I am certain that the person writing in last week, who compared my writing style to that of Marcel Proust, would be horrified to learn that, during my youth, my closest intimates were all bartenders and bouncers. Not only that, but that I myself was something of "disco duck." I hung with a wild crowd, most of us hotel, restaurant and bar workers in a resort city. Because we spent our days and nights watching other people party, we spent the wee hours, midnight to sunrise, at an after-hours club --- appropriately-enough named the Shark's Club.
The festivities would often start there and then migrate to "The Ranch," the apartment I shared with my bartender roommate. Rick is now an attorney. Even then he had the scruples of an attorney. He had a whole set of actions which he would describe as "low bitch" moves because, as he phrased it, "You'd have to be low bitch to treat anybody that way."
Many was the morning I had to stumble over prone bodies littering our living room floor, snuggled against the empty beer cans, empty bottles of Scotch and Rebel Yell sour mash. Then orange juice or Coca-cola, a beer and off to the bar. The cycle resumed its brutal momentum as the DJ climbed back into his elevated booth, the colored lights swirled in the darkness, David Bowie's "Young Americans" tore through the perfumed, machine-generated fog, and silk-sheathed women bared their throats for the kill.... Another night of bacchanalia, of frenzied dancing, of brutal and conscientless seductions, had begun.
By the time we burst into the Shark's Club, we were so frenzied by the emotional carnage of the night that there was no question as to whether there would be victims, including the most wounded among ourselves, the only question was how many this time.
Our leader was the manager of the bar, a high school heart-throb, who was still pugnaciously handsome. He was blonde, athletic(a former wrestler, broken nose and all) and too debauched for someone in his mid-twenties. The last thing he should have been was a bar manager. Too often, we would end the night searching the club for him, invariably to locate him with arms folded like a mummie's across his chest, passed out under a secluded table.
Those were the good nights. On the bad ones, he would black-out before we ever reached the Sharks. More than once, riding with me in a vehicle, he would suddenly go to the other, black-out place, while we awaited a traffic signal. Then, as casual as you please, he would exit the vehicle right there in traffic to go and live the alternative life of the blacked-out person. He confided to me once, "I woke up and didn't even recognize the woman sleeping next to me, Rod! I could have done anything while I was like that, and I'd never know about it."
This sometimes frightened me. But I was his friend. I actually admired him.
When he, Wally, would see me scribbling in some corner, he might crack: "Hey, Amis, when are you gonnah get something published, sucker, so's I can collect on my immortality?"
That was how it was. The purpose of my writing was to provide immortality for those with more important lives than my own. It was inconceivable, for Wally and many of my other friends, that I might have something of significance of my own to say....
And it did not help that I was the "nigger" in this supreme playground of the white boys. A resort city wedded like the Virgin Beach/Vagina Beach which it was to military installations. Most of these friends were themselves transients, military brats, thrown together in the final years of their adolescent lives because their families were suddenly stationed here. Some had managed to go on to college, but seldom the Ivy League bastion, and only a few had completed. Those who had been abroad had only been so briefly, as children, and looked down on anyone who was not WASP. They knew I had trod the intellectual course, had been abroad, but had scant interest in what I had seen or experienced. Catholics could get inside the door, but only with monied connections. I had been President of their student body in high school, but that was their last referent for me. Nothing of the suffering, the insight into the people of the earth, nothing of the arrogance of our nation and how it would always be part of its psychic disease, was of interest to them. Who cared about the losers of the social Darwinism equation which prevails on this planet? Certainly not these Good Ole Boys. America was the greatest! And if you didn't believe that, maybe somebody should kick your ass. Commie-pinko sumbitch!
Nobody knew if I would be there to back them up when the Good Ole Boys, at the height of their cups, were ready to "Cha-Cha."
Like too many drunks, these boys --- and as it was a racist clicque, it was also a sexist clicque, dominated by the boys --- carried a lot of machismo into their interactions. Likely as not, there would always arise an opportunity to throw punches, to "Cha-Cha," as fisticuffs were euphemistically called.
It was only a matter of time, I knew, hanging with this crowd, before I would be called upon to demonstrate that I had learned to Cha-Cha.
But the Fates had been spinning other plans for me. It was 1976, the bicentennial of the nation, and there was something brewing in the town that year, the seeds of the first of its now-accepted series of riots.... There would be a grand Cha-Cha along its "strip" --- that repository of hotels, night-clubs, and restaurants --- which would give everybody pause. I remember walking down Atlantic Avenue on July 5th, through constellations of broken glass littering the streets, the aftermath of the 4th of July riot, broadcast prominently on CBS News, a riot started because some people decided to have a van parade which mushroomed into bottle-throwing, tear-gas wreathed, attack-dog rushing chaos. Cha-Cha.
Not long after this riot, I knew I could not remain there. I packed some clothes, a copy of Norman Mailer's Genius and Lust, into a backpack and hitch-hiked out of town, never to return. I planned to write a novel about all I had seen and experienced there and elsewhere. I had seen violence on three continents, and I wasn't yet thirty. I knew then, as I know now, that there is no reason for the phrase "senseless violence." I have never seen any violence that was sensible...
I was aware, too, that there was something horrid brewing in the breast of the world, something which would need a major exorcism. The triumph of conservatism was not about winning "hearts and minds," it was about violently eliminating any voices of opposition. I had seen it in my own country before I left: Kennedy, King, Kennedy, Malcolm. The ideas were not dead, just the people popularizing them. This was not about persuasion, at all. Coercion was obtaining, and we were letting it happen, while we danced the night away....
BarnesandNoble.com Home Page
LONDON CALLING!: FLISS USSHER on the transcendence of the dance.
TRIO: THOMAS HART's take on "The Invisible Dance."
PLANETARY MADNESS: JENNIFER BLUE's weekly forecast on your sign.
ON DRUGS: ADAM J. SMITH looks at "Bad Raids" in good neighborhoods.
POWERSBOOKS: BOB POWERS interviews "River Angel" author A. Manette Ansay, who seems to be "Dancing Toward Stardom."
BarnesandNoble SEARCH: If you're like us, you like good writing. Use the Barnes and Noble Search Engine page to find great savings on good books, delivered right to your home or office!
