Free Better Than Easy by Nick Alexander

returns to smile and chatter at us throughout the meal, telling us amongst other things that her brother is gay,
“too.”
This causes Tom, once she has gone, to whisper, “Jesus! Is it stamped across our foreheads or something?” We toast to Tom’s birthday, eat a sickening heap of profiteroles, and then, stuffed and happy, head on for the next leg of our Parisian adventure.
    The first gay bar we find in the Marais is the Quetzal. I remember it vaguely from some distant visit to Paris, and am again stunned at how unchanging France is. American and English cultures are so dominated by novelty and fashion; France manages to just chug along as the rest of the worldrepeatedly implodes and reinvents itself. However, once inside the Quetzal the idea of change starts to seem quite appealing. Though the barman is smiley and welcoming, there are only five guys in the bar, and none of them look particularly happy, well or wise.
    Tom flashes the whites of his eyes at me, takes a gulp of his beer and grabs a free sheet from beside the door. “I think we might be needing some alternative addresses,” he declares. “This
really
isn’t Amsterdam.”
    We drink our beers quickly, and – for some reason feeling a little naughty – shuffle out the door.
    â€œHow low energy was
that?”
Tom says outside.
    I turn the map around as I try to find my bearings. “Must be something they put in the beer,” I mutter. “Anyway let’s hope it’s better in the next place.”
    As we near the Cox, there are so many people on the pavement that I wonder for a moment if they aren’t having some kind of private function, but as we push through the fifty smokers outside, and squeeze intimately past another hundred leathered bodies
inside
, it transpires that, tonight, the Cox is simply,
the
place to be.
    â€œWow,” Tom says.
“How
many cute men?”
    And they are, without a doubt, the prettiest bunch of leathery, bearded men I have ever seen. “Tell me about it,” I say.
    â€œWow! I’d do just about
any
of them,” Tom says, making me frown in mock outrage. As we reach the bar, I tap him on the shoulder and say, “Check out the bar-staff.”
    There are three men working the bar: two identical Tweedle Dee / Tweedle Dum boys with tattoos and beards and a third steroid-pumped hair-bear with pierced nips, leather jeans and a Sam Browne belt. They are all taking themselves very seriously and pouting so much they look like post face-lift Cher, which strikes me as a terrible waste ofso much work at the gym. With some difficulty, I order two pints from Tweedle Dum. He’s so terribly caught up in his own aura that he’s unable to lean towards me far enough to actually hear me, so I’m forced to transmit the message in mime. Once he seemingly has understood – and it’s hard to know really because he neither smiles nor speaks, but sweeps instead, dramatically away – I hand Tom a twenty Euro note before pushing through to the toilets, wondering exactly
why
this bar is so popular, and the other with the friendly service, so empty. Maybe Parisians thrive on rudeness?
    The urinals are so close together it seems impossible to use the third stall, so I wait until two are free and occupy the farthest. But the second I start to piss, a guy – another man-mountain in chaps-over-jeans and a Lucky Strike motorcycle jacket – squashes in beside me. I move as far sideways as I can, but I can still see that, a) he isn’t pissing, and, b) he’s looking at
me
pissing. Maybe he’s searching for inspiration.
    As I squeeze my way out past his butt – and the size of the place is such that it really
is
a squeeze – he distinctly says, in an angular foreign accent, “Very nice.”
    Back in the bar, Tom has lined up two pints each. “It’s only happy hour for another ten minutes,” he tells me, “So I