Russell Banks - A Permanent Member of the Family

This exchange has hooked Allyn at the lip — his head is tilted to one side and his gaze switches from me to Enrique and back to me, like one of us is about to hand him the keys to Sodom and Gomorrah.

Allyn says to me, “That true? Wow! Where is it, the Green Door? What is it, a nightclub? A sex club?”

I explain that it’s just a bar located in a minimall on the outskirts of town. It looks like a normal neighborhood sports bar on the outside, but inside at the rear of the place there’s this green door, and like the song says, you knock three times and when the door is opened a crack you say, “Joe sent me,” and they let you in. “Never been there myself. But I’ve heard no matter what you’re into you can find it behind the green door. Girls in schoolgirl uniforms, cougars, fatties, black, white, and, yeah, Thai. Probably fat Polynesian boys too, and contortionists, rubber suits, whips, ropes, the whole carnival of sex acts. At least that’s what I heard. Never been there myself.”

I can see he doesn’t quite believe me, like it’s too good to be true, and I suppose for a guy like him, a Christian dad and husband, a businessman who’s never patronized any club nastier than a country club, it is too good to be true. He purses his lips, deep in thought.

“How do you know what they like?” he wonders. “How do you ask them what they want?”

Enrique says, “Fuck, man, they ask you what you want! You the fucking customer, man. It’s like ordering a drink in a fucking piano bar.”

“Got it!” Allyn says. But I can tell he’s not at all sure of what he wants. He’s probably not even sure of what he wants at home in bed with his wife and waits instead for her to tell him what she wants, then does his manly best to give it to her. Which is why tonight he’s wandering down the darkened alleys of his mind to the Green Door. He’s spent too many years postponing desire, cultivating fantasies and turning himself into a sexual window-shopper to know what he really wants. Like me, maybe. Only with me it’s about life in general and not just sex. Could be that’s why the guy both attracts and repels me.

Enrique takes a careful first sip of his martini. He nods with approval and says to me, “Good martini. Tell Precious to keep his wallet in his hand when he’s getting off.”

I don’t want to call him Precious so I just say, “Keep your wallet in your hand when you’re getting off, man.”

“Got it!” Allyn says again.

“And keep an eye on your watch. That’s a nice watch,” I say.

“Movado,” he says. “Top of the line.”

IT’S A FEW MINUTES after six, still early, and Allyn’s at work on his fourth Long Island iced tea. It looks like he’s not going to make it to the Green Door. Not tonight anyhow. His eyelids are drooping and he’s smiling at his reflection in the big mirror behind the bar. Enrique’s halfway through his second martini and is unto himself, reading the Miami Herald sports page. At the moment, however, despite the hour, the Piano is a happening place. A huge bus has pulled in to the casino and unloaded a couple dozen young giants, most of them black, with twenty or more huge duffels, and a half-dozen normal-sized older men, most of them white. According to their blue and white T-shirts and hoodies, they’re the basketball team and coaching staff from Daytona State College. Probably in town for a Suncoast Conference NJC double-A game against Broward College, where there’ll be scouts in the stands from Division I teams like Miami or FSU working the junior college circuit. Like the guy said, this is America, and we’ve got a genius for marketing.

The young giants mingle in the lot by their bus and gawk longingly through the glass doors at the bars and restaurants and casino beyond, while their coaches and handlers check them in and eventually herd them inside the hotel into elevators and send them up to their rooms. As soon as they’re gone, the coaches and handlers head straight for the Piano, where they take over a large table in the corner with an unobstructed view of the fifty-two-inch flat-screen opposite the corner where the piano is located. I grab the remote from under the bar and flip the channel off Judge Judy onto ESPN, and the whole crew locks onto the screen with mouths open like a nest of baby birds waiting to be fed.

By now the six-to-closing shift has hit the floor, Tiffany and Alicia, the Mutt and Jeff of waitresses, the long and the short of it. Which is a good thing because, in addition to the Daytona State coaching staff, eight or ten slim young dudes have just sailed in. They want champagne. They want to hang out with the piano at the Piano. It’s their fourth night here at the hotel and their first night off from performing at the Hard Rock with Cher, who is rumored to have taken the entire top floor of the hotel for herself and is having everything sent up. No one on the staff in any of the casino bars and restaurants can claim to have seen her in person up close except for a few waitresses and some stagehands who glimpsed her when she was being helped on- or offstage by one of her many assistants.

These guys tonight are Cher’s backup singers and dancers, and they’re lookers, naturally. They’re sharp L.A. dressers with perfect rotisserie tans and matching razor-cut haircuts and bodies that won’t quit. They’re all wearing tight black trousers like toreadors and puffy-sleeved shirts in various pastel colors that should be called blouses, not shirts, and they don’t stand around and drink and brag to each other or hit on strangers like most male customers. Instead they wave their hands in the air and talk in staged voices like they’re about to break into a Liza Minnelli song. They flounce and bounce like the tiled floor is a trampoline. They’re performers and can’t stop.

I enjoy listening to them and watching them move. They make me want to sing and dance myself, even if I can’t carry a tune and am heavy-footed and have a lousy sense of rhythm. I’m sixty-four and though in my youth had the requisite looks, I never acted the way they do, and now I sometimes wish I had. Not necessarily the gay part, but the loud, dancing, showing-off part. The flash and flamboyance. It looks like fun.

Too late now, though. The flashiest thing I ever did in my youth was audition for a porn movie production company in South Beach when I was thirty-five, divorced and broke. I have a seven-inch dick, but they said it had to be seven and a half, so I took a forty-hour mixology course at the New York Bartending School of South Florida instead. The rest is history. I’m still divorced, but no longer broke. I still have a seven-inch dick, but I’m not thirty-five anymore.

AROUND SEVEN, Allyn seems to break the mirror’s hold on his attention. He shakes his head and blubbers his lips like he’s waking from a nap and asks for driving directions to the Green Door. I make him wait while I finish topping off seven flutes of Moët & Chandon for Cher’s chorus line. Mutt and Jeff tray the flutes and haul ass. When I give Allyn the directions I say he should be careful driving. After four Long Island iced teas, if the cops stop him no way he’ll pass a Breathalyzer.

He sticks out his chest and says, “Are you intimating I’m drunk?”

Enrique folds his paper and says, “Back the fuck off, white bread, or I’ll cut your fucking nuts off.”

Both Allyn and I say, “Huh?”

It’s not clear whose nuts he’s threatening to cut off or why. I assume they’re Allyn’s, but Allyn’s giving me a concerned look like he thinks they’re mine.

Enrique furrows his brow like he’s going to cry. He looks first at me, then at Allyn, and says, “Jesus Christ, I don’t know what made me say that. I’m really, really sorry, man. I got this disease, it’s like a kind of autism and makes me say shit I don’t want to say. I apologize, man.”