Second night at Foxes.

Zero margin of error.

Every single person from 9h42 to close who walked through the door had their ID checked, *very* thoroughly. The opening routines took me twelve minutes longer than they took Alex and me, together, yesterday. I'll bring that time down with practice. Starting at nine's OK, but that's about when Vice starts shutting places down, it seems. So basically, for that half hour, I rush -- I hurry up to wait.

Just for the written record, police cruiser E106 cruised through the lot around 11h42 PM bar time, turning west onto Central from the front exitrance.

We don't call it "Foxes Booze 'n' Cruise" for nothin'.

:) :)

Best way for me so far seems to be to stand *in* the door -- between the prospective customer(s) and the bar -- nonthreateningly blocking their forward motion, and smile and ask them very nicely, please, may I see your ID? Thank you. Would you mind taking it out? I *do need* to scan it. Thank you. Only one person resented my asking; she was black, I don't doubt she thought I was giving her a hard time just because of it. Oh well. She was also just barely of age. I'm sorry if she thinks I acted out of racism but then again that's her denfense against problems that I've never really faced. Good for her and more power to her.

From nine to eleven was dead. Just a few stragglers from happy hour nursing their final cheap beers. At eleven, the film crew from the east coast all came in. Lacking anything better to do having checked them all once they're in, I help out the barkeep -- who's new, not to the bar, but to that particular job *in* the bar -- to keep things running smoothly, cleaning ashtrays and bringing back glasses and such.

(I *love* Madonna, btw. Hated her in the '80s, of course, but wasn't working in a gay bar then, now was I? OF COURSE NOT. Monroe was but a prophet of Madonna.)

Pennsylvania. New York. New Jersey. Connecticut. New Hampshire. Nevada. Missouri. All different IDs with different layouts and different ways to check to see if it's real. Several different layouts even for the same state depending on when it was issued. I check it every way I can, look at it, memorize what's where on each, then check the guidebook to read up on what I've just seen. It sticks with me after I've held the card in my hand.

I did make one mistake. The gentleman from New Hampshire's driver's license was expired. He was clearly in his 30s, and was (if I remember right) 34, according to his ID. He'd grown a beard since then (it quite became him, too) but it was absolutely, positively him. He also had a bunch of other cards with his name on them -- none of which, of course, really proved anything I cared about. But in the press of there being a little line out the door -- the first I've seen at Foxes in a long time -- I figured if worst came to worst I'd lose my job but surely they wouldn't shut down the bar over a thing like that: the equivalent in my eyes of changing lanes having signalled twice within the space of 100 feet, or of finishing an otherwise correct lane change where the curb is coloured yellow. Not strictly letter of the law legal. I didn't know that -- now I do and it won't happen again. But last I looked they were just shutting down our bars by arresting bartenders, not by rounding us all up and checking all of our IDs.

Though that may very well be next, with the new police chief.

Quid ipsos custodes custodiet?

Felix.

The name I never use. Too complicated. Let it go unsaid. I am not felix.

I'm but a watchwatcher there partly to be admired as I sashay and swagger authoritatively around swinging the keys from my left belt loop.

Yes, my *left* belt loop.

If you don't know what that means, don't bother. Please.

No fights tonight. Good. One customer -- an honest to god straight man who just "likes to come over to the other side every now and then" commented admiringly at how every other place on Central's "going absoluely crazy" while even with 30 people descending on our bar out of the east coast all at once "absolute calm" reigns supreme at Foxes. Yes, I say to him, I've always felt the same and liked that about this place. I don't explain to him in detail *why* it's only like that here. I do admit that my chest swelled up a bit with pride at that comment. Just like it swelled when, hundreds of bicycle cops emerging from underground to "sweep" Pershing Square, that one guy, completely out of place, told me as he stood next to me standing otherwise alone between the handful of people milling about and the army of cops about to drive them back by force that I seemed a "very safe person to be around".

We have allies amongst the breeder population, it would seem. They cannot help the way they are, and some of them are genuinely good people, utterly secure in their identities, to such a point they can go to the seediest gay bar ever -- and feel totally at home. The same gay bar too many of my own kind shun for being seedy. For being in the wrong neighbourhood. For being "dirty". For daring to let in, and serve, and treat with the same respect as anyone, drag queens and "Indians". For having those strategically placed cobwebs, here and there, which hold the place together. There are some straights out there, it seems, who do deserve something not terribly unlike respect from me. God bless 'em, just so long as they don't start shit in *my* bar. My bar is open to any and all who won't cause trouble, and closed to all who will, whatever their proclivities and inclinations.

Yes. It's a gay bar.

The rest of the evening? Gloriously uneventful. No altercations between the drag queen and her drunken butch boyfreind (who I don't doubt for a moment is the real bottom in the privacy of their boudoir, poor pathetic little prick who probably can't get hard without getting his prostate pounded and can't stand to admit it to anyone who doesn't look like a natural woman). One guy did tell me not to let his boyfreind back because he was drunk, but hell. He didn't seem any more drunk to me than the guy telling me not to let him in. I didn't smell alcohol on his breath and he was otherwise OK, aside from whatever personal stuff they had between them. That's not my business. My business is to make sure that we stay open. Period!

There was one guy I seriously took to be -- oh please forgive me, I know not what other word to use -- retarded. (OK, I lied -- but I *do* rather like that word. To be fair, he did seem mentally impaired.) Not quite all there to begin with. Elevator going to the eleventh floor in a twelve storey Zigzag Moderne West Texas sandstone brick building from 1931, shall we say. Not that he was anywhere near as gorgeous as the architectural masterpiece of H.C. Trost's Bassett Tower in El Paso (and not that there's anything wrong with the Bassett Tower's elevator, much less that it's twelve and not fifteen stoeys). He was acting OK when he came in and of legal age and all that. His ID was completely OK and he gave me no trouble. No alcohol on his breath but after drinking one beer the bartender cut him off, observing, much as I did, he *was* OK at first, maybe a little slow or something, but now he's stumbling like mad. I literally clapped him on the shoulder, held his arm, and showed him out, thanking him for coming, when he decided to leave. I guess the water he was being served was not to his liking. Gawd only knows what's in the water here, what with Kirtland and Sandia's Low Level Radioactive Waste Dump and LANL upriver and over the aquifer and what have you. He wandered down the sidewalk stumbling often into Central.

Alas, I can't keep everybody everywhere safe. It's the police department's job to watch traffic and pedestrians on the sidewalk, not mine. Private business could never hope to cover the costs of such a thing, which as I understand it, is precisely why we pay sales tax on everything. Too bad they're too busy raiding the fag bars to bother with such mundane affairs as jaywalking and public drunkenness which net so precious little to the city coffers while merely keeping the streets safe. You know, as opposed to, say, shutting down all the fag bars and planting evidence of the sort that's recently gone missing from evidence lockers on local faggot bartenders.

Not that I'd have a problem with the police or the city acting as they do if they were a business. If they were a business they'd have to show a profit, and from a profit perspective it just makes more sense to shut down all the fag bars like they do than it does to enforce routine traffic codes. Not that I want the city to go bankrupt, mind you, but honestly. With the "1% for public art" program, if the little sweep they did of all the fag bars on the 13th of last month brings in maximum fines, that's what -- 3,500 bucks that'll go to what -- dumbass sculptures in the freeway medians? Puhlease. Why not spend that money, since it's already been allocated, for an endowment for something lasting? Like live theatre? You know -- something that won't just wind up in one person's pocket for a project that looks (arguably) great for five or ten years, then decays to look like crap before it has to be torn down because the taggers love it, but something that will provide an ongoing source of jobs and revenue and so on and so forth? Or why not spend it to build a park -- like right outside my damn window? Perfect spot for a park. Perfect. But no, the parking lot's too valuable.

Of course the city government is not -- or rather, should not be -- a profit making enterprise. Whole purpose of taxation combined with representative government as I understand it is that everyone pays to get something that everyone benefits from which no one *could* profit from if the private sector did it.

Mayor Chavez, I have a bold business initiative for you. If you really want to shut down all the fag bars in town, as you do seem determined to do, why not form a public-private partnership to hire all the unemployed queers in this town to go 'round once every election cycle and do it without involving city government directly at all? They could issue citizens' arrests of all the bartenders and doormen who do anything wrong, and the cops could do "catch and release" when they go down to the station. You get the feather in your cap and we get some good paying jobs. Everyone's happy.

"My god! Your sanitizer water's at 101ppm. It *should* be between 50 and 100, silly faggot. You're under arrest."

"OK. Silly me. I guess I'm closing now and heading to the station. I'll be back in an hour, OK?"

"OK."

Perhaps you could give such a corporation some generous tax credits for employing minority populations.

Because guess what. That's just about the *only* way you'll shut *us* down.