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Jason and I walked a mile or two down the road to a motel near the center of town. Neither of us wanted to spend that night in the house with Mark. We checked in, and after getting to the room turned the air conditioner as high as it would go.

Neither of us spoke for a while; we just sat on the bed and waited for the air conditioner to cool the room. Both of us seemed stunned by what had just happened back at RJ’s. Then Jason pushed me back onto the bed and kissed me.

For a brief moment I was all his, feeling his weight pressed down on me and wanting nothing more than for him to keep kissing me. Then I thought of David, and how upset he’d been as he drove away from RJ’s. Somewhat reluctantly, I pushed Jason gently away from me.

“Jason, I can’t,” I told him.

Jason sat up on the bed.”Well, that sucks.”

I smiled. “Yeah, it does.”

“Well, it’s nice that you’re loyal, I guess,” Jason said. “I should probably go before I do something you’ll hate me for.”

I tried to assure him that there was no way I could hate him, and that if I wasn’t already in a relationship with David I would be all over him.

“Give me a call if anything ever happens,” he said. He wrote a phone number on the notepad by the telephone, hugged me, and I felt a blast of hot air as he opened the door and walked out into the courtyard.

After he left, I used the phone to call Santos. When I started telling him what had happened, he already knew. David had called him, and had left a phone number with him to give me in case I called. I thanked Santos, and called the number.

David was sitting near a payphone at a cafe down the road. I told him about the room I’d rented, and he told me he’d be right over. After he arrived, we decided to spend the night there at the motel — the room was already paid for, after all — and then we would head back toward Orange County in the morning. Neither of us could see any good coming from our staying in Chico any longer.

Not long after the sun came up the next day we were on the road back. Two days later, with nothing but our two tip jars, the clothes we had been wearing, and David’s car, we arrived back in Orange County.

–

Sometime during the trip, I lost the piece of paper with Jason’s phone number on it. I left several messages with Santos trying to get it, but he never returned my calls.

Roderic’s interest in getting me back waned quickly once the distance between us was gone. We’re still good friends.

David and I broke up within a month of our move back home. I haven’t spoken to him since.

The heat the day after Jason arrived was intense, as it often could be in Chico. The thermometer hanging on the patio outside RJ’s read 115, and it was still 10:00 in the morning.

When I had left that morning to get ready to start the early bartending shift, David was still sleeping, or at least pretending to be. Jason had come with me to the bar; he had arrived late the night before and hadn’t seen the place yet. I gave him a quick tour, and he helped me with slicing limes, wiping down the bar, and all the other usual tasks I’d do before opening for the lunch crowd.

We talked as went about the chores, and I soon found myself liking Jason for more than just his excruciatingly good looks. He had a sarcastic sense of humor like mine, and before long we were throwing barbs like we’d known each other since long before last night. When I teased him for being such a slut he hadn’t even flinched when I’d topped him the night before, he threw back that it was because he didn’t feel it. I’d call him a big, dumb jock and he’d call me a short little geek. He genuinely seemed to like me, and I found myself very pleasantly surprised the he had turned out to be a lot more than just a gorgeous lay.

He kept himself busy around the bar after the customers started arriving. Being the new guy in town and as good-looking as he was, he didn’t have a hard time finding new people willing to keep him company. I was glad he seemed to be having a good time.

David showed up a few hours later, and to my surprise he didn’t appear to be upset. Instead, he came behind the bar, gave me a kiss, and appeared to me to be in a genuinely good mood.

“I’m sorry,” he said, shrugging. “I got weird.”

I hugged him again, gave him a kiss on the neck, and let him know it was OK. “I guess we won’t be doing that again, huh?” I asked, and he laughed, nodding.

As the day went on the temperature inside the bar rose, the swamp coolers on the roof insufficient to keep out the heat. By the time Mark arrived it had become so bad that the customers were coming up the bar with requests to be hosed down with the soda gun.

Mark was visibly angry about something, and signaled to David that he wanted to speak to him in the back office. I glanced at David, and he obviously had no idea what was going on as he followed Mark to the back of the bar. I heard a door slam, and then nothing for nearly a half hour.

When David came back, he was pale. When I asked him what happened, he told me Mark had fired him.

I was incredulous. “Why the hell would he do that?”

“Because he wanted Jason.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Look, I’m getting out of here before he comes back out. I’ll talk to you later.”

I was furious. I stormed back into Mark’s office, demanding to know why he’d fired David. He glared at me. “That’s between him and me. It’s done. Go back to work.”

I kept at him. “If you fire Dave, you’re firing me, too. I’m not staying here without him.”

“Fine,” he hissed, and stood up from behind his desk. He stormed out of the office, and out to the bar area, where he picked up the small knife we used to cut fruit for the drinks. He then grabbed the inflatable sheep from above my tip jar and stabbed it with the knife several times. As he threw down Becky’s deflated vinyl remains, he turned to me. “Get the fuck out.”

He was still holding the knife, and I wasn’t going to wait to see what would happen if I stayed. I grabbed my tip jar and David’s, and left the bar as quickly as I could, stopping only for a moment so that Jason could follow me out into the parking lot.

David had already driven away by the time we got outside; he obviously hadn’t been expecting me to be following him. Jason and I did the only thing we could do: we walked quickly down Cherry Street away from RJ’s into the choking heat of the Chico summer. Jason looked back a few times to see if Mark was following us, but I never did.

Aside: Christ, I’ve gone and made it into the double digits. And a warning… the following is a bit more explicit in parts than the earlier chapters. My recollection of the events is particularly vivid today for various reasons.

Things were very tense between David and I for a while. My violent outburst had scared both him and me, and it took both of us time to readjust and feel comfortable with each other again.

I was feeling very isolated during that time. We were in a small town, far from anywhere I’d ever called home. I didn’t feel like I could talk to Mark about relationship problems with the man I’d stolen away from him, and Santos had never been anyone with whom I had ever had any kind of serious conversation. Since it’s really bad form for a bartender to start crying over his problems with the clients, that didn’t leave many places to find a sympathetic ear.

One afternoon during this silent period, as I was walking down the main street downtown killing time before my shift, I came across a pay phone. Without thinking much about it, I picked up the phone and started dialing one of the few numbers I had memorized: the one for Roderic’s house. I was half-hoping he wouldn’t answer; just the act of dialing his number was a comfort to me, and gave me a feeling that there was someone out there I could reach out to if I ever needed someone.

“Hello?” It was Roderic’s voice. Suddenly I realized I had no idea what I wanted to say to him. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to speak to him.

“Hello,” I answered after a moment. “I was just calling to see how you were doing.”

“I miss you.” Roderic’s voice was more somber and sincere than I think I’ve ever heard it. There was a sadness in it that I wasn’t expecting. I felt like my heart was being constricted, and noticed it was getting harder to breathe.

Without waiting for a reply from me, he continued. “I didn’t realize it before you moved so far away, but I never should have broken up with you. I love you, and I want you to come back.”

I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream, to hang up. I wanted to go home.

I chuckled half-heartedly, sure Roderic would see through it. “Kid, your timing has always sucked. Couldn’t you have maybe mentioned that before I moved a thousand miles away with some other guy?”

His tone changed a bit, and the conversation turned to small talk about how our respective lives were going. On the surface it very mundane, but the undercurrent of longing was there throughout. When I finally said goodbye and hung up the phone, promising to call him again soon, I felt drained.

I shook off the feeling by the time I started my shift, as I always did. It didn’t pay to be gloomy when people were counting on you to pour them drinks, keep them entertained, and make them feel like you were always just one more tip away from sleeping with them.

–

Time heals all wounds, and spackle works for the holes in the drywall. It took several days, but eventually things between David and I returned to normal. He promised to tone down the jealousy, and I promised to be more understanding. The make-up sex was some of the best ever.

By the time Santos’ cousin Jason came up for a weekend visit, we were a happy couple again. Jason was gorgeous. He was about six feet tall, with an athletic body and a beautiful face. Mark was obviously smitten with him right away. “Back off, boys,” he exclaimed when Jay arrived, “This one’s mine.”

Jason blushed, which only made him that much more attractive. “Hey, Pat,” David said. “Could you help me set up a place for Jason to sleep? I don’t know where you hid the pillows.” The look I was getting from David told me that it was a ruse; that he was trying to get me to follow him into the bedroom so we could talk privately. I did, and we closed the door behind us.

“He’s hot, huh?” David asked.

“Yeah, he is,” I agreed. David obviously had more to say on the matter, so I waited for him to say it.

“Ummm… Do you want him?” David’s look didn’t seem to contain any jealousy, but I felt like I was treading on dangerous ground.

“Why?” I asked. “Do you?”

David was obviously nervous talking about this, and hesitated for a few moments. “Yeah. I think it could be fun.”

I agreed, reluctantly. My reluctance wasn’t so much because I wouldn’t have loved a chance to fuck Jason, but because I didn’t want to appear to eager to David, who’d already shown his capacity for jealousy. Still, I felt safer knowing that, if anything happened, it had been David’s idea.

That night Mark invited Jason to sleep in his bed, but he politely declined. “If it’s OK with you,” he said, “I’ll just sleep on the floor in the bedroom.” Mark obviously felt rejected, but shrugged it off.

Jason, David and I stayed up late that night, talking about what it was like to work at RJ’s, things Santos and Jason had done growing up together. After a while we ran out of things to talk about, and decided to turn in for the night. We each claimed a spot on the two mattresses we’d pushed together on the floor, and said goodnight before turning off the lights.

I wasn’t able to fall asleep that night. I was in the middle, and having David on one side of me and our beautiful visitor on the other had my pulse racing. Then Jason rolled under his blanket, his leg crossing mine, and it sent a jolt through me. I prodded David lightly with my elbow. he was still awake, and when he looked at me I tipped my head toward Jason. David nodded.

I grunted, and rolled over, throwing my arm across Jason’s chest, my face barely an inch from his. When he opened his eyes, I kissed him lightly. He responded by pressing his face into mine and sliding his tongue between my lips.

I grabbed David’s arm and pulled him toward us, signaling him to move to a position where Jason would be sandwiched between the two of us. Jason then turned and began tonguing David, while I kissed and nibbled on his neck and shoulders from the back. Before much longer each of us had another’s dick in his mouth.

After running through every variation of who was sucking whom, Jason moaned the he needed to be fucked. David and I looked at each other, and he nodded at me again. I moved to a position behind Jason as he moved onto his hands and knees while he sucked David.

I watched Jason taking David into his mouth as I pushed into him from behind, and was a bit surprised that I didn’t just blow my load immediately. I was somewhat proud of myself as I managed to contain my excitement and thrust in and out of him for several minutes, reaching under to stroke his cock as David pumped in and out of his mouth. David’s eyes were locked on mine, with a look of… something. Something I couldn’t read.

Then, suddenly, David moved backward, away from Jason. He moved back to his side of the mattresses, threw the blanket over himself, and declared that he was tired, and that he was going to sleep. That’s when I realized what the look in David’s eyes had meant. He couldn’t stand the sight of me fucking another guy, even if he was involved in the act. Things were different now than they had been when we’d both been involved in the pool table orgy at Dreams. He was no longer willing to share me.

I should have stopped it then, but I couldn’t. I kept fucking Jason and stroking his cock with my hand until about 15 minutes later when we both came, loudly and simultaneously. Not long after that I fell asleep, feeling Jason’s breath on my neck as he pressed against my back with his arm draped over my shoulder.

David was at least a couple feet away, at the far edge of the mattress. I don’t know if he ever really slept that night. I suspect he didn’t.

Business was good at RJ’s right from the start. It surprised me that, for such a small town, there was such a large bunch of regulars willing to come in several times a week for drinks. We also got quite a few customers from the local university, since we were the only gay bar within nearly 100 miles.

For the most part it was a very fun place to work, though there were rough nights. Sometimes the local fraternities would bring new pledges through as a sort of initiation, and things could occasionally turned violent when a young, good-looking straight guy would realize he was being ogled by a barful of men. In the one of the worst incidents, someone drove by and fired a shotgun into a car parked out in the lot; that made people a little nervous for quite some time after.

Most nights, though, it was a lot like working at Dreams had been. The tips were just as good if not better, the customers were friendly, and I was enjoying the small town atmosphere. Also, unlike at Dreams where I started bartending long after David, and where I had always been in his shadow, at RJ’s we started on equal footing and I had more than my share of guys who preferred hanging out at my end of the bar on the nights we both worked.

One couple in particular, Mark and Peter, was always trying to talk me into going hope with them after closing. I would always politely decline, letting them know that I belonged to David, though if I’d been single I would have done it in a heartbeat. Peter in particular was very good-looking, and had a smile that made my knees weak. Though they never gave up trying, after a while we became friends and the come-ons became more of a joke than anything else, at least as far as I was concerned.

On the weekend of Chico’s first gay pride festival I had the day off, but I came by the bar as I usually did to be with David. Peter and Mark were there as well. They were stopping by for a drink before they went to the festival, and asked if I’d like to tag along. I’d been wanting to go anyway, so I stopped on our way out to let David know where I was going.

The look on his face when I told him was one I’d never seen before. He was angry at me. I started feeling a little anger bubble up in me as well, at the idea that he didn’t trust me to be away from him with a couple other guys for a few hours. After a few tense words were exchanged — David telling me he didn’t want me to go with “those two sluts,” and me accusing him of not wanting me to have any friends — I left the bar with the two of them.

I’ve never been one to deal with jealousy well. Despite all my stories about three-ways, homewrecking and billiard table orgies, I’m a loyal guy. If given a long leash I’ll take it, but I’m not the type to go off and fuck a couple guys while my boyfriend’s at work. The accusing tone from David had really irritated me, though, and it may have been partially out of spite that I went with Mark and Peter.

When we returned to the bar for the start of my shift, David didn’t speak a word to me before going home; he was obviously still upset. It gnawed at the back of my head all night, and when I finally got home after the bar closed he was still awake, standing in the center of the room waiting for me.

“You slept with them, didn’t you?” he accused me as soon as I came into the room.

The anger boiled right back up. “No, I didn’t. Why can’t you trust me?”

“It’s OK. You can tell me.” As he slumped back against the wall, the look he gave me told me it wasn’t OK, and that he thought I was lying to him.

I felt sorry for him. I had never seen him this insecure, and this sad. I walked up to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Look, David,” I told him. “I love you. I don’t want those guys; all I want is you. I need you to believe me.”

The look he gave me back was pure venom. “Whatever. I hope you had a good time.”

The anger exploded again inside me. Without realizing I was doing it, I balled my hands into fists. Why wouldn’t he believe me? Couldn’t he see I loved him? What kind of asshole did he think I was?

“God damn it!” I yelled, and punched the wall next to his head, leaving a large hole. David’s expression changed from accusation to fear, and I was suddenly disgusted with myself. The man I loved was afraid of me. There was no way I’d ever hit him, but how could he believe that? At that moment, I was sure I’d ruined everything.

“Oh God, David, I’m so sorry.” I tried to hug him. He pulled away, and left to go sleep on the living room couch. It was the first night I’d go to sleep without holding him since I’d moved in to the house in Anaheim.

The next morning, we got to work doing the final cleanup before we’d open RJ’s. We cleaned the bar until it sparkled, mopped down the floors, and took things we wanted to store away down to the basement.

The basement at RJ’s was a dark and cramped place, filled with cobwebs and the kinds of assorted junk you’d expect to find in the storage room of a bar that had been around as long as RJ’s had. There were decorations for every major holiday and several minor ones, a couple of old signs that had once been outside where the “RJ’s” sign now hung, and box after box of old pictures. After we’d carried down all of the things we needed to stash away, David and I started flipping through those pictures.

It was an interesting look at the history of the place we were about to reopen. There were decades of drag queens, drunks, and shirtless dancers; other than the haircuts and clothing styles, most of them could have been snapshots of almost any gay bar I’ve ever been in.

After going through what must have been hundreds of those photos, David stopped. “Oh my God,” he gasped. “That’s him.”

“That’s who?” I asked, looking at the picture I held in his hand. It was a young man, probably in his early twenties, and appeared to have been taken some time in the 80’s.

“It’s the guy I saw in the mirror.”

Thoroughly freaked out, suddenly neither of us wanted to stay down in a dark, musty basement any longer. We grabbed the picture and ran back upstairs into the bar.

We spent the next few hours making sure the place looked perfect, and before long we were ready to open the doors. As my final personalizing touch, I pulled Becky from the box we’d brought her up in, reinflated her and placed over the bar just above my virgin tip jar.

The previous owner (whose name I have now forgotten, so I’ll call him Frank) dropped by about a half-hour before the time we were due to open to wish us luck, and Mark cracked open a bottle of champagne and poured rounds for all of us. After a toast to our own success at the new RJ’s, David pulled out the picture he’d found in the basement and showed it to Frank, asking “Do you know who this guy is?”

Frank took the picture from David and looked at it. An expression of sorrow crossed his face. “Yeah, I do,” he said. “That’s Donny.”

“Was he a customer here?” David asked.

“Yeah,” Frank answered, without looking up from the photo. “He was. Used to come here a lot until he committed suicide. Right out there in the parking lot, as a matter of fact.”

David, a bit shaken, explained what he’d seen the night before in the mirrors over the bar. I’m sure he expected Frank to think he was insane, but instead Frank’s expression changed from sorrow to something like amusement as David told his story.

“Really? That’d be just like Donny to mess with you like that. He was a real joker, always screwing with everybody,” Frank laughed. “You know, you’re not the first person to say he’s still here, either. People have told me sometimes that they come by after we close and they can see the lights on in the game room and hear someone shooting pool. That was Donny’s thing. He could be quite the hustler when there were new guys in town. He loved messing with the out-of-towners. Looks like maybe he still does.”

Whether he was there or not — and I’m not really prepared to pass judgment either way — Donny became a constant presence at RJ’s after that. Whenever anything later happened in the bar that we couldn’t explain, like when something went missing, there was a strange noise, or we’d come into the bar in the morning to find the pool table had been used after we could swear we’d put away the queue sticks and balls the night before, we blamed it on Donny. There was even a time when we were closing up that I could have sworn I saw him standing by the ice machine watching me out of the corner of my eye, only to vanish when I turned to look at him… but I’ve been known to see things that aren’t there when I’m extremely tired. In any case, just before we opened, our final toast was to Donny. When you might have a restless spirit wandering your bar, it can’t hurt to stay on his good side.

I just did some fairly exhaustive searching, and was a little sad to find that, apparently, RJ’s doesn’t exist any more, at least not by that name, and not as a gay bar. It was almost like going back to look at the house you grew up to find it’s been replaced with a strip mall.

It was here.

Not long before Dreams had been shut down, Mark had been telling me about a bar named RJ’s he’d seen for sale in Chico, a small college town in northern California. At the time I had just thought it was a subject brought up to spark conversation, but later I came to believe that Mark had seen the end of Dreams coming.

The subject came up again the day after the raid. Mark made a few calls, getting all the details and negotiating a sale price. After several days, he came to me. He’d been able to negotiate a very good deal on the bar, but didn’t have the money. He was going to need an investor to come up with all the cash he’d need to be able to purchase RJ’s. He knew David and Santos didn’t have that kind of cash, and asked me if I knew anyone who might be interested.

Have I mentioned that my grandmother had set up a trust fund in her will that would become available to me when I became 25 years old? Less than a week later we had packed all of our belongings into the biggest truck we could rent from U-Haul and were headed north on I-5 toward Chico to get a look at the bar I now half-owned.

RJ’s was, at the time, the only gay bar in Chico. It may still be. It was a large, old, wooden box of a building on the corner of Cherry Street in an industrial section of town. It had been converted from a gas station some time in the 50’s, if I remember correctly. It had a fairly large seating area, a game room, a dance floor, and a fenced-in outside patio area. I loved the place immediately.

The first morning after we arrived David and I began cleaning the place up, overhauling the sound and lighting system, painting the walls, and getting ready for a grand reopening under new management, while Mark and Santos worked on the house next door that came with the property. At night they stayed at the house while David and I slept in two joined sleeping bags we’d unrolled on the floor. Fortunately, by this time Mark had fully given up his stake in our relationship, and we were free to cuddle together at night and into the morning without fear of giving him a heart attack.

During the day, we’d occasionally get visits from some of RJ’s regulars, who wanted to see what all these Southern Californians were doing to the bar. Many volunteered to help out, and in addition to letting us get to know some of the people who’d soon be our customers, the work went much more quickly that we’d anticipated at the cost of only a few free beers.

The night before the bar was to open, David and I were curled up together in a naked, post-coital knot on top of the sleeping bags. He had to use the bathroom, so I reluctantly let go of him so he could make the run down the hall to the men’s room. I sprawled out on the sleeping bags, smoking a cigarette. I remember thinking that it would be the last night David and I would be able to have this much time alone together for the foreseeable future. Once the bar opened, one or both of us was always going to be working on any particular night, and private time for just the two of us would become a very rare thing.

When David came back, he was visibly pale. “What’s wrong?” I asked, and he stumbled over and collapsed into me. I held him, and could feel he was shaking, and he was staring off in the direction of the bar. “David? What’s wrong? Are you OK?”

He didn’t say anything for a while, but just held on to me, trembling, and looking at the bar. Finally, he half-whispered, “The mirror.”

“What? What about the mirror?” I was starting to feel afraid.

He finally tore his gaze from the bar and looked at me. After several seconds he started to relax a little, then shuddered and seemed to shake off a lot of whatever it was that had been affecting him.

“You’re going to think I’m crazy,” he said, a look of embarrassment starting to mix with the now-fading look of fear on his face.

“I know you’re crazy, David. You’ve got the papers to prove it.” It was a running joke with David, referring to some counseling he’d been in a few years before. “Just tell me what happened.”

“I saw a face in the mirror when I walked by. It was staring right at me.” He started shaking again.

I held him a while longer, and after a short time he started to laugh. “Maybe I am crazy.” A few minutes later we both walked over to the bar together, and I stood there with him while we both looked into the mirrors over the bar. I held him, occasionally kissing his neck and cheek until the fear left him and he was convinced he was safe.

We both crawled into our sleeping bag, and I held him tight against me until I could tell he was asleep. It would be at least a couple of hours later before I would finally drift off. I couldn’t take my eyes off the mirrors over the bar.

All of us were a bit dejected and shaken up when we got home the night Dreams was raided. David, Santos and I had come in David’s car, while Mark had been held back by the police and ATF agents who, understandably, had several questions they wanted to ask him. Not many words were spoken among us; we were all worried that Mark might not be coming back.

At around 1:00am, though, he arrived. While he looked a bit tired, otherwise he appeared to be handling the situation much better than we were. I was so glad to see him back, and apparently well, that it took me a moment to realize he was carrying the pink cake box I had seen the strippers holding.

We tried asking him what happened after we left, but he held up a hand. “Not tonight. We have a birthday to celebrate.”

He opened up the box, and pulled out a cake. When I saw it, all of the tension and fear remaining from earlier in the evening faded away in an instant. The cake was shaped like a pool table. “Happy birthday, Eight Ball,” Mark smiled, using the new nickname I’d earned after the billiard orgy of the week before. “Somebody light this thing.”

David fished out a lighter from his pocket and lit the candles, and Mark told me to make a wish. It was the only birthday wish I’d ever made that I still remember: I wished that I would always have friends who cared about me as much as the people I was with that night; people who could ignore that something awful had just happened, and pretend nothing was wrong so that my birthday wouldn’t be ruined. It was the second time that night that I almost started crying. It’s not something I do often, and while it was somewhat embarrassing it was a very good feeling.

I blew out the candles, and then was handed gifts by Mark, David and Santos. I opened David’s first: a new pair of bike shorts. “You look great in mine,” he told me, “But so do I. I want them back.”

Next was Santos. He had given me a peanut butter grinder. Santos was a foot fetishist, and I had known him since before I started going to Dreams. We hadn’t been good friends, but we ran into each other fairly frequently. Santos had a long-standing crush on me, or at least on my feet. For a very long time, Santos had been telling me how he’d like to spread peanut butter all over them and lick it off. “Just think about it,” he’d say, and he said it again with a huge grin when I opened his gift.

Last was Mark’s gift: an inflatable, anatomically correct female sheep we would later christen “Becky.” I feel the need right now to dispel a vicious rumor perpetuated by people who only know parts of this story. I was not the person responsible for the traces of lubricant that people were always horrified to find near Becky’s rear orifice. It was Mark, and it happened approximately ten minutes after she was first inflated.

I’m going to repeat that, just in case anyone missed it: I never fucked the sheep. Mark did it. He discovered at the same time that Becky had a particularly cruel sharp seam inside her, and the act of inflatable bestiality only lasted a few seconds. After that, there was no way I was going to ever put any sensitive part of my body inside that thing.

Aside: I knew when I started writing about this stuff that it would probably take at least a couple entries to get through, and here I am on part five and I haven’t even gotten to the official start of summer yet. If you’re one of the people I’ve accused of being long-winded lately, I take it back, Peter.

The night of June 7th, 1991, was my 25th birthday. When we unlocked the doors to the bar and walked in, I was overwhelmed. That afternoon, Mark, David and Santos, the bar’s manager, had decorated the place for my birthday. There were “Happy Birthday, Patrick” banners on the walls, balloons tied to the Tanqueray bottles, and a string of lights hanging over my tip jar. Almost everywhere I looked I saw something they’d put there for me, and I was touched to the point that tears started welling up in my eyes. Partially out of gratitude and partly to hide my face, I hugged and thanked each of them before we all started preparing to open the bar for the night.

Mark had arranged for a troupe of strippers to come in that Friday, which seemed to pull in a crowd even bigger than what we saw on a typical Friday. Even several hours before the strippers were due to arrive the place was packed, the tips were great, and every time I turned around someone was wishing me a happy birthday with words, a kiss, a slap on the ass, or a few dollars in my underwear. I was eating up all the attention.

Then Roderic arrived. You may remember me mentioning an ex-boyfriend I’d broken up with, triggering the depression that probably started me to go to Dreams in the first place. There he was at the bar, grinning at me and looking me up and down with those striking green eyes as I stood there in my briefs on the other side. The product of an Irish father and an Italian mother, Roderic had a combination of light and darkness in his looks, with his pale skin and dark hair, that I found incredibly attractive no matter how hard I tried not to. I signaled to David that I was going to take a short break, and got a suspicious look back from him. He didn’t know Roderic, but it was obvious that Roderic knew me, and I was sure I saw a small spark of jealousy in David’s eyes as I pulled on the pair of pants I’d stashed behind the bar and followed Roderic out.

“Happy birthday,” Roderic said when we got outside. “Have you got a smoke?”

I looked at him in mock horror. “What the hell?” I exclaimed. “I pretended to give up smoking for you, and now you’re bumming cigarettes off me?” When Roderic and I had been together, I’d used cans of Binaca and a lot of stealth to convince him I’d quit. He’d been very flattered I’d done it for him, and didn’t catch on that it was was a complete fraud until months later.

I gave him a cigarette, lit it, and we took a walk around the bar. It was a warm and clear night, and the late spring breeze on my chest and back as I walked with Roderic felt wonderful. We didn’t talk about anything particularly meaningful, sticking to small talk and what each of us had been doing recently. Still, being close to Roderic again for the first time in months brought back feelings for him that I’d thought were gone since I’d been with David. I was very happy to see him, and still felt the pull towards him that I had since I’d first met him, but he also brought with him the pain and sadness I’d felt for a long time after we’d broken up. It soon began to make me very uncomfortable. I mentioned that it was almost 11:00, when the strippers were due to start, and that I had to get back inside.

We had made it halfway around the bar at that point, and headed for the back door. The strippers were filing in, and I couldn’t help but notice one of them was carrying what was very obviously a pink cardboard cake box. I held back for a moment so I could pretend I hadn’t seen it, and then Roderic and I went back inside, and I quickly hugged him and got back to work. David never asked me about Roderic, saving me the discomfort of having to explain that I’d left him alone to watch over the bar so I could have some privacy to talk to a guy with whom I was relatively sure I was still in love.

A few minutes later the lights all went up, and suddenly men in police uniforms were everywhere. There was a small cheer at first, which quickly died down when everyone realized they weren’t strippers; they were real police. More men in windbreakers with “ATF” across the back poured in the room, and began yelling that the bar was closed, and for everyone to please quietly and calmly exit the building.

I would later find out that Mark has been denied a liquor license for Dreams, but rather than close it down he had just kept running it without one. Time and the law had finally caught up with him, and that night we cleaned up and closed Dreams for the last time.