IV
The world lost the Golden Lion Lounge in late 2011. Whether it was due to lack of customers, failure to pay taxes, or the zoning board finally realizing the place ought to be condemned, I can’t say. I also can’t say I was really saddened by the news; I had moved from Cinti and it had been at least a year before that since I’d been back to the bar.
Instead, the image of Cinti that came to mind was Martha, dozy and pensive on her perch, the last of billions of passenger pigeons that died at the Cinti Zoo in 1914. Nobody much cared about the pigeons when they were alive; they were ubiquitous, harmless, and not particularly good looking. Apparently you could walk right up to a group of them and clobber them all over the head before any one of them would realize something was amiss. But when they were gone, the world suddenly seemed an emptier place. Keep your hawks and falcons and cardinals; I guess people realized that sometimes the world needs a big, ugly bird that never really bothered anybody.
Of course there are and were other gay bars in Cinti. There is a nice, clean, glitzy one across the river where all the college kids and fancy people go; at least one piece of Dolce & Gabbana is required for admission. And if your cologne isn’t Gaultier Le Male, it had at least better be one of its seasonal variations. There was also that post-industrial wasteland down by the old train station; new and decorated in steel and concrete and metal. There was a lot of leather there and the phrase “$3 well drink” might as well have been spoken in Farsi; you’d be looking at six bucks for a Coors Light.
Jim and Gary would never go to these places. Neither would I, for that matter. And the drag queen would have to do a lot of waxing beforehand if she tried. Without Golden Lions, I saw us all instead in varying types of lounge chairs, alone in our living rooms, mixing a tumbler and pretending we hadn’t actually bought (and were then playing) a solo album by Annie Lennox. When it was there, we never really loved it and just showed up for a few hours; but now, with it gone, we looked around and weighed our other choices.
While those other bars might have nicer décor, more variation, and better names, they also market the one true thing Golden Lions lacked: attitude. Each has a theme; you have to be somebody to go in there, whether it be a good-looking blonde in a tank top or a daddy vying for first prize in this week’s Peter Marino–look-alike contest. And even then they all end up looking the same. Nobody really cared at Golden Lions: if you showed up on a Tuesday in a suit, great. Wednesday, if you came in a flower-checked muumuu, not an eyebrow would be raised. And nobody would send out a team of bloodhounds if you didn’t show up on Thursday. It was College Night, after all, and so anticipation of fresh meat would be high.
Instead, it was just nice to have a place that was as untrendy in 1978 as it was in 2008, a place as dark and dismal on a Monday as it was on a Saturday, and where a pint of flat beer would always, always be $2.50.
RYAN SCHNURR
Family Bones
MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER WAS NEARLY SIXTY years old when he dug a basement in his backyard and built part of a house on top of it. When I say dug a basement I mean he walked out his back door one day with a shovel and started digging. By the time I came around the project was long finished, and there was a garden between the house and the shed that he tended with great care. My great-grandparents lived in that house for fifty-seven years; it is the closest thing my family has to a homeplace.
This place I’m talking about is on East Wilson Street in Oxford, Indiana. Three houses in on the right. The house is white, with a nice big porch on the front and flowers hanging in a pot on the corner. I don’t know if the flowers are still there, though. Grandpa’s big green desk with the magnifying glass hanging over top is in the spare bedroom to the right, and the kitchen smells like those small, round sausage patties and maple syrup. The upstairs attic is big and hot; Grandpa’s journals line the shelves in one corner, and there’s a foggy window that looks down through the bathroom vent from up there. Family legend has it that Dan Patch was born pretty much in the backyard. (For a long time I thought Dan Patch was a politician; it turns out he was a record-breaking racehorse at the turn of the twentieth century.) There’s an agro plant across the street, or at least there was. Last time I was at the house I didn’t even recognize the place: the eaves were falling down on one corner of the porch, and the backyard was a tangled mass of weeds and long grasses.
What’s funny is I can tell you how
