The gender conundrum

The bar itself is one of many similar establishments that have pustulated the capital, places where modern day Mastifays and Cutouters meet to drink a Stag for breakfast and graduate to stouts by lunchtime.

He leans insouciantly on the counter that runs against the wall, so that his back faces the customers, many still clad at 4 pm in the uniforms of their night-time professions.

His rump is lifted saucily in the air, so that a generous amount of Galvin Klein underwear is displayed.

Since it has not been pulled all the way up, and one suspects that the elastic band whose duty it is to keep his groin within the confines of the law is rather loose, his buttocks play peek-a-boo with the customers, as he rocks his torso to the music being blasted.

He finally decides to turn around and take the money the customers thrust at him with tough fists, handing them in turn the ubiquitous stout.

Guinness seems to be their unofficial sponsor — the black bottles line the counter, stand empty on the fly speckled tables, provide oral comfort to the men — and occasional women — who are already stale drunk.

In the bartender’s — I’ll be generous and call him a bartender — right ear is a gold earring.

It’s in the shape of a rifle, an AK 47 I believe. Gold teeth festoon his mouth.

In the gloomy semi-darkness that’s necessary for the consumption of alcohol, the metal at his ears, mouth and throat gleams, the black velvet of his skin functions like a display cloth.

He looks like a common thug, who leans against urine-soaked walls and grab his crotch as women walk by. He looks like the kind of man who makes you uncomfortable when he enters a maxi; makes the more paranoid passengers remove their jewelry surreptitiously. Then he speaks.

"Listen girlfriend," he addresses one of the girls getting a drink out of the rusty freezer with a voice that’s a peculiar mix of husk and squeak, "I tired tell you, you see when I eh get my beauty sleep, is not to cross me eh!"

The fingers snap back and forth, forming an invisible X in the air as he says the word "cross."

Then he drops his arm off his hip and turns and walks back to fiddle with the tuner on the radio, feet tapping along in time to the syncopated rhythms.

It’s a jarring anomaly, that voice, that walk, those gestures originating from that insalubrious source.

The body is muscled hard, it calls to mind packed dancehalls made murky and malodorous from the smoke of marijuana, reggae music jarringly thumping, distorting the rhythm of one’s own heartbeat.

The voice calls to mind The Village People, men in tight leather pants and shirts left unbuttoned to expose smooth torsos, Techno music and an excessive, effeminate attention to hair.

I realise I am vacillating between two stereotypes. That in my mind I’m doing the same thing I judge others harshly for. I feel bad, for I make it a point to ridicule the notion of knowing someone’s sexual orientation simply by the way they drape a cardigan around their neck or by how short they wear their hair. My initial reaction to him was typecast.

Yet knowing all this, I still go through the compartments in my head, pulling out and holding up for inspection commonly held beliefs of what makes a man, comparing and contrasting and making assumptions, coming to conclusions.

Subconsciously I tick off the incongruities I perceive in the man behind the bar. Before me I see two stereotypes: the "gangsta" who every schoolboy seems to emulate or the "chi chi man" who the gangsta loathes, the latter’s peculiar mix of the masculine and feminine grates against the codes the usually violently homophobic thug lives by, the conviction that anything female is inferior, weak and therefore to be ridiculed or despised especially when present in a man.

The bar is a microcosm of all that is negative in society at large.

Everything inflexible and disenchanted and bigoted seems to have been boiled down to a hard, bitter, unpalatable ball that’s stuck in the throats of workers and patrons alike.

It seems such a hard place to be an irregularity, to be inconsistent with the mean delineations we set out for each other to follow.

I wonder how this dichotomy manages to survive in a world that so narrowly defines its sexes.

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