Recognizing what we had 40 years ago, today…

Recognizing what we had 40 years ago, today…

When I was an art student in New York & London, I worked part time as a bartender/ waiter at a pub in either, Tribeca or Notting Hill, respectively. It was the perfect job for me. Being in a crowd of people every evening stopped me from feeling lonely, it gave me a chance to meet people and the physical bar counter and furnishing, for example prevented anyone from getting too close. I found relationships with people difficult, at times. I was bashful and withdrawn, and this job brought me out of my shell. I may have been gay but didn’t know it yet. I was experimenting. Growing up among the British landed gentry, and NYC gentiles I didn’t think gay was something I could be. All I knew was my friendships with girls were complicated by the fact that I sometimes wanted to kiss them, and my relationships with boys were complicated by the fact that I often didn’t.

Working in a pub was safe, where my contact with the patrons was confined to innocent banter, jokes and orders thrown across the bar above the high volume of R&B and rock music blasting from the jukebox in the corner.

A few months after I started working there, I arrived at my shift to find an unfamiliar gal leaning against the bar. She was laughing with her friends, a pair of crutches propped against the bar stool. She was the center of attention and clearly known by everyone, although I had never seen her before. Her head was entirely bald, which suited her with his dark skin, and when she hobbled off to the bathroom, I noticed that one of her legs was missing below the knee. A war injury, I’m sure perhaps in one of the wars of the era, like the Vietnam war, lost by Americans 40 years ago.

But the explanation turned out to be more mundane. I had been brought up to believe it was bad manners to ask questions, so it took a bit of eavesdropping before I learned that her name was Mikie, she was a regular, and she hadn’t been in the pub when I started working because she was in the hospital having her lower leg amputated — apparently because of cancer. Soon I started looking for her whenever I arrived. If I saw her approaching the bar, I would pour her drink, anticipating her order, and watch her face light up when I pushed it toward her, immediately. She must have eavesdropped too, because she started calling me by name, waiting for me if I was serving someone else and hanging around, long after I had served her. When I collected beer glasses, she would lope up behind me and put her chin on my shoulder like an overgrown puppy. I would turn my head and kiss her on the cheek, her eyes would crinkle into a smile, and then she would swing around on her crutches and head back to her friends. If she was sitting on a bar stool and I walked past, she would put one arm out and catch me by the waist. “Nicky, my adorable!” she would say.

“Mikie, my beautiful!” I would reply.

I would ruffle her nonexistent hair, and she would grin bashfully and let me go. She never asked anything more of me. It was the gentlest friendship I had ever experienced.

When she returned to the hospital for more operations, I visited her. I would sneak in joints and we would sit on the fire escape, smoking. I never asked her about the cancer, the operations or her prognosis. I didn’t want to be nosy; I figured she would tell me what she wanted to, and the rest was her business, not my bees’ wax.

One evening the landlord of the pub threw a fund-raising event for cancer research. First prize in the raffle was dinner for two at a Michelin-5 star restaurant. By accident or design, Mikie won it. At the end of the evening, she hopped up to me, put her arm around my waist and whispered into my ear, “Will you come with me?”

I saved my tip money so we could take a taxi to the restaurant. Formal attire was required, so Mikie dug out a tie and an outrageous purple and green plaid suit, with kilt, which she wore with the trouser leg, if there was a trouser, I don’t quite remember, tucked into her waistband to hide her stump or the kilt was longer to hide the stump. The restaurant was filled with dapper-looking businessmen dining in bored composure with clients, girlfriends or wives.

Mikie and I felt spot-lit in the middle of the room — the skinny blond guy in a ill-fitting suit or the skinny blonde in a floaty goth dress with multiple ear piercings, don’t quite remember which and the gal in the loud suit with half a leg. It was obvious we didn’t belong, and we milked it for all it was worth.

The waiters gave us special treatment, perhaps relieved by the break in the monotony, showering us with attention as if aware that this was a once-in-a-lifetime event, which it was. The meal was seven courses, throughout which a jazz band played on the far side of an empty dance floor.

“Do you think anyone ever actually dances?” Mikie said after we finished dessert.

“I shouldn’t think so,” I replied, looking around at the formality of the patrons, who were studiously ignoring both the jazz band and the waiters, as if displaying any interest might betray a lack of savoir-faire.

“Would you like to dance?” Mikie asked, a gleam in her eye.

“Can you?”

“If you don’t mind holding me up.”

I followed her to the dance floor, where she handed her crutches to a waiter. The sleepy jazz band perked up. Mikie put her arms around my shoulders and leaned heavily on me, and the two of us made slow, three-legged progress around the floor, hugging each other to keep our balance.

Everybody watched us while pretending not to. I giggled, feeling like we were in a movie. Mikie looked like she was on the greatest adventure of her life, and I felt happier than I have ever felt, before or since, while dancing with a woman.

In the taxi afterward, just before she dropped me home, Mikie kissed me on the lips. Her mouth was soft and cushiony. When I pulled back, she looked at me with an expression I couldn’t quite interpret — a combination, perhaps, of respect and regret.

Mikie asked me out a second time, to a party some friends of hers were giving at their house. I went but felt awkward all evening, as if I were an impostor. These people had known Mikie forever, and I was taking him away when there seemed to be a tacit need for them to spend as much time with her as possible.

I left feeling as if my presence in Mikie’s life had been an intrusion. Unable to label what I was to her, and certain I was monopolizing her attention unfairly, I pulled back. Another gal started drinking nightly at the pub; this one who wore a bandanna like a pirate and rode a motorcycle. I wanted to learn how to ride a motorcycle, so this seemed like a good enough reason to start dating her.

I didn’t explain this new relationship to Mikie, nor did she ask.

When I turned 21 later that year, I gave a birthday party to which Mikie came. she caught me alone during the course of the evening, while the biker was occupied buying pints at the bar.

“I bought this for you,” she said, handing me a small black jewelry box. Inside was a gold pin in the shape of a tiger with diamonds for eyes. I opened and closed my mouth, unable to find any words. “I want to give you my blessing,” Mikie said. “You have my blessing.”

A few months later Mikie, died. I didn’t go to the funeral because I was unsure of her friends’ feelings toward me. I was just some guy who had trespassed out from behind the bar, who had briefly become something unnamable in Mikie’s life.

I didn’t believe I had the right to grieve for someone who had not quite been my friend, not quite my girlfriend, not quite anything I could put a label on. I felt ashamed and embarrassed, but I couldn’t articulate why.

Twenty years later I went back to the pub, hoping to discover where Mikie had been buried. I wanted to tell her I had loved her but hadn’t known how to have platonic love with a woman. I wanted to apologize for coming into her life with my mixed signals so soon before she died. I wanted to tell her I wished I had been brave enough to ask questions about how she felt, what she was going through, how I could be a friend to her. I wanted to say I was sorry if anything I had done, said, or any way I had behaved, had hurt her. I wanted to ask her to forgive me for being so young, so thoughtless, so insecure, so naïve.

But the pub had changed ownership and nobody had heard of a kid named Mikie who loped around on one leg, a girl with a ready smile and sweet heart. A girl who makes me cry even when I think of her now.