Read Online Stages by Donald Bowie - Free Book Online Page B

in the face with a great big piece of raw rhubarb. If the mothers in the neighborhood had ever found out, I think they would have been proud to know that I defended my honor with something that came from one of their vegetable gardens.”
    “Was he ever arrested?” Kathy asked.
    “No,” Melanie said. “As a matter of fact, last Christmas vacation I heard from one of my friends that he just got his doctorate. In medieval literature. Somebody ought to tell him that there’s a place up in Vermont that’s hiring.”
    Paula made a face at her beer mug and said, “Yuck.” She continued, “I wonder if they think you don’t notice them trying to look up your dress while they’re delivering their lectures.”
    “I think it stinks,” Mike said softly. “I think it all just stinks.”
    “Gee,” said Kathy, “I’m having such a nice time I wish I’d get kneed in the head more often.”
    “Sorry, Kath,” Mike said. “Maybe I should have stayed home. I’m tired. And I always get in a bad mood when I’m tired.”
    David signaled for a second pitcher.
    Four pitchers later, the party was over.
    David said he was going to meet his girlfriend at her sorority house.
    “Don’t keep her waiting any longer,” Melanie advised.
    “Someone in that sorority was kept waiting too long last week, and she died from brushing her hair.”
    Mike said that he was going on to another place.
    Melanie and Paula walked Kathy back to her dorm. On the way, Paula said, “Mike’s going to some gay bar, isn’t he?”
    “Yup,” said Melanie.
    “Our company is never enough for him,” Paula said. “His evening’s never complete without… ”
    “The sad part of it,” Melanie put in, “is that he never has an evening in a gay bar that’s complete either.”
    “Oh, I’m just glad to be me,” Kathy sighed. “Whatever the knocks may be that I’ll have to take.”
    After her friends left her in her room, Kathy undressed and put on the blue terry bathrobe that her mother had brought her to help speed her recovery, the way she had by buying her pink flannel pajamas when she was sick with the measles as a child.
    Paula returned to her room and opened a fresh carton of Parliaments.
    Melanie went to her room, changed her clothes, and went out again.

13
    Sporters, the oldest gay bar in Boston, did not give itself away knowingly. Its facade was as blank and anonymous as painted plywood could make it. There was no sign on the place, and the windows had been boarded against the intrusion of daylight or the authorities.
    Pushing open a door that looked nailed shut, Melanie walked into a U-shaped bar room that smelled of cigarettes.
    A few heads turned to check out the newcomer, and then quickly regrouped around their drinks and ashtrays and sotto voce gossip.
    Just as she knew she would, Melanie found Mike sitting on a stool at the end of the bar. Most of the men who frequented Sporters were regulars, like Mike, and most of them gravitated to the same spot every evening, as he did, for security in the face of rejection.
    “You come here often?” Melanie asked.
    Mike turned around.
    “Oh, it’s you,” he said.
    “Let me try again,” Melanie suggested. “You live around here?”
    “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” Mike responded.
    “Because I feel comfortable here, that’s why,” Melanie replied. “It’s the one place I know of where I can sit down and have a drink with the absolute certainty that some slob isn’t looking at my boobs and thinking about coming on to me.
    “Oh, in that case, why don’t you pull up a stool and join me?” Mike said.
    “Don’t mind if I do,” said Melanie.
    She ordered a Bud from the bartender.
    “Nice vibes in here tonight,” she said to Mike after she was served. “I mean, nicer than usual.”
    “You know the Boston crowd as well as I do,” Mike replied. “Nobody ever loosens up unless they’re at an Irish wake.”
    “This is what?” Melanie asked. “It