I think I met a friend for breakfast at a gay bar. I thought it was a breakfast joint – a simple Italian restaurant that also served breakfast. I’ve been part of a couple for so long, I’d forgotten that some breakfast joints are actually places to hang out to stave off a hangover or do something to advance the prospects of last night’s drinking. When I go out for breakfast, I’m wishing for an inventive egg dish, and secretly longing for a flaky, buttery biscuit. That’s it. I’m not masking any sexual longings, not nursing a hangover, and certainly not wondering if the person I went home with last night is going to last past breakfast. It’s a done deal – he is. I’m so far out of the bar scene, gay or straight, that I was astonished to find myself in one.
I met up with a friend who I don’t see that often, so we picked a place near where she had to take her dog, Lou, in to the vet. At least she had to take the dog in three weeks back, when we made the plans. Although Lou was apparently much better by now, we couldn’t come up with any other idea of where to go, she’d already map-quested it, so on with our plan. The place was miles from our city’s queer neighborhood (our city is so liberal that we have moved beyond gay and have a fully out and politicized LGBT community), and even farther from the up-and-coming queer area, which is where many older, moneyed folks now live, as the former area is more urban and young and hip, and apparently midlife happens to everyone, and once it does, you just want to live somewhere away from flashing neon lights and the smell of stale beer on the sidewalk.
I got to the restaurant just a few minutes before my friend, and in walking past the front, noticed that all the window tables had men at them. Only men. Once I came inside, I saw a few tables with middle-aged (or even in their 60’s) men and women. And a full bar. But no one was sitting at it. The friendly, older proprietress greeted me warmly, told me I could sit anywhere I wanted, and I chose the last remaining window table, so it was guy pair, guy pair, me, guy pair, guy pair. The food on the other tables looked promising – substantial omelets and crispy hash browns, the sign of a good kitchen. The woman asked me if I wanted coffee; I asked for a split orange/pineapple juice, and off I was on my way to a terrific breakfast. The glass arrived – a pint glass filled to the rim.
When my friend came, we started chatting, which is basically what we do. We barely finish the “hello,” almost throw the menus down, and get to the real purpose of the meeting – to dish. And dish we do.
The blue-eyed waiter, who I assume is the owner’s son, came by and my friend ordered cranberry juice. “Do you want vodka in it?” he asked. “No, I’m good,” replied my friend. She cocked her head and looked at me, trying to decipher if she had just heard what I had heard, and how odd it was.
“Did you see his eyes?” I asked. “They’re so blue. Too blue.”
He came back for our order, and this time my friend could see his eyes. Yup, those were blue. Aegean sea blue. Cerulean blue. You can name it whatever color you want to name it, just don’t for a minute think that it’s the kind of blue that occurs naturally in eyes.
We ordered, we dished, he brought our food, we marveled at it, we dug in, dishing the whole time. Turns out there are some people with whom I’ll happily talk with my mouth full, manners be damned in the service of girl talk. With just morsels left on our plates, the waiter came back, sat on the banquette next to my friend, looked directly at me, and asked if there was anything else we needed for a spot? If not, he’d like to go have a bong hit.
He was holding a lighter and a cigarette. It was my turn to cock my head. I thought I heard him say he was going to go have a bong hit. These are not the usual words that flow through my auditory neural pathway, so I was a bit slow to respond, but I think I muttered something about us being fine. My friend, however, was even slower than me. Stunned silence, it turns out. She had misheard him, thinking he said he wanted to go out and “bond.”
Just for a moment, I imagined my friend and I sneaking out back for a bong hit, returning to our table and ordering pint-glasses full of vodka-soaked fruit juices. But I could just have easily imagined that I snuck out in a satin gown, holding a Cruella deVille quellazaire, wearing above-the-elbow black silk gloves. Not me. I’m the kind of person who looks up the right word for a long, elegant cigarette holder – I care much too much about everything to fit either fantasy. I order from the menu as if its listings are mere suggestions – so my egg-white only vegetarian omelet (skip the cheddar, add smoked salmon) was on the way. I don’t want vodka in the morning, and I haven’t even thought of bong hits since I was in college, where I was pretty square anyway. ‘Hooka’ never quite appealed to me. I didn’t like watching people inhale so deeply that their cheeks sunk in like a kid doing a bad impression of a fish, their lips sucked forward through a glass tube.
But the waiter saw us through his own eyes. Perhaps to him we looked like every other girl couple to stumble in for a weekend breakfast. We were, after all, in his breakfast joint. He works there every day. He must serve spiked breakfast beverages to a lot of people who are not starting their day, but continuing their previous night. People who want beverages in a pint glass that just hours ago held beer. People who would happily join him in a bong hit if he asked them. If we’re sitting there, at his table, ordering his Mom’s breakfast, the odds were quite high, in his world, that we partook of everything.
I’d like to come back for breakfast again, and I’d know now to expect the feel of a morning-after queer-friendly bar. They did a great job with the eggs, and the whole meal was yummy. The proprietress clearly loves to feed people. I’d enjoy this blue-contact-wearing bong-smoking, booze-pushing waiter again, because I almost never encounter someone whose assumptions of the way the world works are so radically different than mine. And it’s even rarer for someone to mistake me so grandly for someone I’m not. And sometimes a girl’s just got to go trolling for a biscuit.