At Castro’s by Colton Huelle

“It’s the damned lesbians,” your father was telling me. We were sitting at the bar at Castro’s Backroom, the cigar shop on Elm. He’d recently returned from visiting you out west, and I was asking after you. He told me that your roommate jumped down his throat when he complimented you on losing weight, and this got him started on the lesbians. “They’re turning straight women against us,” he continued, “and pretty soon, they’ll cram us into stockades and harvest us for our seed.” 

His voice was loud enough for the whole bar to hear, and this was intentional. Not long before, two women had started playing darts nearby. They were taking turns telling stories about why they hated men. Your father raised his eyebrows to me and whispered, “You hearing this?”

And then he began relating anecdotes—blaringly—about the kind of women who really ground his gears. One of the two women had stopped playing to devote her full attention to us. I swallowed what remained of my scotch and tried to catch her eye, signaling I don’t know this man.

This woman––Jazz was her name––was about five-six and built like an atom bomb. She was chomping on the nubbins of the fattest cigar I had ever seen, and a mushroom cloud hung above her cherry-red faux-hawk. 

“I love fucking up bad men,” she told her friend. “The other night, this bouncer at Murphy’s tried to put his hands on me, and I knocked his fucking tooth out. For real. He spit it out into his palm after, and I just walked out with a big shit-eating grin on my face.”

Your father rolled his eyes, chuckled, and took a surreptitious glance over his shoulder. Jazz was glaring at him and rolling a dart between her tattooed knuckles. 

I first ran into your father at Castro’s Backroom one night a few months earlier. I like cigars well enough, but mostly I wanted to watch the Celtics game with a bunch of gruff New Hampshire men. I was standing in the humidor closet, inspecting cigar labels like I knew what I was looking for, when your father poked his head in and asked me if I wasn’t his daughter Monique’s high school pal?

I was flattered that he remembered me from your graduation party five years earlier, but more acutely I was mortified. What had you told him about that night? That I broke down crying at the end of the night and confessed my undying love for you? That you patted my back and told me that I deserved to be loved like that too, only not by you? 

But if he knew about any of that, he was kind enough not to let on. He told me not to smoke the lighter cigars if I wanted to be respectable and bought me a chocolate brown stogie with a silver hammer and sickle on its label.

We knocked back a few scotches, and he told me that you had just broken up with the guy that you’d dated through college. He reported this as though it would mean nothing to me. Because why would it?

Your father is a bad man. The second time I hung out with him at Castro’s, the bartender was wearing knee pads. He asked her why.

“It’s all tile back here,” she explained. “And it kills my knees to stock the lower shelves.”

“Ah,” your father said, winking at me. “I was hoping you might be running some kind of side hustle out back.”

The poor girl turned beet red. I said nothing. 

Jazz kept telling stories about fighting men at bars. At some point, Knee Pads chimed in. “I wish they’d hire you here,” she said to Jazz, then nodded her head towards your father. “Someone needs to keep the boys in line when they forget their manners.”

That was when your father slammed his hands on the bar and stood up. “Ladies,” he said, gesturing broadly between Jazz and Knee Pads, “and I use that term with extreme generosity.” Jazz shifted her weight to her back foot and stood up straight. “Good luck to you both,” he continued. “Good luck trying to make it in a man’s world with all your rancid man-hating. This has been an atrocious evening, and I very much would like to not leave a tip at all. But I’m a gentleman, so I’m leaving you ten dollars. Buy yourself some brand new knee pads.” 

A sharp cackle erupted from Knee Pads. Jazz smiled.

He turned to me. “Let’s get out of here.” 

For months, I had wanted so badly to weasel my way into your father’s good graces. This was how I would finally win you. But earlier that night, before Jazz showed up, he told me that you’d started seeing someone new. 

“I think I’m all set,” I said. 

Your father’s eyes narrowed. He took a final pull on his cigar, and exhaled in a way that told me I was nothing. “Suit yourself, cuck.”

When he left, I told Jazz and Knee Pads that your father was an acquaintance whom I despised. Jazz bought me another scotch and said, “See? I don’t hate all men.” 

Twenty minutes later, Jazz looked at her phone and said, “Oh fuck, I think that guy’s Snapchatting me.” She asked me what your father’s name was.

“Andre Lamontagne,” I said. “But how would he get your Snapchat?”

“She’s an Onlyfans model,” Knee Pads answered. Jazz was busy responding to your father. “She has like twenty thousand followers.”

“Ooooooooooh, I’m gonna fuck this guy up,” Jazz said. She was clapping her hands, giddy like a child. She turned to me. “Do you know where he lives?”

I said I did. 

END

Colton Huelle is a friendly neighborhood fiction guy and MFA student at the University of New Hampshire. His previous writing has appeared in Ghostlight, SOFTBLOW, and The Prism Review. 

9 December 2022