Star Garage

I am in a discotheque, back when the whole word was used but years after they fell from popularity. The music is loud; so much so that we strain to hear it but too quiet to hear the words. I use we in the sense of the totality of the place; we are a rhythmic swarm moving pirahna-like across the bones of the building. And back again.

My friend Jim is quiet, unpredictable. Dangerously he rises from the table, smiling as if he alone knows of a wax museum concealing the corpse of Jesus. I see him kissing the bare back of a girl he has never met. Kissing in a soft, widening spiral. Behind each kiss a gin blossom surfaces like a red spider through honey.

On the dance floor I join another friend. This is in the days before AIDS, the days before homosexuality itself. Like old science experiments Mark and I are quietly asked to leave.

Outside invisible clouds offer prayers of snow. Jim first will not and then cannot remove his head from the window of the gin blossom girl's automobile.

At home we dance in the living room, clad in our underwear, strumming tennis rackets. We have no curtains. To us the windows are mirrors but in the night outside cars circle the house. To them we are like carnivorous fish in a tank. To them we are everything.

We, the collective we, slide up and down the skeleton of our home. It is not our home at all.

*Originally published in a slightly different form in TRAMP #10, Spring 1991* Based loosely on events that occurred in Missoula, MT circa February, 1979. Ask Jim - he remembers it.