Owners of The Pearl Had a Rough Exit From Your Mom's House

The building at 2199 California Street that had been the Mercury Cafe is now officially The Pearl; in March, Dom Garcia and Ashlee Cassity, along with partners Jonathan Mora and the Sapphic Collective, leased the place with an option to buy. But the rough patches they encountered at their last location aren't smoothed over yet.

Back in December, Garcia and Cassity opened a tiki-themed lesbian speakeasy, Pearl Divers, inside Your Mom’s House at 608 East 13th Avenue, in a deal they'd made with the venue's owners last fall. Soon after, though, Jillian Johnson bought Your Mom's House from that ownership group, though a few members stayed on as silent partners.

Johnson officially inaugurated her ownership of Your Mom’s House with a party on January 4; at the time, she told Westword she was excited about the deal with Pearl Divers. "I was super happy to see Pearl Divers being a partner of Your Mom's House," Johnson said. "It's one of the few lesbian bars left in the country. That's a big deal to me. I'm all about girl power.”

According to Garcia and Cassity, on January 2 Pearl Divers signed a year-long operating agreement with Johnson setting rent for half of the space at $4,000 per month. They also say they paid her for all of the alcohol and supplies that were bought under the venue's liquor license and used in their half of the establishment.

But Johnson says the $4,000 monthly charge was a management fee, not rent, claiming that subleasing on a liquor license isn’t allowed. She adds that she considers all of the liquor bought under the license and used by Pearl Divers to be “stolen.”

Both sides now say they're talking to lawyers; meanwhile, club-goers around town are talking plenty about the changes at both Your Mom's House and the Merc.

The Liquor License Fight

According to Cassity, the original plan when Johnson took over Your Mom's House from James Bedwell and James Hite was for Pearl Divers to be added to the liquor license, which has been held by the Pearl Stop LLC for years; Cassity and Garcia say they were happy to go through the city’s background check and legal process to become joint liquor license holders.

“I was never going to put them on a liquor license,” Johnson responds. “They were doing things not proper and it's my liability and it's my bar and I bought it like that and I didn't have to stand for it.”

On January 10, Johnson sent Garcia and Cassity a message expressing concern that their bar operating inside Your Mom’s House was in violation of city and state liquor laws. Although she now denies ever intending to add them to the liquor license, Johnson also sent a message that she needed to be on the bank account for Pearl Divers in order to subsume the business into the Pearl Stop LLC and add it to the liquor license.

Garcia replied "lol" to Johnson's suggestion about adding her to their bank accounts.

As soon as Garcia and Cassity realized Johnson had no intention of adding them to the liquor license, they say they began looking for a new place.

Meanwhile, Johnson reported the situation to the state Liquor Enforcement Board, which told Westword it could not provide any information due to ongoing investigations. The Denver Department of Excise & Licenses confirms there is a pending request to change the liquor license at Your Mom’s House to remove Hite and Bedwell and add Johnson.

“The corporate ownership change request is pending review by the city and does not prohibit the business from operating while the review of the application is underway,” says Eric Escudero, communications director for Excise and Licenses.

But both Johnson and the Pearl Divers owners say the liquor license issue was just one of the problems with the shared space. Cassity and Garcia's agreement with Bedwell had allowed the tiki bar to use the entire Your Mom’s House space rather than just the tiki section every Friday. But Johnson became upset at the loss of revenue for her bar.

“I'm simply not taking this liability anymore,” she texted Garcia and Cassity in mid-February. “I could make more a month easily if I had Fridays. So this is not doing anything for Pearl Stop, except making it harder and a huge liability.”
The complaints became more petty and personal, too. Cassity and Garcia says Johnson demanded they fire an employee for closing a door while mopping the floor. Johnson alleges that Cassity and Garcia let people rollerskate on Your Mom’s House’s infinity floor and threatened to “cancel her in the queer community.”

Tensions came to a head after the Pearl Divers owners announced they'd be moving to the Mercury Cafe building, which they'd transform into The Pearl; they planned a final party at Your Mom’s House on March 21.

On March 15, Cassity says she woke to messages in which Johnson said she would lock them out of the space for not paying their half of the quarterly insurance. The quarter began in March and Pearl Divers was set to be gone by the end of the month, so Cassity told Johnson they would only pay the amount for the time they would be in the building.

What had really set Johnson off wasn’t the insurance, though. The night before, someone had written “Fuck Trump, Fuck ICE, Fuck Jill,” in Sharpie on the back of the bathroom door at Your Mom’s House. Johnson texted Cassity that she was going to “go fucking wild” if the graffiti wasn’t cleaned up immediately.

Johnson found a social media post from the wife of a Pearl Divers bartender repeating the graffiti message, so she says she's convinced that bartender had something to do with the graffiti. The bartender denies it. “We're very open with our employees and they're open with us,” Cassity says. “We just reached out, and we're like, hey, if someone wrote it, please let us know. We'll go cover it up, whatever.” The employees all said they didn’t hadn't written the message.

Garcia's wife, Anne, fixed the graffiti to say Bill instead of Jill when the team went to move out much of their tiki bar on March 18. But someone then added “i-a-n,” making the graffiti say "Fuck Billian." Jillian is Johnson’s full first name.

Matt Youngblood, the production manager at Your Mom’s House, went to oversee the move at Johnson’s request. He says those conducting the move were making comments about Johnson, and he kicked Anne out for being disrespectful. Garcia had already stopped going to the property because tensions with Johnson were so high.

The Final Pearl Divers Party 

The Pearl Divers crew say they felt they had to move quickly on March 18 because Johnson had threatened to lock them out. But they still had a date planned on March 21 with DJ Tatiana, a local track spinner and advocate who had arranged for lawyers to provide immigration advice pro bono as part of the event.

Cassity says they really wanted to make DJ Tatiana’s event happen. She texted Johnson: “If you shut us down, you will ruin Tatiana's event and also a group of people that deserve this event.”

Johnson says she viewed that message as a threat that she had to let Pearl Divers do whatever they wanted or they would block DJ Tatiana’s event. Text messages viewed by Westword show DJ Tatiana brokering a deal between the two sides so that the party could go on.

The deal included Pearl Divers paying all the outstanding liquor costs for both Your Mom’s House and Pearl Divers, allowing Your Mom’s House security to supervise the event, covering a $300 cleaning fee and a $200 supply fee, and only using bartenders of Johnson’s choosing. Johnson also refused to let several Pearl Divers employees, including Garcia, be present; Garcia notes that all those banned are either trans, gender queer or a person of color.

In a counteroffer, Cassity said that if Johnson would pay them the $1,548 in prorated rent for Pearl Divers being forced to vacate the property early, then they would pay the full liquor invoice; they requested an additional bartender who speaks Spanish be allowed to work the event.

“All her little numbers can just fuck off,” Johnson says of the prorated rent suggestion, although she did agree to Cassity's counteroffer. Though the event went well, both sides wish they hadn't gone through with it.

The next day, Johnson posted photos on social media along with the full names of Cassity and both Garcias while tagging Mora and the Mercury Cafe, saying the future owners of the Merc had trashed her bar.  “They deserve that,” Johnson says. “I'm not going on to social media to cancel anybody. I'm just stating truths. I'm stating pictures and the videos that we have when we walked into the venue, when we were trying to be amicable and professional, and they trashed it.”

Cassity and Garcia both deny that anyone involved with Pearl Divers trashed the bar.

Underneath Johnson’s post (which no longer shows up on her page), someone named Jim Haynes commented: “Me and my 44 buddy are always available to make things fair!! Let me know how far they get and if they need put down.”

Because of that comment, Cassity and Garcia filed a police report. The Denver Police Department confirms that a report was filed for threats in the 600 block of East 13th Avenue.
With tensions already high, that weekend the Mercury Cafe suffered a fire in the alleyway between the dumpsters behind the building.Though the Pearl owners say they aren't blaming Johnson, they find it ironic that the next day she posted a graphic on Instagram with this saying: “Easiest way to ‘get your spark back’ is burning everything down.”

“I should just not exist and then everybody can just be happy,” Johnson says of that post. “That would be their karma if their shit burned down. Nobody wants the Mercury Cafe to burn down. It's just unfortunate they're the owners of it now.”

The Denver Fire Department confirms the existence of the fire but says no further investigation is planned.

On April 1, Cassity and Garcia opened The Pearl at 2199 California, far from Your Mom's House. And that's how they all like it.