club mary's was in sarasota( it's now the cheetah club). it wasn't immediately attractive to me. i had other fish to fry. i'd moved to sarasota to attend new college. first day there i got a phone call. tom, a peripheral carastro/ogden character, was calling. he was over at the asolo theater on the grounds of the ringling museum(in fact, part of the new college campus had belonged to john ringling). he was there on a student work/study internship from fsu. he wanted to have a drink. i wanted to have a drink too. things hadn't been going so well for me there on campus(that's really another story altogether).
tom & i repaired to the grog shoppe, a very very dark daytime drinking kind of place right on tamiami trail only a few blocks from campus. tom & i began repairing there every day. we always seemed to find a way to make that happen. we seemed to need lots of fixing.
tom was gay. he didn't know i knew that. in p'cola, he'd made the incredibly bad decision to tell biffer(rulaine)that he was so she'd quit pestering him for sex. i think rulaine had made a conscious decision to fuck all the guys in the ogden crowd. i have to say i'm glad i wasn't part of the ogden crowd. poor tom was. in an act of desperation, he fessed up. naturally, rulaine processed this as an insult to what she considered her immense sex appeal(she was the kind of woman who thought she could "save" a gay man from himself just by fucking him; a mirror image of, say, mike johnson, who felt that any lesbian would be turned into a raging nymphomaniac just by sleeping w/him). rulaine told folks in confidence what tom had told her in confidence. i was told in confidence. i think these folks had a little too much confidence considering the cast of characters we're dealing w/here.
so... i knew tom was gay. i had no problem w/it. my new roommate at new college(frank) was gay & out. there were lots of gays on campus. i'd been spending a lot of time w/dondi & nicki pippins at the red garter the year before i'd left p'cola. i had no problem w/gay. i did have a problem w/gays in the closet. more specifically, i had a problem w/tom not knowing that i knew. it made for uncomfortable situations. i would wince every time tom would make a male-like comment about some woman. tho he was never as bad as bobo & grady hooting & hollering at women from the car, he SOUNDED like them. it became a grotesque parody of sexual identity. it went on for a few months. i was actually taking my oath of silence seriously. club mary's was the final straw.
he insisted on going there for his 21st b'day. we'd driven by it many times & i'm sure i'd wax poetic about strip clubs. we'd taken to drinking in various places around town, making a kind of circuit that began at the grog shoppe, proceeded to the broadway bar(a continental boiler maker was de rigeur here: a heineken & a shot of courvoisier), cut downtown to the gator bar on main, & ended up at the bahi hut later in the evening. usually, by the gator bar, we weren't feeling any pain or much of anything else either.
that's when he brought it up. "fuck, let's go to club mary's." "ok, sure. sometime." "no no no no, i mean now." i hadn't seen this coming. i did not want to go to a strip joint w/a closeted gay man. "it's your b'day. we'll go some other day. let's just drink tonight." "it's MY birthday & i want to go to club mary's...let's go." he stood up. what could i say? he was driving. we went.
the place was pretty much just what i expected. dingy, neon-lit. a blue strata of smoke undulated in the air. there was the requisite pool table & central florida rough necks huddled around it. it was not an atmosphere to put anyone not a regular at ease. we paid way too much to get in & way too much for the beers. i was on a student budget & this kind of extravagance was usually reserved for several cases of beers. tom was paying for most of it but still. it just wasn't right.
we hadn't taken two gulps of beer before one of the girls came up to see if we wanted a table dance. "no thanks," i blurted out quickly. the fake smile(more a grimace)dropped from her heavily made up face in an instant. "yeah, well...that's how we make our money here," she spit out & turned away. she walked directly to the bar & began gesticulating to the bartender. i hadn't thought we'd have much fun here but this was shaping up into something else altogether. i remembered that college kid in the boat bar in key west. i wasn't eager to explore that experience.
within a few minutes, another girl approached the table. the blank bovine-like expression on her face belied the implacable nature of her request: "table dance?" tom was quick to agree. i noticed he'd begun to sweat, his freckled brow was spotted w/beads of it. she stood at the table, her feet never really doing anything. she swayed from side to side. she had faraway eyes, vaguely focused on something on the other side of the room. her lingerie didn't look particularly clean & when she pulled the front of it up to expose her pendulous breasts & stretched marked gut, it was hard not to just bolt from the table. tom looked stricken.
what seemed to last an eternity ended suddenly. i'd been wondering if this was going to seriously impact my sex drive when i realized she was standing there no longer moving & the music had stopped. "that was nice," i choked out. "well how about a nice tip?," she snarled. tom pulled out some cash & handed it to her. i don't think he looked at how much he was giving her. he just wanted her gone. she stood looking down on us for a few seconds. "numbnuts," she muttered w/scorn. she walked slowly away clutching tom's cash in her hand.
us? we moved a whole lot more quickly getting out of there. i knew i had something i had to do. the next night i let tom know i knew his secret. i was worried he get upset that i'd let his charade go on for so long. he was actually more stunned that it had gotten out. we spent that evening just hashing it out, going over the various betrayals. he had a hard time getting his head around it. this seemed to be a first for him. i wanted to assure him that it wouldn't be the last but it struck me that that wasn't much assurance.
it didn't impact our budding friendship at all. once he was out w/me, he was very out. no more comments about women. i stumbled into my dorm room after a palm court party & found him in bed w/my roommate, frank. we were chatting in the grog shoppe one night & i was musing on what women must feel like when men ogle them. he asked simply, "you want to find out?" we were at my first real gay bar, the first stingers,(no tranny acts) within minutes. i don't remember being ogled. i was a little disappointed.
sometime later that night the male bartender motioned tom over. "hey, your straight friend is over there." tom looked & saw me passed out under a table. this wasn't a new sight for him. "how'd you know he was straight?," he asked the bartender. "honey, are you kidding? dressed like THAT in a gay bar! ha ha ha ha"
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