Flare jeans in the lost and found bin. Chi-Lites vinyls at the thrift store. Anyone who extends
two fingers to measure the pulse of Disco would dial up the mortuary, not the ambulance. Has
society lost its groove, you may ask, its twinkling, glitter-clad vivacity?
Follow this guide and
breathe life into its inert lungs:
- Open the closet. Wade past dusty polaroids, and a ticket stub from 1978 (recently re-doused in cologne). Retrieve your multichromatic platforms.
- Sharpen your lip-liner stump to a point. Carve around the mouth (smudge the teeth).
- Bare your cleavage to the late-autumn chill, then materialise a cab. Flick your chunky
jewellery with press-on nails (for the clink), and hustle onward.
Arrive at the club, concrete rattling for miles around. Wince when the guard’s inspection of your ID is cursory at best. Weave through swathes of eighteen-ers and their mid-twenties
boyfriends. Feel haggard, thrice your age. Gather your revival apparatus and compensate.
Lower your nostril to a bench and drive along the white lines. Ride the lightning.
Look up.
Watch the mirrorball amalgamate into its final form; one thousand luminous hands, grasping,
snapping, flicking to each trumpet snare and soulful yowl. Congratulate yourself. You have
summoned the incandescent carrion of Disco.
Each square of glass is an eye. The string, its neck, and its wheezing breath settles on the tiles of fluorescent bathroom doors, needle-strewn and gritty with dirt. Every light slice is a syllable. It speaks in morse code between the corners of shades and glib ashes of teeth:
‘Don’t you want to be beautiful, baby?’ it croons with the velvet of fifteen carpeted miles,
‘Dance with me. Sing to me. Glide your lipstick on and move your limbs to my sultry rotation.’
Somewhere in your mangled hippocampus, think, ‘I’m spent!’, the suggestion of a migraine
ebbing in your skull. Slow your heels against the harsh LED’s beneath them; amber, dead,
lime, dead. Notice the whiskey puddle congealing a lost napkin on the ground. Sad. Quashed by
the turns of stiletto shoes and snakeskin wedges.
‘Let us reunite. Use your groove and let me hold you— heave yourself up to me.’
Climb to the second storey. Let the maternal arms of Disco catch you as you fall. Let it revive
you instead, with its hot lung-smoke and medicinal powders.
Awaken in the back of a stagnant taxi, unzipped and open-chested.
Recall your unceremonious departure from the club and the security guard’s rough palms
hefting you out the back entryway. Peel your skin from the taxi’s leathery fabric and gaze longingly at the club thrumming across the road. Try to murmur your address to the moustached driver, stick your fist into the recesses of your brain and come back empty-handed. Feel idiotic. Impart a crisp smack to your cheek and miss. Throw your weight at the ajar door.
Fall out of the car. Let the concrete collide with your fleshy form and let it cool the oppressive heat of your menopausal skin. From the corner of your eye, watch partygoers loiter and file from the club, laughing distantly, jostling one another, dancing. You didn’t even make it a block away.
Weep. Tremble. Stare up at the lightless sky and have half a mind to stay on the sidewalk forever. Think about your life: that missed train in your youth, the cheap wine you suckle on when the empty bed looms too large. Hear Disco’s death-rattle punctuate the night’s end and beckon the sun to rise.
Become a chalk outline in the morning when recreational joggers find you in a pool of sherry
and the sodden remains of your joie de vivre dead and rotting beside you. Wait for the flies to swarm.
-