“WHO’S A FAGGOT?!?!?”
I could hear his voice over the late ‘70’s album-oriented rock, maybe Peter Frampton, maybe not, that was filtering through a loft party in Soho. He and I were casual friends but there was something about his edge and the morbid fascination that comes from never knowing if someone’s schtick is some sort of extended meta-comedy or…he was really nuts, that attracted me.
This plus he had the totally genius name of Mickey Mauser. Which, if you think of the gun is a little bad ass. If you think about the saucer-earred cartoon rodent? Not so much.
Anyway I had hoped whatever was happening would blow over. Or at the very least it wouldn’t/couldn’t be tracked back to me as a source since I had brought him. I was eating cheese, enjoying the music and post-the Stonewall Riots and pre-AIDS, Mauser’s cri de coeur disturbed. Not because of the homophobia, necessarily, but because it was clearly a pretense/prelude to a fist fight in this instance.
Colin, the party host, found me.
“He come with you, Eugene?”
I nodded. Put down the cracker and cheese and found my way over to him.
“Let’s go.”
“What?!?!”
“Let’s go.”
“You want to leave? You don’t want to talk to those girls any more?”
“No. Let’s go.”
“Yeah. Fuck these fruits.”
I nodded again. I still don’t know what had happened. I do know that the entire way out of the party he screamed invective at whoever had precipitated the original outburst.
This could not be fixed.
He holds his arm up and drops his wrist, limp now, in a sign I got…gay bar.
Which is to say, I never went out with him again. You see, while being amused by those who dance to the tune of different drummers is fine, being a wet nurse to a hair-triggered tough guy who expected me to back his every play? Is not.
I left Soho that night, and ultimately New York. I never saw Mauser again and California is where and what I came to call home. With the change of locale came something curious too: allergies. I had never had them, didn’t know what was happening as I got them, and didn’t know how to deal with having them until someone hepped me to antihistamines as a solution.
I hadn’t made the connection initially but soon had figured out that antihistamines make you drowsy. Make that DROWSY. If I hadn’t taken them by eight o’clock the night before I spent the next day before noon…loggy.
It was on one such loggy morning where I had taken them well after eight o’clock that I struggled awake well before 10. I had made an appointment to get new tires for my 1967 muscle car. Yeah, I probably shouldn’t have been driving but somehow “under the influence” in my mind, only meant alcohol. And the tires were on sale.
This was not totally irresponsible. I wasn’t sloppy. Just not super crisp and made it to the tire shop without incident. The Korean cats who ran the place did me right, replaced and balanced the muscle car tires. I paid, slid into the driver’s seat and began backing out of this mini-strip mall’s even smaller parking lot. It was closing in on noon. It was, like, 11:30. In the morning.
Not that the time of the day mattered right then because there’s really no time that’s the right time to hear the sound of metal crunching against metal. And all of that American iron I was sitting on top of, a cursory glance through the rear view mirror now indicated, had hit another car backing out at the same time.
Slipping the car into park I get out at about the same time that a stocky woman with a crew cut came flying out of her car.
“YOU DUMB MOTHERFUCKER!!!”
Under normal circumstances I find that disrespect begets disrespect, and a stream of invective directed my way often results in an in-kind return donation. But it was right about now that I remembered the antihistamines and I wasn’t entirely sure I could have passed any kind of field sobriety test. Not because I was really impaired. Just because this woman seemed so convinced of my guilt that I could feel myself acceding. I just didn’t have the fight in me. What I DID have was an overwhelming desire to…sleep.
“CALL THE COPS!”
I shuffled. We all waited. I peeped the Korean tire cats whispering to each other. Then smiling. And nodding at me.
The cops show up. A male cop and a female cop. I marshall every ounce of PRESENCE I can muster to blast through the grog and I start to explain.
“Well, officers, it seems like we were both backing out and struck each other.”
“HE’S A FUCKING LIAR!”
Another cop shows up. So now we have two male cops and one sort of uncomfortable female cop. The male cops are whispering to each other and the heavy set woman is feeling her oats and in the presence of an audience is lighting the place up.
“THIS PIECE OF SHIT! HIS CAR IS NOT DAMAGED AT ALL! BUT LOOK AT MINE! LOOK AT IT!”
Which I sort of now do for real. It’s not badly damaged. But as it all coalesced on this weekday in May, for her, it was bad enough.
And now, by way of inventory and since I know you’re wondering: everyone in this scenario outside of me and the Korean cats are white.
“SHUT YOUR MOUTH!”
A blond cop, the second guy who showed up had raised his voice, and it snapped my head around since I hadn’t been talking. But he wasn’t talking to me. He was talking to the stocky screamer.
There’s laughter in the other male cops eyes. The female cop looks…dejected. Low grade, but enough that my read on what’s going on is totally all over the place.
The Korean guy who had worked on my car sidled up to me and nods to the building next to theirs that for the first time I noticed. It was a bar. It was the bar she had come out of. He holds his arm up and drops his wrist, limp now, in a sign I got: she had been in a gay bar.
The Korean guys knew it to be such, so did the cops, including the female cop who I suspected knew well before anyone else in our sad stage play had. And now I knew. The only one who didn’t now know that everyone knew was the stocky screamer. Who my heart was going out to.
The blond cop had bodied up on her. It was the language of intimidation and I watched her shrink while the female cop looked away. The dark-haired cop wandered over to me and chuckling explained. It was before noon, and she’d been drinking in that bar and was likely impaired. And oh, “it’s a gay bar,” he smirked.
The blond cop comes and joins us. “Since her cars not too badly damaged she’s willing to let this go if you are. I mean no one is clearly at fault here so….”
“Well, I’m clearly restoring my car so yeah…” It was a 1967 Chevy Malibu, yellow with big black patches of primer on it. The car was pretty clean otherwise. But I felt totally dirty now.
“Sorry for…all of this,” she said waving in my general direction as she ducked back into her car leaving me to stand around in the last victor’s circle I ever wanted to be in. “Sorry, again.”
Yeah. Me too.
I wasn’t sure of what I could have done even if at the point it had become clear that the tide had turned against her. Not because of the drink, but because of “the gay”. Admitting responsibility wouldn’t have stopped this. She may have been loud, abrasive and a woman, but it was “the gay” that did her in.
And I felt complicit. Not because I wasn’t checking my rearview mirror but because I didn’t oppose being drawn into this sexual othering even though I have no idea how I would have. Either then, or now, 33 years later.
I got back into the Chevy and pulled out. The cops stood still, talking to each other. The Korean cats waved. I was now sober as a pope. Later on that year they started making a non-drowsy antihistamine called Claritin. So, at least there’s that.