The seven foot tall queen was belting out “I Will Survive” and managing to easily out-Gloria Gloria Gaynor and the crowd was more or less following along. The crowd – now relegated to audience – at the camp ground cantine didn’t mind the free entertainment, even if a few of the card carrying members of the John Birch Society were shifting uncomfortablly behind their sweating bottles of light beer.
Every Saturday night during the season, Tom and Rosie, the owners of the Pilot Lake Camp Ground Resort turned the cantine – which also doubled as a general sundry store and the primary management office – into a karaoke bar. No liquor – couldn’t afford the extra insurance and didn’t want the extra hassle – but they sold cold bottles of beer and pre-mix margaritas in regular and strawberry, along with dollar cans of pop and the usual kinds of potatoe chips, pretzels, and Rosie’s homemade rice krispy muffins (which were really just muffin shaped rice crispy treats -- but she like calling them muffins because it made them sound unique.) Tom thought it would give people an excuse to get away from their camp sites and spend extra money on beer and munchables and conversation. Sometimes the campers ordered pizzas from town and sat around half the night just talking. It wasn’t complicated. It was just a nice time.
Gradually word got out and people who weren’t staying on the property came out and joined in. At first, they offered to pay a cover charge to come in; but Tom said, No that wouldn’t be right. And that turned out, at the time, to be a good decision; because the new people would come in, drink more beer and margaritas, kick in a little for the pizza, and the cantina became something of a community epicenter out in the woods, away from town and away from the two bars that dominated the nearly non-existent night life in Mount Arliss. At one point, Tom and Rosie even talked about getting the extra insurance the additional license to serve liquor, and open a full-service bar … at certain times and only during the regular season.
But then .. THEY came.
Tom knew he wasn’t the kind of person who didn’t like people because they were different; he’d grown up in Mount Arliss and knew just how intolerant some older folks were, and he didn’t see himself that way. At first, some it was just one or two Mexicans – migrant workers on the huge corporate farm that had eaten up several area farms after the men who owned them became too old and their sons didn’t have any interest in being farmers themselves. He didn’t mind and he didn’t ask any questions so long as they didn’t cause trouble and so long as they paid in cash. Then they started bringing their checks to the store to get them cashed, and before long, it was part of the regular business – in season, of course. Sometimes they even brought instruments and played their own music and drank beer (never margaritas, which Tom thought was odd) until it was time to close the doors.
And even THAT was okay; sure, some of his campground customers took offense; but the worst the Mexicans ever did was play their music and laugh a lot – which was kind of like getting a free concert. And they didn’t try to mingle with the campers; the kept to themselves and jabbered on and on in Spanish. Tom worried sometimes that they might be talking about him – though he had no idea why he thought they might – but mostly they seemed to be telling stories and showing pictures. And that seemed normal enough.
But then, he thought. Then them others had to start coming, too.
And Tom told himself after they started coming and buying beer and drinking A LOT of pre-mix strawberry margaritas that he didn’t really care if they were queer … not REALLY … even if it didn’t make any sense to him. Sometimes a couple of the lesbians would start getting frisky, and that didn’t really bother him too much. The only thing about it that really bothered him was that it didn’t bother Rosie, either. And most of the gays – the guys – you couldn’t even really TELL they were queer unless you were paying attention (which he never did) and none of them ever got frisky while they were in the cantine.
The problem was that some of them were a bit too … well … obvious. Like Grant, the seven foot tall queen who came out for karoke night and sang so much that the campers stopped signing up. It was like they were scared to tough the microphone after he’d used it … like queer was a disease they could catch the way people caught mono off of toilet seats. But everybody drank and everybody bought potatoe chips and pretzels – except the queers, and they didn’t hardly eat at all; but they drank a lot of pre-mix margaritas while they sang show tunes to one another. Everybody drank. And Grant drank and sang and drank some more. Some nights he drank so much that between him and the other queers, Rosie ran out of strawberry margarita mix three hours before it was time to close.
A few of the campers complained, but as Tom explained, he couldn’t simply NOT serve them without opening himself up to a lawsuit. And with the courts being the way they were and with the Democrats being in charge, he told them, what was he supposed to do? Tom had, in fact, voted a straight Democratic ticket the last election; but a lot of his customers were, like his neighbors, conservative church going people who liked things to Stay The Same.
The problem was that Grant was the most flamboyant of the queers and he didn’t seem to mind who knew it. Tom had to look at him several times when he first started coming into the cantine for karaoke night because in the right light Grant looked like he could’ve been a woman … or at the very least, one of those female impersonators he’d seen that one time in that bar down in New Orleans when he was on leave from the Army. He’d heard stories about people who drank too much and picked one of them up … just thinking about it made his stomach turn a little. If Grant had an advantage, it was that he was almost seven feet tall, which intimidated most anybody who might have, if he were smaller, taken exception to his behavior. And he never came to the cantine alone. And he never stayed if his friends left.
The cantine was crazy busy that night. The campground was full to capacity, the Mexicans had just gotten paid, and the queers were taking over the karoke machine. He made his way behind the bar to give Rosie a hand.
“How we doing?” he asked her.
“We’re running low on strawberry margarita mix,” she answered, while she was getting one of the Mexicans another round of beers for his table.
“What about the extra case?”
“Already gone through most of it.”
“Shit!”
“Yeah.”
“Should I run and get some more?”
She looked up and wrinkled her nose. “At this time of night? What’s open?”
He looked at his watch. He’d have to drive an hour to get to the nearest 24 hour grocery that carried the pre-mix margaritas. “Right.”
Rosie shrugged and smiled. “We’ll just make do and buy more for next time.”
“Make do,” Tom repeated.
