Shortly before his father died, smoking on his deathbed, a psychiatrist explained his tantrums with words like serotonin and norepinephrine and bipolar disorder and alcoholism. These were the times when Bert stopped shaving and watched the scar on his cheek disappear behind patches of dark stubble. Thirty-five years later, he sits in his antiques shop and makes a peace sign with two fingers. Whatever it was, Bert is into his sixth decade now, and those days are long behind him. The waist-long ponytail he wore in the sixties is buried somewhere in the back of a closet, and his father has been buried for a long time.
Life is routine now.
Mornings begin at five or six o'clock, with coffee and a half hour of meditation. Fifteen years ago, the two of them spent their life savings on an antique shop, and named it after the second oldest gay, leather bar in the world. Bert is petting his beard like it holds secrets. At some point, someone in Adolf's family must have come to the U.S., and they must have just gotten rid of his picture at an auction or something. He was someone's Uncle Adolf, I guess, from Germany.