The main characters in today's episode include:

John Towsley  — The Black Hat Lounge's manager and head bartender.

      Towsley is a former Green Beret Major forced to resign his commission "for the good of the service" just three weeks shy of twenty years military service.

      Military life and military missions are the only thing he knows and John has never quite adjusted to civilian life. He is embittered because he is used to leading and commanding others and now is forced to do the humble work of a resort-town bartender because he has no "real world" job experience. 

     Towsley drifted into Old Port City four years ago, when his camouflage colored VW ran out of gas two miles south of the town. The town's only bank and Harry's Garage had both refused his personal checks. So John took the "bartender wanted" ad out of the lounge's window and applied for the only job he could find in the off-season. The owner, Harry Egans in desparate need, hired him on the spot as the paramedics were carrying his current manager out the back door to transport her to the county hospital's maternity ward.

Jimmy Missula: — the lounge's piano player.

      Jimmy is a veteran of the war in Vietnam and is a typical casualty of America's longest and most controversial war. He's been discarded by society. He's been refused work, housing and a normal life by a society that 's tried to sweep the war under some invisible rug. Jimmy began piano lessons at age five and probably would have realized his dream to become a concert pianist if the Draft and subsequent life-changing events he experienced in combat had not killed his hopes, smashed his ambition, and destroyed a promising future. 

      But, one beautiful Spring day, while on patrol in the jungle near Khe Sanh, a Chinese-provided anti-tank mine detonated by a twelve-year-old Vietnamese guerrilla fighter killed four of his buddies, shattered his left leg and forever darkened his mind. A piece of shrapnel had also wedged itself in Jimmy's left hand, causing permanent nerve damage. Jimmy was the squad's leader and has never forgiven himself for, "getting my men killed. If I hadn't gotten drunk and high the night before the mission, I might have spotted the little gook bastard before he blew us up.", a phrase that he repeats to himself a dozen times a day.

      Jimmy suffers from Post Traumatic--stress Disorder and Clinical Depression. He hates himself, any and all governments, most people and any kind of authority, especially the police. He's been married four times, each marriage ending in bitter divorce and has lost most of his worldly possessions each time because he never bothered to show up in court. "No freaking judge is going to tell me what I can and can't do! Besides, the ugly, ungrateful bitch can keep the freaking furniture. Only furniture I need is a freaking barstool!" is his favorite comment about marriage and divorce. He's spent fifteen years in therapy at Veteran's hospitals and at a local PTSD clinics and now at age fifty-five, only thinks about suicide after the nightmares that torture him during those long nights when he dreams and reenacts the terrors that were his life as an eighthteen-year-old Marine in Vietnam. 

      He's working at The Black Hat Lounge because the owner pays him in cash and doesn't declare Jimmy's tips, so Jimmy doesn't have to pay his third ex-wife child support for his only daughter, Matty. He's written to her every day since his mother got a court order throwing him out of their apartment fifteen years ago, but has never mailed his daughter a single letter and has never fought the court's order giving his ex-wife sole custody of their daughter. But every Christmas, he sends his daughter an expensive present. The package never includes a return address and the card he includes is never signed.

Gary Crosly: — a hairstylist, gourmet cook and deck hand.

      Gary, is a "stone-cold" homosexual. He had his first sexual experience at age ten when his mother's neighbor took him on a camping trip and molested him for four days. When he told his mother about it, despite the neighbor's threat to cut his throat, "while you're asleep", she remarked. "I knew you were a little faggot all along." She never reported the incident to authorities because of her fear that her current lover would leave and because she was deeply ashamed. And she never took Gary to the doctor or for counseling. 

      Her only other comment on the matter was, "It's over and done with. There's nothing can ever change that or what you are! Besides what would the town's people think? They'd blame me! They'd think it was my fault. You'd better not say anything to anyone, ever, because they'll take you away and put you into a foster home with a bunch of other queers. And the same thing would happen to you every day. So you had better keep your mouth shut!" 

      As a child, Gary was very effeminate, because that's how his mother treated him and brought him up. Karen Crosly had never cut his blonde hair until his sixth birthday, after he'd started school and gotten infested with hair lice and had dressed Gary in dresses at home until age nine. She had always been over protective and "used to go completely crazy" if Gary got his hands or clothes dirty and never let him play sports or rough games with the other children. 

      She instead taught him to arrange flowers, to play with dolls and during his teenage years, would pose nude for Gary while he practiced his drawing and painting. The camping trip incident merely reinforced his mother's attitude about Gary. She had always secretly wanted to sleep with her son and teased him about being queer when he did not respond to her overtures. She had also always resented him because she'd given up a promising future in her family's law firm when, at age seventeen, she had met and fell in love with a tall handsome beach bum ten years her senior. Eddie Eckberg, who went to Malibu for a surfing contest the day after Eddie's mother Karen Crosly, told him she was pregnant, has never returned or acknowledged Gary's existence. 

      Karen's family, a wealthy and prominent bunch, most of whom were judges and lawyers in San Francisco had disowned her and had sent her to a distant cousin's house in Old Port City where she'd given birth to twins in a hot attic bedroom loft during the town's longest heat wave in fifty years. Gary's twin, a blonde, blue-eyed little girl had only lived for two days. Gary's mother had transferred her guilt to him and had never stopped mourning the death of his twin sister. The sister had been found in the twin's crib with a pillow over her tiny face and Gary was fast asleep on the pillow.

The Stranger

      He's tall. He wears a black hat with a brim pulled down over his face and a gray trenchcoat. He's apparently violent and does not like queers. That's all we know for right now.

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