Mark Findlay
At age twenty-four, Mark Findlay was a part-time bartender at an Irish bar, Mike Riley's, on First Avenue in New York City's East Village. He worked Tuesday and Wednesday nights, Sunday afternoons, and Fridays as the secondary bartender on duty. He had shoulder-length reddish-brown hair and because of him college girls and other young people started to come to the bar to drink, play pool, and play the jukebox. Before this, Mike Riley's had been sort of an old-fashioned neighborhood bar with an older, working-class male crowd. Mark had been permitted by his boss to select music for the jukebox, and he had gotten some Pogues, Clash, U2, and other popular music onto it. He was amiable and considered good-looking, though mostly because of his accent, which was fairly rare among young guys. Mark was from Ireland. He lived in Yonkers with his uncle but eventually got an apartment on East Twelfth Street.
Mark liked to mix odd drinks, but because young people did not like to drink so many odd cocktails he would sometimes invent them fancifully while his fans played pool and then offer what he had made to them for free. This was an acceptable business strategy because it made these kids like the bar and also to drink with abandon, forgetting that they were, in fact, paying good money for at least three-quarters of what they were drinking. He was also tipped very well. Sometimes he had to pay himself for the free drinks he made if he had used expensive liquors to make them.
Once he had an apartment in the East Village, Mark would go out drinking to other bars where some of the relief bartenders also worked, or places the kids who came to his bar went drinking on other nights. Sometimes he would go out to see bands play, because he was often invited by band members to come see their bands.
One Saturday night he was hanging out with a small group of kids drinking beer after a band had played and they all decided to go back to someone's apartment and snort some coke. Mark was thought to be very funny. He pretended to get all crazy on coke and pretend-fought with some of the other boys. He made a subsequent beer run with one of the boys, a kid named Doug, and Doug thought maybe Mark was being flirty on their walk, but, as this flirtiness was only a matter of eye contact and an ambiguous smiling, Doug did not regard it with any certainty. It had not occurred to him that Mark could be gay and he didn't know Mark well enough to have been that comfortable making it clear that he himself was gay. Doug did not hang around all that much with gay guys and often the straight guys his friends were friends with did not pick up on him being gay. But he liked Mark smiling at him and Mark always gave him every third drink free so he enjoyed this attention a little more than he would have with another random straight guy.
When the apartment party was winding down, Doug and Mark ended up walking home together. They bought slices of pizza on St. Mark's and more beer at the corner deli and sat on a stoop talking and drinking. Mark said that there was something about himself that he did not tell people, especially his young friends from the bar, because people might not understand and might not think well of him if they knew what his secret was. Doug thought he guessed what Mark was talking about. They were sitting in a peculiar way—Doug on a step midway up the stoop with his legs spread, forty-ouncer of beer by his side, Mark a few steps down, leaning back against the inside of Doug's leg, pressing back harder every time he reached for the beer. After a while, they wandered back toward Mark's apartment and stood, awkwardly, in front of the building for a while, talking bullshit, Doug very awkward and Mark smiling and blushing.
They kissed once on the lips, chastely, briefly and afraid. Then they kissed, for a while, like two people who were going to have sex, their arms around each other's chest and shoulders, their tongues in each other's mouth, the hardening bulges in their jeans rubbing together electrically. Mark stopped to say he could not let Doug come up to his apartment and, after more kissing, Doug told him they could go to his. Without taking his warm hand off Doug's back, Mark said he had to go upstairs and sleep, had to get up the next day, but he would see Doug around, surely. Doug felt weird and anxious walking the rest of the block to Avenue A. The few people loitering around the street may have noticed he was one of two boys kissing on the street. But maybe, because of Mark's hair, they had not noticed he was a boy. Or maybe they did not see, or maybe care.
Doug was very upset by what had happened. He thought he had somehow done something wrong, or else that Mark was not sure of his sexuality and that kissing him might cause ill effects somewhere down the road.
In fact, Mark could not let Doug upstairs because he had a lot of guns in his apartment that weekend. He had eight semiautomatic rifles lying underneath a plaid flannel sheet on his couch, and several boxes of ammunition as well. He needed to wrap them and pack them into cardboard boxes the next morning so that associates of his uncle could pick them up and ship them out in whatever strange way they had of shipping such things out. He was going to accept two thousand dollars in cash for them and put half of it into his own bank account and take the other half up to his uncle in Yonkers and be done with it all by one o'clock in the afternoon when his Sunday shift at Mike Riley's started. Since it was four-thirty A.M. already, Mark was worried about how tired he'd be. He set his alarm for seven-thirty, lay in bed, masturbated thinking about Doug, and took his short night's sleep.
Mark had emigrated illegally at age seventeen, partly to assist in his uncle's IRA activity and partly because he had always wanted to leave Belfast and live in America. As a bartender he had sometimes allowed himself to be drawn into discussions about Ireland and he was not easily able to repress his opinion but he tried to keep his responses general. This was difficult when he was angry or drunk. Americans did not often understand that it did not matter if the British government was generally democratic or humanitarian or that they no longer enforced discrimination against Catholics; that the violence Americans knew of was almost always attributed to the IRA. The point was, quite simply, that the British had conquered another country and sent their citizens to live there and was now pretending that those citizens were just as Irish as anyone and had a right to self-determination, which meant that his country could be ruled by the British and the British could defend their rule by placing armed soldiers on every street corner of the neighborhood he grew up in—and they could call this democracy and every other civilized nation would pretend that it was, just in order to get along. Even though they knew what kind of imperialists the British were and recognized the rights of people to fight them in Africa and Asia and America and every other place imperialists were no longer wanted by the people they had ruled.
This was, in any case, what Mark felt, and as openly as he would express himself when compelled to say something about it. If anyone should talk about the monstrous rich ignoramuses in Boston or New York who gave money to buy implements of death solely out of some half-remembered asserted loyalty to the shillelagh and the shamrock, Mark would instantly clam the fuck up and shake his head and say he didn't know, it was all terrible.
The next time this boy Doug came into the bar, he was very shy and would not stray very far from his friends. Mark tried to be very friendly and encouraging to him when he came to the bar to buy their drinks but Doug had been somewhat scared off by being sent home alone. After his friends had grown too drunk to play pool well and the crowd had thinned out, they all wandered over to the bar and chose stools and slumped over their drinks. Mark asked for one of Doug's cigarettes even though he had his own and leaned in to ask Doug to light it even though he had his own lighter. He wrote his phone number down on a napkin right in front of Doug and slid it to him and said, "I hope you'll call me." Doug took it, somewhat confused, and put it into his pocket.