When we finish, Reyna, Jesse and Yannick invite me to join them at the Wembley for curries and pints with Reyna’s boyfriend, Ben, and his blues band. I decline: I have a booking already.
‘Come with me to the Court?’ I pressure Reyna.
‘Urgh, no – it’slike, so mainstream now, mahn,’ she sneers, with ironic hipsterism that isn’t too far from her actual hipsterism. ‘Plus, I thought you’d turned against the local gay bars, you big traitor.’
‘I haven’t turned against them,’ I explain. ‘I still go to them sometimes. They’re okay for what they are.’
‘What about your crusade to only have gay guys in gay bars?’
‘That’s what we’re opening the Tool Shed for,’ I clarify. ‘There’s still mixed bars. Come with.’
‘But isn’t your problem with straight girls like me who end up flooding those bars?’
‘Yeah, but you’re cool, Reyna, so I’ll make an exception,’ I say, tapping my nose.
Reyna flicks me on the nose. ‘Silly boy – that’s how your bars got into this mess in the first place,’ she says. ‘Every guy makes an exception for his best fag hag. Or his best five hags. And before you know it, you’ve got a hag bar, and you’re blaming us for it.’ She smirks. ‘You’re right. I shouldn’t take up space in your space. Go to yourmainstream bar, mahn. I’m getting a fucken curry.’
Spending my Friday night at Perth’s only ‘gay bar’ to ever regress into a ‘gay-friendly’ bar gives me every reason why the Tool Shed is gonna be so much better.
Apart from the snaking, fuck-off line to get in, the overpriced drinks and the doof-doof songs I don’t recognise, my pet peeve rears its pink cowboy-hatted head when I’m stuck in the drinks line. I get trapped behind a herd of women on a hens’ night. The bride is trolleyed, propped up by two friends. One of the hens looks bewildered by the rainbow flags and drag queens, saying, ‘Is this really a gay bar? Wow!’ and it takes all my energy not to go up to her and say, ‘It was, until youse killed it.’ One specific woo girl among them keeps taking off her cowboy hat and shouting,‘Let’s fucken go girls! Woo!’ with zero awareness that the Shania Twain song ended three minutes ago.
There’s a pack of lesbians smoking outside, off to the side of the bar, and they are either checking the straight girls out or leering at them with disdain. I recognise two of them as a couple in their forties who are close friends with Curtis and Ahmed: Tenille, a big butch leather dyke who works at Perth Zoo, and Kayla, a more femme-type who’s in marketing. We’ve sat drunk around Curtis’ courtyard table enough times to exchange pleasantries when we run into each other on a night out. Tonight, Tenille gives me a brusque but friendly nod, while Kayla runs into the bar queue to give me a hug. When the woo girl goes off for the tenth time, Kayla mutters, ‘Oh, shut up, for fuck’s sake.’ Behind her, Tenille glares at the woo girl, drops her cigarette butt to the concrete and stomps her leather boot on it with unwarranted aggression.
Yep, the lesbians are as sick of the straighties taking over here as we are.
Drunk straight hens are only half the problem. The second half is the drunk straight dudes looking to score with them, who are often indistinguishable from drunk gay dudes, so you can grind with a tattooed bloke on the DF and half the time you’ll make out and the other half he’ll shove you. I’ve seen full-on fistfights break out on this dance floor when straight guys get a whiff of dudes ogling them. I’ve heard ‘faggot’ and ‘poofter’ yelled here, not ironically, but as weapons.
Yet there’s only two gay bars in Perth, so here we end up, over and over, bitching about how much it’s changed and how we’d like to go back to when being homosexual was edgy, so the straights would leave us alone to do our own thing.
Tonight is my mate Brayden’s birthday. Brayden’s a full-blown party boy. If there’s a bottomless brunch or a drag queen bingo night, he’ll be at it. That’s how we met: we were on thesame table for a music quiz night at Connies once with some mutual friends, and between my rock knowledge and him being a human dictionary of dance pop, we wiped the floor with the other teams. We won a two-hundred-dollar bar card, spent it all on Wet Pussy shots that same night, and drunkenly became friends forevermore. But while I’m jaded with the scene, Brayden still lives for it. He goes to every party and knows every homo in town as either friend, frenemy or fuckbuddy. He’s a funny prick, too, camp and bitchy, and he revels in being a skinny freckly redhead – he calls himself the Ginger Ninja.
When I finally elbow my way past the erratic woo girl and land at the bar, I see a new, heavily pierced, green-haired chick serving. My replacement. This is the first weekend since I quit as a barman here. No hard feelings. It was a fun place to work. But working at the Tool Shed is gonna keep me too busy to juggle both jobs. I order a vodka fire engine for Brayden and a Heineken for me and Green Hair charges me the standard amount. I shout in her ear over a terrible Britney Spears/Ginuwine mash-up about my usual discount. She goes out the back to check, and returns saying now I’m not staff, Rita has cut me off. Totally fair, but I feel dropped like a sack of spuds.
I grab the drinks, fight my way through a pack of teenyboppers and break into the fresh air of the beer garden outside. Brayden’s got a long table crammed with his friends. I don’t know many of them, except the couple who are our mutual mates. We make the usual surface-level talk but don’t tend to go further than that.
Brayden sees me coming and reaches for the glass. ‘Yes, Charlie! More BOOZE! I’m getting dangerously high levels of blood in my alcohol stream!’ he bursts out.
One of the couple giggles.
I hand Brayden his poison-red drink. ‘Happy birthday, dude. Bottoms up!’
Brayden winks. ‘I’m already up, babes!’
That innuendo sums Brayden up, and it’s probably why we’re friends.
I join the edge of the party. I’m half-arsing it. Any time someone makes conversation I reply then turn back to my phone. Even though I worked here for years, and can share a nod with the bar staff, the DJs and the drag queens, none of us are friends. It’s superficial. I don’t know if that’s their fault, or mine.
I text a few muso mates to see if anyone’s out, and Reyna, in case she’s changed her mind, and Zeke, for good measure.
Reyna replies fast.Sorry Chucky – still at the Wembley doing a pub quiz which we’re WINNING! And to think my parents said I’d never get anywhere in life. Have fun at the fag hag bar. Do everything I would do.
I like Reyna. She gets me.
None of my other mates are out, either, but the biggest disappointment is Zeke having a home night. I wrecked our reconnection so bad. There’s so much I wanted to say, but I’ve never been good at showing other people how I feel, especially since Matt died.
My phone pings. A second message from Zeke.I missed you, man.
Ah, shit. I get choked up and sip my beer to draw attention away from it. Knowing Zeke doesn’t hate me means a lot. I’d rather be at a pub with him than here.
