Bar

I am standing at the doorway of a bar, in a strange city. A flight delay has caused me to miss my connection, and I am stuck here for one night. I am excited by the unique pleasure that this affords: that of being a complete stranger, in a city that I have never before visited. To be the mystery person, the screen upon which fantasies are projected. I step through the doorway of the bar with a swagger, then pause to scan the room. As if a stage actor in a solo scene, I do not meet the gaze of anyone in particular. By not looking, I invite others to look. Due to the fact that am alone, I invent a form of distributed companionship — a timeless consort who is everyone and no one, everywhere and nowhere. A Knowingness that is above and beyond the here-and-now. This is not intended to be read as arrogance, but rather, a potent combination of presence and absence, availability and disinterest. Anything less would dissolve the screen. Slowly and with confidence, I walk to the bar, while absorbing the scene, mapping the space. I sip my drink and then almost spill it, due to the startling appearance of an enormous, lascivious drag queen, who now looms above me. She points a long, red-painted nail at me and gives me the Call. With a parting of heavily painted lips and a commanding, heavily-lashed stare, she intones: You! I offer some resistance, then succumb. I am whisked away into a back room. I am instructed in the new rules of the game, along with four other recruits. I am now a Contestant. The drag queen stumbles out into the bar on shaky heels, arms aflail. A breathless introduction ensues. The Contest has begun. The bar crowd, which has now become an audience, applauds wildly. One by one, each of us enters onto the rickety, makeshift stage clad only in our underwear, as the drag queen, now wielding a bucket, hurls water at us. We then work the crowd and solicit applause. To win this game, one is expected to manage some degree of erection. If no degree of hardness is possible, the wet underwear simply clings to the contours of the groin and produces a small, unappealing mound. In this case, one must attempt to fool the eye, in the grand tradition of the dancer, the courtesan, the magician. What is sexuality if not a conjuring trick? Desire requires a labyrinth. I know the moves from watching others, and I make these moves work for me. I become someone I’m not. Yet perhaps I become more of the person that I really am? The answer depends upon who, ultimately, I am acting for, and the stakes that have been thereby raised. Stripped nearly naked, a stranger in a strange town, with no social profile to uphold, there is nothing much to lose. Yet there is certainly an amorphous judge for whom I act. The audience is simply one dimension of it, the drag queen its obscene face.