Rawhide

Unconsciously affecting a lisp, I ask the burly bartender for two Jamesssons.

“How do you want those, hon?” he asks.

I slight-eye the dark horizon of the bar to catch my friend’s gaze and relay the query. Three pride flags wrest in technicolor unsteady against the ventilation blasts from their various hanging points. The dark wood walls bear reliefs of bare men and random weiner sketchings (among them a biker, a soldier, another stout man: this one in recline being pleasured manually by a bevy of participants), and various other pornographia.

“Straight,” I tell the bartender defiantly. He serves us at two open seats at the end of the bar by the bathrooms. Both bathroom doors have the same picture posted: a man in a leather hat and vest, holding a vertiginously-sized erection, wielding a prideful grin. House music sounds. Above each door frame is a sign in the imperative form, iterating the single occupant policy of the bar bathrooms. We sip in our Irish whiskey and let the barley harsh slug its warming way down our pipes. Over our shoulders, a man dances in a turquoise banana hammock on a small square platform with a wad of dollar bills gartered to his artificially copper, muscled arm. I toast to my corner bar. To Rawhide.

***

My homophobia is an elliptical bias, something vaguely malevolent that faces inward and never posts into dialogue bubbles. The sight of two men walking towards me on my block, hands interlaced, elicits the reaction of a dutiful smile, as to convey, since I may appear to be that damned devil straight guy incarnate, I want to make sure that you don’t think that I think disapprovingly of your affection for your partner and so I am going to smile a forced courtesy, which I realize is demeaning because I don’t smile at straight couples unless, of course, they are bi-racial. On the same sidewalk, should a man happen to smile at me in flirtation, I am at the same time embarrassed, flattered, and marginally off-put (although to be honest, I’m always slightly disappointed if I don’t get checked out).

When the first reasonable apartment I found in Manhattan happened to be on West 21st (the veritable heart of the Chelsea gayborhood [a term derived by local residents]), I thought, if anything, I would be living in an area considered trendy by most, a desirable spot that would naturally debunk the tendencies one might have to characterize me as more appropriately befitting residence in cloistered Murray Hill, the sickness of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, or the damnable Upper West Side. A sad part of good people is the need to be enigmatic. A very latent part of the Chelsea appeal is that I would not be easily defined by my choice of neighborhood, a well-practiced pastime of any New Yorker.

Only once I settled into my apartment and claimed exclusive patron status of a bodega, dry cleaner, Chinese delivery, and late night diner, did I become aware of the one thing arousing insularity in my Chelsea life: the American idyll of the corner bar. A place you went to watch the game, to get out of the apartment, to start your evening, to end to it, to drink domestics, to know your neighbors, to know your barkeep, to seduce a waitress, to stumble home from, to eat the bar food, to get the local discount, to be a part of something -- a mooring in the maelstrom. Rawhide sat astride the southeast corner of West 21st and 8th Avenue, a flaming parapet against my full acculturation. I passed it on the way to and from work each day, discomfited by its black tinted windows and barbed wire signage, its promise of New York’s Hottest Go Go Men. Every Night After 8 PM. It did not help that an evolving collection of the familiar faces in my neighborhood were visible nightly on the sidewalk outside the bar smoking cigarettes.

Nearly two years passed with this torment. Before my lease expired and my rent was set to increase an obscene amount, I decided to move apartments. I cast a wide net across Manhattan, but ended up not far, just six blocks south. And each day that I would go to my gym (a gay man’s Mecca with live DJ music) or to the bagel shop (a gay man’s ground zero for retellings of last night’s misadventures), I would still pass by Rawhide. Even in the instances in which the front door to the bar was momentarily ajar, the view inside was blocked by a tall black curtain.

The corner of new apartment on 15th Street housed Sabon, a store selling overpriced hand soap, which whipped me into another frenzy of not belonging. I bought $17 patchouli lavender hand soap (guests who now wash their hands in my sink often call me gay) and I cured myself. In my imaginings, Rawhide was the opposite of Sabon; it was the purveyor of cheap and dirty. I pictured black tables lined with coke residue, a scratched up catwalk with dancing poles and multiple codpieces on display, the floor coated with semen splatterings in the style of a hundred wayward Jackson Pollacks, cocks for drink stirrers, balls for ice cubes, sections of the bar filled with groups of men fucking in the most lavish and aggressive formulations of carnality imaginable. In my New York life, there was no single place more foreboding.

***

I ask my friend Alex to come with me. Although I know he already hates Chelsea for its jungled exhibition of homo-ferocity, Alex is my only gay friend.
“Rawhide is too aggressive,” he decries,” even for me.”
I enlist another friend, a lesbian (like most straight men, I automatically exempt lesbians from all characterizations as gay) whom a year-and-a-half before I managed to convert back to heterosexuality for about three weeks (only reinforcing my misguided theories about lesbians). At midnight on a Tuesday, we walk into Rawhide.

***

I have chosen the most sedate night of the week and the Rawhide of actuality is a feckless far cry from the one I shuttered to envision. We shoot a game of pool on a red-felted table with a black mo-ped scooter suspended overhead. For once, I am not embarrassed by how poorly I shoot pool. My friend hypothesizes that everyone in the bar probably thinks she is a transvestite and notes as both the bartender and dancer (now a tattooed man in black boxer briefs) repeatedly inspect her chest from afar to gauge whether its bulge is real. At the end of the bar two Lilliputian men make out against a support beam. A man sits alone watching the local news on mute. At the other end of the bar, a couple sits together. When one goes to the bathroom, he brushes by my friend and says “Excuse me, dude.” His date goes up to the dancer and slips him a dollar. The dancer sways on his platform with his arms around his patron. His date joins them from the bathroom and they take turns dancing with the man on the platform before heading back to the bar. We continue to shoot pool and our conversation has long veered back to the things we’d normally discuss.

The turquoise banana hammock returns to the platform. Gloria Gaynor plays. One of the men from the bar goes up for a dance and my friend gives a stunned report of a pubic-hair-and-penis-shaft sighting behind me. I suppose aloud he must have at least tipped him five. We get back to the game and it comes down to the eight ball. My friend knocks in the game winner, smiles, and excuses herself. While I am alone, one of men from the bar walks by me. Just as he passes, he stops and holds up his glass. I clink mine against his and offer “cheers.” He goes back to the dancer. When I get home and even before I’ve taken stock of what I’m doing, I go to wash my hands.