It wasn’t as bad as it sounds. Holidays in the city quiet things down and even streets like Geary and Polk seem almost quaint and slow, kind of thoughtful.

So it wasn’t so depressing, spending most of a sunny and cold Christmas day inside the darkness of that bar, around the corner from the porn store and up the street from the cheapest place in the city to get flowers — granted they were always on the brink of wilt, but so pretty anyways. I wore eyeliner and a suit jacket with a tie and shabby pants, a Christmas uniform. The bartender was kind, most people are in those situations. He gave me a wink in camaraderie, called me “Sonny” and filled up my glass to the brim. There were only a couple other people there, huddled together in the dark recesses. The TV played a video of some really bad drag acts from the ’70s, all with pervy Santa scenes, lots of feathered hair and old, pimply asses.

She walked in about an hour after I’d gotten there. I was only half-way through my drink. She looked very tired. She sat a few stools down and ignored me, ordered a ginger ale, and looked at the bartender in a sheepish, familiar way. The bartender called her “Princess” but I couldn’t tell if that was her real name or just a term of endearment. It was another twenty minutes before she looked in my direction. Her face was one of those kind of ageless faces, wrinkles and character embedded in her skin but somehow her youth still right there on the surface as well.  Maybe pushing sixty. Maybe if she looked happier she could have passed for forty-five. It was hard to say, I’m bad at guessing that kind of thing. She called me “Darlin” but not in an endearing way. Her voice cracked with not too much tenderness in it and she asked me to pass the salt. She wanted extra to sprinkle on the pretzels sitting on the bar in front of her in a cracked plastic bowl. I felt like she was sort of sizing me up as she drank her ginger ales. She had five in the hour she’d been there. Time was crawling by, but not in a tedious way. The day was just taking it’s time. I kept looking at her legs; she had nice legs, the kind that regular women might get envious of having for themselves. A man’s legs, but womanly — strong and long and waxed or shaved now, very smooth. Pretty.

I’m not sure how we started talking. Neither of us asked each other about our families. It didnt seem like a great question to ask of someone sitting alone at a dirty bar on a family-type holiday like Christmas; either you’re Jewish or you’ve got some lonely tale to share in that kind of situation.  She said she had lived in San Francisco probably since the time I was just learning how to crap in a toilet and she said she had some stories to tell me. She talked like a lazy, run-on sentence, kept asking me if I believed that she was telling the truth (I did) and once she got going, she stopped talking only to take another sip of soda. She was on glass number eight two hours in.

“See, there was this guy, Roy Raymond…heard of him? No? Well he founded Victoria’s Secret, the lingerie store, and for about six months I would meet him down at the Ascot Hotel and give him a fantastic blowjob. Honey is that too crass? Well, he was a nice, married man with a couple kids, but I still sucked him off every Friday night at 6 p.m. sharp. We always met right outside the front door, right there on Market Street, before going into one of the rooms. The last time I went to meet him he wasn’t there and it was so strange. He had always just been so consistent, you know, so responsible. It seemed very weird that he hadn’t shown up. I waited for a long time, before I finally took off and left. I thought about him all that night and had some bad dreams even… Saw the paper the next day. Turns out he had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge the night before. Turns out the Golden Gate Bridge is the world’s most popular place to commit suicide. What a distinction. Shit. This town is so god-forsaken. Now bridge operators keep bottles of liquor on hand at the toll booths so they can have something besides kind words to coax all those depressed people back off the railing. The most popular place to off yourself. That’s so sad, isn’t it, Darlin’?…”

The bar was filling up a little bit more now. Mostly with other tired-looking people. One guy had all these crazy bells hanging off his clothes, an attempt at Christmas cheer. Like he’d made himself into a sort of Christmas tree, and decorated himself, but the bells were all broken and messed up and looked cumbersome to walk around with, lots of cattle bells, clangy things making noise as he wandered around the room, fiddling with the jukebox and going to the bathroom a lot. I think he was high on something. Kind of jumpy and furtive. Wanting something but not knowing how to get it — maybe company.

“Sugar, you ever heard of that nutjob Reverend Jim Jones? No? Where the hell have you been? Well, you’re young but don’t you know your history? Well, this is a good one, get another drink and listen up.” (She was on ginger ale number twelve.)

“Jim Jones was this reverend here in the late 70s at the People’s Temple, and really popular because he leaned way to the left, and became the darling of all the liberal types here. He had his shit together on social issues for the most part, kind of a homophobe but overall pretty good for the times. Good on race issues, environmental stuff, and, man, he was a charismatic bastard. He called himself a prophet and was in good with then-president Jimmy Carter, George Moscone, and a bunch of other bigwigs in politics at that time. He even got this award right before all this shit went down, something like the god-damn Martin Luther King humanitarian award… So fucking ironic. His congregation was mostly lots of down-an’-out types who had been kicked out of other communities. Lots of drug addicts, criminals… He became famous for taking incorrigible sinners and making them into productive members of society. He talked a lot about black power and the homeland. But it all started getting really cult-like and people who devoted themselves to him really want all the way.”

I had to piss and excused myself and made my way to the back. In the restroom mirror I looked at my face for a long time, looked at my shoulders an how they were kind of stopped over. I tried to have good posture, tried to stand up straight but it felt pretty uncomfortable. I gave up and looked at my eyes and they seemed bright but kind of sad too, even though I felt alright. I smiled at myself for a second and felt kind of ridiculous but pretty good, too, and brushed the hair out of my eyes. I needed a haircut, I needed to do some laundry. The urinal was pink porcelain and there was lots of pink and silver glitter on the floor. I bent over to get some of it on my fingers and even though I thought about how germy it was to do that, I couldn’t stop myself. Standing up again, I ran my glittered fingers along my cheek bones. Pink. I straightened my tie and headed back to the bar. Princess had ordered more drinks for us. She noticed my cheeks right away and said how glitter will do a young man wonders. She smiled her first real smile and reached over to straighten my collar. She came across as being so tough, with her harsh voice and rough stories, you know, but she was so tender really. I could see it. She brought her hands back to rest in her own lap and asked me if I wanted to hear the rest of the story.

“A real uplifting one, eh?,” she joked, and winked at the bartender — who was now leaning over the bar towards us, resting on his elbows in a way that made it easy to imagine what he looked like when he was a little kid…

“Well, where was I? Oh yes, well he really was a nutjob as you may have gathered… Things like, he considered all the women in the congregation his wives and their children were his children. He was reported to have said at one point that because of his spiritual energy he had to masturbate something like thirty times a day. Amen, right?!, and also asked for help from his female followers in that department. All during this time he was buying up plots of land in Guyana and had named the shantytown commune there Jonestown, after himself. Eventually he took a thousand or so of his ‘true believers’ with him to Jonestown and soon reports started coming back about torture and brainwashing and keeping people against their will. This one California congressman tried to take control of the situation and promised to visit Jonestown and personally escort back any residents who wanted to return to San Francisco. Apparently a number of people left Jonestown with him, but they were ambushed and killed just before boarding the plane to come back home. I think that was around 1978. Sugar, you might think I’m an old broad with no memory left to speak of, but jesus are you listening to me?! I remember everything… Even got the dates right…

“Well the next thing you know, word gets back here that all the people in Jonestown were dead after drinking Kool-Aid laced with cyanide. Babies and children were killed with squirts of the stuff from eyedroppers and Jones was found with a bullet-hole in his head. Now how’s that for history? Like my stories, kiddo? What a cheery way to spend the holiday! Merry fucking Christmas everyone…” (with a wink to me) “Kind sir, another two sodas over here please. Friends, the night is young.”

It was dark outside the bar. Someone had propped the door open even though it was really cold out, the place was getting thick with smoke even though you’re not supposed to smoke. No one cared. It felt good that it was dark out, made it cozier-feeling inside. Or maybe having Princess tell me stories is what made it feel cozy. The guy who earlier was fidgeting around with the bells attached to his coat was now passed out behind the pool table in a chair, light from the bathroom hallway shining on him in a way that made him look almost wholesome, like he was someone’s grandpa sleeping after a big family meal while everyone else — all the kids and grandkids — sat around and laughed and talked with each other, telling stories about when the old man was younger and all his antics.  About when he took the family to Yellowstone for a camping trip but forgot the tents, or when we worked the night shift all through Thanksgiving-time at the post office so that he could afford to spoil them all at Christmas.

Princess looked so beautiful to me, now that I knew her voice and her sad stories and what it felt like to have her feel close to me. That kind of beautiful, not like seeing just a regular pretty girl. She was the kind of beautiful that makes you hurt. You know that feeling? Her jaw was a little stubbly with shadow and her wig. Was it a wig? It was kind of messed up. But she was that really good kind of beautiful where you want to walk her back to her crappy Tenderloin apartment, where little kids play ball in the hallway until 2 a.m. and the security guard stays up by doing lines and you want to go home with her and draw her a hot bath and make some tea or maybe something good to eat and lay down with her in bed and just rest there next to her, your hand smoothing the lines of her face delicately, like you were her parent or her little kid, someone with no ulterior motive, someone who wanted to be there just because they loved her. That’s the kind of beautiful Princess was, the kind that makes your ribs ache…

“Sonny, you drunk on ginger ale?”

I had been staring off a little and I must have had a funny look on my face because then the bartender and Princess started laughing and I did too, and for no good reason we were all cracking up so hard, other people in the bar looking over to see what all the fuss was about, and also smiling. And I didn’t know if I would even get to learn the bartender’s name and I didn’t know if the clangy bell guy had a family or not, and I didn’t know if I could improve my posture, or how long the pink glitter would stay on my cheeks, or if I would get to walk Princess home later in the night, but I laughed really hard along with everyone just because it felt so good, and because sometimes things are just easy like that.