by A.C. Koch

'Whiskey' is one of those words, like 'punkrock' and 'all-nighter,' that hasn’t circulated in my vocabulary for ten years. I’ve grown up, after all, and college is a long-gone dream that happened to somebody else. I left town, moved to the city. I’m a high school teacher now, who goes to bed by eleven, and if I drink anything it’s a bottle of imported beer that ends up half-full on the nightstand, flat and warm and forgotten by morning. I listen to Dixieland jazz, not Fugazi, and I haven’t stayed up all night since the last marathon of finals before they handed me my Education degree. Time went by, and everything slowed down. I’m sure you’ve all been there. But the past sneaks up in tricky ways. 

Last week I was handing out quizzes in my Algebra class when I caught a whiff of cigarette smoke on one of my students, and something lit up my brain like an old pin-ball machine. High school kids reek of cigarettes all the time, but there was an extra ingredient to the smell on this girl. The musky tang of fresh sex, maybe mixed with a little booze, and a cigarette to finish off. Jesus. I sat at my desk flexing my jaw and staring into the paperclip dispenser, seeing nothing. It was a Tuesday afternoon, the last class of the day. An hour later, I was taking the commuter bus out of the city, an hour’s trip back to the college town I hadn’t set foot in for ten years. A whiff is all it takes, my friends. It was autumn, with maple leaves as big as hands scattered across the brick mosaic of the pedestrian mall. Something about the cool edge of the afternoon breeze sparked a familiar tingle in the throat. “Whiskey,” the tingle said.

The bus had left me headachy, my feet were sore after trekking up and down the pedestrian mall where all the bookstores and pizza joints had become Gap Kids and Banana Republic, and that was reason enough for a drink. I slipped into the Sundown Saloon, the very bar where I’d spent half my college years but where I was now a stranger. The tingle of Pine-Sol hung in the air from the early morning clean up, with the rank of spilled beer and decades of cigarette smoke lingering around the edges. A handful of men sat along the curve of the bar, most of them regulars whose names I might have remembered if so much time hadn’t gone by. They were all moustaches and cowboy hats, and I exchanged a nod with a couple of them. The bartender seemed to recognize me in a corner-of-the-eye kind of way. I almost remembered his name but couldn’t come up with it. Well whiskey on the rocks, I told him. I set a ten dollar bill on the counter and he left it there like a contract between us.

The juke spun early motown, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, nothing that really fit the mood. But the whiskey went down good. I drank it slow, letting the ice cool my lips. A game was going on at one of the pool tables and I watched the balls gliding and clicking and disappearing into their holes. Couldn’t quite figure out why I’d come here, but not too worried about it.

I was into my second round when I noticed that the guy to my right was wearing a dress. He sat hunched over a half-empty beer mug and an empty shot glass. He wore an old leather jacket, and underneath it a red polka-dot dress that hung down the barstool, hiked over his hairy knees. I only noticed this out of the corner of my eye. He was staring into his beer. His stubbled jaw flexed and unflexed. I wasn’t going to say anything. Who knew what kind of day he was having? I would never come into a place like this wearing a dress. Not with all the old bikers and roughnecks sitting in their drunken clouds. But this guy sure didn’t seem to give a damn—even in that dress he looked tough. I kept my mouth shut and watched the pool game. Everyone else along the bar was mutely watching as well, everyone except the guy in the dress who was scrutinizing the rising bubbles in his beer. The juke ran out of tunes. A textured stillness hung over us all. Then a guy in a ball cap that said WAL-MART came in the door and strolled past the pool tables, along the bar, and he let out a bark like he had just stubbed his toe. “Whoa! What’s up with that?” he hollered. He was standing a little ways behind me, looking at the guy in the dress. “What’s up with that, huh?”

The bartender came over and put two hands on the bar. “What are you hollering about, Jimmy?”

“Since when you start doing transvestite night, huh?”

The guy in the dress turned around. “Don’t give me any shit, Wal-Mart. I mean it. Just don’t say another word.”

They looked at each other for a moment. Then Jimmy kind of snorted and walked down to the corner of the bar where he hoisted himself onto a stool and said loudly to the cowboy next to him, “Panzy wearing a dress.”

The bartender walked down to Jimmy, twisting a dishrag in his hands. “Hey, lay offa the man. He’s having a drink like everybody else. What about you?”

“Alright. Gimme a PBR.”

The bartender pulled a Pabst draft and slid it onto the bar in front of Jimmy. I stared into my ice. It probably looked like I was sitting with the transvestite. There we were, side by side, staring into our drinks, me in my jeans and sport coat and him in his leather jacket and summer dress. He turned and looked at me for a minute before rubbing his whole face with the swipe of a hand and sniffing. “I woke up this morning in this,” he said.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. I woke up on a bus stop bench on Canyon Road with this thing on, and this jacket over my face. This is my jacket, but this ain’t my dress. I don’t know whose dress it is, I don’t know where it came from, I don’t know where my clothes are and I have no idea what the hell I’m gonna do about it. Understand?”

“Yeah.” I chewed some ice. “Pretty strange.”

“Pretty strange? You say that’s ‘pretty strange?’”

We looked at each other.

“Well, I mean, it’s probably not the kind of thing that happens all the time.”

He watched me, real serious.

“I mean,” I went on, “I’ve worn a dress myself, actually, if you want to know the truth, but it was sort of a private party. I don’t know what I’d do if I woke up in a dress. Get a drink, I guess.”

“Exactly.”

Truth be told, I’d worn dresses plenty of times. Back in the days when words like whiskey, punkrock and all-nighter zipped around like bee-bees day and night. I played drums in a punkrock band all through college, and crossdressing was one of our gimmicks. I wore a gunny sack with combat boots, lipstick smeared over my mouth and eyeliner running down my cheeks with sweat. Or sometimes a leather mini, with ripped fishnets—that kind of thing. Years ago, it seemed crazy and taboo, and it was definitely a turn-on for the kinds of girls that hung around our shows. The girls who ended up musky and boozy and smoky in the morning, reeking of fresh sex and hangover and (although we didn’t realize it) youth. Nowadays, of course, kids keep right on drinking and smoking and screwing, and getting younger. And no one really gives a damn if a punkrock kid wears a dress. “You know,” I said, “it’s not really taboo anymore for a guy to wear a dress. People are used to that kind of thing.” He watched me dead on. “I’m fricking uncomfortable, alright?”

“Sure.”

We both knocked back our glasses. My whiskey was gone and so was his beer. 

The bartender fixed us up.

“So,” I said, “what were you doing anyway?”

“What was I doing? What was I doing? I wasn’t crossdressing, that’s for sure.” He fixed me with his dark eyes, deep set and too close together. You could tell he was the kind of guy who took himself a little too seriously. Maybe a philosophy major. “I was partying with some friends up on the Hill and took off with this chick, friend of my girlfriend’s. We go driving around, the two of us, ‘cause she just got a new car, some fancy Jetta or something. So we end up on Flagstaff to look at the city lights, you know, make out a little, smoke a fatty. Then she wants more booze so we get a bottle of gin and keep driving around. I don’t know. Nothing weird. She just wants to keep driving ‘cause it’s her new car. I don’t even know her. But that’s all I can remember. I must’ve passed out or something ‘cause I don’t even remember getting back to the party.”

“Wow. So she just dumped you off somewhere.”

“I don’t know man.” He gulped down his beer, signaling for another shot. “I don’t know if Tracey found out or what. My girlfriend. Shit, I bet she found out.”

“That’s rough.”

“Yuh.”

There was nothing else to say for a while. His jaw flexed, unflexed, flexed, unflexed. He was trying to work it out in his head but he couldn’t get a hold of it: those dead hours when he had passed out and remembered nothing while God knew what was happening to him. He just kept drinking himself deeper. The silence was a little uneasy. I went over to the juke and dropped a couple quarters in. I selected ‘Round Midnight’ and ‘Summertime.’ Miles Davis opened up, cool as ice. More people were coming into the bar. They came in happy, not like the sour drunks that bellied up during the afternoon. It could have been getting dark but there was no way to tell because the door was at the bottom of a stairwell and no daylight ever seeped in. The guy in the dress just kept drinking, slow and deliberate. Nobody else bothered him or even noticed his get-up. Like me, he didn’t seem to know anyone else in the bar. Maybe he too had been out of town and out of touch for years. I wondered if he had any money to pay for his drinks or if he had lost his wallet along with his pants.

Halfway through ‘Summertime’ he said in my direction, “So what am I gonna do, man?”

“I don’t know.”

“Shit.”

“Can’t you just go home? I mean, in Boulder it’s not such a big deal if a guy walks around in a skirt. Hippies do it all the time.”

“In a red polka-dot girly dress, excuse me? I don’t think so. I live out in Louisville, man, gotta take a bus.”

“Hmmm.”

He eyed me. “You got a car?”

“No, huh-uh. Rode the bus into town.”

*

Someone touched my back and I swiveled around. It was Jennifer Patrick in a black camisole and long skirt and clunky boots. A black ribbon tied tight around her throat. Super sexy. She gave me a hug and brushed her lips against my neck. “Long time, fella,” she said, all smiles.

She was the perfect person to see at that moment. I had been strolling around town all afternoon and hadn’t seen anybody, and getting a little sad about it. The guy in the dress wasn’t helping either. But Jennifer Patrick. She was the girl in the back of your mind you always hope is going to be there, wherever you go. It had been years. She used to go to parties, and I knew her boyfriend. Then they split up and she stopped coming to parties but I would see her sometimes with her little daughter at the cornerstore, and she’d invite me up to her place for dinner and I’d end up cooking while her kid danced around to Sesame Street records and flirted with me and Jen smoked and watched us and said we were playing family. But it wasn’t really like playing family, because we never kissed and never went to bed. Her kid was always around.

Now (ten years later!) I rubbed the back of her head. Her hair was different, short and very blonde. “Beautiful,” I said. She slid onto the barstool between me and the guy in the dress and she stared talking at a hundred miles an hour. I leaned on my elbow and smiled into her face, all bright and flashing as she spoke. Her life had turned around, she had her Masters, she had bought a house up on Flagstaff looking out over the city, she was singing with some jazz quartet.

“Hey,” I said, “did you hear ‘Summertime?’ I just played that one. Will you sing it for me if I play it again?”

“Mm-hmmm,” she hummed, smiling.

I went and plugged another quarter into the juke but there were a few selections ahead of mine so it would take a while. Over my shoulder I heard Jen say, “Cool outfit! What a look.” When I got back to the bar she was feeling the fabric of the guy’s dress. “We should trade sometime,” she said, “but I don’t think my camisole would fit you.”

The guy laughed aloud. He was pretty far gone by now.

“You tell the story,” he said to me.

“Oh boy.” Jen was watching me. “Okay,” I said, “he was partying last night, and he blacks out. So this morning he wakes up on a park bench wearing this mysterious dress—he doesn’t know whose it is—and all his clothes are gone.”

“Wow!” said Jen, looking back and forth between us.

“It was a bus stop bench,” he said. “There were a couple people waiting for the bus, going to work I guess. They stood around and pretended not to stare. They thought I was some kind of freak.” We all laughed, even the bartender who was washing glasses below the bar in front of us.

“I’m sure this kind of thing happens all the time,” Jen said. “It’s just a practical joke.” She put her hand on my knee under the bar and gave me a half-wink. “You look great in a dress, I happen to know. I’m going to put sleeping pills in your whiskey there and then stuff you into this”—her camisole and skirt—“and leave you on the courthouse lawn.” She burst out laughing. The guy in the dress stared into his drink, eyes large.

“I bet that’s what the assholes did,” he hissed. Jen and I laughed even louder but now the guy in the dress was serious. 

“Those assholes,” he said. The bartender refilled his shot glass and said, “This one’s on me, guy. Best story I heard all day.”

This got me wondering whether the guy had any money at all. I was about to ask him when he put down the shot and then slid off the stool to head to the bathroom on wobbly feet. The guys shooting pool watched him pass in silence and then grinned at each other, doing a pantomime of prancing fairies.

*

Jen and I got to talking in the old way, her hand on my leg under the bar. It was like the years in between had never happened.

“Why didn’t you call me if you were coming to Boulder?” she said. “Because I wanted to run into you, like this. Don’t you think this is better?”

“But what if you didn’t run into anybody, and you had to go back home all alone and lonely?”

“Well, then I would call you from a pay phone on the way out of town and make you beg me to come back.”

“And you would just be begging an answering machine because I would already be out on the town.”

“Then I would run into you. Like this.”

When there was nothing left to say she just let loose with her smile and there was nothing else you could do. I could see the mapwork of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and around her mouth but they only made her better-looking. We clinked glasses, butted shoulders, leaned closer to talk as the place filled up and noise rose all around us. Somewhere in there, ‘Summertime’ passed and neither of us noticed.

“Jen, we missed the song! You gotta sing it to me.”

She sipped her vodka and a trace of orange misted off her breath. “Summertime,” she started, drawing the word out extra long and putting a smoky vibrato on the last syllable, “and the li-ving is ea-sy,…” She sang low over her drink, under the music and the chatter, and to anyone else it would have looked like she was just speaking close into my ear. Her breath on my cheek reminded me of another time, years ago, when she had sung to me just this way. She was living in a cabin back then, on the slope of the foothills at the edge of town. This was one of those times when I’d run into her and her little girl at the corner store and we ended up pooling our groceries to see what kind of meal we’d come up with.

“But it’s a girl’s world,” she’d said as we went onto the sidewalk, my arms full of paper bags and Jen pushing the stroller. “We don’t let Sierra’s daddy in the house, because he doesn’t belong in a girl’s world. Right, sweetie?” But Sierra was glassy-eyed with child-sleep under her blankets. Jen shrugged at me. “But we’ll let you stay if you put on a dress.” Smile, wink.

At her place, she put on a Miles Davis record and sang the words in her smoky voice. Candles flickered on the window sills and white Christmas lights gleamed in strands around the ceiling. I lingered by the high windows looking out over the city lights. Little Sierra dozed in the other room and Jen’s roommate Rachel sat smoking on the couch. I didn’t know if that word ‘roommate’ should have quote marks around it or not, since I knew Jen had a tendency to play both sides of the plate, but I didn’t dwell on it. It was a girl’s world, after all. I took a seat backwards on a chair and Rachel and I both watched Jen standing in the middle of the carpet with her cigarette burning down to ash, forgotten in her outstretched hand as she sang. Her eyes closed and her lips held the shape of the notes in slow motion. Rachel gave me a look and shook her head, grinning. Jen was doing it like she did everything else: so stylish you couldn’t stand it. “Someday my prince will come,” she sang. She went on for a couple tunes and then suddenly snapped out of it and a great smile lit up her face. “You need a dress!” she said, pointing at me, and then whirled into the next room.

“What did she just say?” said Rachel.

“I think I’m in trouble.”

Then Jen was back with a little cotton sundress, the kind I love to see on a woman on a summer day but definitely too skimpy for me.

“Oh,” I said, “I was thinking more along the lines of a cocktail dress. You know, long and black, maybe with a string of pearls?”

“Shush. Put this on. You’ll look marvelous.”

Marvelous, a real Jen word. I changed in the bathroom and checked myself out in the mirror. Usually I was half-drunk and revved up for a show before I put on a dress—certainly, I never did it sober. In fact, it looked better than it should have. I was a flat-chested, wiry woman with a tousled hairdo. I looked like a lesbian, I guess. That might even come in handy. I walked into the living room and Jen and Rachel burst into exclamations of delight. “What a dame!” they shouted. I spun around to the bebop jazz and the girls oggled me and we took turns dancing with each other. Rachel was crazy about me, running her hands up and down my body, pressing her chest to mine—though I don’t know if that meant she liked boys or girls. Jen found a long string of fake pearls and looped them over my head so I could dance like some flapper, three feet of pearls swinging down to my knees. Then everything stopped when we heard a tiny voice: “Mommy?” We all turned to see little Sierra in the hallway holding a stuffed bunny. 

“Are you playing family?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, hon,” said Jen and she went and picked her up and took her back into the bedroom, cooing.

“Dysfunctional family,” I said.

Rachel slapped me on the chest, smirking. We turned the music down and slow danced until Jen came out of the bedroom and then she cut in. Jen and I swayed, her cheek pressed against my neck where I could feel her lips brushing my skin. Later, Rachel kissed me on the check and Jen on the lips and went down the hallway to the master bedroom. Jen and I danced to the end of the album, even slow dancing when the jazz was skittish and wild. She peeled herself away to start pinching out all the candles. “You can have the couch. I’ll get you a blanket.” Alone and in the dark, I sat on the couch in that dress, wondering what I was doing there, pulling the blanket over my naked thighs. True character, I had heard somewhere, is what you are in the dark. Did that mean I was truly a crossdresser? A lonely crossdresser, embarrassed and sober and a long walk from home?

*

Jen had gotten to the end of the song. Her voice dipped into the whispery low notes as she sang, “So hush, little baby, don’t you cry.”

I clinked her glass with mine. “You’re a star.”

“I sound better with a microphone.”

“No, you sound great just like that, right in the ear.”

I signaled to the bartender for more drinks (How many was that now?) and waited until he’d slid them onto the bar in front of us before I said, “Whatever happened to Rachel?”

Jen blinked, hesitated, then threw her head back in a laugh that caught the attention of half the bar. “Jesus, it’s been a long time. She married some schmuck and disappeared. No letters, no postcards, nothing. You’ve been out of town for a while, haven’t you?”

“Guess so.”

Jen peered at me from the corners of her eyes. “And Sierra’s in high school now. Can you believe that?”

Whoosh. I got that tingly feeling, just for an instant, like when you’re standing on a very high place and looking down and you feel an irrational urge to throw yourself into the void. Tiny Sierra is in high school?! Is she drinking, smoking, having sex with the rest of them? Is she dysfunctional? Or is that normal behavior now? “Wow,” was all I could manage.

Jen was twisting around to see who was in the bar, now that things were livening up. “Where’s the crossdresser?” she said.

It had been a while since he’d headed for the john. “Maybe he got his ass kicked,” I said. “Should I go check on him?”

Jen shrugged. “Nobody cares in this town if a guy wears a dress around.”

“But a red polka-dot girly number?”

She grinned. “So pay his tab. It’ll be good karma, in case the same thing happens to you some day.”

I couldn’t foresee the kinds of events that would lead to me waking up in a mystery dress at a bus stop on a weekday morning, my life being public school and early bedtimes. But I called the bartender over just the same and settled the guy’s tab. It was a little steep as he’d been drinking all afternoon, but the bartender cut me a deal, charging happy hour two-for-ones. “I’ll let him know who his fairy godmother is,” he said and the three of us exchanged a smirk over that one. Jen peered over my shoulder and gave a smile and a wave to someone across the room. “Look, Jacky, they’re waiting for me over there. You’ll give me a call, won’t you?”

I told her I would. She was gone with a kiss on the cheek, weaving her way through the crowd to a table full of people I didn’t recognize. My whiskey was not having the desired effect. Instead of taking the edge off the day, it was making me wistful in a sad-eyed way. Booze never used to do that to me. What did the guy in the dress have to complain about anyway? All he had to worry about was where the next party was, and whether his girlfriend was going to bitch him out. He didn’t have to go home early, sober and alone, then get up at dawn and ride the public bus to the high school. I wouldn’t have minded one bit being in his position. I would walk up to the table where Jen sat with her new friends, sit down with my cocktail a-jingle, start talking and bragging and shooting the shit. “You guys aren’t going to believe what happened to me!” Drink all night. Acquire heady aromas. Make something of the evening. But tonight was not the night. I settled up my own tab and shrugged on my sport coat. Out the door and up the steps, the street was hung with twilight and the first stars were coming out beyond the skein of trees. 

*

I ended up seeing him again, but he didn’t see me. I was easing into the antiseptic dark of the bus seat, resting my head on the shuddering window and watching the campus slide by in the dark. It was an hour’s ride back to the city, and it would be good to get some sleep and take the edge off what was going to be a sour headache in the morning. The bus stopped at an intersection before the freeway turnoff, and I had a view across the parking lot of a Circle K where a woman in a red polka-dot dress with gnarly legs stood hip-cocked on the sidewalk in front of the doors. It wasn’t a woman, of course, it was him. The crossdresser. He’d taken off his leather jacket now, draping it with a hooked finger across his back, and his naked shoulders were white and bulky and very unfeminine. A slight figure in jumbo skater pants and a red smock stood with him, leaning in the doorway and holding a broom upright: a boyish girl, working the graveyard shift. She threw her head back and laughed. A whole series of hoops glittered along the curve of her ear, and there was either a fat spider or some Chinese character tattooed on her neck. She looked barely old enough to sell booze to the Circle K clientele. 

Sealed in silence, I watched. How had the guy gotten halfway across town so fast in his get-up? Was this chick his girlfriend? or the other one? or had they just met? She leaned forward as if to kiss his outstretched hand (!), and then I saw the spark of a lighter and the cigarette between her lips. He lit up himself, and their exhaled smoke wafted ghostlike under the sodium glow of the all-night lights. Maybe he was making something of the evening after all. They’d be musky with fresh sex by the time the sun came up. Then the bus geared up and lurched into motion again, and the gender-bent midnight tableau at the Circle K slipped away and out of sight. I probably shouldn’t have paid for his drinks. But then again, maybe my karma would come back around sometime, in the kindness of strangers. Someone who caught a whiff of himself in me. Was I living some experience at this very moment that anyone might envy me for? I peered over the seat back at the scattered heads of my fellow late night commuters, each of us headed into the city for God knows how many reasons. Would any of them rather be the guy in the dress, sweetly drunk and chatting up a punkrock clerk at a convenience store? Would any of them rather be me, all grown up and headed home in the night?

A.C. Koch writes: "I live in Zacatecas, Mexico, where I teach English at a university and edit fiction for Zacatecas: A Review of Contemporary Word (www.zacatecas.org). My work has appeared in The Mississippi Review, Exquisite Corpse, Blithe House Quarterly, Carve, River City, In Posse Review, Oasis, and forthcoming in Oysterboy Review. Stories of mine have recently been awarded first place prizes in the Stickman Review Fiction Contest and the PusanWeb Writing Contest. I moonlight as a jazzman."