Chapter 1

“Another fireman. That makes five.”

John Ellison took a sip of his vodka tonic and regarded the man in the yellow slicker and red plastic helmet with an air of weary disdain. “You’d think they’d at least try not to look like overgrown kindergartners.”

Mike Monaghan, preoccupied with trying to remember the order the nun waiting at the other end of the bar had just given him, nodded absentmindedly as he poured gin over the ice in a glass, neatly popped the caps from two Rolling Rocks, and searched beneath the counter for the bottle of vermouth. Damn it, Paulie, he thought, silently cursing the barback whose duty it was to set up before the evening rush. Why can’t you ever put things back where they belong?

“I know this is the Engine Room, and I’m sure they think they’re being very clever, but can’t they show a little more imagination?” said John.

“Actually, engine rooms are on ships and submarines, not in fire stations,” Mike remarked as he grabbed a pile of napkins to hand to the nun along with his drinks. “Technically, they should be dressed as sailors.”

“That makes it even worse,” said John, draining his glass. “Not only are they unoriginal, they’re ignorant.”

“Well it was very original of you to come as Mr. Rogers,” Mike told him, eyeing the blue cardigan John had buttoned almost all the way up. “I know I definitely want to be your neighbor.”

“Fuck you,” John shot back. “For your information, this is what all self-respecting high school science teachers wear.”

“The stuff of teenage boys’ wet dreams,” joked Mike as he took John’s empty glass and refilled it.
“What have I missed?”

A man took the seat next to John at the bar. Leaning over, he kissed John quickly on the mouth.

“Nothing,” said John. “Just the annual Halloween Faggot Parade and Masquerade Ball.”

“Russell, I don’t know how you live with this bitter queen,” Mike said. Anticipating the request he knew was coming, he poured a rum and Coke and slid it to the man who had just joined them.

Russell took the drink, lifted it to his lips in salute, and took a deep swig before replying. “I’m just with him for the sex,” he said, earning a laugh from Mike and a roll of the eyes from John.

“How was the sale?” asked John, changing the subject.

Russell groaned. “Three hundred overweight women all insisting they were size 4s,” he said wearily. “I barely made it out alive.”

“Oh, the perils of retail,” said John.

“I didn’t even have time to come up with a costume,” said Russell.

“Thank God,” John told him, sounding relieved. “There are enough cowboys, Batmen, and lumberjacks here to recreate an episode of Let’s Make A Deal.”

“Actually, I think those lumberjacks are lesbians,” Mike teased. “And since you’re asking, I’ll take what’s behind door number two.”

Russell laughed. “You don’t have to be so uptight,” he said to his lover. “Halloween is supposed to be fun.”

John snorted. “Excuse me if I’m a little tired of this nonsense. All day long I had to teach chemistry to children dressed as gangbangers and hookers,” he said. “Not that every day isn’t like that.”

“You should have gone as Grand Master J,” suggested Mike. “Pimp Daddy of the science lab. You could show them how to make their own street drugs. That would get them interested in chemistry.”

“I don’t see you in a costume,” John retorted. “If you think this is so much fun how come you’re not dressed in some inane get-up?”

“I am in costume,” Mike said. “Can’t you tell? I’m a straight guy.”

Russell laughed as John shook his head. Mike, noticing a ghost waving a ten-dollar bill at him, excused himself to attend to the customer.

“Can we go now?” John asked Russell.

“Go?” Russell said. “They’re just about to start the drag show.”

“That’s exactly why I want to go,” said John. “I’ve got a splitting headache, and being here isn’t helping.”

Russell looked down into his drink. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “We can go. Let me say goodnight to Mike.”
John stood up. “I’ll be outside,” he told his partner.

As John pushed his way through the crowd toward the door, Russell finished his drink and set the empty glass on the bar. He caught Mike’s eye and waved.

“You’re leaving?” asked Mike, coming over and automatically sweeping the empty glass into the plastic tub beneath the counter.

Russell sighed. “Her majesty has a headache.”

“So send him home by himself,” suggested Mike.

Russell shook his head. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m pretty beat anyway. I’ll see you later.”

Mike nodded and watched as Russell left. Russell and John had been coming into the bar regularly for the six years Mike had worked there, and still he hadn’t figured out what kept them together. One of these days, he thought, he’d unravel the mystery. But tonight wasn’t the night. Tonight he had too much else to do.

He turned his attention to the customers lined up three deep at the bar. Within moments he was busy mixing drinks, his hands finding the bottles, ice, and wedges of lime as his mind ticked off the orders: three martinis for Wonder Woman, a shot of Jack Daniels and a Cosmo for the scarecrow, and a Budweiser for the devil with the wicked smile. Then he was on to a new set of faces and the next round.

“What’s an old queen have to do to get a sidecar around here?”

“Simon!” Mike said, leaning across the bar to kiss the cheek of the man addressing him. He eyed the old-fashioned black dress and powdered wig Simon was wearing. “What are you supposed to be?” he asked as he began putting together the sidecar.

“What did I just say?” asked Simon primly. “I’m an old queen.”

Seeing Mike’s confusion Simon shook his head. “You children have no sense of history,” he said. “Victoria. I’m Queen Victoria.”

Mike nodded. “Oh,” he said. “I get it.”

Simon took his sidecar and handed Mike a five. “Don’t feel badly about not knowing,” he said. “Someone else complimented me on my Zsa Zsa Gabor costume. There are, I’m afraid, disadvantages to being the oldest one in a room.”

Behind Simon a drag queen sporting a pink-sequined dress, enormous breasts, and a beehive hairdo that added a good two feet to her height stepped onto the small stage that had been erected for the evening. Taking up a microphone she flashed a red-lipped smile, batted her false eyelashes, and addressed the crowd.
“Happy Halloween!” she shouted. “Welcome to the Engine Room. So, what will it be tonight, tricks or treats?”

“Tricks!” shouted the crowd.

The crowd around the bar thinned as people turned to watch the show. Simon pulled out a stool and sat down. “She got that from Walter, you know,” he said to Mike.

Mike knew. He’d heard Simon’s stories about Walter many times. Everyone in the bar had, particularly in the year since Walter had died.

“He was so lovely,” Simon said, speaking to no one in particular. “So beautiful.”

Mike looked at Simon’s face. Caked with makeup, it reminded him of a crumbling painting. How old was Simon, he wondered? Surely he must be over 70. And Walter had been even older. Mike, picturing Walter, tried to imagine the wrinkled little man with the white moustache who’d worn corduroy trousers and neatly-pressed plaid shirts dressed in drag.

“I remember the first time I saw him,” Simon said. “It was at a party given by my friend Harold Carver. We didn’t have a bar to go to back then, but Harold was wealthy and had a big house in Saratoga. Every weekend we went there. Escaped, really. From our lives. One weekend someone brought Walter along as a guest. Friday night he made his entrance to dinner dressed in a beaded gown, and I fell in love with him.”

Simon looked at Mike and smiled, the pancake makeup on his cheeks cracking and flaking off. “I know it all sounds terribly fey,” he said. “But he wasn’t playing at being a woman. It was just his way of having fun.” Simon sighed deeply. “It all seems so much easier now, doesn’t it? We have our bars, and parades, and we’re on the television for everyone to see. People talk about how terrible it was back than, how we had to hide who we were. But they forget that it was also magical. We had our own secret world. Maybe we were afraid sometimes, but we weren’t unhappy.”

Simon looked down into his glass. “We weren’t unhappy,” he repeated. “Not then.”

“Would you like another one?” Mike asked him, nodding at the empty drink. “It’s on the house.”

Simon shook his head. “Thank you, but no. One makes me maudlin. Two will make me positively morose. I think I should probably take myself home before I become a spectacle.”

“You’re going to miss the costume contest,” Mike told him.

“That is a misfortune I will have to live with,” Simon said, standing up. “I pray that I am up to it.”

He waved away the change Mike had placed on the bar. Mike pocketed it as Simon turned and melted into the crowd. With only a few customers waiting, Mike enjoyed the relative quiet. The drag show was in full force, but he was able to block it out. It was a trick he’d developed during years of bartending in places whose clientele favored the cover of blaring music over the ability to communicate with those around them. He simply tuned the noise out, losing himself in his work or his thoughts.

He observed the action from within this sphere of artificial silence, surrounded by the chaos that was Halloween at the Engine Room but at the same time removed from it. As he straightened the bottles and restocked the napkins he watched the faces of the patrons. Many of them he recognized, but others were strangers to him. This was to be expected. The Engine Room was one of only three gay bars in a two-hour radius. The towns of upstate New York had many charms, but the availability of entertainment for the queer community was not one of them.

Oddly, this was one of the things that appealed to Mike about life in Cold Falls. He’d lived in larger cities, Albany and Syracuse for several years and a brief three-month stint in Buffalo one summer, but he preferred the quieter atmosphere of the smaller towns. Not that Cold Falls was merely a flyspeck on the map of New York state. An hour north of Utica, it shared with that city a history and economy based in brewing. Founded a hundred years earlier, Cold Falls Ale continued to be the bar’s best seller, beating out Coors and Budweiser by almost three to one. An image of the falls that gave the town its name graced the label, and the brewery’s motto–”Give me a cold one”–was regularly shouted out by customers, each of whom Mike rewarded with a friendly laugh suggesting that it was the first time he’d heard such cleverness.

He didn’t mind. He liked his customers. Like the town itself, they had quickly become familiar to him, until he knew their faces and names in the same way that he knew the most recognizable of Cold Falls’s landmarks: the brewery, the falls, the statue of the town’s lone celebrity (Cuthbert Applewhite, a dairy farmer who had distinguished himself in 1892 by preventing an assassination attempt against presidential candidate and former fellow upstate New Yorker Grover Cleveland during a campaign stop, and who after Cleveland had secured his second, improbable, term in office had been awarded a medal of distinction that he wore for the rest of his life, even when mucking out the barn).

In addition to their names, Mike knew their stories as well. He fell easily into the time-honored role most bartenders held along with their ability to mix drinks, that of father confessor and unpaid therapist. The tips he received were just as often tokens of appreciation for the advice he dispensed as they were for the strength of his cocktails, even if all he’d done was nod sympathetically during a patron’s rambling, boozy dissection of a recent breakup.

Stories. It was all about stories. Everyone had one, and almost everyone wanted to tell it. All he did was listen to them, and for that his customers were thankful. He was like a book they were writing, recording the events of their lives in his head. Maybe, he thought occasionally, one day he would write them all down. But who, he asked himself, would want to read it? To whom would the individual stories of heartbreak and joy be of any interest besides to those who told them? It was, Mike thought as he washed and dried a wine glass, one of the less appealing characteristics of human beings, the ability to be completely uninterested in the lives of those around them while desperately longing for someone to pay them attention.

A burst of cheering made him look up. On the stage, the beehived drag queen was putting a crown on the head of a muscular man halfheartedly dressed as a pirate, the primary clues to his identity being the patch on one eye and the stuffed parrot somehow affixed to his shoulder. Apart from these props he was nearly nude, which Mike assumed was the reason for his popularity.

“How about showing us your Jolly Roger?” the drag queen teased, shamelessly pawing the pirate’s chest as the crowd roared.

“Can I get a cold one?”

Mike looked away from the action to see a skeleton standing at the bar. He wore a black turtleneck and pants painted with crude representations of bones. His hair was slicked back and his face, too, was painted black and white to resemble a skull. His eyes were misshapen white spots above a ghostly mouth, and the overall effect was unsettling.

“Great costume,” Mike remarked as he pulled a beer from the ice-filled chest and handed it to the man.

“Thanks,” came the short reply. “How much?”

“Two bucks,” answered Mike.

Three dollar bills were slapped on the bar. Then the skeleton man turned away, scanning the crowd.

Mike took the money, putting two of the bills into the register and adding the third to the rest of his tips. The man, he guessed, wasn’t one of the regulars, otherwise he wouldn’t have had to ask the price of a beer, which hadn’t changed in well over a year. Probably he was one of the visitors who came in only on nights like this, when they could hide behind the anonymity of a costume. Maybe there was a wife at home, perhaps a kid or two. Mike saw a lot of guys like that. They came to the Engine Room from other small cities, driving an hour or more to ensure invisibility while they spent a night living other lives.

Usually he only saw them once, but sometimes they showed up at regular intervals. Apart from their nervousness and unfamiliarity, they were easy to spot. Often they forgot to remove their wedding rings. He glanced at the left hand of the skeleton man. It was bare. Still, that meant nothing. Not all of them were married, of course. Some were simply afraid of who they were.

The man moved away, out of Mike’s sight. Looking for something, Mike thought. He was looking for something. They all were.

That’s why they came there.