Eagle Memories

In the middle of my Toronto trip, an old bartender friend of mine dropped me an email. I thought it had been to reminisce about the time I fucked him in the parking lot of the Detroit Eagle, where he’d worked. Or maybe the time on the patio. Or at the baths. No, though. He was wondering if I’d heard about the closing of the bars where he’d used to work.

The bars in my city, I should explain, aren’t clustered together as they are in Toronto or Chicago. They’re not contained in a neat little network or neighborhood. No, they’re all far-flung, and usually in some of the worst neighborhoods imaginable, so that a typical night of gay bar-hopping here wouldn’t consist of stumbling out of the door of some well-lit establishment and down a few paces to the next, but rather of bundling up in one’s blizzard-protecting clothing, making sure that one’s car is still intact and not perched on cinderblocks, then piling in and driving twelve miles to a destination in another ratty and depressed area of the city.

So no, I hadn’t heard that the Detroit Eagle was closing, I told the bartender. Yet I wasn’t surprised. The Eagle had been in decline for years; it was in an industrial wasteland, surrounded by abandoned homes and overgrown empty lots. It had been a regular hangout of mine for several years, a long time ago, and I enjoyed the packed house of leather-and-denim-clad men on Saturday nights. I’d had a lot of good times with friends there, back when it was a regular destination. But then, about seven or eight years ago, the crowds began to thin. Friday nights, I rattled around the place like the last candy in a Whitman’s sampler. The Saturday crowd, which used to pack the place, dwindled rapidly as guys fled to other hot spots. By the time I stopped going every week, a hopping Saturday night at the Eagle meant the two bartenders and maybe eight guys smoking themselves dry around the bar.

Saturday night was the bar’s last night, so a bunch of friends who used to go regularly with me decided to get together and say goodbye to the place. We’d gone out for pizza and beer beforehand, and found the streets around the Eagle getting pretty full when we arrived at ten. One of our group, Barry, the innocent one, had never been to the Eagle before. “Don’t worry,” I consoled him. “We’ll get you fisted on the pool table.”

“Wait. What?” said Barry, who pulled at the lapels of his white dress shirt as if to protect himself.

No, there was never any fisting on the pool table at the Detroit Eagle. Not when I was around, anyway. Damn it.

Inside the Eagle was quite a crowd. It was as if the city’s fetish crowd decided to have one last huzzah. Men stood around in their gear, from simple leather vets and caps to full leather daddy fantasy wear. A couple of men wore rubber; many wore ratty jeans and had stuffed different-colored bandanas in their back pockets. Two men wore mascot costumes that completely covered them; one looked like a gray Snoopy (in leather chaps and vest, with a biker’s cap), and the other appeared to be Clifford the Big Red Dog. Around them, on all fours and wearing kneepads and studded leather canine masks that were zipped up and padlocked in the back, were several shirtless boys pretending to be puppies.

It was when the puppies started to mock-hump each other that I suddenly got nostalgic. I’d had a lot of good Saturday nights there. “You know what?” I said. “In memory of the place’s passing, we should all do something we did back in the day.”

“Like what?” asked Matt.

I nodded at the room’s far end. “Like you should make out with someone on top of the pinball machine.”

“I didn’t make out with anyone on top of the pinball machine,” he retorted instantly.

“Oh you did. Don’t you remember that guy? His head was under your shirt as he sucked your nipples!”

Loftily, he replied, “I wasn’t on top of the pinball machine.” He sniffed. “I was leaning against it.”

“Or you,” I said to Mark. “Remember that guy who used to stalk you? You should find him and stalk him back.”

“And what did you do?” asked Barry, the innocent one. Almost immediately, everyone else in our group of seven friends snorted, sputtered, choked, or gargled in a cough. I shot a cold, cold stare around the circle. “What?” asked Barry, oblivious.

“Well going by that logic,” said Mark, “he ought to be pinning a divorced dad of two against the wall and making out with him for two and a half straight hours.”

“There was nothing straight about that make-out session,” said Mark’s partner. “And he should also be ordering random men in the bar to take off their shirts.”

Barry’s jaw had distended slightly. “Suggested is more the word,” I assured him. “I never ordered.”

“He should in the bathroom peeing in some guy’s mouth,” said Matt.

“Listen, Mr. Pinball Persnickety-ness,” I told him. “I peed in a cup and then made him drink it in the men’s room. I didn’t feed him from the tap, here.”

“Didn’t you once make a leather sub clean your Doc Martens with his tongue on the patio?” asked Don.

“Oh my god!” Barry seemed horrified.

“I thought you told me he peed in the fountain out there and made someone drink from it,” said Don’s partner.

“Same guy,” Don told him.

Mark piped up again. “Remember when he told some man to take off his pants and the guy almost broke his legs?”

“It was his own damned fault for leaving his pants around his ankles and trying to walk down the stairs,” I growled. “If he’d had any sense, he would’ve taken them all the way off.”

“Or not taken them off at all!” Mark said. I had to admit he had a point.

“He ought to be getting handcuffed for over an hour upstairs to a spanking bench,” said Don.

“Oh my god!” said Barry.

“Listen,” I told him. “Don’t listen to these assholes. It was a fetish demonstration and they couldn’t find the key. I wasn’t. . . .”

“He ought to be wearing his old jeans with the enormous hole in the seat and letting random guys stick their hands in,” said Matt. Barry’s eyes widened. “Without underwear.”

“Well, it doesn’t make any sense to wear underwear,” I said in my defense.

“Not after you took it off in the men’s room and sold it to that drunk guy who tied it around his head,” said Matt.

“He wasn’t that drunk, and those were two different nights,” I found myself saying to Barry. Somehow I recognized I was fighting a losing battle, though. “I think we’ve all had enough,” I said firmly to everyone. “The past is past, right? Here’s to the present.” I lifted up my bottle of water in a toast. “And to the future.”

No one joined me in my toast, but they all remained silent for a little bit. Then Mark spoke up again. “He ought to be fucking the bartender on the patio.”

“And fucking the bartender in the parking lot,” Matt added.

“And getting sucked off upstairs behind the second bar,” said Don.

I stalked away and let them reminisce. Sometimes it’s a pain to have friends with such long memories.