The Eighth Day

 

The Eighth Day was a bar that I lived at for about ten years. It was an unlovely place, dimly lit by only the light from the pool table and the angriest orange neon that I’ve ever seen. It was well known but seldom mentioned within the community. It is difficult for me to explain what the attraction of the place was for me, and why I continued to return over the years. I was always drawn to seedy places and colorful people, and the Eighth Day filled the bill in that regard. It was populated by hustlers, drag queens, drunks, drug dealers, trolls, and was the place for more respectable men to sneak by and indulge themselves in the sins of the flesh.

I learned of the Eighth Day from the street hustlers downtown who hung around Sid’s pool hall around the corner from the Trailways bus station. Sid’s was a tale in itself with an entrance from the alley and a long staircase up to a smoky billiard hall with a domino room to boot. But my experience there was limited and superficial. It closed early in the evening, and the clientele would either wander over to the Wine House a few blocks away or head north to Fitzhugh Avenue and the Eighth Day. I remember their names almost twenty years later – Tito, Maniac, Li’l Bit, Jason, Cutthroat Randy, Cindy Lee, Medford, and others not so easily brought to mind but residing in my memory as flashing and fading images from the dimly orange-lit neon cavern where I have filed away the entire episode of my life during that period.

Most of the people at the bar were male prostitutes and their clientele. The rest were just camp-followers of a sort. There were a handful of us who simply liked to drink there, but we were few in number and insignificant to the overall affect. The Eighth Day was first and foremost about the business of offering up young male bodies to older men with money and providing chemical solace to those who gave themselves on that market. When I say the Eighth Day I’m not referring to it as a business entity. Bill and Ray, the owners, were not directly involved in drugs or prostitution as far as I knew. It just happened that their bar was home to the majority of vice in the lower levels of the Dallas gay community of that era. Any benefit they derived was incidental, albeit lucrative I’m sure.

The bartenders I remember from the Eighth Day are Chuck, AC, Bishop, Chee, and Larry. There were others whose names I have lost, but these were the ones who watched over the bar for most of this period. My favorite was Chuck. He had been bartending in Dallas for some time, and it is said that he was shot by a customer at another bar a few years earlier. I don’t know the details, but I know there is truth to the story. He always brought me down a notch when I walked in the door by calling me "Francis" in a loud voice. But he was kind to me in an unkind place and he made the strongest drinks that I’ve ever seen coming across a bar towards me. Part of the reason for this was because the Eighth Day used smaller glasses than everybody else, but Chuck used less mixer than the rest as well. My bourbon and cokes had just enough coke in them to take the edge of the cheapass whiskey, but not enough to darken the color much. Chuck kept me informed of who was trouble. He routinely tricked with all the new arrivals and could give a report on their attitudes and abilities to any who were interested. I rarely was.

I had two acquaintances killed in the parking lot of the Eighth Day. One was a guy named Maniac. I believe that his real name was Michael Willis. He was a heroin addict from Louisiana. I was always giving him weed to sell for backup money to keep himself from getting sick. In exchange for that he would keep an eye on my car if he happened to be loitering on the sidewalk in front of the bar. I knew that it didn’t do me any good, but it removed the practice from the realm of charity and placed it within that of business and made it respectable for both of us. I liked him. He was standing in front of the door one afternoon when a car pulled up and a guy stepped out with a semi-automatic rifle. Nine bullets tore into Maniac’s body, and it still took a week for him to let go and die. For more than a year there remained putty on the door where the holes had been filled.

The other killing that I remember was that of Tito. Tito was a Puerto Rican guy who hung out at the bar with his wife. Almost everybody liked Tito even though he talked a lot of trash. I consider his death accidental and incidental to a speed freak’s need to be returned to the prison which provided the only safe, structured home he knew. The killer’s name was Medford, and he blew Tito’s head from his shoulders with a shotgun in an argument that some say was over a reefer, and others about $3 gas money. I knew both the guys as acquaintances, and I had slept with both of them at least once. I knew that Medford couldn’t handle life in the free world, and he was so over the edge on crystal that it was only a matter of time til he found a way back into the joint.

I paint a grim scene of life at the bar, but for me it was not like that at all. There was always something happening there - so many petty schemes and crimes. I never knew who I might see sitting in their car in the parking lot waiting for a boy to come out. Several local businessmen and political types were known to frequent the block in search of gratification that they couldn’t get at home. There was one guy well known by the hustlers who would pay over $100 just to have them shit on a glass-topped while he laid under it and masturbated. There was also a man who had run for mayor on the idea of monorail for Central Expressway. I saw him more than once soliciting the services of the patrons and wondered what life was like in his home in Pleasant Grove. He’s dead now anyway, so who cares. One of the largest real estate developers in the country who headquartered in Dallas had a son who was a favorite among the hustlers on Fitzhugh. He paid top dollar and was pleasant as well by all accounts.

I remember a birthday party we threw for Chuck at his apartment. It ended with all of us drunk out of our minds and Chuck chasing his runaway schnauzer dog down the street with a .25 pistol. It wasn’t too many years later that he put that same gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger as he lay dying of AIDS in his apartment two blocks from the bar that could not long stay open without him. Most of the others are dead now as well. Larry and Chee are still around. *Larry is living with his sister in East Texas, and I see him occasionally. He was dwindled away to almost nothing. Chee is still about this part of Dallas, but I never really knew him other than as a face across the bar. AC and Bishop are long gone as well.

The Eighth Day hung on for a while after Chuck died, but it wasn’t the same. Most of the hustlers I knew were either away in prison or gone on to live more respectable lives as washed up drunks at the tamer establishments around town. Were I today drinking, there is not a bar that I would spend an entire day and night at like I did there. As bad as that place was, Dallas is measured as less in my eyes for its absence.

 

5 July 1999

 

 

 

 

* I recently learned that Larry had finally passed on in the summer of 2000