The Strangest Place

October 1993, Amelia's at Galtier Plaza, St. Paul

“Hey Steve,” Dennis said, behind me.

It was around 2:30 and I was ready to go home, go sleep, go work the day job too soon. Dennis was one of the owners. I’d been tending bar at Amelia’s less than a week and this was maybe my second or third night working the main bar during an event. I liked it, liked the other tenders and waitresses, but it took too long to get out after closing. I had stood up after he had finished counting the money in my cash drawer to be sure it squared with the count I’d written down and signed for him already, and we still had to wait while he double-checked, assuring all the bartenders’ drawers matched the electronic receipts. I was walking toward the bar to sit with the others—Andi my waitress that night in the main bar where the stage was, Tracy the waitress from the pool hall upstairs, and Cheryl the lead bartender, who had been upstairs with Tracy.

I turned to look back at Dennis. “Yeah?”

Dennis was a large, Mediterranean bear of a man with a black, black, thick beard, and soft dark eyes. He always dressed as a chef, in whites, but he spent little time in the kitchen.

“You do good work.”

“Thanks, Dennis.”

Dennis nodded, then resumed balancing receipts.

I sat at the bar next to Andi. I liked the late-night view we had of Mears Park from above.

“Should we ask him the question?” Cheryl said.

“I don’t know,” Andi said, shaking her head, looking into her glass of blush. “Tracy never finished answering.”

“Well, Tracy wanted to tell us her life story—I just wanted to know where. She said where—in a hot tub.” Cheryl shrugged.

“Yeah,” Andi said, “but I want to hear the story.”

“I didn't really even like the guy,” Tracy said. “My roommate was pretty sure I'd like the guy and she kept on buggin’ me to go out with him and he kept calling and askin’ me out. Finally, there was this party we went to, and he was there. I was hangin’ around with some pretty different people then. They were into all these different sexual things like menage-a-TWA and stuff like that.” She said ménage à trois with a dismissive flip of her hand, like she thought she knew maybe it’s a French phrase but didn’t care. “So, there weren’t many people left at the party and my roommate and her boyfriend and this guy I hadn’t really liked all that much were all in this hot tub and we all started making out.”

“All four, together?” Andi asked.

“Yeah,” Tracy admitted, hunching her shoulders down a little, half smiling. She peeled more of the label off her Miller Lite bottle. “But then my roommate’s boyfriend got out of the pool and watched the three of us for a while, and then my roommate got out, too, and she sat there on a chaise lounge with her boyfriend, and they watched me doing it with this guy in the hot tub.”

“The guy you didn't like,” Cheryl said.

“He wasn't all that bad,” Tracy said. “He's the father of my daughter.”

“From that night?” Andi asked.

“No!”

“So, he must not have been all that bad,” Cheryl repeated.

“The funny thing about it, to me, is that he didn’t even know until afterward when my roommate told him that I was only fifteen. ‘That’s illegal!’ he said.”

“That's worse than illegal!” Andi said.

“You never said where yours was.” Cheryl looked at Andi.

“Yes, I did.”

Tracy nodded her agreement.

“Oh yeah, in a park.” Cheryl rolled her eyes.

“Nah-ah,” Andi said. “Beach.”

Tracy nodded at Cheryl, pointing an upturned finger at Andi.

“It was really erotic,” Andi said. “I was really young. Well, not that young,” she added, glancing at Tracy. “I didn't even know what it was when I was fifteen. And who has a roommate at fifteen anyhow? Were you in boarding school or something?”

Tracy shrugged, tipped her bottle up to sip some beer.

“Well, I did know, but I wasn't thinking about that—I was, well, that doesn't matter.” Andi swirled the wine in her glass. “I was in my early twenties, and there were all these campfires, and I was just walking along the beach at night, and I saw this guy. Our eyes met and it was like, Zzzzt!” Andi raised her palms to her temples and jabbed them forward like two karate chops. “Zzzzt! We locked eyes, and he was mine. We didn’t say anything at all. We walked and held hands like we just belonged. We curled up together under a blanket. I didn’t know if anyone else knew just what we were doing, but we were doing it, and it was so erotic with all these other people around, doing things, just being among all these other people, on the beach, the sky, the waves.” She sipped her wine, shook her head while swallowing. “Nothing else ever like it. Noth-ing.”

“I've never done it with a stranger,” Cheryl volunteered, encouraging Andi.

“It wasn't like we were total strangers. We’d never met, and I remember wondering while we were doing it whether he even knew English, but we sure spoke the same language, and that was the start of a really serious relationship. We stayed together for two years. He had to move to another city, and we had this heavy-duty long-distance romance for a long time. Killer phone bills and weekend flights, the whole mess. He was a really super, neat person.”

“Steve, just so you know, the strangest place I ever did it was a satellite dish,” Cheryl said.

I nodded.

“Hey Dennis, you havin’ a beer?” Andi yelled back at the office where Dennis was talking with Mike the security guy.

“I’m going to have exactly one beer, and then I’m outa here,” Dennis yelled back, as if we were the ones keeping us all from going home.

There was a tray stacked with clean ashtrays on top of the hinged section of the bar top that could be flipped up for access behind the bar. Andi stooped to sneak under it, refilled her wine glass. “Want another Beck’s?”

“No, thanks,” I said.

“One person has been notably silent during this conversation,” Cheryl said.

“Yeah,” Andi said.

Tracy nodded.

“So, you gonna tell?”

I got up to retrieve my jacket. While I ducked to get behind the bar, I made something up. More truthfully, I embellished. “In a railroad switching yard,” I said, “in the grass, between two trains moving in opposite directions.”

“Ooh,” Andi said. “Was the earth moving?”

“Oh yeah. The earth moved.” I sat down again beside Andi.

Dennis appeared, reached over the bar to pluck a Miller Lite from the ice bin, sat down by me.

“All good?” I asked.

Dennis nodded.

I stood.

“You on the schedule tomorrow?” He asked.

“Yeah.”

“Good,” Dennis nodded, took a long pull on his beer.

“G’night.”