Three, To The Swizz’!

James K. Moran

 

 

WITHOUT MASKS, THEY ALL STOOD on the Alexandra Bridge that spanned Ontario and Quebec. Beneath it flowed the Ottawa River. Sunlight winked off the white caps and filled Tom, who said, “Oh my gods, guys, I fucking needed this.”

Each of the friends inhaled and exhaled to savouring the taste of freedom, as well as the smells of dirt, trout, and perch. The mournful cry of a seagull drifted from afar.

“We can tell,” Dave replied. “First time walking?” For a quiet coder who dressed emo in a black-on-black ensemble, sporting multiple earrings, Dave could bare the sharpest horns.

Tom growled through his beard and lunged toward Dave, becoming a marauding predator of red-black-and-white plaid shirt, sleeves rolled up, and denim jeans.

Dave retreated to Reece’s far side. They hadn’t horse-played like this since their twenties. But today was special.

“Don’t poke the bear,” Reece said, chuckling. In khakis and a button-down, his hair and goatee freshly shorn, Reece did not run. His was a quieter rejoicing, savouring a moment over a mixed drink, whether watching a televised Olympic victory at a bar or attending Ottawa’s annual Pride parade.

And Tom couldn’t stand his cool demeanour. They were out. They were alive. “I thought we could celebrate it being over.”

“Spoken like a true therapist,” Reece said.

“Coming from an accountant, I’ll take that as a compliment.”

Behind them, across the Ottawa River, the Museum of History stood on the Quebec side. Even today, the globular buildings appeared mixed contemporary. In May daylight, under a peacock-blue sky, surrounded by a verdant lawn, it looked like an H. R. Giger creature had wandered lost into Gatineau, and settled down by mistake.

“Ahem,” Reece said. “Gentlemen… if I may?” He lit a tightly rolled cigarette.

Dave sniffed. “The green where we graze.”

Tom arched his eyebrows comically once, twice.

“Well, don’t just stand looking all manly,” Reece said. “Take it!”

Tom accepted, took a drag. The joint hidden under his paw, he shared with Dave.

It went around.

The river flowed westward. The museum hugged the shoreline on the left, before yielding to red brick and panelled residences, and green space. The water of the rapids shushed, far off. The sun, behind them, glazed the sight as though in an impressionistic painting.

Tom cleared his throat.

Reece saw tears in the man’s eyes. “You okay, big guy?”

Tom nodded, wiped his nose. “Just thinking of the last time we got out. The last time that anyone got out.”

“We can frolic in the fields again,” Dave mused, his tone hushed, amazed.

Reece wrapped an arm around Tom’s shoulders, stretching to do it. “We even all scrubbed up for the occasion.”

Dave rubbed his goatee. “I didn’t shave this.”

“It took you a pandemic to grow it, so I don’t blame you,” Reece said.

Dave, his turn with the cigarette, dragged hard, hacking up a puff of smoke. The cloud streamed upward, briefly appearing like horns atop his head.

Sounds of yelling and of pumping music rose from below. The trio hurried to the railing and looked over and down. A ferry was passing under the bridge. Strobe lights roamed across it, from bow to stern. Multicoloured streamers flapped from the railings in the breeze. Men gyrated on the starboard. Reece counted a dozen. They were all large, and they all wore leather accessories of some sort. Two in the centre of the pulsating mass, broad-shoulders covered in leather, wore matching pants, chaps, and boots, all a move. The man on the right, trying to match his dark-skinned dance partner’s contortions, looked up to see Tom, Reece, and Dave staring down.

“Who are you?” Tom yelled down to them.

“Can’t you read, handsome?” The man tipped his cap and a swipe of his moustache, à la Freddie Mercury. He gestured to the banner on the port side, facing Tom, its garish, multicoloured letters—The Twelve Dancing Princesses—arranged in a prism of colours. Beside that, in equally large, letters, it said, Ottawa Knights Pandemic Recovery Fund. “We’re sneaking off to party with the princes!”

The man’s dance partner swished long, pitch-black hair. His coffee-dark eyes were discernible even from afar. “Don’t tell the king!” he cried in an equally rich voice, swinging his hips, his leather forearm cuffs. The mane of hair hid his face, revealed it again. He too was hirsute, although less so than his burly companion. He compensated for this lack with lustrous, mocha-coloured skin. Tom and company guessed it was likely very smooth to the touch, as was his black beard.

The dancers wore facemasks around their necks, not over their mouths. On closer inspection, Tom saw they were multicoloured. Stylistic, not functional. A shorter, Chinese guy, pleasantly stout, and leather-capped, pirouetted around the duo.

“Where you headed?” the capped fellow, whom Tom had addressed, yelled up, barely audible. The ferry was getting too far away, turning away from the three friends. The man gave a palm rub-down of his barrel chest, hidden behind a layer of hair.

“Swizzles!” Tom hollered over the music and distance, adding, “Woo-hoo!” He was unsure if they heard him.

The crowd of dancers, now all looking up, hoorayed in return.

They must have heard something, then, he thought.

“See you on the other side of the thing,” the capped one shouted, although barely audible.

His fellow dancer yelled up at them but the ferry drifted completely out of earshot and the partygoers waved farewell.

“I think he said, ‘Go, Hairs!’” Dave said.

“‘No Hairs?’” Tom guessed.

“Ah,” they said together, united in a sudden deduction: “Go, bears!”

“Geez, someone was hitting on you,” Reece told Tom with a baleful gaze. “What else is new?”

“Yeah, what is with you?” Dave asked.

“Some things haven’t changed during isolation,” Reece drawled. “You’re like the Captain Jack Harkness of the queer circuit.” He was gesturing widely with the joint, as though it were in a cigarette holder and he a southern belle.

Tom bore a grin that, even through his rangy goatee, could break a heart or split firewood with its charm. Tourists always used to ask Tom for directions. No matter where the friends went. And they had been through it all together. Some tourists even asked Tom what was the best route to his bedroom.

Dave leaned into Tom, took an exaggerated sniff. “Is it the manly musk coming from that merkin on your chin?” Dave was not as active in Aikijujitsu and Karate as he was in his twenties, but for someone in his late thirties, he was limber. Chuckling, he easily dodged Tom’s swipe.

Dave sidled up beside Reece and Tom again, closer together than they would have before the pandemic, but not as close as in their university days, after they’d met one another at a LGBT mixer.

“Remember that pick-up line you used sophomore year?” Tom asked Dave.

““Hi! My name is Dave and I’m ...”

“ …Chinese and queer.” Dave cringed.

Reece rolled his eyes. “Unlike myself, being black and bi. Gentlemen, as you are aware, I consider that pick-up line some good, old-fashioned bullshit that I would never, ever, deign to say. Draw your own conclusions.”

“My conclusion is that we’re all far more classy than then,” Dave countered.

Reece and Tom understood this as a reference to being in their early thirties. Each had a relatively stable career that somehow weathered the pandemic. Tom even had his own private practice, an office on the posh stretch of Somerset Avenue.

They pushed off the railing turned away from the river and headed down the path that descended to the foot of the bridge and into Ottawa. Below, on the left, a seldom-used path led up from under the bridge. Parliament stood to the right, or west, stoic and stony. The National Gallery’s glassy tower stood leftward, to the east. Across from it loomed the U.S. Embassy in all the militant glory of a highly fenced perimeter. Reece once referred to it as Mordor, and had once dared a one-night stand to venture into the embassy and be a modern-day Frodo by dropping a doublets into the diplomatic washroom.

“So, if those are the dancing princesses, what are we?” Tom asked.

Reece slapped him on the back. “The three billy goats gruff, of course.”

They all began to laugh, a marvelous thing almost-forgotten during the pandemic. They watched the people teeming in the streets of the Byward Market, from the gallery onward, the vast colours of not only the rainbow, from the populace of a city of nearly a million unleashed to go for coffee, or ice cream, for a drink, for a date or a hook-up, for a meal on a patio with friends in a country wise enough to not only legalize cannabis but also sodomy and marriage.

“Tell me, what’s so funny, fellas?”

They heard the voice but couldn’t place it at first. Until, one-by-one, they looked to the path under the bridge. Someone stood half-hidden, the border of shadow and light showing little more than a toothy grin and ripped jeans, boots old and scuffed but almost brutal in their thickness and stains.

“Celebrating freedom again?” the stranger asked.

The friends all exchanged a knowing glance.

“You know him?” Reece whispered. “I don’t.”

Tom and Dave shook their heads. “No,” they answered in unison.

Eyeing the stranger, Tom was reminded of the bridge’s uneasy history of hate-crimes. In the late 1980’s, during that summer when he discovered the mystery of wet dreams, a waiter heading home from work was accosted by three young men, who had followed him through the night-time cruising area of Major’s Hill Park, mistakenly assuming he was gay. The waiter was attacked and briefly held over the edge of the bridge by his ankles before being dropped into the water. “I like your shoes,” reported on endless newscasts, quickly became the cruel taunt every bully used in middle school the rest of that year. Tom, months before a growth spurt, heard it as he was tripped or shoved against lockers.

“And yourself?” Tom asked, taking point as the tallest.

Reece extinguished his handiwork during his friends’ momentary hesitation.

The stranger drew closer. “Is this where all the fags hang out?” He stared at Reece. “Fag, as in joint?” Again, that grin. “That’s what the British call a dart. And you’re all fags, right?”

Dave stiffened and, out of reflex, drew closer to Tom. Once, in university, while the friends were leaving a Byward Market bar, some drunken jock had begun screaming at Dave, before hurling him against a wall in the nearby alleyway. Thankfully Tom was just behind him and intervened. The walk back to their shared apartment had been taciturn one rather than the usual nocturnal joust of who had caught the most hither-come stares from locals.

“Oh, we get it,” Tom said, stepping in front of his friends. “You’re hilarious.”

The stranger’s boots scuffed the pavement. The leather vest and ripped denim were a nod to rough style but could not disguise his considerable, furry girth. He looked like he would be at home lurking on the edge of a leather bar’s dance floor or a Mr. Leather competition, albeit the kind of contestant who wouldn’t put in the work and would still expect to win the title.

“What do we have here?” The man’s grin was either flirtatious or menacing. “The three billy goats gruff, eh?”

A pause. He looked at Reece. “The snob.”

Reece’s cheeks flushed. “Opinions vary.”

He glanced at Dave. “A runt.”

Dave narrowed his eyes at the speaker.

And then the stranger addressed Tom. “Oh, and the refugee from Goldilocks: one of the bears.”

Reece began heading away from the man. The others followed downhill.

“Leaving so soon? See you on the other side, then!”

The friends walked abreast and, coincidentally in order of size; Dave on the left, Reece and Tom on the right. Cars passed in the adjacent lanes on their right. Someone honked as they passed by.

“Anyone know what that was about?” Dave asked, obviously referring to the asshole under the bridge.

“No clue,” Tom said.

The friends attempted to shake off the encounter with the, for lack of a better term, troll. For a moment, they only had their quiet thoughts. Ahead of them lay Ottawa, and the sea of people. Tom, Reece and Dave had walked these streets countless times before, pre-pandemic. Now those days seemed distant and halcyon, as though they took those late alcohol-and-drug-fuelled late nights for granted. But the pals were out again, in the open air, having crossed the divide and each of them was as fresh as the spring weather, randy for adventure in all its shapes and sizes after some much time cooped up, trying to arrange weird online hook-ups or date when they could. They were ready for just about anything, troll be damned.

Tom, at least, felt fit to burst. At last, he spoke. “To the Swizz’, then.”

“I concur,” Reece offered.

“Hi, I’m gay and I’m ...”

“Shaddup, Dave,” Tom and Reece replied together.

 

 

SWIZZLES, A BASEMENT BAR, STILL held old-school appeal, the kind of place closeted civil servants secretly frequented in the 1960’s or 1970’s, fearful of losing their jobs if they were outed against their will. It was nestled under a passable Chinese restaurant, and accessible by a side alley letting onto a concrete staircase, worn by years of grit and grime, that descended to the bar. A parking lot lay on one side, the whole works surrounded by blocks of government office buildings.

Dave, Reece and Tom approached the stairs, the head of which was, as tradition dictated, flanked by smokers. The local air was perfumed by darts and joints and vapes, oh my.

Tom’s phone buzzed on his back pocket. He checked a text message. “Guys, I need a minute. It’s Cindy.”

“Is your sister still living with those two bitches?” Dave asked.

Reece groaned. “I cannot believe anyone in their right mind would stay with wicked roommates always trying to steal your strang and making the place a sty—”

“—and making you clean up after them,” Dave finished.

“She was,” Tom said, “but she finally met the right girl at some sort of banquet thing—I guess she left the case for her phone there and her new friend returned it?—and got her own place. Turns out that the new girlfriend is some sort of duchess.”

“Good on her,” Dave replied.

“You guys go ahead,” Tom added, dialing his sister. “I’ll need a minute.” He wandered down the block.

Meanwhile, the smoker on the right, a vivacious blonde, eyed Reece through her halo of smoke. “Mr. Blais, as I live and breathe,” Dixie Landers gasped under her cascade of blonde hair, resplendent bosom displayed in a low-cut top. Not only were the local establishments nearly bursting. “My prince has arrived. I would say ‘has come’ but that would be presumptuous, Your Highness, my darling.”

She turned to the three sizeable gents she was chatting with, two across from her, and one beside her. Not leather-men, but all stout and well-dressed. “Fellows, I’ll catch you inside.”

They could not hide their disappointment. Halfway down the staircase, the last one turned back. He bore a cherubic face and handlebar moustache but no hair, beaming mischievously at her. “Just don’t let me catch you sleeping in my bed again.”

Dixie’s face reddened like lava. She turned to Dave and Reece with a huff of breath. “What? I ended up crashing at their place recently. I was partying. So first I raided their fridge, then I crashed in his bed. Made them all brunch, though, darling, to make up for it.” She waited a perfectly-timed beat. “Not jealous, are you?” She batted her eyelashes at Reece. “I have to pay to replace the bed now,” Dixie added with a wink. “Some bears like to do more than cuddle, you know.”

Reece turned to Dave with an imploring look.

“Uh … I’ll meet you inside?” Dave passed through the gamut of remaining smokers and headed down.

At the open door, an imposing bouncer watched his progress. Dave immediately recognized him.

“If it isn’t you,” Dave declared. He almost added the troll from under the bridge, but he really wanted to go inside.

The guy was larger up close, likely taller than Tom. Certainly wider. The smile was the same as before, one that demanded of everyone: Friend or foe?

“How did you get here so fast?” Dave asked.

“Told you I was going to work.” The bouncer glanced inside, then at Dave, in an up-and-down assessment so deliberate, it could have been in slow motion. “It’s quiet, though.” He moved closer, smelling slightly of coconut oil, of sweet deodorant, maybe Irish Spring, but also a trace of musky sweat. “Wanna go in the back with me? I could just eat you up.”

Back in college, one of his professors, a thick, bespectacled man Dave referred to as the Duke, would often treat him to coffee and advice. Dave still remembered much of it, including: You can’t fall asleep at the wheel if you bite down on it. And everyone flirts with the bouncer to get into a bar, but no one goes home with him.

“Thanks, but no thanks.”

The bouncer searched Dave’s eyes. “Oh, come on, now. A sweet thing like you. I could gobble you right up.” And then his gaze lowered until he stopped at Dave’s crotch.

“Sorry—not interested. Besides, my friend is, uh, bigger, shall we say?”

“Bigger, eh?” The bouncer’s stubbly smirk was not unpleasant. It was his approach, more of a crash landing, really, that needed refining. Maybe Reece could give him some tips?

“Sure is,” Dave said, and glanced behind him. At the top, Dixie and Reece were still talking.

“He’s very stylish,” Dave continued. “Likes a martini or a glass of wine, never beer. Doesn’t own a shred of denim. The kind of guy who wears dress pants while around the campfire. Also likes haute cuisine around the campfire.”

This was all true.

“Alright,” the bouncer said at last. “The cover is five bucks.”

“Thought it was three.”

The bouncer shrugged. “It’s discretionary. As in, you can think of it as a tip.”

Dave groaned and paid. Inside Swizzle’s, he went right to the bar along the back wall, and ordered the house red for Reece, a micro-brewery India pale ale with far too many hops for Tom, and a vodka and lime for himself.

Back at the top of the stairs, Reece hugged Dixie and jauntily climbed down, pausing only when he met the bouncer’s eye with an uneasy grin.

“Cover’s five bucks, but could be free for you,” the bouncer said.

“How does that work?” Reece actually had a good idea how things worked, whether in Ottawa or London or New York City or San Francisco or London. Human nature was ever so reliable: wherever you went, politics and sex following you everywhere you grazed, despite your best intentions.

“Well …” The bouncer leaned a meaty forearm against the door jamb, the sounds of a mediocre karaoke cover of the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s “Under the Bridge” floating out from inside. “I am hoping for a bit of tail, and I bet you can swing that ass real pretty.”

“Is that so?”

Reece wondered how long this guy had worked the door? Two years? Ten? He looked like a prisoner, gone to seed, and now released from months of solitary confinement. But weren’t all of them like that? Freed from the pandemic, and trying to remember how to cruise again?

And this guy was rusty. And blatant. “I like your sense of style,” he said as he came close to brushing a palm along Reece’s collar. “No label polo shirt … beige slacks. Nice. Only, I’d get those messy right off the bat, by kneeling on the ground.”

“I’m afraid they’re staying on,” Reece answered.

“Dawling!” Dixie Landers hollered down, her six-foot-two figure looming even more impressively from the top of the decades’-old stairwell. “I’ll be down in a minute. There will be shots!”

“Absolutely,” Reece replied with a nod and a confident wink. He turned to the bouncer. “As you can see, my dance card is full.”

“Don’t waste all this … I’d love to just eat you up.”

“Not sure if I’m the meal for you,” Reece replied. “However, my other friend is the real dish of the night.”

“Oh?” The bouncer drew closer, close enough that Reece could spot a patch of hairs, perhaps bristles, on his neck that the razor had missed.

“Oh, yes. A bear who loves to bare it all. We’re talking just the right shape … handles on the sides just where you want to grab, beefy pecs, and a pelt that gets sweaty but tastes like honey.”

The bouncer looked up, saw Tom appear at the top step. “Glorious flannel,” the bouncer whispered.

Tom did indeed own the customary, Canadian plaid, red-and-white like the flag (with some black thrown in for variety, Reece supposed). Reece also suspected Tom’s boxers were flannel, likely white with a garish maple leaf right in the front. Tom was smiling and nodding at Dixie, who whispered in his ear, to which Tom guffawed. The clutch of smokers was orbiting around him, planets around a sun, drawn in by his charisma. The bouncer’s observant face belied his growing interest.

“And do I need to add that he’s so well-endowed that his Prince Albert always makes the sweetest ‘clink!’ on the porcelain.”

The bouncer’s eyes widened. He licked his lips and added, almost as an afterthought, “Alright. Go on in, then.”

Reece smiled as he stepped inside the bar.

When Tom landed on the bottom step, he was startled by the troll blocking his way into the fabled Swizzles.

Apart from the troll’s profound belly, they stood roughly the same width, and height. Each was astonished that they were at eye-level.

“I remember you. From the bridge.”

“Guilty as charged,” the bouncer answered with a sweep of his arm, revealing some ink along the elbow that might have read, No one’s ever really ready. 

“And now you lurk … here.”

“Only on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Halloween.” He pulled at his beard. “Which makes me wonder, are you my trick or treat tonight, handsome?”

Tom rolled his eyes. “I guess your middle name is not Consent.”

“Maybe I’m tired of just lurking around the edges of life. And now I just want to eat it all up.”

“And I’m not on the menu,” Tom replied.

The troll blocked the door. “Then you can’t afford the cover charge.”

Tom raised his palms in surrender. “Okay, okay.” He waited a beat. “Your approach is not helping get in my pants, you know?”

“My approach?”

“All that gnashing of teeth. What’s your name?”

The troll blinked. “It’s Tony.”

Where was Reece to make an Anthony Trollope joke? “Well, Tony, I’ll tell you a secret.” Tom wiggled his finger for the troll to step closer.

“Some guys, we have this fantasy that we would just die to finally do with a hot … real … fox.”

“I can be a fox,” Tony the troll muttered.

Tom breathed in deep and whispered right into an ear thick with tufts of hair. “I’ve always wanted to …”

“Yeah?” The bouncer rubbed at the front of his pants as if there were a genie in that lamp tucked behind the zipper.

“Walk into some stranger’s apartment, go right into his bedroom, and just … prostate myself there. In his den. And just spend the night as his sex slave.”

“Yeah?”

“Your apartment clean, Tony?”

The troll blinked, swallowed. “Nah, my mom calls it a cave. I think I haven’t changed the sheets since Paul Martin—”

Tom reached past the troll’s leather vest and pinched a very hard, thorny nipple. “Then why are you still here? You go run home to that cave and make it nice for me. And I’m going to drink some liquid courage to get up the nerve to walk in there,” Tom suddenly snapped his jaws nary an inch from the troll’s lips, “and let you be a beast.”

Tony nodded, his tongue almost hanging out of his mouth. He muttered something that could have been a time or an address, and then, adjusting his pants, ran up the stairs, almost knocking Dixie over, as he moved out of sight.

Tom greeted his friends with a wide grin and outstretched arms and accepted a hug and then his ale.

“How did you get past the guy at the door?” Dave asked. “I hope you didn’t have to palm him around the corner.”

“Sorry to throw you to the wolves,” Reece said.

“If I could outlast a vicious virus, some troll doesn’t stand a chance to take me out.”

A crowd of men filled the space between the tables, ordered drinks, danced, or stood around inspecting the scenery. Glitter pervaded the men, magically so. The dancing princesses, or Ottawa Knights, had arrived in all their muscular, stout, leather-clad glory.

Someone down the bar noticed Tom shrugging, leaned in to get better look. He of the leather cap, vest, and wide chest. A welcome sight. The dancer he liked from the ferry.

“We get to roam whatever fields we want, friends,” Reece said, raising his tulip-shaped wine glass.

“To roam wherever we want,” Dave and Tom echoed resoundingly.

They clanked their glasses together and drank.

The Ferry Fairy down the bar stood to his full height. Tom decided, from the thudding of his heart, the rush in his limbs, the swelling in his groan, the denim uncomfortably restricting, that he more than liked what he saw. It was like looking at a Tom of Finland drawing come to life, from the robust moustache, flush cheeks, dark features and broad shoulders. The man, with a nod of his square jaw, raised his pint of IPA to Tom.

Tom raised his glass in return.

The man pushed off the bar and made his way over.

“My prince,” he called sweetly over the ambient noise.

Tom’s friends took the cue to go off dancing. The bar was filling up. Gay Party Time was the hour. Swizzles swelled to life in all its colourful glory. Tom was not one for bleating, but growling, so he did.

A man with lustrous hair wiped his bangs from his face and shimmied up to Dave, as another dancer tipped his leather cap before pirouetting around Dave in what could only be a trademarked move. Joy filled Tom’s heart at the sight.

“Your Highness ….” Tom’s princess from the ferry sang. Lust brought a ruddy glow to the fanciful fellow’s brow as he stood facing Tom.

It was obvious, even to Tom who bore misgivings about happy ever-afters that, on this fierce note of hope, tonight would have a happy beginning.