Next door to the Acme Bar was the half-empty Acme Café, where Lila lurked. Lila Tankersley, half-owner of the Acme, eighty-year-old Georgia belle, could cut people so severely with words, they were not aware of the damage until moments later, when the numbness wore off. By then, she would be dripping words of honeysuckle at them. From time to time, Lila would imagine herself wronged by the bar customers, slam the café door, stamp along the covered wooden walkway to the bar, sock open the swinging doors and demand to see everyone’s I.D., even though she had seen them all before.

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On this particular Friday night, she had only minutes before barged through on an I.D. hunt and was now back in the café, cooking hamburgers. Ray Davis, the Acme’s co-owner, squeezed his way around the room popping one-liners to pop the tension left by Lila. Ray was reported to be a tart. No one reported it more than Ray.

Nan Grinder leaned over the table, invited everyone over to her house for martinis after the bar closed. Jane Baker, sitting at the table, was thrilled, but then everything about the Acme thrilled her. No rat hole to her, the Acme was an enchanted room, the first gay bar her big sister, Diana, and Diana’s lover, Maria Garcia, had taken her to when she arrived in the colorful, picturesque city of San Antonio from a tiny town in West Texas two weeks earlier. Diana and Maria had pointed out Lila and Ray, and she had met Nan Grinder, too. They had told her how poor Nan carried martinis with her in a thermos, like W. C. Fields, because she was a walking ulcer who lived in dread of the day she might be found out as queer, disgraced and fired without benefits from her twenty years in federal civil service. Nan’s paranoia required that she never had just one woman at her house. It was always two or more, or group martini parties. Even when Nan Grinder was in bed with a lover, she had a friend posted on the porch, or a crowd getting stone drunk in her living room on the pitchers of martinis she had prepared.

Jane listened to Louis Potter and Garnet, at the table next to her, congratulating themselves on their personal heterosexual disguises, Louis priding himself on the intricacy of his deception, Garnet on the blunt effectiveness of hers. Six-foot, flame-haired Garnet, her knuckles knotted from cracking them and from cracking annoying people’s jaws with them, said all Nan or anyone had to do, when asked how come they were so old and still not married, was say like she did, that when that pickup skidded off the road and plunged five hundred feet to the bottom of the canyon ten years ago, it took with it the only man she could ever truly love. 

Handsome, apple-cheeked Louis Potter had created the fabulous Susan Deering, right down to the Chanel No. 5 that he gave her last Christmas, and which she always wore. To his colleagues at the office, to straight people everywhere, Louis hand-fed nuggets about his and Susan’s enchanted love. Louis was so self-assured, so imaginative and articulate, that people ate these stories from his hand like chocolate candy. Only the people of the gay bar circuit knew that fabulous Susan Deering was based on fabulous Carlos Vega, who sat drumming his fingers on Jane’s table with the same speed that Jane, sitting next to him, swung her foot in double-time. Whenever Carlos and Jane played skittle ball, he got so engrossed, he forgot to drink his beer, something Jane never forgot to do.

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Sylvia Herrera sat down next to Jane, and Jane’s heart hopped. Sylvia lit Jane’s cigarette, her bracelet slid down her graceful waist. Her knee touched Jane’s; it burned through the cloth of Jane’s jeans. Jane struggled to think of something clever to say but couldn’t even think of something dumb. Still thinking, she reached for her beer too fast and knocked it over. As though directed by the hand of God, it spilled directly into Sylvia Herrera’s lap.

Nimble Ray pitched Jane a towel, and she could not sop the beer up fast enough from Sylvia’s drenched lap, while Sylvia smiled her gorgeous smile, not like she was laughing at Jane or gauging what she could get from her but because she really meant it. “Hey, no problem,” she said, which Jane knew to be gracious, for she had seen Sylvia grimace when the cold beer hit her new blue Bermudas. Rita Bright, watching the two of them, said nothing, just hitched her upturned collar, smoothed her platinum blonde duck’s tail with both palms and acted cool. “Cool” meant she made herself have slow reactions, like waiting until her car careened down the street out of control, through the red light and into a parked car before allowing herself to say, “Umm, low brakes.”

Rita Bright made Jane’s heart hop, too, and so did Teresa Simon, sitting across from her, so composed, such fine small talk, such allure pulsating from such a summer halter.

Winnie Butts, the bartender, shouted hamburger orders through the wall window to the café. Next to this window, Bee sat back on her barstool and smoked cheroots, rolling them around her be-ringed fingers. Her enormous Great Dane, Seabiscuit, circled the room, selecting whose lap to sit in, then sat in it with her hindquarters, while planting her front paws on the floor. From this position, Seabiscuit snuggled herself deeper into the chosen one’s lap, squashing guts into backbone, and gazed placidly around the barroom, certain she was a lapdog.

      The hamburgers were ready. Two powder-dry hands punctuated by scarlet nails reached through the wall window and hurled two hamburger plates down the bar. Winnie Butts reached out and grabbed them in mid-bar, before they hurtled off the end.
  
   “God help you, Winnie,” said Bee, “if you ever didn’t catch them.”

      Jane watched her sister, Diana, take the hamburger plates from Winnie and manage a sickly smile at one of Winnie’s shallow jokes, while Winnie guffawed at herself and slapped her thigh with her bar cloth. In white shorts and tennis shoes, Diane looked almost like a camp counselor lined up for chow, except that her beer belly spoke of nights in the bars since she got kicked out of Texas Woman’s University for being gay and came to San Antonio to work in nuclear medicine on the rebound from her thwarted B.A., and though she stood tall, flayed around ever since for something delineated, something purposeful.

      Maria Garcia took one of the hamburger plates from Diane and set it aside for later. No mixing of activities for Maria. When Maria drank, she drank. When she was through drinking, she ate. Whether she played, worked or worried, she kept activities separated like food on an army plate.

      Jane took everything in. The Acme Bar was packed. Everyone knew most everyone, and she was still learning. She remembered the first time Diana and Maria had brought her here, right after she arrived in San Antonio from the Texas Panhandle, only two days after her twenty-first birthday and dropping out of college. They promised a celebration like she’d never had at home. They came in the afternoon, and Jane cherished that light pouring in from door and across the floor, speaking to her: You, Jane Baker, are in a bar, and you are legal. You can see by the light it’s only afternoon, and you still have the whole night.

      The jukebox played the Twist, the Everly Brothers, and Clarence Henry’s “I Don’t Know Why I Love You But I Do.”

      Jane raised her longneck Lone Star beer and said, “Cheers, Everybody!” Everyone in the Acme Bar raised their beers and said: “Cheers, Jane!”

      Always prone to surges of emotion, Jane could have swooned.

      Late that night, after the Acme, after martinis at Nan’s and dancing the Twist in Nan’s living room with those who made her heart hop, and making dates with them, and after collapsing in the bathroom from too many martinis too fast, Jane sat gazing out the window of Diana and Maria’s apartment on Brahan Boulevard, long after they had gone to bed. The smell of jasmine floated in through the open window, with that of grease on the grill and loud music from Prince’s hamburger drive-in stand below, on whose roof perched a huge papier-mâché¢ hamburger whose toothy onions appeared to cannibalize its own pickles.

      All night long, life like a jukebox, just the kind Jane wanted.

Opening one eye to the blue light of early morning, Jane saw Maria stumbling into doorjambs, spilling coffee on the run, and she marveled that someone so hung-over could get so promptly to her job, so crisply dressed. Maria Garcia, virtuous pilgrim, was a good soldier who would say, as she retched her way out the door, “I had my fun, now I have my work.” She saw Jane watching from the daybed and waved in her direction. Jane, still under the sheets, wiggled her fingers back, and watched Maria straighten her shoulders and lurch toward the front door - - where she careened into Diana’s new hanging fishbowl. The fishbowl pitched and sloshed. Maria flayed at it and cussed in Spanish. The goldfish puckered their little lips and stared at Maria who pushed the hanging bowl out of her way. Most of the contents slopped out onto the floor, except for the fish, who puckered even more furiously in what was left of the water.

      “Quit your bitchin’,” said Maria. “Be glad you can breathe.”

      Jumping up from the daybed, Jane steered Maria out the door.

      Soppy but resolute, Maria ran down the stairs, calling back, “Gracious, Miss Scarlett.”

      Jane turned back to the living room and was just pouring water in the fishbowl when she saw the apparition of her sister, Diana, standing by the daybed, with her white radiation technician’s uniform hiked up, Scotch-taping her nylons to her thighs. Diana saw Jane’s wide-open mouth with nothing coming out of it, and Diana explained, as Jane shrieked with laughter, that her garter belt had worn out and she’d be goddamned if she’d spend anymore of her hard-earned money on another one of those imbecilic mousetrap goddamn contraptions!

      “I’ll show you,” Diana said. She fished in the trash, pulled out a wad of shredded white fabric held together here and there with safety pins.

      Jane shrieked again and said, “Wait till Maria sees.”

      “Oh,” Diana said, “she’ll think it’s frugal.”

      They bent with laughter down the stairs and into the creamy light of morning. Jane laughed so hard. Life was like that - - a little loose, a little unplanned, parties all over, every Sunday morning a crowd at Diana and Maria’s for hash browns, bacon and Bloody Marys.
      Jane was hired that day at Joske’s of Texas, a department store so huge it wrapped around a neighboring Catholic church like a dog around a bone. This job was to be in the accounting department, so Jane had misgivings, since she still counted on her fingers. But - - after two months of reading classifieds and marking bus schedules, after walking in circles at bus stops to keep mosquitoes off because at seven in the morning it was so hot and sticky they were already out, after riding countless buses to job interviews that went nowhere - - to get any job at all was elating.
Jane ran into the hospital and into the radiation wing where Diana worked. Rounding a corner, she bounded into a woman who held a towel over her mouth. She was in her thirties, classy, in an ivory dress. Instinctively, Jane smiled wide and said, “Hi!” The woman’s eyes widened and stared back with a horror and despair so chilling, Jane’s breath stopped. For both their sakes, Jane ran.

      In the staff room over coffee, Diana explained that the woman had cancer of the tongue, her tongue was huge and hideous, and she would soon die of it. Diana slammed her cup down on the Formica table. Coffee spilled across the table and dripped down the chrome leg to the floor. “I hate my job,” Diana said. “I hate it, I hate it.”

      Jane hated it for her, hated that the woman had to have the horror in her eyes and hated that she had seen it and could do nothing about it, as she and the woman stared at each other below the random ax. She told herself to appreciate her own smile, her fine white teeth, her reasons for smiling before the ax fell on her, too.

      The Joske’s job only lasted four hours. The boss trained Jane, pointing to bookkeeping records as she talked. Jane nodded and said, “Uh-huh.”

      “Now then, Jane, tell me what each of these columns of figures signifies.”

      “Uh, well, this is for balance, this is for credits, and this is for dee-bits.”

      With shock waves barely concealed in her eyes, the boss said, “Debits, Miss Baker.”

      That night Jane explained to Diana and Maria that when lunch came, she walked out and never walked back.

      “Without a word?” asked Maria.

      “I was too embarrassed. Jeez, all I wanted to do when she showed me the next bunch of figures was point and say: ‘Here be dragons.’”

      Maria said Jane should be demoted to junior high math and appointed herself her teacher. She said to pretend her hands were flash cards and asked Jane how much was fifteen times a thousand, and Jane said she must be kidding.

      Diana pointed her finger under Jane’s nose and said, “Tell me, if a carrot is more orange than an orange, has the carrot or the orange been misnamed?”

      When Jane said, “Maybe the word orange has appropriated the definition which more properly belongs to the word carrot,” Diana said Jane had bad math and good words.

      “Let’s drink to that,” she said.

      The three of them saluted each other, waving their beer cans through the air. “To bad math and good words.”

      “To bad math and good words.”

      Low afternoon sunlight filtered in through the window and banana tree outside, casting dusky light and frond shadows on the cool Spanish tiles of the kitchen floor.

      Jane watched Diane and Maria cutting up the peppers they had bought at the downtown market. Hot pepper juice ran down their hands and paring knives and glistened on their fingers until the skin peeled, but, determined and unafraid, they sliced the burning peppers.

      When they finished, they poured the fiery hot sauce into Mason jars, and it rolled in swiftly, thickly, where it waited like lava to burn their mouths through eggs and menudo. Diane and Maria named it Three Sot Hotsauce in honor of the three of them, giving Jane credit for nothing, she felt, her with her sissy fingers folded round a beer can.

Sylvia Herrera had a screened-in porch. On steamy, sticky nights, mosquitoes buzzed outside. Flowery vines pushed dark shapes against the screen and perfumed the porch, where they lay, sweating on her sheets. Sylvia Herrera was smooth as cream. In Jane’s arms, Sylvia’s body baked. Her touch on Jane’s thighs made them steam. Sylvia stretched open her legs. Jane’s fingers peeled apart the layers of Sylvia’s swollen lips, like a mango, to the seed. After Sylvia’s transported face, after her orgasm and woman’s moans, then Jane’s. Back and forth they went, from being lover to lovee, juicy and swollen as the red berries that nudged against the porch screen. They stickied up the sultry nights, those tropic nights, teeth bared and eyes rolling.

      Teresa Simon meet Jane for lunch on riverboats plying the San Antonio River, where it cut through the heart of the city. Jane danced down stone steps to Teresa, who waved to her from he flagstones by the green river. To the music of Mexican guitars they ate, their knees touching under small tables, sparks flying from their eyes and thighs. Teresa ate heartily, but Jane never ate enough, too dazzled by Teresa and the setting, by love of booze, cigarettes and Dexedrine, too tyrannized by fear of fat.

      Rita Bright wore sunglasses inside and lived with her grandmother but stayed all over town with other people, with no plans for the next day. She took Jane to a dimly-lit, old house with closet doors open and clothes hanging out, smelling like mothballs, with hi-fis playing hot jazz at top decibel, where they hung out and partied with Beats, drag queens, pimps, prostitutes, half of whom Jane learned were lesbian, too, and unidentified characters from San Antonio’s underworld. Their cadaverous kingpin said Jane was the best thing since Prohibition, so fresh-faced and candid. He said: “Rita, she’s the best girl you ever had.” Rita hitched her collar, acted cool and said, “Yeah, she’s gonna stay that way, too.”

      Diane and Maria said to stay away from Rita Bright, said Teresa Simon was okay, said: “Sylvia Herrera’s the tops; sweet and wholesome, just like you - - good for you.”

      Jane, she just loved everybody.

      Jane and Louis Potter dined on peas and baked chicken, they made eyes and sighs, they charmed, chatted and cha-cha’d. They were at his office party being Louis Potter and the fabulous Susan Deering together. Ha, ha, so suave, so chic. How they torched each other on the dance floor, how they made bright chitchat at the table, not neglecting to cast each other knowing looks, more knowing than anyone imagined, double agents they. Such a clean-cut young couple, with a hint of naughtiness, “un scintilla de boudoir,” as someone put it. Louis was so gallant, Susan so alluring. Louis’s boss clapped him on the shoulder, man to man, and said he was a lucky fellow. The boss’s wife thought Louis quite a catch and Susan such a darling, who wore her Chanel No. 5 with such tasteful discretion.

      How successful they were, how restless. How they left before the office party was over, hurried, laughing, to his car and sped to a gay bar as fast as they could, for a fix. Louis told Jane where he kept a flask of Scotch. She poured drinks into tiny pewter cups. Louis drank and said, “The boss told me we were the sexiest couple there. I had to bite my tongue not to tell him the sexiest couple was a couple of queers.”

      Jane commented that it shouldn’t have to be like this.

      Louis and Jane fell silent, trying to imagine the impossible. Outside the car windows, tantalizing city lights offered adventures of the possible, like the burn of Scotch in your throat.

      Fernando’s Hideaway was blooming with tropical flowers. Carlos Vega was sitting at a table with Teresa Simon and Garnet, waiting for Louis. Jane and Louis joined them, and they took their beers to the patio, where, under paper lanterns, they sat on a low stone wall overlooking the river, which reflected back up to them the lights from the hotels, bars and restaurants that lined it along the Paseo del Rio¢, River Walk, in the flower-scented night. Teresa took Jane’s pills away, but Jane found someone to sell her more.

      Early in the morning, as she headed home from Fernando’s and from Teresa, Jane could no longer ignore her hunger and walked down shaded Brahan Boulevard to busy Broadway and a tiny Toddle House coffee shop. Her high heels clicked on the wet pavement, echoing in the still night. A cool mist bathed her face. She was wired and wined.

      The Toddle House had room for only a counter, and the counter sat only eight. Electric with good will and one-liners and without much trying to, Jane got the other diners and the short order cook laughing at her Joske’s story and begging her to tell it to each new night owl who came in during those deep night hours.

      “Now what was it you said again?”

      “Let her have some coffee first.”

      “Here’s a donut, too.”

      “Just coffee, thanks.”

      “Now what was it you said to your boss?”

      “Dee-bits. I said dee-bits.”

      They doubled in laughter, pounded the counter with their fists. Jane laughed with them, then paused at the door before leaving, surveying her fellow ships in the night.

      “If you think I say ‘em bad,” she said, “you ought to see how I do ‘em.”

      What affinity, what fun. Life was still a jukebox, but up the street, where dark foliage stood in jumbled silhouette against the graying sky, and smelled sweet and rain-washed, Jane heard cryptic messages brushing the night every time the foliage rustled.

     Diana and Maria’s balcony seemed far up and the tree slender. How could she have forgotten her keys? She set her Toddle House cheeseburger on the ground by the tree, slipped off her high heels, dropped them by the cheeseburger, pulled her black sheath dress around her waist, held her purse in her mouth and shinnied up the tree. Tiptoeing through Diana and Maria’s bedroom, where they were sleeping, to her own room, Jane changed to Levis and tennis shoes, tiptoed back through Diana and Maria’s bedroom to the balcony, climbed down the tree, picked her high heels off the ground, stuck them into the waistband of her Levis, held the cheeseburger in her mouth and shinnied up the tree a second time. Tiptoeing to her room, she ate the cheeseburger.
 
     The next morning, Diana and Maria slipped on pieces of lettuce and tomato on the bedroom floor. Diana flew into Jane’s room, with her left nylon taped on and the other one collapsing around her right ankle, demanding to know where the vegetable garden had come from. Jane told her, and Diana shook the Scotch tape dispenser at her and asked, “Why didn’t you just open the front door from the inside once you were in?”

      Jane said, “I really didn’t think of it till now.”

      “Maybe you’d better start thinking more, teen queen,” said Diana.
      The next day, Maria got off duty and went straight to the WAC Shack, that fabled beer bar on Fort Sam for WACs only. From there, she came home and grimly cleaned her way through the living room, washing sticky spots off the coffee table as though she were washing up sin, sweeping up dust storms with the broom. Diana and Jane hunched on the couch, trying to act like they didn’t notice, knowing that was what Maria wanted. Even when Maria attacked the Venetian blinds behind them, wielding the broom only inches from their heads, they fixed their eyes on each other and stiffly pretended to be interested in talking about the news of the day, like the Bay of Pigs.

      More than anything, Maria had wanted the Good Conduct Medal. She wanted it because she was a good soldier who, though she had been assigned to army typing pools from day one after boot camp, poured into her duties her patriotism and earnestness. Only Diana and Jane knew how she coveted that medal. Maria played it down for fear other people would laugh if they knew. Jane knew how that was - - Diana trying to act unbreakable but never able to stop her heart from wrenching at the misfortunes of others - - Jane herself with her love of courtesy, her burning after abstract virtues even after learning these were chuckled at.

      Maria had lost her Good Conduct Medal two nights earlier, when Winnie Butts, the bartender, took out Stacey, a new recruit, got her drunk, brought her back to Fort Sam, parked her red convertible in the WAC barracks parking lot and started making out with her. Stacey was so drunk she hardly knew whether she was in the parking lot or the Acme Bar. Maria was due to report in as Corporal of the Watch, but when she saw what was happening in Winnie’s car, tried to get Stacey out and into the barracks. Winnie Butts just sat there, smiling dumbly, rubbing her hands over Stacey, not understanding or caring, just wanting her treats. Because of this, Maria was late for duty, and that one bad mark, she was told, would prevent her from getting the Good Conduct Medal she was to have been awarded the following week. The recruit, Stacey, was confined to isolation, where she awaited dishonorable discharge for moral turpitude. Sergeants Rusty and Scaggs, fixtures at Nan Grinder’s gay martini parties, had turned her in as a homosexual.

      Maria rattled the blinds with the broom. Diana stopped pretending to discuss the Bay of Pigs, said she could wring the army’s neck, murder Rusty and Scaggs, said she wanted to do something but there was never anything to do. She went to the kitchen and brought back three beers. That was all there was to do.

      Three carloads went in a caravan from Sylvia Herrera’s barbeque to Stein’s Club, a.k.a. the Grove, ten miles outside of San Antonio on the Fredericksburg Highway, winding up and down the Hill Country, where live oak forests, indistinguishable in the night, exuded smells of earth and river water. The car radios blared - - “Here we go looby-loo! Here we go looby-li! Here we go looby-loo, on a Saturday night!”

      Sylvia told Jane to stop sitting in her lap like a broomstick, to sit back and relax. Jane said that was physically impossible - - she was wearing Sylvia’s own tiny jeans on, remember? Nan Grinder had had the shakes ever since she heard about Stacey’s impending dishonorable discharge, and she had dropped a plate of ribs in Jane’s lap at the barbeque, so Sylvia had taken Jane inside to her bedroom where she pushed and shoved her into a pair of her own skin-tight Levis. Jane asked how come Sylvia could slip in and out of them so easy and she couldn’t. Sylvia said, “You’re skinny, but look at your hipbones, so wide apart, just made for having babies.”

      Jane said if God was so great, why didn’t God give them to somebody who’d use them. Nan muttered to herself that maybe she should have used hers.

      The Grove sat two miles off the highway, at the end of a dirt road, set in a tangle of live oak and thickets. It was owned by two crusty buckets, Imogene and Edna, ages seventy-one and –two, lovers thirty years, who paid the vice squad and the Texas Liquor Control Board plenty to leave them alone, because the law knew the Grove was the only place in Bexar County where queers danced together. If they could catch them at it, they could catch a big night’s haul - - arrest a hundred or so of them for being themselves and therefore acting illegally.

      In the barroom up front, Imogene and Edna sat playing endless games of pinochle and watching for police to pull up outside, watching for infringements of the rules inside. The rules were: No getting too loud. No going two to the restroom. No getting quarrelsome. No getting too drunk to stand up. Break these rules and be quickly eighty-sixed or, worse, exiled from the Grove for two weeks.

      Winnie Butts sat with Imogene and Edna. She smiled and waved at Jane and her party as they entered. Few responded, and only then with a mumble. Maria nodded curtly. A shadow flickered across Winnie’s eyes, and Jane imagined a brontosaurus, barely aware of its existence, much less anything else’s, realizing for a moment that it had not been a good thing to step on and crush its own egg, then forgetting and going on grazing.
      The larger back room, the dancing room, was crowded. Couples jostled on the dance floor, and extra chairs were crammed in at the long tables that surrounded it.

      A wan Carlos Vega came over and said that Louis was arrested two nights ago, on the River Walk, for soliciting. Jane remembered that was the night of Louis’s office party, while she was leaving them laughing at the Toddle House.

      With time, booze and the jukebox, people’s moods shifted up. Except for Nan Grinder, who chain-smoked off to herself at the end of a table and would not dance. Sylvia had to sneak into the restroom every time Jane had to go, so she could help her work those tight Levis up and down. Word went around that they were going down on each other in the restroom.

      Garnet slid into a chair next to Jane and hissed, “What do y’all mean going two to the bathroom - - do you two sluts want to get the Grove closed down?”

      At that moment, Imogene appeared at the passageway to the dance room. The bandanna she had had around her neck was sticking out of her shirt pocket. This was The Sign. Police coming. All eighty revelers scrambled to rearrange themselves heterosexually. Lesbians sat on gay men’s laps and whispered sweet nothings. On the dance floor, gay men and lesbians uncoupled from their same-sex partners and, without missing a beat, twirled into male-female couples gliding across the floor to the bossa nova by the time the police appeared at the door.

      The four policemen picked their way around the room, glaring and staring, seeking the lipstick kiss on a woman’s cheek, a man’s fingertips touching another man’s under the table, or, by accident, on top of it; seeking women in drag among these happy couples playing the heterosexual charade - - except for Nan Grinder, who pushed her chair away from the table and cast pitiful glances to the police, screaming with her eyes: “I am a stranger here. I wandered in off the highway and found myself among homosexuals. After you leave, I’ll leave, too.”

      Maria was drunk and sullen. She swallowed her drinks head back and squinted at the police. The flashing Wurlitzer whirred from the bossa nova record to a Ray Charles. Maria sang along with it, belting it out: “Hit the road, Jack, and don’t you come back no more, no more, no more, no more! Hit the road, Jack, and don’t you come back no more!”

      Ray Davis, in whose lap she sat, swallowed hard as the police fixed their gaze on them. The police sergeant turned to walk toward Ray and Maria. The happy Wurlitzer flashed its rainbow colors. Maria’s favorite lines were coming up again, and she opened her mouth, about to sing them at the sergeant, when Ray took her chin in his hand said, “Give a guy a break, sweetheart. I’ve said ten times I’m sorry,” and kissed her.
      Maria instantly understood and looking into Ray’s eyes, said, “How could I stay mad at you, you mighty man?” and embraced him.

      Jane could see the police sergeant’s jaw muscles clench and unclench.
This time the gays had won the Game. The police stalked out but said they would be back.
      After the bar closed, and Diana and Maria got home, Maria ran up and Claremont Street, yelling she was going to kill those fuckheads, those Judas army sergeants, turning Stacey in to make their own queer asses look straight. It took Diana, Sylvia and Jane to chase her down and keep her in the house until she passed out. She stayed in bed all the next day. Every now and then, they would hear the Sunday paper rustle from her bedroom, or the toilet flush, and that was all they heard from Maria.

      After awhile, in late afternoon, Diana and Jane mixed salty dogs in the kitchen, then sat down in the floor and harmonized on songs that rolled out of them, one after the other - - She was poor but she was honest - - On the wings of a snow white dove - - High sheriff and police riding after me and feeling like I’ve gotta travel on.

      Diana leaned her head back against the doorjamb and closed her eyes as she sang and seemed to Jane to be beseeching something.

      They kept the singing up until Garnet called that evening mad as hell at Nan. Garnet said she had driven Nan home from the Grove, and then Nan had refused to let her come in. From behind her locked door, Nan had vowed that neither Garnet nor any lesbian now any gay man would ever set for inside her house again.

      “Hellfire,” said Garnet, “if she’d just say what I do about her fiancé being killed in a car wreck, she’d be okay.”

      Nan not only kept her vow not to let them in, she receded into her house to the point she never came out. For the first couple of weeks, she left to go to work or get groceries. After that, she paid someone to bring her groceries. Then she stopped going to work. One afternoon some of the women from the gay bar circuit went to empty her trash that was piled up and reeking on her back porch. Garnet pushed a note under the door. She had drawn little valentines around it. The closest Jane ever saw Garnet come to crying was when she heard Nan rip the note up, then push the pieces back under the door. Nan said, “Get the hell out of here.” She ran back and forth through her house. Her old friends stopped trying to visit. Every now and then they would drive by and could see the living room curtain open a little, then drop, and they knew it was Nan.

      Diana told the bunch of them as they whiled away an afternoon at the Acme, that Garnet had informed Nan’s bosses at civil service that Nan went crazy because it was the tenth anniversary of her fiancé’s death in the flaming wreckage. Diana said that Garnet really had said ‘flaming wreckage.’

      Garnet said that if Nan never had the good sense to tell the folks at work that that’s why she wasn’t married, then she, Garnet, would tell them for her. After she did just that, Nan’s bosses and colleagues at federal civil service replied to Garnet that that was funny - - Nan had always told them she was in love with a divorced Catholic who couldn’t remarry and wouldn’t live in sin.
      Garnet thought a minute and said, “Well, that little sneak.”
      The self-entombed Nan Grinder became a legend and was spoken of as though she were dead, while the stories grew up around her, while the jukebox kept playing at the Acme Bar and Ray Davis kept popping one-liners and dumb Winnie Butts kept thinking she was charming. The dramas and comedies kept grinding on, at Fernando’s, the Acme, the Grove, where even petty domestic squabbles got their only public recognition - - so they were played up for all they were worth, at the bars, the tables, on the dance floor - -couples quarreling, couples making up - - playing to their friends who watched from the edge of their seats.

      Jane partied harder, harder, driven to party, driven to keep moving. She had a job as a file clerk, her own apartment and a fifty-name list of people who liked to party. The days and nights blurred past, one night, one party, one crowd of people the same as any other, the jukebox jangling. Some Sunday mornings Jane never knew where the gang would end up or which gang she would be with. Whether King William Street, tropical flowers and banana trees, expanses of green St. Augustine grass in city parks lined by mid-Victorian houses going to seed, or offbeat beanburger joints, she was enthralled - - on this street on some morning, after some party somewhere, going to some place for breakfast with some people, getting a little lost in San Antonio, suspended above the grid of it.

      There was something vague in the hot, scented air, some dissatisfaction rising. Piggy banks were not enough to make the roots Maria wanted. Diana was changing job plans and hobbies almost daily, looking, not finding, and now saying she wanted to move to California. Jane wondered why she wanted to do a thing like that. San Antonio was as good a place to rot as any.
Bee’s apartment really was one. The cement floor was painted green, the cement walls red. Bee brought out wine and said she was haggling with the city to get her alley named Bee Lane. Her guests sat on apple crates and drank a new wine called Thunderbird from Mel-Mac cups and Mason jars, and they watched Carlos Vega paint a gorgeous bird of paradise along one of the walls. Seabiscuit, the Great Dane laptop, slept at their feet, only because the humans sat too low and with their knees up too high for her to get in their laps.

      Bee pulled weeds growing up through the woodwork, picked caterpillars and threw them out the door into the alley, and said, When Teresa Simon asked her what she was doing, “Cleaning house.”

      Rita Bright cooked paregoric, tincture of opium, in a teaspoon.

      Teresa Simon took a slow drag off her Players, blew smoke in Rita’s face and said, “It was shitty of you to tell your sweet grandmother that this sweet Jane was taking you to hear the ‘Messiah’ at the church, but she needed to unlock the paregoric for you first, you had the runs so bad.”

      Carlos kept painting but said, “Rita, you dirty dog.”

      Jane hung her head, remembering how Rita’s grandmother’s face had lit up, and she’d asked Jane where it was being performed, and Jane, feeling guilty because the last thing they were going to do was go to hear the ‘Messiah,’ mumbled something or other into her shirt collar. She resolved to find a performance somewhere in San Antonio and drag Rita to it.

      Rita shook out the length of rubber tubing and said, “Go check your answering service, Teresa. Your johns have probably been calling all day.”

      Teresa turned to Jane, took another drag and blew the smoke away from Jane’s face. “I mean what I said earlier, Jane,” she said. “I want you to come to my place and let me cook for you, and we can talk about books and music, which so many people in our milieu have no interest in.” Then Teresa slipped her smooth hand inside Jane’s blouse and said, “You take too many pills, sweetie. Your heart’s beating like a machine gun.”

      Ray Davis looked at Rita and said, “This baby’s so naïve, she really believes Teresa is only checking her heart.”

      Teresa drew her hand out of Jane’s blouse and said, “Oh, for chrissakes. Don’t let them bug you, Jane.”

      “Oh, they don’t,” Jane said.

      But they did.

      “Say, what’s that book over there with the naked lady on it? Why, Bee, how risqué,” said Ray.

      Bee threw a last fat caterpillar out the door and brought the paperback over. “That’s my book,” she said proudly. “I found it in a regular bookstore. It’s a book, about us, about homosexual women.”

      Teresa took the book, scanned it, made a face like it stunk and handed it to Jane. ‘The Lesbian in Society,’ Jane read, ‘a problem that must be faced. Detailed histories of the third sex. Copyright 1962.’

      “It just came out,” said Bee, like ‘The Children’s Hour.’ A bunch of us from the Acme went to see ‘The Children’s Hour’ seven times. There we were, right there on the movie screen and in the movie lobby, right there with heterosexual people who could see that we were real people, too, just like them. I was so proud.” Bee poured more Thunderbird all around, said, “At the end, when Shirley MacLaine hangs herself, I just knew all the straight people were so sorry.”

      Jane winced, and so did Teresa. Oh, God, pathetic.

      Ray watched Rita cook paregoric. Jane said she’d like to see bookstores full of - - what? - - true life gay stories, she guessed.

      Ray slapped his head and said, “She wants the world.”

      “Well, you never know,” said Teresa.

      “Yeah, said Carlos, “remember when we were little kids, and there was no TV, right? Well, I used to say to my mother, wouldn’t it be nice if the radio had a little screen so we could see as well as hear it? And she said that was a beautiful idea but it’d never happen.” He added a new color to the bird of paradise and said, “Louis got me on the costume crew for the Fiesta farce. I’ve got some ideas. You’ll see.”

      Rita Bright blew on the steaming paregoric in the spoon and said to Jane, “Okay, Miss Try-Anything-Twice.”

      “Don’t, Jane,” said Teresa.

      Jane let Rita tie her arm with the rubber tubing and shoot paregoric into her vein.

      Even Rita let down her cool and gasped, “Oh, shit,” when the blood ran out of Jane’s face, and she staggered forward from the toxic overdose of opium. Teresa caught her, and Jane threw up in Teresa’s white capris just as her knees buckled. Teresa and Rita led Jane to a bed, where Jane collapsed, too sick to talk, too sick to laugh, too sick to drift, and they applied wet towels to Jane’s clammy, heavily perspiring face.

      Even Jane was scared, until she felt better. Then she was once more indestructible and capable of tossing her fate to indifferent winds.
Jane and Louis Potter stood on the ledge of the Olmos Dam in Olmos Park in the heart of San Antonio. In the wall of the dam was an opening which led to a tunnel. Workers reached this opening by inching along a narrow ledge that had only enough space for the heels of their shoes, and by flattening their backs and arms against the dam wall.
      When Jane and Louis got past a certain point, and if the floodgates were open, there was nothing but fast, angry water boiling fifteen straight down beneath their overhanging feet. If they slipped, they would surely fall in the water. If they fell in the water they would surely drown. But if they moved painstakingly, and if they kept flattened against the wall and resisted the urge to run or look down, they would probably make it to the opening in the dam wall. Once there, they could grab hold of the iron grate and swing themselves through the opening to explore the inky, dripping tunnel to its end, under a street somewhere in the park. A ghostly light from a distant streetlamp shone dimly on the damp iron bars of the end grate, while, in the pitch black tunnel, creatures they could not see skittered past their shoes, cobwebs surprised their faces.

      Jane was always restless, and Louis had been getting more reckless everyday, ever since his arrest for soliciting, Nan’s paranoiac self-entombment and Stacey’s dishonorable discharge. Now he said what the hell.

      This was their third time to come to the tunnel. This time Louis had brought a reluctant trick, a man Jane did not know. They went first through the opening. Jane stood at the opening and heard the sucking sounds. Suddenly afraid, she wanted to be back on the embankment, safe with Sylvia Herrera, who would not go through the tunnel, who asked Jane why she pushed her luck, asked her why she insisted on wasting her brains. Jane really wanted Sylvia to stop asking.

      To be safe on the embankment, Jane had to traverse the ledge one more time. She heard the water roaring below her as she inched her way back, her shirt scraping along the rough concrete of the dam wall. She knew if she made it this time, she would not make it the next.

      She understood she was mortal and would someday die, and that the experience of dying would be as real to her as this of standing on the ledge, listening to rushing water and to sweet-smelling trees rustling in the night.

      Patty, the new face from Galveston, lay on Jane’s floor by Jane’s apple crate bookcase. Her hands moved artfully from fingering the straw on Jane’s Chianti bottle to fingering Jane’s nipples. Patty was toothsome and appealing, but Jane, remembering her new resolve, broke away from Patty and looked out the window, searching the sky for A Sign From Above but saw only the same bougainvillea hanging over the same old street.

      Turning to face Patty, Jane announced that she had decided to wait from now on for the right woman.

      Patty’s eyes opened wide. She burst out laughing. “Oh, noble youth,” she said.

      Jane laughed with Patty, wiping away tears that came as much from crying as laughing. How confusing it all was.

      She would think about it later, after Fiesta.

      Fiesta San Antonio, was an annual, weeklong April blast, the Mardi Gras of San Antonio, which was inaugurated by the Battle of Flowers Parade on a Saturday afternoon and followed by the lantern-lit River Parade at night, with floats built on riverboats. Gay men waited on Fernando’s patio to shout, “Seafood! Seafood!” to the embarrassed sailors riding on the U.S. Navy float, while the sailors looked the other way and tried to pretend it wasn’t happening, the same way they themselves yelled at embarrassed women in the streets who tried to act like they liked it.

      The last parade of Fiesta was the torch-lit Flambeau a week later, a reiteration of the Battle of Flowers parade but at night. One last time the lofty, intricate floats of the Duchesses glided down Broadway - - perfume and gossamer, burnished gold and shifting lights, with torches flaming - - the Duchess of the Court of the Orchids of Dawn, the Duchess of the Court of the Black Velvet Midnights, the Duchess of the Court of the Scented Gardens of Reverie, the Duchess of the Court of the Luminous Phantoms, and, preceded by heralds, the Queen of the Fiesta, the Duchess of the Court of Hovering Butterflies.

      Jane sighed. Ah, poetry and fantasy!

      Each night of Fiesta, revelers crowded the narrow bougainvillea-covered streets of La Villita, serenaded by mariachis and by the oompah-pah band in the German Beer Garden. Each night in La Villita, at the Arneson River Theatre, was held a traditional parody of the Fiesta. The audience sat on rock benches, packing the amphitheater. Across the lantern-lit San Antonio River, a stately woman wearing a crimson ambassadorial sash across her chest read the Presentation of the Courts and Duchesses from a scroll excessively weighted with hanging seals and ribbons. A herald appeared, dressed in oversized livery, blew a trumpeting call on his kazoo, and the stately woman read out each presentation.

      To cheers and laughter, the Duchesses descended stone steps down the amphitheater’s center aisle and crossed a footbridge across the river to the stage - - The Duchess of the Court of the Allergic Phantoms, wrapped in mosquito netting stuffed with thorny flowers, sneezing her way to the stage, leaving a trail of wadded Kleenex from hands painted to look like hives. - -
The Duchess of the Court of the Sinking Riverboats, all plastic barnacles and lopsided clothes that made her look like a capsized tugboat - - The Duchess of the Court of the Sots of Fiesta, a great, frowsy woman whose dingy bra strap kept falling from her sleeveless, wrinkled, mustard-splotched ball gown, dragging behind her a six-foot trail of clattering beer cans and empty fifths - - The Duchess of the Court of the Odorous Gardens of Ostentation, a woman swathed head to toe in ratty boas on which were pinned Limburger boxes and vials of dime store cologne.

      And then came the Duchess of the Court of the Hovering Vice Squad. Only those in the know knew that this was Carlos’s work, and that this was Sylvia Herrera descending the steps in black leotards, knee-high black boots, policeman’s cap and scarlet cape, carrying in one hand handcuffs and in the other a cigar box marked ‘Bribes, please.’ Fitted over her lovely breasts were plastic cones that emitted the sounds of earsplitting sirens, and flashing red lights that swept across the amphitheater and the faces in the audience.

      Jane held her throat, her heart hopped so high.

      To the stage came five heralds, five kazoos to trumpet forward the Queen of Revelers - - the Duchess of the Court of the Hangovers of Dawn. Only those in the gay bar circuit knew that the Queen was not really a woman but Louis Potter in drag, his face covered with a Mardi Gras mask, gowned in gaudy sequins, wearing a picture hat spilling over with plumes and ice bags. With one gloved hand he held and drank from a Bloody Mary, with the other he sprinkled Nescafe coffee over the crowd.

      The next weekend, a crowd gathered at Diane and Maria’s, enjoying hash browns, bacon, eggs, Bloody Marys and Three Sot Hotsauce, and having ennui. Fiesta was over. It was mid-morning and already eighty-two, the sticky heat pressing down so heavy it carried in it the hush of anticipation, the way the air gets profoundly still before a thunderstorm begins to stir in the leaves. How could they move in this heat, and what could they do but watch birds hop across the dusty terracotta birdbath? Garnet said they could knock the birds off with pebbles and give themselves points.

      “Nan did,” Garnet said. “Only she used rocks. Come home from work and right away, after mixing up martinis, go out to her back porch and chonk rocks at the little birds, trying to bust their little heads. ‘Course the little birds flew away. Nan never winced, never smiled, ever nothing. Just grim, grim, grim.”
No one spoke for a time, just glanced at one another and then down at the ground.

      Jane felt there was surely something hanging in the oppressive air. It did not seem to be rain, but she wasn’t sure. It had to break soon.

      No one knew quite what to do, so Jane suggested the Grove for an after-Fiesta fiesta. Sure, okay, everyone said, all right.

      They went in two cars. The parking lot was already getting full. They were in time to get cold beers and walk around in the thicket out back before it got dark, before Jane, her sister Diana, Maria, Louis, Carlos, Sylvia, Teresa, Rita, Garnet, Rita, Bee and all the rest of them went inside to drink at the long tables, feed the flashing Wurlitzer and everybody sing at the top of their lungs when certain songs came on, like “Hit the Road, Jack.”

NOTE: “Cheers, Everybody!” was first published by Los Angeles’ Clothespin Fever Press in 1987 in the book, Shitkickers and Other Texas Stories, then subsequently re-printed by Southern Methodist University Press in 1990 in the anthology Common Bonds: Stories by and about Modern Texas Women. (Whether or not they still lived there.)
- - Carolyn Weathers, Long Beach, 2008