The only people we did judge were the customers: them. Helped that I already wasn’t a big fan of them. Them, being the mostly affluent, white gay men of the D.C. area. They weren’t fans of me either. Most of them barely tolerated women. It was a little better as a bartender. The shittier I treated them, the better they tipped. Everyone loves a surly bartender. But especially as a bouncer, when I didn’t recognize their superiority, their first instinct was to act like men will whenever a woman doesn’t obey them. Because I had no status, not to them. It didn’t even matter that I looked like them, at least dressed like them.

Gladys, the old drag queen who ran the coat check as some form of a drag queen retirement plan, was my unofficial stylist. She looked like a Baptist preacher’s wife. I liked her immediately. She punctuated stories the same way my grandma used to tell us about her neighborhood: “That was when Miss Ambrosia, she’s dead now, was living with us over that video store on 17th with Aaron, who passed about a year or so later. There was a boy named Felix. Girl, she was the statue of David come to life. Lovely boy, passed in ’89, I think.”

   She’d let us raid the coat check for left-behind clothes. If she hadn’t, we’d have pilfered what we needed anyway, but it helped that she often examined my selections and said, “Honey. No.” Our customers checked everything, not just jackets; they’d check their pants, shirts, and sometimes bags of work or gym clothes. For years, my entire wardrobe came from the Badlands coat check—lots of Abercrombie and Banana Republic. Old Navy I had to buy myself, or else show up to my other job, whatever that was, in shirts that cost more than I made in a day.

Badlands wasn’t my only job most of the time. It was the only job I couldn’t sabotage. I’d been fired twice, quit once. Every time, Joey took me back. Badlands was where I felt safe. Where I felt at home. Where I could hide. Where the music and lights and drugs made the world outside and all the pain that came with it disappear. I could stand behind the bar and pour drinks and the world came to me, but not too close. I didn’t need to fit in. Didn’t have to worry about saying the right thing. Didn’t need to be accepted by anyone outside the club. Didn’t matter that I couldn’t go home for Thanksgiving. Someone from the club always took in the strays.

I didn’t need a social life. I had a job at a club. The hours don’t really allow for a social life anyway. It doesn’t take long working bar shifts—seven p.m. to three, four, often five a.m.—before you become entirely nocturnal. The first week or so, you fall asleep right away, or something like it, your eardrums still thumping from the house music. Then one night you hit the after-party with the others. Sit in a hot tub and sip Grand Marnier because, while it really does taste like sugared ass, that’s what everyone drinks. You go for pancakes after the after-party. Why not. Even if you save your entire check, you won’t make rent. Eventually, you need an hour of TV before you can sleep. It helps with the goddamn thumping in your ears. When you no longer go to bed until the sun comes up, it’s over. You’re on the night shift now. The 7-Eleven clerk knows your name. You ask about his kids. The prostitutes in the park warn you about the guys around the corner. Better if you stay on Rhode Island. Lunch is bar olives at ten p.m. while you fill in a crossword. My only friends were similarly sleep-deprived bartenders and bouncers, sex workers, servers and cooks from restaurants around the neighborhood who hadn’t seen the sun in a week.

   When that job doesn’t pay enough, and it never does, you take second jobs—shuttling lobbyists from K Street to the Old Ebbitt Grill and back in a town car while they yell at their cell phones. Slinging coffee at Starbucks to anorexic housewives in Georgetown. Grooming anxious labradoodles in Dupont. The second jobs don’t last long. Fall asleep in the town car and miss the phone call and a senator has to wait an extra ten minutes for a ride. The manager at Starbucks calls a kid a retard when he asks for an application, and you drop the green apron on your way out, tell yourself it was a moral stand. But really, you could use some sleep. You call an asshole an asshole for his dog’s freshly cropped ears.

   It didn’t matter. I had the club. And Joey always let me come home.

* * *

—

When I was a kid, when we were living in Switzerland in this run-down chalet outside Zurich, I kept a radio stashed in a hole I’d carved into my foam mattress up on the top bunk of these three-decker bunk beds they always built to shelve us. At night, I’d lie up in my shelf and listen to Systemite music circa 1990—heavy on Madonna, Sinéad O’Connor, Roxette, and the Cure, for my angsty preteen heart. I’d listen to that shit, and I’d picture my life as an adult.

I’d imagine I wasn’t in the Family. The Antichrist hadn’t come. I’d gotten out, somehow. I’d gone to college. Had a career. I was always a little fuzzy on the details. What was perfectly clear was I’d live in a city where I’d have friends like I’d seen in movies. We’d sit outside on restaurant patios, on the stoops of our funky apartments, in tiny backyards of brownstone town houses, on the beach in the winter where we’d road-trip on vacation—I liked mixing up the locations. We’d sip wine and beer and fancy cocktails or brown liquor in clear glasses. And we’d talk. We would talk about everything—our relationships, our dogs, our jobs. We’d debate religion and politics, and someone would bring up something they’d read in, say, The New Yorker. (The New Yorker was the only publication I could name, thanks to my grandmother’s stockpile of back issues.) We’d talk about books and music. We’d know the band’s name and the lyrics. We’d be witty. We’d tease and flirt and joke. We’d have inside jokes. We’d smoke cigarettes. We might experiment with drugs. We’d be fun. We’d be interesting. We’d talk.