Lights and music are on my mind/Be my baby, one more time -Cut///Copy
I am quite drunk. My body is like bees.
Lights and music and a crowd of pretty gay boys. Tight abs and tighter jeans. I order a rum and coke and somehow manage to choke it down. It's too strong and I'm pretty fucked up already. It's the only drink I buy all night and even so there comes a time when vomit is pretty much inevitable, although I somehow manage to avoid this body-rebellion. Later, I dream of puking my guts out, thick hot strings catching in my dream-throat.
But for now, lights and music. House and top 40. Not really my bag, but when in Rome. The dance floor is gyrating pelvises. Everything is hard: the beat, the bodies, the boners. Nine o'clock shadow darkens too-strong jawlines from beneath layers of heavy makeup. Drag-giants lurch around in platinum Marilyn wigs and six inch heels.
I find respite in a glass of water and a red faux-leather couch in a dimly-lit lounge area and strike up a conversation with two pretty twenty-year-old boys with cool haircuts. One of them wears black leather motorcycle gloves. Later, we dance together and promise to meet again in the lounge should we become separated. I want to protect these not-so-innocents, protect them from heartbreak and bad hair and AIDS and their own insecurities and later, in the lounge, I offer what little drunken wisdom I have. They even seem to listen, and when we say goodbye at the end of the night, I hug them both fiercely and they claim me as one of their own.
More lights. More music. Many of the boys are now shirtless and sweating. I dance with them, smiling. From my view onstage, I look out at the sea of bodies pulsing with sex and shame and desire, pulsing beneath the lights like some sort of weird homogenous underwater creature, and I feel an odd detachment. I am a stranger in a strange land.
Back in the lounge, I sit cross-legged and alone on a black faux-leather loveseat. A tall dark-haired woman collapses beside me and laughs in a lovely eastern-European accent, "Oh, I am so drunk! I cannot drive home yet!" I laugh with her, horrified because she is even drunker than I am, and offer her cabfare but she just laughs and lays her head in my lap. I stroke her hair. Her friend arrives, swarthy and similarly-accented, and sits beside her and takes out his cell phone and she admonishes him, "Ooh, darling, put that thing away! So ugly!" and we have a deep philosophical conversation about cell phones and blackberries and they are shocked to learn that I don't own either. She sits up and I offer her a sip of my water, which she accepts with a lilting laugh. Before I leave, I make her promise me she won't drive home, but she laughs and promises she won't drive just yet.
Lights and music and at the end of the night the club empties and I am left almost alone on the dancefloor in a sea of empty plastic cups and beer bottles and condom wrappers and my body is still like bees and the only way I can get rid of them is to dance and so I do.
