Voices from the Rust Belt by Anne Trubek

Author:Anne Trubek
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador

Geography of the Heartland

JOHN LLOYD CLAYTON

A Night at the Golden Lion Lounge

I

Gary’s really not a bad guy. He always gives some bit of advice or counsel gleaned from years of trial and tribulation. He’s a good listener. He smiles and he means it. He always remembers your name. But I’d cover his tab for a month if he would just stop referring to everybody in the place as “old queens” and “us old fags.” Invariably this begins complaints about his poor health, his doctor appointments up at Good Sam, his medications, his surgeries, and the daily aches and pains that cause him to be unable to work a normal job. With a face that has lost all decorum and droops like a basset hound’s, he drinks gin and tonics by the liter, wears flimsy plastic sandals that show his hairy, bulbous toes, and works from home as a telephone operator for an HMO. Finished with his litany of pains and his sixth G&T, he falls into far-too-detailed reminiscences about his lost loves. When the crowd has turned and every man begins looking down at his watch, he ends by invoking all of us in the drama: “Well, you know, Dorothy just needs a good hard fuck now and then!”

This might turn a few heads at one of the trendy coffee shops down the street. But he’s saying it at the Golden Lion Lounge, the kind of Cincinnati gay bar where time has less stopped than never actually caught up in the first place. You could find it at Clifton and Ludlow, right in the middle of a municipal neighborhood that was swanky a hundred years ago, became a drug-infested slum after the war, then in the nineties became an eclectic neighborhood of French bakeries, Indian restaurants, and clothing shops selling hemp jewelry and organic cotton tees at 45 bucks a pop. UC is just up the street and DAAP kids pace the sidewalks, intentionally scuffing their $400 sneakers so they look all broken in and worn.

Golden Lion, however, has never changed. It has no windows. It stands upright covered in dull beige plaster from sidewalk to roof. It has no sign, though legend says affixed to the other side of the plywood plank that serves as a door were some sticky letters unevenly applied, the kind you use on your mailbox. But you heard others call it “Golden Lions” and so you did the same. Take away the cellular phones and color photographs and it could be 1929, you sliding in with your brother-in-law after a terrible day on the stock market. Stonewall could be two days away. That eighty-six Camaro parked out back? It might actually just be new. Gary himself might range from thirty to sixty-eight, but in this light he’s ageless.

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