by Kyell Gold
Aziz didn't want to just stand in front of the door; eyes were beginning to turn to him now. So he walked in, intending to look for Gerald, but he was a foot from the bar before he caught sight of the cougar sitting alone at a table below a window glowing dimly from outside neon. Before he could move toward that wall, the kangaroo behind the bar caught his eye. "What can I get you?"
"Ah..." Aziz shook his head. "Club soda, please."
"Coming up." The bartender grabbed a water glass, scooped it full of ice, and sprayed club soda over top of the ice cubes. He slid it across the wet wooden bar to Aziz. "First time here?"
"Yes. Thank you." Aziz took the glass. "How much?"
The kangaroo waved him off. He spoke with a light Oceanian accent, muted like Aziz's own accent. "On the house. Got an idea what you're looking for? I know most of the regulars here. Save you a bit of time."
The bear to his right perked an ear, curious as well. Aziz glanced his way. "Ah, 'looking for'?"
"Sure." The kangaroo grinned. "Come here alone but don't want to leave alone, right? Don't have a phone out so you're not checking Grindr right away, and if you didn't do that when you walked in then you're not on it. So, you want a bottom or a top? Young or old? Big or little? Bondage? Harder stuff?"
"It's his first time," the bear growled. "And he's drinkin' club soda. He ain't gonna want harder stuff." His accent was pure Upper Devos.
Aziz sipped his soda to give himself time to process this. He had a vague idea what "top" and "bottom" meant, but wasn't anxious to ask or find out by any other means. He was about to excuse himself when an idea occurred to him. "What about that one?" he said. "Cougar in the military gear."
"Ugh." The bear rolled his eyes and went back to his beer.
"Gerald's maybe someone you should save for a month or two down the road," the kangaroo said kindly. "When you've got a couple notches--couple more notches on your belt."
"Why?" Aziz creased his brow.
"One minute." The kangaroo took an order from a grey fox at the other end of the bar.
"Because," the bear growled, "he just comes in here, doesn't talk to nobody, doesn't leave with nobody, just sits with his drink all night long taking up a table."
"What's wrong with that? I'm sorry. I don't know the customs here."
"S'okay." The bear rested his paw on the bar and tapped his claws. "Ray's just tryin' to protect you. Figure if you go over and Ger growls and tells you to get outta his face, you might get the wrong idea about this place. We might growl, but most of us are pretty nice."
"I see." Aziz rubbed his finger along the coolness of his glass. "Perhaps I'll go talk to him, but I promise if he's rude, I won't think badly of the rest of you. All right?"
The bear's shoulder rose and fell. "It's your time. Waste as much as you want."
"The thing about Gerald is," the kangaroo--Ray--said, coming back, "he's married."
"That ain't why he's not hooking up," the bear growled.
"Clyte, you wanna keep your comments to snacks and beer? Something you know something about?"
"You want me to start talking about this shit you call beer?"
"Preaching to the choir," Ray said, indicating the bear's glass. "Where I come from we wouldn't use this shit to mop the floor."
Aziz cleared his throat. "Thanks very much for the help," he said. "I think I will go talk to him, and if he's rude then I'll come back for your advice."
"Good luck." Ray raised a paw and waved with a cheerful smile. "If you can get a half dozen words out of him, you're a better fellow than me or Clyte."
8
Gerald
Aziz navigated the tables holding his club soda until he arrived a few feet from Gerald, where he stopped. What was the etiquette? Should he just sit down? Before he could make another move, Gerald rumbled, "I'm not interested."
"What?"
The cougar raised his head and met Aziz's eyes. "Not interested." He enunciated the words clearly. "Go away."
It flashed through Aziz's mind that that was more than a half-dozen words, but that wasn't his goal. "I'm not here to hook up," he said, hoping he was using the phrase properly. "I just want to talk to you."
Gerald groaned and leaned back, his head flopping over the back of the chair. His tail curled and uncurled quickly, whacking the wall. "Did Ben send you? Lion Christ, I told him no more counselors."
"I'm not a counselor either."
The cougar brought his head up and looked at Aziz, really looked at him. His eyes rested on the club soda and then traveled back up to the cheetah's face, getting more interested. "Were you in the service? Over there?"
Aziz shook his head. Gerald fell back, disappointment obvious in the flattening of his ears. "What the hell do you want, then?"
"I told you. I want to talk to you." When Gerald didn't respond, Aziz went on. His back was starting to hurt, so he put all his energy into this last attempt to connect. "You come here often enough that the bartender and customers know you as someone who doesn't want to talk. So why come to this bar full of people?" The cougar continued his bored disinterest. Aziz took a breath. It probably wouldn't be prudent to mention Benjamin, so he was left with only two other possibilities, and he couldn't talk about the persistent image of the shirtless cougar to anyone, especially Gerald himself. "I wonder if it is for the same reason I came here."
Gerald's ear flicked. After a moment, he said, "All right, I'll bite. Why'd you come here?"
"Because I couldn't think of anywhere else to go."
The cougar grunted. After two seconds of thought, his paw gestured toward the chair across from him. Aziz took that for permission and sat down, setting his club soda in front of him and exhaling in relief.
"I thought you were in the service," Gerald said, gesturing to the club soda. "Because you're not drinking. A lot of guys come out of the service and go through AA."
He must have smelled the lack of alcohol. "Not you?" Aziz inclined his head toward Gerald's beer.
The cougar shook his head and took another sip. "Keeps me loose. What's your story?"
"My, ah." The cheetah placed both his paws flat on the table. "My religion forbids it."
Gerald tilted his head, and then his eyes widened as he processed that. "Muslim?" At Aziz's quick nod, he said, "Hell, don't worry. I was over there fighting, but I ain't one of those guys who thinks all of you are terrorists. But..." He squinted. "What're you doing in a gay bar? What branch of Islam are you?"
Aziz took a drink to make sure he wouldn't blurt out anything about Benjamin or the tape. "Sunni Islam. And for why I'm here...someone opened the door," he said, "and I walked in."
"Hah." Gerald smiled for the first time. "But it's not cool with your religion either, is it? It's..." he searched for the word. "Haraam? Even with the Sunnis?"
Surprise widened Aziz's eyes. "Yes," he said. "But only to act on one's desires. To have the desires is not something we can prevent. But I, ah..." He was going to tell Gerald that he didn't have the desires, and yet that felt as though he would be distancing himself from Gerald.
"That's not helpful." Gerald broke into his hesitation, then shook his head. "Sorry. I don't feel like debating religion. You do you."
For a moment, Aziz parsed that as a reference to masturbation, but a moment later remembered the colloquialism. "I only recently realized this about myself," he said, playing along because Gerald was sympathetic, figuring out how to turn the conversation to relationships. "But I don't know how to handle it. I can't talk to anyone at my mosque about it, and I can't talk to my wife."
"Wife, huh?" The cougar shook his head. "How long you been married?"
"Twenty-nine years."
Gerald stopped, the beer halfway to his muzzle, and set it down again. "You don't look old enough," he said. "You're just realizing you feel like this now? You never looked at guys before?"
"I did, sure." Aziz coughed and covered his mouth. "But that's not--I mean, there are problems with my marriage."
"So you finally, what, looked at some gay porn? Or did you always do that and just didn't admit you enjoyed it?"
"I never did." Aziz tried to keep the stiffness out of his voice. "Well--for a long time. I did a few years ago, but I thought it was--forgive me--disgusting."
The cougar inclined his head. "I've been there. I thought gay porn was gross until I was fifteen or so and actually tried it."
Aziz's tail curled. He shifted his weight in the chair. "I've known gay people. But recently I met a..." A "married couple" would be skirting too close to the truth, but he'd started the sentence now and his tongue, diverted from its original intent, filled in words seemingly on its own. "A jackal who was my son's lover."
"Whoa." Gerald leaned forward, close enough that Aziz could smell the beer on his breath. "Your son's gay too?"
Now he constructed the lie in his head and his tongue complied. Lying was not something he felt good about doing, but he wrapped it in a veil of telling someone else's true story, and that kept the sense of wrongness at bay. "I wanted to talk to him about his faith and how he could--how he could reconcile. But my wife--my wife is very devout. She insisted we sever all contact with him."
"Hate those religious fanatic types. No offense to your wife, but she sounds like a bitch. Throwing out her own son?"
"Her...her faith is very important to her. As it is to me. Do you have a faith?"
Gerald shook his head slowly. "Used to go to church growing up. Kinda fell away from it." He shrugged lightly. "Don't miss it, to be honest."
"Don't you wish you could talk to someone spiritual?" Aziz gestured with a paw. "I wish I could. None of my spiritual leaders would understand. I can't turn to anyone except people in here."
"And not all the people in here are friendly toward Muslims," Gerald said, looking around as though he could spot the non-friendly people right away. "Lucky you sat down next to me." His brow wrinkled. "Was it luck? Did Ben actually send you?"
"No, I promise. I don't know Ben."
The cougar relaxed. "Well, maybe Allah's looking out for you, then."
Aziz bowed his head out of reflex and murmured, "Subhān Allāh," under his breath. Then he looked up at the cougar. "You've mentioned Ben twice."
"Yeah." Gerald withdrew, hunching his shoulders.
Again, Aziz held his tongue. Twenty years in a pawnshop had taught him that silence got people to talk more readily than questions, but it was a hard technique for him to use, even with all those years of practice, when he was interested in a conversation. "Yeah," the cougar repeated. "Ben. Well, let me tell you. Me and Ben, we're proof that a good relationship ain't just about finding someone who turns you on."
Flashing back to the tape helped Aziz stay silent while Gerald gathered his thoughts. "We got married quick," he said finally, paws cupped around the beer glass he stared down into. "We'd been dating three months and it was great. 'Fireworks,' Ben would say. He loves romantic books and movies. I like a good action flick, get the blood pumping. Well. Usedta, anyway." He exhaled. "That's another story. So I was going off to the war, and you know, there's always a chance...I mean, we're the best army in the world, and things aren't really hot anywhere, but you never know. Drive over an IED one day and..." He made an explosion noise, his paws flying away from the beer glass and returning to cup it.
"In my home country," Aziz said into the pause, "not where I was, but a few hundred miles to the south, there was always fighting. But not with explosives. Just guns."
"Right." Gerald was deep into his own story. "Y'ever lose anyone to the war?"
"No."
"Lucky. I lost a friend...but that's still another story. Ben. So anyway, Ben wants to get married before I ship out, like in a romantic movie. And I'm...I'm pretty head over tail for him at this point, so I say yes and we do it and it was pretty great. Then I left."
"You had," Aziz clamped his muzzle shut over the rest of the question about their honeymoon and said instead, "to leave right away?"
"Pretty much. That's why we did it, y'know? But it was great, Ben's great. We wrote e-mails back and forth and it made me feel good to have someone waiting for me. Made me maybe a little more careful. I had a couple buddies who fooled around with some girls there, but..."
Into the pause, Aziz said, "Another story?"
"Hah. And how. But anyway, I got back a year and a half ago. We had some trouble with money right away. Ben lost his job and my paperwork with the VA kept getting stuck. And Ben just kept talking about how it was fine because we had each other. I was having trouble adjusting and I couldn't get my therapy set up because of the goddamned VA, and I kept focusing on practical things like where we were going to get food from."
"That seems reasonable."
"Thanks," the cougar said. "I thought so. But Ben didn't want to take a job just to put money on the table. He's trained as a social worker, and he's been looking for more jobs in that area. The problem is there are so many people out here who want to do that job that there's a long process. He'd rather work for a non-profit and make no money than take some kind of custodial job that would at least make it easier to pay our rent."
"So you have to make all the money?" Aziz asked.
"Not anymore. I finally convinced him to take a bartending class and now he's got a good job at Clancy's over on Bellmont. I got a small pension from the army and I'm working down at the shooting range on Firefly. You know it?"
Aziz shook his head. "I stay mostly to Upper Devos."
"What do you do?" Gerald inclined his head.
"I own a store." The words came out before he could stop them. Only then did he realize that Ben might have told Gerald about the cheetah who'd gotten their camera back. What could he say he owned instead of a pawnshop? An antique store?
But Gerald didn't ask, just nodded his head. "I don't get over to Upper Devos much. There's a coffee shop there that one of my old army buddies turned me on to, but other than that I stick to Cottage Hill."
"So you've both got jobs," Aziz said before the cougar could ask him more about his store. "So things are getting better?"
Slowly Gerald shook his head. "When we were having money troubles, I thought maybe our problems were about that. But now the money's coming in, and because his job has weird hours, we don't have a lot of time together. What we do have he wants to spend indoors watching movies cuddled up on the couch. I like going out and seeing things. I get restless if I'm indoors too long. I don't know if that's a change because I was in the war or what. I think I was like that before, but I cared about him so much I could talk myself into doing whatever he wanted and I'd be happy just to spend time with him. Now..."
Aziz picked up his club soda and sipped. Gerald let out a sigh. "Nothing as dramatic as like what you were talking about. But I don't feel that magic anymore. I think Ben does, but it makes me feel guilty and sad when he tries to do romantic things and I'm not feeling it."
Like bringing a honeymoon tape back. Aziz wondered if Ben had tried showing Gerald the tape yet. "A marriage is more than romance," he said. "A marriage is an agreement between a husband and--between two people. You don't just abandon it if there is trouble."
"Yeah, yeah, Ben's read me that speech already." Gerald narrowed his eyes. "What if there's nothing there anymore in a marriage? What if there might be someone else out there who understands you better, someone else who's right for you? And it's not anyone's fault, it's just that you've changed, and he's changed, or maybe you've changed and he hasn't and that's the problem. How long do you have to try to work it out before you give up?"
Nothing came to Aziz's tongue. "I don't know," he said after a moment.
"Yeah, you got the same problem, only you got a religious angle to it. I can't help you with that. Parents didn't take me to church much, and when I figured out I was gay, well..." He laughed.
"If you don't mind me asking," Aziz said, "how did you figure it out?"
"No big trick." The cougar finished his beer. "Like I said, I thought gay porn wa
s gross, but I wasn't interested in straight porn at all. Then a friend of mine came out as gay in my high school class. He said he thought I was hot but he understood if I didn't feel the same. And I couldn't stop thinking about him. So we started hanging out. Hooked up once or twice, and then, I dunno, I started meeting more people."
"And this was..." Gerald frowned at him, and Aziz clarified. "How old were you?"
"Oh. Sixteen. Well, fifteen when I started looking on the Internet for gay porn. To be disgusted at." He cleared his throat. "It was a really confusing time."
"I can imagine." Aziz folded his paws together. "When I was sixteen, I..." This time he managed to catch himself. That was not a memory to dwell on now. "I was working at my father's market stall. My wife and I were married when I was seventeen and she was thirteen. We had one child and he was three when we came to this country."
"Wow. So you've been here a long time."
"Over twenty years."
"How much has changed?"
His first thoughts turned to the neighborhood they were sitting in, one he only knew a few things about. "We looked at Cottage Hill when we first moved here," he said, "but it was a poorer neighborhood then. The environmental activists had gotten the factory up in Chellah Heights closed, and a lot of the people were out of work. Even then it was a--a gay neighborhood, but I didn't realize it. It wasn't as..." He searched for the word.
"Obvious?"
Aziz nodded. "The people were not so open. There were rainbow flags, but I didn't know what those meant until much later."
"It, ah," Gerald exhaled. "It makes it a lot easier to find people. You know, to have a normal life. I told you about high school, how hard it was to realize who I was. If my friend hadn't come up to me, I might never have met another gay guy for years. Now..." He gestured around to the bar. "I can sit with a whole bunch of them."