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“Rihanna!” Audra squealed, and before Patrick could protest, she had grabbed his hand and started pulling him into the bar after her. “It’s a sign,” she said. “Let’s go, boys.”
As he crossed the threshold, Patrick registered the rainbow flag over the door, by which time it was too late to object. Neither Hector nor Corey seemed to have a problem being in a gay bar, and Audra had already taken to their new environs with zest.
“Gays love me,” she informed them. “Can you blame them?”
Patrick could not claim the same ease, and so while Audra sauntered to the front of the line at the bar, he stuck to the wall, practically hiding behind Corey and Hector to avoid anyone recognizing him. It didn’t take long for him to see the flaw in his strategy: People kept looking over anyway because while Corey and Hector weren’t technically famous, being tall, muscular, and conventionally handsome in a gay bar was tantamount to the same thing.
Maybe he was just being paranoid. The simple act of being physically inside a gay bar didn’t mean anything. He was here with Audra and Hector and Corey, after all. He was, arguably, playing wingman to his trainer, whose crush on the actress had become painfully obvious. And his companions seemed to be having a great time, swigging beers, not bothered at all by what their presence here might mean. In fact, Audra seemed to be very much enjoying the attention she was getting from a group of young men who were “just obsessed” with her last film, in which she had played an exotic dancer who vows to solve the murder of her best friend while battling an opioid addiction.
“You were phenomenal,” one of them told her.
“Iconic,” said another.
“So raw and real,” added their friend.
Audra grinned. “My tits looked insane, right?”
“Oh my god, so good!” the first replied. “Did you—”
“I’m bored!” Audra interrupted. “Let’s dance!” And like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, she led the three men over to the cramped dance floor.
Corey waggled his empty beer bottle. “Another?”
“I’ll take another water,” replied Patrick.
“Careful now,” said Corey. “You wouldn’t want to accidentally enjoy yourself.”
“You know what? I’ll take a sparkling water.”
“You’re crazy,” said Hector, throwing one arm around Patrick’s shoulder. “Corey, mine’s a tequila soda.”
“Ah, screw it,” said Patrick. “I’ll have a beer.”
Corey pumped his fist in the air, as if Patrick’s acquiescence to hops was a victory for all Australia, and lumbered toward the bar. Before Patrick knew it, one beer turned to two, and then a third, and it was occurring to him just how long it had been since he’d allowed himself to let loose when Audra returned, without her new companions, and pulled in all three of them with her back toward the dance floor, singing along word-perfectly to Dua Lipa.
“How do you know all the words?” Patrick asked, marveling.
Audra looked at him, stunned. “How do you not?”
Patrick was not intimately familiar with the song currently playing. He didn’t even think he liked the song. But god, to be three beers deep with your closest friends! Or, at least, the closest things you had to friends when you spent your life traveling from set to set.
“I love you guys!” he yelled. Audra laughed, and replied, “Of course you do, you precious thing,” while Corey nearly crushed him in a headlock. “We should do this every night,” Patrick said, at the same time as Hector bellowed: “Shots!”
Some indeterminate time later, the music stopped. All four of them began to protest—surely it was too early for this place to be closing?—until it became clear the dance floor was getting more crowded, not less. Patrick followed the direction of everyone else’s gaze as a spotlight fell on the raised area that Audra’s twinks had been using as a podium just moments before, and which he now realized was a stage.
“Theydies and gentlethems,” uttered a voice over the sound system, “please welcome to the stage your hostess for the night, the beast from the East, she of the gaysian persuasion, the wanker from Sri Lanka, Birmingham’s very own messy Desi…Tamil Nitrate!”
A vision in red and gold took to the stage, spinning and waving so enthusiastically that it took Patrick a moment to notice her full, lush dark beard.
“Yes!” Audra squealed next to him. “Fucking yes! I love drag queens!”
“And we love you right back,” the queen responded via her mic, pointing in Audra’s direction. “Hello, lovely lushes of the Village, my name is Tamil Nitrate, but you can call me Tammy. How are we all doing tonight?” When met with assorted shrieks and hoots in response, Tammy nodded her approval. She spoke with the same voice that’d come through the speakers a moment ago, and Patrick found it somehow all the more charming that Tammy had been announcing herself.
“Now,” she said, “we have got a fantastic show for you tonight, and some amazing queens lined up. But before we begin…I have a little tradition that I like to start each show with.”
She patted herself down in an exaggeratedly lewd manner, eventually retrieving a tiny bottle from her hairy cleavage. “It’s poppers o’clock!” she proclaimed, waving the vial triumphantly in the air.
“Poppers o’clock!” chanted the crowd, clearly composed of regulars. “Poppers o’clock! Poppers o’clock!”
