Tom wore a wedding ring but never seemed in any hurry to get home. I only found out later that he’d been recently (and brutally) divorced; lost his wife, his kids, everything but the big, empty house. We were company, and company was all Tom wanted.
One night, Tom came with a date for dinner. They sat in the dining room and were treated like visiting royalty, lavished with food and wine and (after much whispered debate at the bar as to the appropriateness of the gesture) the special dirty fortune cookies that Barney bought in bulk from some Asian company, containing such cockeyed wisdom as “Two lovers is better on one hand” and “Confucius say: Man suck own dick never much lonely.”
I don’t know what fortunes Tom and his lady ended up getting, but they’d laughed, so we all figured we’d chosen right.
IF I POURED FIFTY DRINKS, beers included, it was a busy night. A hundred at the upstairs bar was almost unheard of. For long stretches—hours at a time, and sometimes whole days—not a single customer was seated in the dining room.
On the surface, it seemed like the simplest job ever. But my job was not to tend bar. It was to look like I was tending bar in those hours between the much more engaging and interesting duties I performed for Barney and Jake along the periphery of the restaurant business.
For example, China Town was the only restaurant I knew of then that got liquor deliveries at eleven o’clock on Tuesday nights. It was the only place I knew that took its delivery from the back of a beat-up, wheezing panel van with the name of some Asian produce company still showing ghostly through several coats of whitewash and spray paint. The owners did their ordering standing in the dark in the small parking lot outside the back door, pointing at cases of wine and whiskey and rum stacked up inside the truck while the driver totted up the list on a cocktail napkin or scrap of newspaper. The negotiations were conducted squatting on the pavement in the glow of the truck’s headlights, stacks of bills thrown down onto the ground. My job was to stand in the doorway, a skinny, five-foot-six-inch Irishman armed with a baseball bat.
Sometimes I was told to leave the bat and go watch the front door—to sit just inside the glass and not allow anyone in under any circumstances for forty-five minutes. I was never told explicitly what I was supposed to do if someone did try to come in. Was I supposed to warn Barney and Jake? Call for help? Politely ask them to fuck off?
So some Tuesdays I watched the front, guarding against detachments of imaginary tongs or, worse, cops. Some Tuesdays I watched Barney’s or Jake’s back while he did his business—me slouching coolly against the doorframe with the Louisville Slugger near at hand, eyeballing the “helpers” the drivers would sometimes bring with them and giving them my best sleepy-eyed, heavy-lidded, I’m-so-bad-this-whole-scene-bores-me Steve McQueen stare. And on other nights I’d stand there the same way, but with a murderous little Vietnamese cook from the kitchen (a mean fucker, short but ropy, banded with hard muscle and covered in jailhouse tattoos, who never said a word to me in English except to call me Fuckhead or Mayonnaise Face) and two or three of his crew. They never did anything except squat, loose-limbed and menacing, in a tight group just outside the door. Squat and smoke. Squat and smoke and stare silently out at the truck driver and whoever he’d brought along with him. The head cook’s tattoos were black and smudgy, but easy enough to read even in the dark because no matter how poorly it’s rendered, a swastika is still a swastika and KILL spelled out across the knuckles is tough to mistake for anything else. He had spiderwebs inked on the sharp points of his elbows, a dragon on his neck, and though the only time I would ever see him for any length of time outside of the back parking lot was when he and the crew would sit down at the bar at the end of the night, he would still call me Fuckhead or Mayonnaise Face, even when I was lining up free Tsingtaos for him and his boys.
On the one night that the bunch of them were inspired to actually stand, they were even scarier—something in the way they uncoiled from the ground, flowing to their feet like water and advancing on Jake’s back slowly but with unquestionable purpose.
The trigger for this unprecedented show of quiet force was the driver of the panel van. He’d been hunkered down across from Jake, the two of them quietly doing their business, when suddenly, and in the middle of negotiations, he’d yelped, thrown down a wad of bills, and leaped to his feet with his hands raised. His helpers—three of them, who’d been hanging around the truck’s back door giving the four of us hanging around by the restaurant’s back door the stink-eye—scrambled, shouting, to their feet and hurried to see what the trouble was. Meanwhile, me and the V.C. had simply strolled over quietly, casually as can be, as if merely curious about what was going to happen next. Like, what’s happening here, Cool Breeze? Is someone going to apologize to the boss or are you all gonna end up as tomorrow’s short rib special? Make your move.
It wasn’t me saying this, of course. It was our numbers, and mostly, Vietnamese Hitler, who stood there smiling all the way back to his molars like he was anxious to get things started so he could eat someone’s heart. I wasn’t saying anything at all, because I was too busy cursing myself. In the excitement of the moment, I’d forgotten my bat. I’d also forgotten to mention to anyone that I had absolutely no desire to get my teeth stomped out in some kind of cheapjack gang war behind a Chinese restaurant for five bucks an hour.
Ten an hour, maybe. But in any event, if I was going to get my ass kicked, I wanted a fucking raise.
Once the sides were arranged, Jake sighed as if this whole thing—this whole misunderstanding, whatever it was—was just deeply disappointing to him. Then he turned his back on all of it and started walking away, passing straight through our little defensive line, heading for the back door. This made me exceedingly nervous because, every once in a while, there’d be a night when two trucks would show up for the liquor delivery rather than the usual one. On those nights, Jake or Barney would come back inside, tell me to close the door, lock it, and walk away. “Business,” they’d say, shrugging. “Let them settle it themselves.”
We’d all go upstairs, have a drink, wait five or ten or fifteen minutes, and when we went back down, there’d be one truck again. I never asked how such complications in the supply chain got resolved.
That night, the driver of the delivery truck only let Jake get about halfway to the door before yelling something. It was either a concession or an apology, since everyone suddenly relaxed and reached for their cigarettes. Jake shrugged, turned around, came back and finished his business. The cases got unloaded. Money changed hands.
And when it was all done, Jake took the pack of Marlboros out of my shirt pocket without asking and lit one for himself. “You forgot your stick,” he said.
“There were only four of them. I figured I didn’t need it.”
I hadn’t meant it to be funny when I said it, but, on hearing it, Jake exploded with laughter. So much that he had to bend over to catch his breath. He yelled to the cooks in Chinese, repeating what I’d said, holding up four fingers and making a swinging motion with his own invisible bat.
I TOOK TO WEARING most of a tuxedo to work every day, having bought three or four pleated, bone-colored shirts off the dead man’s rack at the thrift store and augmenting them with black trousers trimmed in satin, a black bow tie, and the cummerbund I used to wear when I was selling videos at the mall. When it was slow, I’d stand at the end of the bar smoking cigarettes, drinking Chinese beer out of tall, elegantly curved pilsner glasses and watching the news or boxing or The Simpsons on TV.
I was enamored of the decaying glamour, the soured class, the cracked veneer of luxury China Town had. On the rare nights when the house was busy, when the bar grew inexplicably crowded and the dining room loud with trade; when Barney and Jake moved smilingly through the throngs like they were on rails, calling everyone by name; when the whole place filled with the sounds and smells of business—laughter, fried rice, call whiskey, raised voices, smoke and fragrant puffs of steam coming from plates uncovered at table, t
he silver domes lifted and miniature mushroom clouds blooming toward the ceiling—I could almost convince myself that I was somewhere when, really, I was nowhere at all.
I had one regular who’d come in to play chess with me, a professor of history from one of the local universities who, after three or four beers, would admit to a passionate love for dead historical figures like Marie Antoinette or Mao Tse-tung and an absolute loathing for his students. When the professor one day mysteriously stopped coming to the bar, I learned to play go instead. Like chess, go is one of those games that takes two minutes to learn and several lifetimes to master. When I say “I learned to play go,” what I mean is I learned how to open the enamel box Jake kept his gear in, unroll the board and set the little black and white stones in their places, and that I learned how to do all that with just one hand so as to leave my other free for smoking and drinking, which is the only reason I’d “learned to play go” in the first place—to have something to do with my right hand during the long, slow hours that was healthier than what my left hand was doing. I needed an anchor for my vices, and like baccarat, snapping away at a typewriter in a crowded bull pen, or counting enormous stacks of money, playing go just makes one’s bad habits look cooler.
When I discovered that Barney and Jake would bet on anything, I found myself another pastime: losing money to Barney and Jake.
There was a tree in front of China Town. From a table set against the second-floor windows, you could look out and be eye level with the branches. Come autumn, Barney and Jake would do exactly that: sit at the table and watch the tree, sometimes for hours at a stretch. They were betting on which leaf would fall next.
If more than one table was occupied in the dining room, they’d bet on which would finish first. They’d bet on customers sitting down at the bar, guessing how many drinks they’d have and leaving it to me to keep count. No matter what number I gave, one of them won and one of them lost, and the loser always blamed me for doing something wrong. When Jake noticed that I liked watching boxing, he would bet against me on the fights. Whether I wanted to or not.
In this way my nights at China Town got considerably longer. Barney and Jake irregularly ran a small, very private casino operation out of a rarely (legally) used private back room off the bar. The three-table concern alternately offered poker, pai gow, blackjack, roulette or craps depending on who was playing and what their favorite game was. Play didn’t start up until well after midnight (I’d actually had no clue this even went on until the first night I was asked to stick around) and would go for hours. The room would be blue with cigar smoke, crowded with sector cops, bent lawyers, rich suckers, regulars and friends of the house, all squaring their cards, tapping their chips or watching the little white ball go round and round. I was drafted to provide drink service—locking the front door, standing behind the bar and making ghostly passes through the back room every twenty minutes or so, moving silent as a geisha.
If a space was open at a table, I’d sometimes be asked to play. You’d think I would’ve been smarter than that, but I wasn’t. I developed a half-decent system for five-dollar roulette but never had the pool of available cash necessary to make it pay. Barney offered me house credit, secured against my paychecks. You’d think I would’ve been smarter than that, too. Again, you’d be wrong. I ended up working a month for free after one bad night and, not long after, got skunked again playing Chinese three-tier poker all night and ended up owing the brothers another three weeks.
My only saving grace was the ponies, straight bets on long shots, always to win. One lucky horse could pay for a lot of bad afternoons.
Still, as it slowly became apparent to the brothers that the proverbial luck of the Irish only held for such things as horse racing or drunkenly falling down a long flight of stairs and getting up without a scratch,10 but not for life’s more important pastimes like love, war and (most notably) card playing, I was invited to sit in more often. As it slowly became apparent to me that I had precisely zero skill at such things, I started to beg off—saying I was tired of giving back money I hadn’t even earned yet. Jake’s solution? I just needed to make more money.
This, as it turned out, was easy because on Sunday nights (and occasionally some other nights as well) China Town hosted private parties in a dim, mildew-smelling, bunkerish banquet space in the basement. A full bar was down there, with a dance floor only slightly warped by the damp, a DJ booth, seating for about a hundred. It was used for Chinese wedding receptions (a couple of which I’d worked), festival celebrations, birthdays of regulars, things like that. But on Sunday nights (some Sunday nights), it was reserved for the Sunshine Club.
“The fuck’s a Sunshine Club?” I asked Jake, imagining a gathering of granola-eating, unicorn-humping hippie Girl Scouts or mob of elder queers.
Jake just smiled like someone’d fishhooked him in the jowls and pulled. “Sunday at seven. And wear a clean shirt.”
THE SUNSHINE CLUB turned out to be a loose association of swingers, wife-swappers, closet fetishists, bi-curious dry-humpers, and gang-bang enthusiasts who, in a city such as Rochester, which still clung to the tatters of its historical small-town puritanism with fierce zeal, were lucky to have found each other at all. That they had to “find each other” repeatedly at my bar, at the darkened back tables, or in the empty DJ booth in the basement of China Town every couple of Sundays was, depending on how you look at it, either a measure of the desperation of rust-belt perverts and sexual freethinkers or just another example of how weird a job my gig at China Town was.
Club members didn’t need much in the way of atmosphere or ambience to get down. A warm room with a lock on the door was enough. They’d bring their own music to plug into our PA, their own decorations, and ask only that the lights be kept dim and the whole party be treated like a lock-in. In other words, once things got rolling, the doors would be bolted until a certain hour. No one in and no one out.
Such a party (or succession of parties, as things would turn out) does need drinks, though. A lot of them, served strong and fast and with no fuss, to lubricate the cogs of fringe social interaction and blackjack the inhibitions of those who might normally be unwilling to get bent over a bar table and aggressively rear-ended in public.
Prior to my being handed the gig, Michael (remember him?) had been acting in this capacity. And while, under normal circumstances, someone who gets their kicks being finger-banged by strangers in a grotty basement or being led around by a leather strap tied around their ballsack is not really in much of a position to comment on the comportment of others, Barney and Jake had been getting some complaints about Michael’s behavior from the swingers. Apparently, some nights he would refuse to serve anything but beers—claiming he had no liquor while standing before a fully stocked wall of bottles, then saying that he wasn’t being paid enough to do anything but crack bottles. He would try to engage certain members in long conversations about their chosen kink or lifestyle, which was not what these people were coming in for. Most annoyingly, he’d started begging for tips—a massive bringdown in any service situation. My first duty upon being given the Sunshine Club nights by Jake was to fire Michael.
Again.
THE SUNSHINE CLUB IN ROCHESTER, NEW YORK, was heavily populated by what I would politely call veteran swingers. It wasn’t exactly Girls Gone Wild, with stupid-drunk coeds taking their tops off and tongue-kissing each other, beautiful people posing nude on the banquettes or hordes of hard, tight, morally challenged underwear models tenderly exploring their sexuality in full view of me behind the bar. The parties would start around seven or eight and require at least two hours of drinking and fully clothed flirtatious socializing before anything fun happened at all, which made the parties rather like a corporate meet and greet or faculty luncheon that, at a certain point, was destined to go totally sideways.
Still, no matter how open-minded and accepting a cat might be (and I am just about as open-minded and accepting as cats come), seeing some gray-haired captain of
industry squeezed into a pair of assless chaps and a black leather Brando–in–The Wild One motorcycle hat strutting around the dance floor and cavorting disreputably with some thirty-year-old hustler already blown out on poppers and clinging desperately to that last shred of his youth is going to start to demoralize you after the tenth or twentieth or fiftieth iteration. If you’re me, it’s going to put you, oddly enough, in the mind-set of fierce, almost hysterical, monogamy because anything—even a state so biologically unnatural as sexual exclusivity—is better than suddenly finding yourself alone with your fetishes at thirty and having to spend your Sunday nights in the basement of a Chinese restaurant hoping to get ass-fucked by Thurston Howell III just to prove you still got it.
ON SUNSHINE CLUB NIGHTS, the number of bodies and volume of heavy breathing was enough to raise the temperature twenty degrees, when the shaded half-windows up along the ceiling would fog and sweat and the cigarette smoke would pool around the lights in the soundproofed ceiling like antigravity milk. Some nights I’d make three and four hundred dollars in tips that were almost like hush money so I’d just forget the things I’d seen: frantic pansexual groping in the booths, dry-humping orgies on the dance floor and wholly unnatural things done with my bar garnishes. Some nights—totally in violation of my bosses’ orders and plain common sense—I would duck out from behind the bar and follow a couple of the younger, hipper Sunshine regulars across the dance floor, dodging knots of revelers and stepping around impassioned adulterers breaking their vows two and three at a clip, until we reached a narrow back door that let into a mostly unused access hallway. There, we’d do tiny toots of meth or cocaine off the fat pad between thumb and index finger. And though weed, amyl nitrite, and Nembutal weren’t really my thing, I’d do those, too. At least I wasn’t walking around in a black leather gimp mask, licking rum off the nipples of senior citizens, or sliding a hundred across the bar to settle up my tab at the end of the night and only then noticing the crust of dried semen on my knuckles. Everything’s relative, I guess.
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