I walked into the bar where Mario said he would be. Unlike most bars I'd been to for a while, it was crowded. It was smoke-free and well air-conditioned. Its clientele drank beer or cocktails, rather than straight spirit. Finally, it was gay and not the gay meant by the novice English speakers in Tashkent, educated from old Soviet textbooks that taught a very un-ironic proper British English. It was a 21st century New York gay, which is serious, like an old fashioned university mixer, if the university were single-sex; with men with fine white teeth and loosened ties tied around starched collars, sport jackets removed in after-work casual and draped over worked-out forearms. They stood in group formation, talking to one another though with the eyes never quite settling on those of the interlocutor's. Occasionally, you could find one holding court before several others. All spoke loudly over a powerfully percussive remix of a Pet Shop Boys tune. To my long untried eye, everyone seemed to look strikingly the same or uniform, like the stereotypical lack of discernment one has when encountering the natives of a foriegn country, another race of humanity, that prompts you to dismiss them with something like, "they all look the same."

Happy hour, I thought. I should be much happier. In Tashkent, I could only dream about finding myself here, having been deprived of precisely this; there, at best, I could enjoy a furtive glance across the Lucky Strike. I searched through the heavily scented forest, squeezing through the sea of bodies, almost giving up on trying to find Mario, when finally I spotted him. He was hard to recognize for some reason, something was different about him, smoething that I couldn't put my finger on. Perhaps that he looked so much like everyone else here, with his workshirt and tie, drink in hand, red face, mouth wide open in laughter at the chatter of one of his cohort. Had he changed, I wondered, continuing to remind myself that just because I had been gone didn't mean that peoples' lives hadn't stopped. As I came approached, he reached over drunkenly as though to kiss me on the cheek.

"Ugh, you're so sweaty," he said and then began to introduce me to the people standing around us as, "my friend who's just come back from Russia."

"Why are you saying Russia? It's not Russia. It's Uzbekistan," I corrected him.

"Well, most people never heard of Uzbekistan."

"So? That doesn't make what you say any less incorrect."

One of the guys who either I'd just been introduced to, or was standing nearbye and listening in chimed in, "that's where Cher is from, right?"

"That's Azerbaijan," responded another.

"Azerbaijan, how could I forget that," he said. "I need another cocktail."

"I need a cocktail," I said forcing conviviality. "Do you think they could give me something straight up."

"No," Mario said, his eyes rolling. "That isn't done here."

The place was so crowded, there was no place to escape and hide, there was no barman in sight. It would be challenging to leave, let alone get to the bar.

"Do you like it there in Ur-Pakistan?" another asked. He was clearly trying to flirt with me, I decided. Not really interested in wherever it was I lived.

"Yes," I responded and turned to Mario and lowered my voice, "do you think we could find another place to go? It's a bit loud, no?"

"This is the place to go on Tuesdays. Tuesday is the new Thursday," he said again, as he had on the phone earlier. "In a few hours, it will be the place to be. You will see everyone -- everyone comes here."

"Everyone?" I was slightly consoled by the appearance of a waiter who took my order. They could not serve me a shot of vodka with a tonic chaser. However, they could bring me a vodka-tonic. It is the same thing, I wanted to say, but less work; but the waiter had no patience for me.

"Though it does mean we run the risk of seeing Jared. I told you about him, right?" He said.

"Which one is that?" I asked. We hadn't talked for a while, hadn't caught up. Once, we were the kinds of friends who had spoken every day, knew everything about each other and talking came easy. Today, it felt strained. I didn't know who Jared was, but I knew Mario well enough to guess what the story was; time had passed since we last saw each other, but he'd hardly changed.

"Come on, I just told you about this guy... The really cute blonde guy with the great body -- who I would keep seeing at these gay MBA meetings. And I thought that there was really some chemistry there. Finally, we decided to go to dinner together on a Saturday night a few weeks ago -- on what I thought was a date, I mean, we said that we were going to do it again, perhaps the next weekend, but I got the flu. Long story short, he never called and doesn't even return my calls. I mean, who does that?"

I tried to look attentive, interested, sympathetic, as he spoke, but could not respond. His head looked big and round to me, like the shape of Charlie Brown's head, out of proportion with the rest of him. Why had I never noticed that he had a big head before?

With drink finally in hand, I made the mistake of starting to think aloud. "He we are, we're 30 and discussing the problems that seem like they should be a teen-ager's problems. I live in a place where people ask me why I'm so old and don't have a wife and two-three children, like them. Of course, I'm not like them, but it does make you think about things and what's important..."

"You," he said with a squinted, condescending eye, "don't live in the real world." Then he continued to ramble on about frustrations he had at work, about being "on the beach," not being put on good projects, about feeling underappreciated. I held my tongue, sucked more vodka tonic from the tiny cocktail straw, bit into the slice of lemon hugging the edge of the glass.

Labels: Entering the bar

  ¶ 4:49 PM