A silent moment in the music

It’s a glaring autumn day and I am pleasantly mellow from a new sleeping pill I tried last night.

I was in bed, hazing and fluttering to the wind and creaking house, and felt as though I was back in the era of coming down from a night of hard dancing and partying.

I recalled a wild time. I had been with the usual crowd of about fifteen friends and it was a surprisingly small club and a winter gig. The DJs were from Detroit and the crowd worshipped their mix of dropping in Motown to high NRG beats.  I left everyone in a moment of clarity and certainty that I wanted to observe and absorb the undulating crowd of arms in the air.

Upstairs I prowled the mezzanine then bumped into an old friend that I had dropped for his ruthless wildness.  He was still elfin, delicate looking, shave-headed, his homosexuality projecting from him like a prowling beam.  We fell into each other’s arms and grinned ecstatically. “I want to hang out with you.” “ Yes, let’s go NUTS.”

He offered me cocaine,  e, speed…patting his cargo-pants pockets and beaming.  But even with the gleeful daemons wanting to play I had a ‘one elixir' rule and my choice was drink…”NO, let’s do shots!”

We sank shots and then champagne from the mezzanine bar then drifted down to the floor, soon in the middle, riding high on the wave of sound and people-pleasure, dancing like gleeful imps and air punching. I forgot the old ruthlessness he could show and swam with him instead in the moments of being beautiful and glorious.

He was my age, and at over thirty we were older than many in the crowd, so we busted out tricky moves from the early eighties house-music days and soon had a circle of dancing ‘fans.’

We danced for hours, leaving only for more champagne and toilet breaks; him coming into the ladies and using the make-up of many passing girls…

At dawn I still liked him, a lovely thing, and we parted to go to separate recovery-days, mine at a small club where the flavour was trance and jazz and fusion, him off to an outdoors day-rave.

It was years until I saw him again; he was skipping lightly arm in arm with beautiful young queers through a park I was in with my son.  He beamed at me and nodded at my boy.  I smiled and clasped my child’s hand.  A flicking moment where we acknowledged a passionate past friendship and respected the gulf between our now-lives.  We had forgiven each other;  me for his diamond-hard- core, him for my casting him adrift when he broke one too many times.    Forgiven each other through a communion of wild dance.  Would I want him in my life again?  No.  But how I love that memory of our dancing.

 Another jewel in my box of pretty things.