Death, Dance, Disco, and Sex
David and the Lion’s Den, Chapter 3
We caught the bus up to 23rd Street after the boat-cruise party meeting, Hilda leaning on Carla’s arm, me clutching a twine-tied box of cookies, Howie keeping us all in stitches.
“So then Jill put her hand on her hips,” he told us as the door hissed and we climbed down. “She stared Raph down and said, ‘If you think I’m splitting my tips with you tonight, you lazy little slut, you’ve been snorting more than coke between blowjobs in the bathroom.’”
“Oh, my gawd, I thought I was gonna wet my pants,” Howie laughed as we crossed the street. “You’da thought Raph’d be pissed, but he just smiled and blew her a kiss.”
“Ice cream, anybody?” Carla asked, flicking her whip toward the Haagen Daz on the corner. “It’s still early, I don’t have a date till 11.”
“Awesome!” Howie agreed. Everything’s awesome to him.
Hilda mumbled something that sounded like agreement, but I started to turn around. “Not tonight, guys, sorry.” I was broke, of course. “I’ll just head home and see if Jill’s OK.”
“Sit your ass down, Cookie,” Carla growled. “My treat. Didn’t your mama ever teach you it’s rude to turn down a lady’s invitation?”
I blushed. We sat under an umbrella eating expensive ice cream out of paper cups, watching taxis light up Eighth Avenue like so many fireflies on parade.
“Is New York anything like Vienna in the 30s?” I asked Hilda as Howie gushed over Carla and got to know her.
“Oh, no! Not one bit!”
Then she paused for a moment, and I could see her thinking. “Not on the surface, at least. My city was quiet, and green, and terribly ancient. Vienna was an old woman already when this spot was a forest,” she sighed. “When you breathed, you breathed in ghosts.”
“Not on the surface? There were similarities?”
“Oh, yes!” Her eyes began to sparkle. “The artists, the writers, the musicians, the talented tortured souls — they all came to Vienna. Just like you came here.”
“So New York reminds you of home?”
“No, Liebchen. New York is my home. Here, I raised my daughter and buried my husband. Here I have my friends and my life.”
“You never wanted to go back?”
A shadow passed over Hilda’s face. Her eyes closed for a moment. “No,” she whispered, patting my hand. “That place I remember is dead. Here is alive and beautiful.”
I thought I’d figured something out. “Is that why you volunteer? Is that why you’re helping us?”
“David,” I tell you something,’ she murmured, her voice fading so low I had to lean in to hear her. “I remember. Remembering is why I help.
“I remember being different. Being hunted. I remember running in the dark and the cold, night after night, my baby in my arms, my hand over his mouth to stop him from making any noise to help them find us and shoot us.”
I noticed Howie and Carla stop their raucous gossip to listen.
“I remember being cold and sick, being so tired I could not see, being hungry to death, having no food and no milk in my breasts for my child.
“I remember that when he finally stopped moving and the end was close for him that I prayed that I should die, I prayed that God should kill me, me who has no religion.”
Then she smiled — that ugly, ancient, yellowed, girlish smile. “That was so long ago that I almost never remember, but I never really forget. So you ask why I help? Maybe now you know.”
Howie beamed at her while my thoughts ran in tortured circles. I couldn’t understand either him or her. His round, teddy bear cheerfulness in the face of suffering and death made no sense. Her gentle thoughtfulness confounded me.
Had her baby really starved to death while she was running from people — from Nazis — trying to kill her?
What the hell?
The idea crystalized in my head in an instant. “I need to paint them!” I said aloud. “Before it’s too late.” I thought that if I painted some of our clients, if I really looked at them, I could figure out what I was seeing. Figure out what the fuck was going on in my friends’ heads.
I wondered, though. “Do you think that would be too, too…?”
Carla filled in the blank. “Macabre?”
Have you ever gotten really lost in something? Gotten so into it that your mind melted away and you lost who you were as you faded into everything around you? Howie says that’s what happens when he meditates.
Me? I do it with painting. And dancing.
One Friday night around midnight, Howie, Jill, and I were closing. He’d worked the bar, so he was sweaty and tired. He may be overweight, but he sure can shake his ass when dozens of paying customers are lined up to get drunk and stuff his tip jars.
“We still going out?” I asked as I bounced up the stairs to find him wiping his brow with a bar towel. I’d just bused my last table. He grinned and pantomized dancing as he polished walnut veneer.
“Oh, there you are!” Jill hollered. “C’mere, I got your tips.”
I walked over to her barstool and watched her count out about 70 dollars in mostly fives and singles. “Get your share from Claudia yet?” she asked as I took the money.
“Yeah, she just left”
“Keep an eye on her. She cheats.”
Fifteen minutes later, the four of us bundled into a cab to head up to Jill’s. Howie badly needed a shower. He had his club clothes in a bag. He smelled like grease and old scotch. We probably all did.
Except for Raphael. He reeked of sweet cologne and sour sex. Like usual. You almost didn’t notice that about him after a while. I’m not sure how he got invited along. He just ended up in the taxi with us, smirking and crushing against me.
We all hurried to clean up and change, then strolled over to Sixth Avenue and walked the few blocks down to the Limelight. We could hear the music pumping out of the former gothic-style church before we turned the corner. Howie lit up a fat joint, and we passed it around as we pushed through dense crowds to line up at the door.
The drag queens on duty were turning a few people away, but we didn’t have any trouble, not even Raph. Either his ID looked pretty good or the door queens thought he looked hot.
Jill dragged us into the main room, but I couldn’t take the cheesy pop sound.
“C’mon,” I mouthed to Howie after Jill started dancing with some Ivy League type. We started up the back steps as he lit the jay again. I was feeling pretty buzzed. We stood on a landing halfway up and smoked it down — me, Howie, and Raph.
Cut him some slack, I thought as the kid smiled at me and passed me the butt, holding his breath like a pro. Stop being so hard on him. He’s probably just shy. Probably wouldn’t make a bad …
Howie’s shriek broke my chain of thought. “Oh, my gawd! Donna Sommer!”
He grabbed the roach, put it out on his tongue, swallowed it, and ran. Raph and I looked at each other and shrugged. We were just stoned enough to follow our friend in the small, packed disco room, its psychedelic ball lighting people up as they threw down moves straight out of the 70s.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or track down more weed. When Abba started to play, Raph and I beat a panicked retreat.
“Upstairs, man” I told him. “You like techno? I figured he was better suited to the main room downstairs with Jill and the rest of the straight kids, but the music upstairs was why I came. Maybe he was into it too.
I felt it pulsing into me even before we pushed through the crowd near the door, guys trying to press flyers or condoms into our hands, whispering drug prices into our ears, or just blatantly sizing us up and checking us out. The low drone of the music beat into my body, hypnotic and trance inducing.
Raph put a hand on my chest and pushed me into a wall. “Wait. Un minuto.” He pressed a drink into my hand a minute later. It burned like straight iced vodka. We went inside.
The air hung low in the cavernous room, thick with poppers and sweat. Colored strobes pulsing with the music barely lit the dense crowd. I drained my plastic cup in one go, crumpled it, and tossed it aside.
Hours passed as I let the music take me. I drifted in and out of tight knots of dancers, stopping to rest only long enough to refuel once with vodka. I caught a glimpse of Jill a couple times. Raph was never too far away.
I found him next to me toward the end of the night, swaying and grinding his pelvis into a pretty little thing who looked Puerto Rican, running his fingers up and down between her cutoff denim shorts and skimpy knit tube top.
The air burned from too many people, too much dancing, and too much summer. I let the heat cradle me, let the smell of hot skin caress me, let the images of shirtless bodies flash at me with the strobes.
I wanted to melt into the air and fill the entire room.
Then everything flashed white as a roar rose up from the crowd. The air turned cold and acrid as dry ice machines rained down frozen fog.
The cold broke the spell and pumped energy into my body. As the fog thinned into silvery shimmers, Raph’s ephemeral outline flickered into hard focus. He had his girl’s tits out, palming then and pinching her little brown nipples with a dreamy expression on his face.
I watched him for a minute, thinking that if I looked hard enough I could learn something about the real him, the non-mercenary him I was just discovering and liking.
Then I saw the bouncers coming. “Hey!” I laughed, poking Raph and shouting above the music. “Take it behind the curtain, horn dog. You’re gonna get thrown out.” I pointed at the black cloth that divided the dance floor from the back room where the bouncers enforced no rules.
Smelling the heat rising from his skin as they sauntered off, I decided it was time to let myself get picked up. I started making eye contact, and 15 minutes later, I was pushing past that curtain, myself.
You just read Chapter 3 of a character-driven mystery set in Greenwich Village during the worst of the HIV Plague Years. David, Jill, Hilda, Richard, and Howie are walking a path that leads to intense friendship and love, to the creation of gorgeous but wrenching art, and to the unraveling of a series of horrific events that nobody sees, not even as they happen. Because sometimes what you’re looking at isn’t what you see.
