The old Ukrainian Ballroom had a great wooden dancefloor, yet it still seemed the sort of place that generated its own electricity from decomposing mysteries kept behind triple-locked doors. Yet there I was. Flygirl and Slinque had taken me out on the town and we were on "the list" for one of David Mancuso's legendary Loft Dances held in the belly of the Ballroom.
Mancuso has been putting on these underground loft parties since 1970 and Flygirl's crew has been hooked in for most of that time. Dancers fly in from around the disco globe to catch the party. It's an infusion of vibrational plasma. Everyone rocking to their own syncopated whirl. Some are second generation revelers, all so très fabuloso at home in the scene. Yet if I had passed these same folks on the bustling street below, without our shared dance, I suspect that we just would have passed each other by, blank eyed and wooden faced. Life, so often, is a contextual tango.
The dance hall was semi-dark, but for the winking disco ball and the sporadic pulse of several ancient strobes that burst against the colossal balloons strung along the ceiling. The tables around sides of the hall held floating groups of revelers pulling tequila shots and indica blunts. Mancuso worked the turntables at the edge of the dance floor. He was clad in rumpled black and seemed to prefer easing back into the shadows between cuts. In the flickering ambergris light his beard was a burqa revealing abalone eye teeth.
Thugs and their kids danced with urban jubilation. Meatboys bumped their booties. Asian women in stiletto heels offered themselves to the dancefloor like haute sushi: smoked eelwomen with florescent ginger glitter, ahi bangle girls with wasabe cologne, sashimi twins in op art makisu dresses and edamame earrings. A lump-headed turtle man danced low to the ground as if he was mating with his grandmother's ghost. Funky ballerinas spun wonder from their thin improvisations. An elegant man syncopated in place, all in black with a brilliant white silk scarf. He seemed to be a shadow spinning into form. Jukers held horizontal space as they swung into improbable isolations. Transgender disco divas swirled around each other in the center of the dancehall like flume eddies.
There was this one old guy with a beatific smile doing my moves. He was officially old, but standing straight. He was pale and all in white with a sleeveless t-shirt showing off his scrawny arms. But wow, could he move. He had this continual motion thing going that I recognized. He danced a weight shifting salsa without a partner. He danced my moves, but with a sommelier's panache. He rocked. Or perhaps he was just having a marvelous palsy fit.
I did my hootchie-cootchie dance in the throng (but not in a thong) and let the sound and disco lights charge through me. As the energy built in the strobe-pierced dark I was spun back in time to 1986, and Divine's private fortieth birthday bash at the Electric Circus in the East Village. Ephraim was running the light board and sound system for the gig and I had just arrived in from Oregon that day. I remember being the only one in patched bib overalls at this over-the-top bizarre fashion bazaar. Using the bathroom in the smarmy basement was as close as I ever came to being in the alien bar scene from Star Wars. In the dark I could not determine one sex from the other by neither head nor nether hair.
Kaz Sussman is a carpenter by trade, an anarchist by nature, and an expatriate New Yorker by circumstance. He is a disaster response worker, among many, who deploy to assist those folks caught in the path of national catastrophe. He now lives in a home he built in Oregon from abandoned poems. His work is available in From Here We Speak: an Anthology of Oregon Poetry, Dance Macabre, qarrtsiluni, and Clockwise Cat.