No Gods
by Amy Drayer
South Broadway
There are two bars in my neighborhood that aren’t terrible. Aren’t full of hipsters and liars, mostly lying to themselves but still not worth the goddamn words you’re wasting on them. I always walk to the bars, right up Broadway. If you can’t walk to the bar you shouldn’t go because you shouldn’t drive drunk. And if you’re at a bar and you’re not drunk, what the fuck are you doing? I mean, just what the fuck are you doing? I know what I’m doing and it’s not wasting my time in bars I haven’t been in before and driving around drunk. Jesus Christ.
Black Crown and BJ’s Carousel. One’s pretending to be new and going to die soon, and one’s old and dies next week. Even South Broadway is on the slate to get overrun by dog-loving craft beer drinkers, but you can still find pockets where you can get a good gay pour. But two bars, that’s where I go. Alternate nights. They’re both full of queens but they leave me alone. What the hell would they do with a drunk old lesbian?
In Denver there’s the Detour for lesbians, but I wouldn’t be caught dead there. Christ no. The only thing worse than all the queers in my bars are the dykes at the Detour. Washed-up assholes who think they’re tough, but what a bunch of pretenders. Used to be right on Colfax and ten years ago when I lived on Capitol Hill I’d drink there. I moved sometime around 9/11 and so did they. Now it’s to hell and gone all the way out on West Colfax. Shit. If I walked out there I’d be dead by morning.
Now as soon as I say this, of course, I get a call from Jackie. I’m sitting at home minding my own, but she’s all fired up about it being Friday night at the Detour because they’re going to have a draaag show. Not a drag show, but a draaag show, she says, because she’s excited. It’s kings, though, she says. Kings! What the fuck am I going to do with a woman dressed up like a man? Jesus Christ, now the baby dykes pretend to be men to get attention. I spend the best fifty years of my life trying to get it through our thick heads that men aren’t role models, and this is what it comes to.
But I never could do anything about Jackie. She’s a magpie and there’s always something sparkling somewhere. Used to be me, but Christ, that’s been a decade or more.
“Kings!” she proclaims. “Cheryl, you’ll love it. I know you will. They’re just so handsome. And they lip-sync, dance around, you know. The music is wonderful. Like drag queens—”
“What the fuck business do I have with any of it? And I assume the gestapo is still up our ass about smoking inside. Do these kings do their thing on the patio? No? Then fuck off.”
“I’ll give you a ride,” Jackie replies, because she doesn’t know how to listen. No one knows how to listen. “I don’t drink anymore, you know, but I’m just so excited for the show.”
“No. You don’t drink anymore, and you can’t stop telling me about it. Now you smoke that damn douche flute, and I can’t stand it. Why the hell do you want to suck strawberry weed out of a mini dildo? Jesus Christ, Jackie.”
“Well, you’re clearly drunk, but it’s no use arguing about it. Eat something and I’ll come by and pick you up in a couple hours. I want you to come, Cheryl. It’ll be fun.”
The Detour used to be fun. It used to be perfect. God, what a place. Full of women who knew what they were about and not even the bar was pretending to be something it wasn’t. It doesn’t take an expensive logo or a lot of light to drink whiskey, and a lesbian who’s drinking anything other than beer or whiskey should just piss off. Dark wood everywhere, neon too, of course. Casting a nice glow over things. You could see the pool tables and the bar and the door all at the same time. Drinks were cheap, food was cheap, you didn’t have to watch every goddamn word that came out of your mouth. New girls knew to sit down and shut up for a while and they didn’t get their panties in a bunch because you looked at them wrong.
They got gentrified out of the original spot, and now it’s West Colfax and drag kings and gray Formica tables and a drop ceiling in BFE. The neon feels like a communist hospital on a bad trip and the whole thing reminds me of drinking in the sales room of my greasy cousin Rick’s used-car lot in Greeley.
But I go on Friday because it’s Jackie. And then, who walks through the door of the Detour Friday night, but Lisa Ward. Can you believe I used to have a crush on that woman? God. I had the biggest crush on her. We’d lie around on the couches for hours at the Women to Women bookstore talking about how the world was going to be someday when we were — what? Liberated? What a crock of shit. We were kids. But she only ever had eyes for Sandy Rook, and they married, for Chrissake. Well, not really of course, that’s off-limits — thank Christ. Eleven years into the twenty-first-century AD with the walls coming down around us, but fuck if we let the gays marry. Yet those girls still put on the whole hetero show. Even fucking registered. Few years later, Sandy got cancer and died. And now Lisa’s with some other woman and it doesn’t take brains to see it’s not like it was, but lesbians are so damn codependent.
“Cheryl!” Lisa calls out. “Cheryl Russo. It’s been an age and a day at least. Wow, it’s good to see you. Let me buy you a drink. You here for the kings?”
Who the hell is this old broad? I ask myself. Lisa’s thick blond hair’s all silver and white now. She used to have the sharpest blue eyes like lasers, and I loved that. No bullshit in them. Now they’re watery and kind. Christ. Lisa Ward with old, kind eyes.
“I’m here because Jackie dragged me,” I reply. “And no thank you. I buy my own drinks. But if you want to talk, I’m outside.”
“You haven’t changed at all, Cheryl. Give me a minute. I’ll be out.” Lisa smiles at me. People are always smiling like they mean it. She’s got a mouthful of implants now, looks like. Wonder what happened. Her teeth were always good, and I suppose she knew it. White and straight as pickets and when she smiled it did get to you. But time’s a bastard.
Lisa sits down at my rickety table on the patio and launches right in, because would it have been too damn much to ask to just take each other in for a minute? It would, because people hate silence. Terrified of it, more than hate it, is more like.
She’s off to the races: “It’s so good to see you. So good. Do you remember, Cheryl...” I fade out when Lisa starts there — here we go down memory lane. The old queens do it too. “When we both worked in the movement? We thought we had the world by the tits, didn’t we? I’d just love to walk into Women to Women one more time.”
“Well.” I consider my Scotch and light a Lucky. “There were a hell of a lot more tits but it didn’t do a good goddamn. But I do miss it, Lisa-girl. All of us fired up like we were going to do something that mattered. I’ll give you a remember-when. Remember when equality was a four-letter word? We were talking about liberation! Never have to hear a minute of hand-wringing over ‘but what about the men.’ We cared about women back then. No one cares about women anymore.”