“That’s why I’m here!” he says. “To do business with the Seminoles! I’m hoping to open a chapel and meditation center at the resort. My partners and I are franchising prayer and meditation centers at Indian casinos all across the country. We’ve got over sixty up and running and another twenty-seven under contract.”
“Sort of like fast food franchises?”
“In a sense, yes. The Indians really get it. They’re a very spiritual people, you know, the Indians. The true genius of America, however, is marketing,” he goes on. “We use Starbucks as a template. And the Hard Rock Cafe itself. The only difference is that our product is not coffee or food and alcohol or musical acts, and it’s certainly not gambling. Our product is nondenominational spiritual space.”
“A product that’s invisible. Very cool. Any complaints, you can blame the customer. Better than selling bottled tap water,” I say, kidding him a little. Although I’m an observant Jew in some ways, I’m very secular in others and don’t believe in anything that’s invisible, except atoms and molecules, and even about them I’m agnostic.
“Let’s go back to our previous conversation,” he says. “Concerning the ladies of the night.”
“Okay. But first tell me how you actually make money from these spiritual spaces. Do people have to pay to pray?”
“The casino pays us, naturally. It’s the same as if we rented them an attractive fountain for the lobby or a big tropical fish tank. It embellishes the environment. It elevates the ambience. The design and arrangement of the furnishings, the altars and wall decorations all follow the ancient principles of feng shui. Which is good for luck, you know. Gamblers need luck. It’s a pop-up structure, so we own and maintain the space. There’s also a donation box for the users of the space, the beneficiaries, to express their appreciation.”
“Like a gratuity?”
“You could say that. We have a regional team that comes around every week to empty the donation boxes, and it does add up, yes, indeed. Casinos are full of troubled people looking for spiritual relief and uplift, and when they find it they are grateful and like to express their gratitude. But our main source of income is the monthly rental fee for the space itself. Now, my friend, back to our previous subject.”
I’m actually more interested in these pop-up nondenominational chapels than our previous subject, but he’s the customer. I ask him again what on the sexual menu interests him. Is he into meat loaf, mac and cheese, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? Or does he want something more exotic?
A tall, wiry kid in his mid-twenties with a storm cloud in front of his face has settled into a stool three down from my guy and is half listening to our conversation with what looks like disapproval. He has one of those five-day beards designed to demonstrate the high volume of his testosterone flow. I know the kid slightly, name’s Enrique. Dominican, I think. Speaks good English with only a slight accent. Comes into the Piano once every ten days or so and stops off for a drink or two before heading into the casino. Doesn’t talk much. I believe he’s into low-ball roulette. Owns a string of car washes, he told me once, a small-time businessman on the rise, not the type who’d work for someone else. I’ve never seen him crack a smile. Authority issues, probably. Can’t say I’m drawn to him.
I toss him a nod to let him know I’ll take his order in a second, but also to cue my guy that if he wants to talk about ladies of the night he should keep it down or else talk in code. For all I know, Enrique’s actually an undercover cop. Because of the casino and hotel there’s all kinds of plainclothes and undercover cops lurking around, private security guys, local and state, even feds.
Bowtie glances over at Enrique, seems to catch my point and tells me in a low voice that he’s interested in some real hot Thai food. “Spicy and burning hot!” he empasizes. Then he turns on his stool 180 degrees, grins at Enrique, winks and says, “Know any place nearby, friend, where a white man can eat Thai or maybe Polynesian?”
Enrique snorts and slips him a slim smile. “You talking Thai men or Thai women? Maybe you’re talking fat Polynesian boys,” he says and barks a laugh without smiling and shakes his head like he can’t believe my guy is a serious person. I’m not sure he’s a serious person myself, but his personality sticks to me like Velcro. I’m a bartender, I take people as they come. I don’t believe anything they tell me, and I forget them when they go. But something about this guy appeals to me and at the same time turns me totally off. Makes me want to help and hurt him simultaneously. Something about him confuses me.
“White man,” Enrique says to himself and snorts again. He turns and shows his back to us. On his neck he’s got the tattooed top of a porpoise done in Japanese woodcut style leaping out of his gray silk T-shirt. His shiny black hair is pulled tight into a short ponytail that tickles the porpoise’s nose. I go over and take his order, which he gives without looking at me. Vodka martini. Straight up. Ketel One. Extra dry. Three olives.
Enrique knows what he likes.
Bowtie says to him, “What’s your name, friend?”
He pulls out his iPhone, makes like he’s checking his e-mail. “Enrique,” he says. “What do peoples call you, man?” He doesn’t look up from his phone. “Whitey?”
“Heck, no! Allyn. Spelled A-L-L-Y-N, pronounced Allen, as in . . . ,” he says and looks at the ceiling. “I can’t think of any famous Allens. Woody Allen? Anyhow, if spelled with a Y it’s a Gaelic name and means ‘precious one.’ From that you could surmise that I was an only child, Enrique, and you’d be right.”
Enrique looks at me and says, “Tell Precious about the Green Door.”
“You think?”
“Sure. He want a sexual buffet, he should go to the Green Door. Precious, you can get off any way you want at the Green Door.”
This exchange has hooked Allyn at the lip—his head is tilted to one side and his gaze switches from me to Enrique and back to me, like one of us is about to hand him the keys to Sodom and Gomorrah.
Allyn says to me, “That true? Wow! Where is it, the Green Door? What is it, a nightclub? A sex club?”
I explain that it’s just a bar located in a minimall on the outskirts of town. It looks like a normal neighborhood sports bar on the outside, but inside at the rear of the place there’s this green door, and like the song says, you knock three times and when the door is opened a crack you say, “Joe sent me,” and they let you in. “Never been there myself. But I’ve heard no matter what you’re into you can find it behind the green door. Girls in schoolgirl uniforms, cougars, fatties, black, white, and, yeah, Thai. Probably fat Polynesian boys too, and contortionists, rubber suits, whips, ropes, the whole carnival of sex acts. At least that’s what I heard. Never been there myself.”
I can see he doesn’t quite believe me, like it’s too good to be true, and I suppose for a guy like him, a Christian dad and husband, a businessman who’s never patronized any club nastier than a country club, it is too good to be true. He purses his lips, deep in thought.
“How do you know what they like?” he wonders. “How do you ask them what they want?”
Enrique says, “Fuck, man, they ask you what you want! You the fucking customer, man. It’s like ordering a drink in a fucking piano bar.”
“Got it!” Allyn says. But I can tell he’s not at all sure of what he wants. He’s probably not even sure of what he wants at home in bed with his wife and waits instead for her to tell him what she wants, then does his manly best to give it to her. Which is why tonight he’s wandering down the darkened alleys of his mind to the Green Door. He’s spent too many years postponing desire, cultivating fantasies and turning himself into a sexual window-shopper to know what he really wants. Like me, maybe. Only with me it’s about life in general and not just sex. Could be that’s why the guy both attracts and repels me.
Enrique takes a careful first sip of his martini. He nods with approval and says to me, “Good martini. Tell Precious to keep his wallet in his hand when he’s getting off.”
I d
on’t want to call him Precious so I just say, “Keep your wallet in your hand when you’re getting off, man.”
“Got it!” Allyn says again.
“And keep an eye on your watch. That’s a nice watch,” I say.
“Movado,” he says. “Top of the line.”
IT’S A FEW MINUTES after six, still early, and Allyn’s at work on his fourth Long Island iced tea. It looks like he’s not going to make it to the Green Door. Not tonight anyhow. His eyelids are drooping and he’s smiling at his reflection in the big mirror behind the bar. Enrique’s halfway through his second martini and is unto himself, reading the Miami Herald sports page. At the moment, however, despite the hour, the Piano is a happening place. A huge bus has pulled in to the casino and unloaded a couple dozen young giants, most of them black, with twenty or more huge duffels, and a half-dozen normal-sized older men, most of them white. According to their blue and white T-shirts and hoodies, they’re the basketball team and coaching staff from Daytona State College. Probably in town for a Suncoast Conference NJC double-A game against Broward College, where there’ll be scouts in the stands from Division I teams like Miami or FSU working the junior college circuit. Like the guy said, this is America, and we’ve got a genius for marketing.
The young giants mingle in the lot by their bus and gawk longingly through the glass doors at the bars and restaurants and casino beyond, while their coaches and handlers check them in and eventually herd them inside the hotel into elevators and send them up to their rooms. As soon as they’re gone, the coaches and handlers head straight for the Piano, where they take over a large table in the corner with an unobstructed view of the fifty-two-inch flat-screen opposite the corner where the piano is located. I grab the remote from under the bar and flip the channel off Judge Judy onto ESPN, and the whole crew locks onto the screen with mouths open like a nest of baby birds waiting to be fed.
By now the six-to-closing shift has hit the floor, Tiffany and Alicia, the Mutt and Jeff of waitresses, the long and the short of it. Which is a good thing because, in addition to the Daytona State coaching staff, eight or ten slim young dudes have just sailed in. They want champagne. They want to hang out with the piano at the Piano. It’s their fourth night here at the hotel and their first night off from performing at the Hard Rock with Cher, who is rumored to have taken the entire top floor of the hotel for herself and is having everything sent up. No one on the staff in any of the casino bars and restaurants can claim to have seen her in person up close except for a few waitresses and some stagehands who glimpsed her when she was being helped on- or offstage by one of her many assistants.
These guys tonight are Cher’s backup singers and dancers, and they’re lookers, naturally. They’re sharp L.A. dressers with perfect rotisserie tans and matching razor-cut haircuts and bodies that won’t quit. They’re all wearing tight black trousers like toreadors and puffy-sleeved shirts in various pastel colors that should be called blouses, not shirts, and they don’t stand around and drink and brag to each other or hit on strangers like most male customers. Instead they wave their hands in the air and talk in staged voices like they’re about to break into a Liza Minnelli song. They flounce and bounce like the tiled floor is a trampoline. They’re performers and can’t stop.
I enjoy listening to them and watching them move. They make me want to sing and dance myself, even if I can’t carry a tune and am heavy-footed and have a lousy sense of rhythm. I’m sixty-four and though in my youth had the requisite looks, I never acted the way they do, and now I sometimes wish I had. Not necessarily the gay part, but the loud, dancing, showing-off part. The flash and flamboyance. It looks like fun.
Too late now, though. The flashiest thing I ever did in my youth was audition for a porn movie production company in South Beach when I was thirty-five, divorced and broke. I have a seven-inch dick, but they said it had to be seven and a half, so I took a forty-hour mixology course at the New York Bartending School of South Florida instead. The rest is history. I’m still divorced, but no longer broke. I still have a seven-inch dick, but I’m not thirty-five anymore.
AROUND SEVEN, Allyn seems to break the mirror’s hold on his attention. He shakes his head and blubbers his lips like he’s waking from a nap and asks for driving directions to the Green Door. I make him wait while I finish topping off seven flutes of Moët & Chandon for Cher’s chorus line. Mutt and Jeff tray the flutes and haul ass. When I give Allyn the directions I say he should be careful driving. After four Long Island iced teas, if the cops stop him no way he’ll pass a Breathalyzer.
He sticks out his chest and says, “Are you intimating I’m drunk?”
Enrique folds his paper and says, “Back the fuck off, white bread, or I’ll cut your fucking nuts off.”
Both Allyn and I say, “Huh?”
It’s not clear whose nuts he’s threatening to cut off or why. I assume they’re Allyn’s, but Allyn’s giving me a concerned look like he thinks they’re mine.
Enrique furrows his brow like he’s going to cry. He looks first at me, then at Allyn, and says, “Jesus Christ, I don’t know what made me say that. I’m really, really sorry, man. I got this disease, it’s like a kind of autism and makes me say shit I don’t want to say. I apologize, man.”
I tell him no problem, and Allyn says the same, and then, as if to reassure him, Allyn invites Enrique to come along with him to the Green Door.
Enrique politely declines.
Allyn turns to me and says, “How about you, bartender? Care to join me at the Green Door and get sweaty wet with whatever or whomever you fancy?”
It strikes me that Allyn’s the one with the disease that makes people say weird shit they don’t mean, except that he means it. “No, thanks, man. I got too much to do here tonight.”
Enrique says, “Yeah? What’re you doing, killing people?”
“Naw, not tonight,” I say. “Actually, my replacement called in sick, so I’m stuck here till closing. Otherwise, yeah, I’d be out killing people.” Two can play at this game.
Allyn says, “Or hanging with me at the Green Door!” He lays a hundred on the bar and says keep the change and wobbles from the bar. I deduct sixty for the register and pocket the rest.
Enrique says, “No fucking way that dude’s going to end up at the Green Door.”
I ask him about this disease he’s got, if it comes and goes, or does he have to fight it all the time in order not to say shit he doesn’t mean.
“Only time I can forget it is when I’m sleeping. Sometimes I get tired of fighting it, like tonight, and just say fuck it, you know?”
I say I know. But what I really want to know, and don’t ask, is how it feels to suddenly blurt out whatever pops into your head. It must be like going behind the green door. It must feel really good to let yourself do that. It must in a way be fun, like being a glittery member of Cher’s chorus line swirling across the stage singing “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down),” which is what they’re singing now at the far end of the bar, one of them on the piano, the six others, arms over shoulders, in an actual chorus line, kicking left, kicking right, having a wonderful time performing that goofball of a song for each other and for anyone else in the bar who cares to watch and listen. The coaches all dig it, and Mutt and Jeff grin and watch, and even Enrique seems to like it. And me—maybe especially me, I like it.
IT’S TWO IN THE MORNING before I finally clear everybody out and get the bar washed and locked down and head for the employees’ parking lot on the other side of Seminole Way. I’m dragging my bony ass, but if I worked for one of the casino bars instead of the Piano I’d be serving drunks till dawn, so I’m not complaining, just saying.
As I cross the lot toward my Corolla, motion detectors automatically turn on the new ecologically correct LED streetlights, and after I’ve passed beneath they switch off behind me, one bright light handing me on to the next and then blinking out, all the way across the enormous, nearly empty lot. Palm trees along the sidewalk click and snap in the breeze
. A quickie rain shower has cooled the air and clouds of steam rise from the lot as if the pavement is heated from below by fires in the devil’s workshop. I’ve crossed this lot thousands of times and never given it a nod, but tonight for some reason it’s spooky. Makes me edgy.
In my head I’m listening to Enrique and Allyn, especially Allyn, when I arrive at my car and get in. Over the course of the night I had maybe a dozen conversations with customers, some of them interesting, even a couple of them useful. Despite that, I can’t remember a one of them, except for my exchange with Enrique and Allyn at the start of the evening, which has stayed with me in a slightly irritating way, like a day-old bee sting.
I’m driving across the lot in the direction of the exit at Lucky Street, still running those guys’ words past my inner ears, when my headlights catch three men and a solitary Ford Fusion sedan with its front doors wide open parked at an angle across two adjacent spaces. Caught in the cone of my headlights the three figures are otherwise surrounded by darkness. They act like I’m not there or they don’t give a shit that I am. One of the three is jumping around and making big purposeful punching gestures like he’s reenacting a WWE wrestling match. He appears to be shouting at the other two, who stand off a few feet and watch him warily as if they’re not sure why he’s performing for them. They’re younger and smaller than he is—red-faced, unshaven Raggedy Andys, a fat one with a long braid who looks like a Seminole and a scrawny one who looks Hispanic. Homeless sunburnt junkies or rosy-faced drunks, I figure. South Florida’s largest minority. Next to the sedan they’ve parked a matching pair of grocery carts stacked with garbage bags filled with all their worldly goods.
The one making the wild gestures I suddenly realize is Allyn, my Long Island iced tea guy, who looks like he’s been mugged—bow tie undone, shirt unbuttoned to below his navel, the right sleeve of his jacket half torn off, the suit itself spattered with mud and what looks like spilled red wine or possibly blood, hard to tell in the glare of my headlights. His comb-over is fluffed up like he put his finger in a light socket. He’s got a couple of ugly blue bruises on his forehead and a purplish egg swelling below his left eye.