied my glass, the beer warm and sour.

  “Two more?” The bartender.

  “I guess so,” I said, immediately wondering why I should want to extend our stay.

  As the bartender set the frosty mugs in front of me, the general came storming from the men’s room, seething. His shirt front was soggy, and the water had dripped to the front of his trousers. Uh-oh, I thought. I hoped he hadn’t gotten a good look at the results, as he appeared to have had a slight accident.

  “What’s wrong, Traveler?”

  He grabbed his glass and drank half of it in one gulp, his throat pumping furiously.

  “Goddamned little punk,” he said, too loud. Others turned to look at us.

  “Be more specific,” I said. “And perhaps a little quieter. What happened?”

  He lowered his tone, but his anger continued at a rolling boil. “I’m at the sink trying to clean my shirt, and this damn kid comes at me and offers to suck me off. Right there in the men’s room!”

  “Traveler…”

  “He’s so damned insistent about it. I tell him hell, no, and he doesn’t even listen. He starts unzipping my pants, for Christ’s sake, and that’s when I got the hell out of there. Is everybody in this place some kind of goddamned freak?”

  “Easy, Traveler. Please just sit down, okay?”

  He caught his breath and parked himself on the stool. Bruce Springsteen finished his paean to the working man, and a few seconds later, some contemporary dance pop blared out of the jukebox speakers, an itchy electronic beat underneath washes of synthesizer, a simple bass line and an even simpler melody. An anonymous female voice moaned over the top: “Be my loverboy, be my lover.” A couple of patrons gravitated to the dance floor and started gyrating suggestively.

  It was a long shot, but I asked anyway. “You want to dance?”

  “To that?” the general snorted. “That’s not music.”

  He didn’t seem inclined to talk, and I was starting to feel a bit uncomfortable. Under the glare of the man with ten inches, I moved my bar stool closer to the general’s.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I just want to make sure everyone knows we’re together.”

  “You don’t have to sit in my lap,” he said. But at least his anger had subsided.

  I cupped a hand around his ear. “You’re the sexiest man here. I wouldn’t want anyone to steal you away from me.”

  “No chance of that,” he whispered back, “regardless of the offers that have come my way of late.” I slid my hand around to the back of his neck, and brushed my fingers gently against the short hairs. I could feel him crackle. He liked it, and I did, too.

  “Hey,” I said. “I like to ride your mustache myself. And you like to ride mine, as I recall. Suppose we finish our beer and beat it back to the hotel?”

  “That’s the best idea you’ve had tonight.”

  After two glasses of beer, I needed to hit the men’s room myself. I completed my business unmolested and returned to the bar. The general had picked up the summer issue of a Midwestern glossy gay magazine lying on the bar and was paging through it. The cover featured a pouting, well-muscled, hairless, blond youth, his genitals coyly obscured by an inflatable pool toy. I took my seat and watched as the general paused to inspect some of the ads, many of which promised services you might not be able to explain to a straight man without blushing.

  I scrutinized the general as he took in the images, most in lurid color, splashed across the pages. In the gay community, we brag about our rainbow, our diversity, but how could my general even imagine settling anywhere into the continuum? We could search through magazines from Provincetown to San Francisco without finding pictures of people like him, everyday men with everyday lives, narrow, fuzzy middle-aged men who were still trying to figure out where or if they fit. Could there be such a thing as gay pride for a gay general? Even in our recently liberated military, we were mired in the detritus of not asking and especially not telling.

  On the military side, we had six ranks separating us, and in that respect, the scale tipped his way. On the personal side—the practical necessity of living publicly as a gay man—could we ever bridge the gap between his innocence and my experience?

  Would he want to?

  He finally tossed the magazine aside and swallowed the last of his beer.

  “Let’s go,” I said. He didn’t belong here. If I wanted to be with him, neither did I, and I was content. As I paid the bartender, Mr. Ten Inches sidled up to the general and whispered into his ear. The color drained from his face, and I thought for a second he would take a swing at the guy. But the general maintained his composure, cupped a hand around the guy’s ear, and delivered a terse remark that obviously pleased him even less than mine had a little earlier.

  Then the general steered me toward the door. Before we stepped out into the night, I wrapped my arm around his neck and pulled his mouth down to mine. For a second, he struggled against my embrace. “Not here,” he whispered, fierce.

  I responded with the same ferocity. “Yes, here, damn it. If we can kiss anywhere in public, it’s inside a place like this. Now’s your chance, so would you just humor me for once?”

  He sighed and complied like a sullen child.

  “You can do better than that, Traveler,” I said when he pushed me away.

  After another sigh, he proved as much, and I hung on to him until I was satisfied he remembered why people did such things in the first place. Someone—Terry, perhaps?—hooted, “You go, girls!” And though the general tried hard to keep a straight face, he even grinned when we finally finished. A handful of people in the bar clapped and whistled when we separated, and the general turned and offered a rakish salute.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  We walked out of the bar with my hand in his. We stood next to a rainbow flag in the flashing neon light of the bar sign, and he breathed in and out, heavy, as if he’d just finished a workout. Perhaps he had. As we stood on the sidewalk, a pack of drunken college boys stumbled past us. One of them, catching sight of the general’s hand in mine, hooted, “Guys! Check out the faggots!”

  The general let go of me as if I were a jolt of electricity. His fingers curled into fists. Thankfully, the boys were too well lubricated to make much of an issue of us, and when they sized up the general and saw he was in the mood to engage, they backed away and left us alone, to my unrestrained relief. We did not need such confrontation.

  “Okay,” I said finally. “I admit this was a bad idea. I’m sorry. Do you want me to call a taxi?”

  “Let’s walk. It’s only a couple of miles, isn’t it?” the general said. “I could use some fresh air after that place.”

  I nodded, and we walked, side by side but still apart. His angry silence was a canyon, a chasm, with us on opposite sides.

  I ached for him, wanted to comfort him but wasn’t sure how. Perhaps he’d been strafed with too much information over the past several days. Regardless of what he’d insisted earlier, he could never have anticipated my parents’ welcoming him into our family with such honest conviction. There was our lusty afternoon in the hotel room, a first for us, which he had initiated with no prompting from me. And my brainstorm, his first visit to a gay bar, provided the perfect disastrous end to our perfect adventure.

  I hadn’t realized the bar might seem like an unforgiving place to a stranger, even a hostile place with an atmosphere of desperation. Because I had always gone to gay bars with a group of like-minded friends, I’d never thought about the challenge such an establishment might present to a fighting man like the general.

  But couldn’t he have made more of an effort to play along? To follow my lead for a change? He might never be comfortable showing his affection fully in a public place, but he would have to learn to trust me and unbend a little. I am by no means
an exhibitionist, but I see no problem with holding hands or even embracing in public as a natural response to being in love. If such expression shocks anyone looking on, I care very little. The surest way to get me to do something is to tell me I couldn’t or shouldn’t. Kissing a handsome man on Main Street. Joining the military and falling for a general.

  The general takes his honor seriously, and he was waging his own war inside. I knew it. In the business world, such a relationship as ours is not without its ethical dilemmas. The boss-and-employee romance may be the stuff of novels, but the reality is much less likely to result in a happy ending. In our case, the Air Force complicated things considerably.

  My certainty that love could somehow conquer all was ridiculously naïve. Military law had something to say about it. Between two officers, close friendship, to say nothing of a sexual relationship, is forbidden. Between two men, it would be ruinous, in spite of the presumptive gay-friendliness of the military these days. We had already violated several key statutes of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and if we stayed together, we would continue to do so.

  I knew as well as he did that no general officer in the Air Force had ever been convicted by court-martial for engaging in an unprofessional sexual relationship. Freedom from such censure seems to be another privilege of rank. But even so, he had a lot more to lose than I did. His retirement benefits were at stake. Maybe the general didn’t have to worry about a court martial, but a serious fraternization charge might result in his being reduced in rank by one or even two grades, which could cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars in retirement pay. And the gay angle would only increase the ugly publicity. The Air Force Times, our national independent newspaper and barometer, would certainly cover the story in gleeful, painstaking detail. The scandal would overshadow whatever good the general had accomplished in three decades of service. How could we weather such a storm?