dancing

i was always a dancer. still, last night at the hollywood bowl, dancing in a time warp with a throng of 40-somethings bopping and contorting to the tunes of berlin, the fixx, the b-52s and human league, i couldn't help but recall my dancing past.

specifically, i remembered my friend, katie d's den, in claremont. her parents weekended in carlsbad and so, the party started midday on fridays and extended typically to monday mornings, when we would all shuffle home and ultimately to school where many of us would reconvene to work on a college newspaper. the weekends and nights at kathryn's were beer-drenched and clouded by a haze of ganja. conversations in the back yard around the pool were extensions of english literature classes and weeknight poetry readings in random coffee houses. my mexican friends always praised garcia lorca, neruda and borges while the colombians and those white kids from the inland empire just wanted to talk about sepultura or ozzy, or metallica.

kathryn was a chameleon. as gregarious as girls get she was our hostess and also the magnet that brought these disparate cliques together. in addition to the colombians and the white, long-haired inland empire rockers, and the baldwin park contingent who travelled like coyotes to anyplace that held even the slightest promise of barley pops, there were kathryn's claremont friends, the children of the liberal, academic elite, with their perfect skin and brilliant white teeth. (surprisingly, they were largely unpretentious and open.)

i remember the various friday routes to kathryn's. sometimes kathryn and jose and i would just end school with a quick drive in the car to inconspicuously smoke pot. once stoned we would part ways with a plan to meet up later at friar tuck's or the hi-brow for drinks.

friar tuck's was a bright bar with well lit pool tables and there was always a war between those who wanted to hear country and western tunes and those who wanted to hear classic rock. after a few pitchers my mexi-friends and i would wade out into the parking lot to smoke a quick bowl and make our way across route 66 to the hi-brow. if friar tuck's attracted a consistently nascar oriented crowd, the hi-brow drew strictly from the local cluster of liberal arts colleges.

the hi-brow was low lit to begin with and even darker after our arrival as we would often unscrew a few light bulbs or pull the plug on an occasional neon. it was about mood there. gone were the patriotic country songs from across the highway in favor of otis redding and marvin gaye and the pixies and ween. no pool tables, just 16 square feet of hardwood dance floor and a waist high juke box. if i made it to that dance floor it would have been at the very end and it would have represented my arrival at a certain altered state, a sublime buzz in which i could groove on the dance floor without caring if my friends were making fun. they were all too cool to dance. not the girls, just the guys. occasionally gabe would get out there but pep, (jose, or popstar,) and fidel and uncle manual and bear and juice and all my friends from aztlan would decline to dance on the grounds that it simply wasn't cool to do so. their glances as i swayed back and forth to one of those mid-tempo dave mathews songs of the time, surrounded by chicks, mostly adhered to the hips of would be dance-floor harlots but when their eyes met mine their gazes belied a sense of jealousy.

at last call after several distinct groups had met up we all looked at one another and wondered where we could go next and always there was kathryn offering her house. we would caravan the couple of blocks sometimes running into 7-11 to pick up some beer and once in that spacious back yard we drank and smoked more without hint of inhibition and we laughed and talked into the wee hours. occasionally some people hooked up and found places to unleash their new found ardor for one another. otherwise people dropped off by turns, finding a place to curl up or having a ride arrive until at the end two or three heroic figures would see signs of daylight haunting the atmosphere and agree to go sleep somewhere for a while.

'round 11 or noon of the next day those who remained would end up out back smoking cigarettes and discussing the previous evenings events. at some point kathryn would feed the stragglers who had nowhere else to go, (this was a nearly exclusively guy club, save katie d herself,) and we would strip down to underwear or perhaps a pair of her dad's shorts and hit the pool for the majority of the afternoon. in the evening we might barbecue and start calling people to come on over to kathryn's or meet us at some party or nearby bar, and weekend days would bend into nights and snap back into quiet afternoons that would end up right back there in kathryn's back yard, possibly in the jacuzzi, under the cover of night with nirvana or sepultura or maybe jeff buckley seeping through the windows and sliding glass doors of the den to our ears poolside. the conversations about raymond carver and the buk and juan rulfo would commence without missing a pulse only to be dropped for comparisons of bob dylan and leonard cohen or passionate pleas on the corruption and dishonesty in the american justice system around consensual crimes.

last night i remembered a time when kathryn's friends, jackie and shannon and others, came out back to implore me to come dancing, (in the den of course.) i was acting cool and weakly declining when one of them, (kathryn or jackie, i think,) told the guys i was hanging out with to, "stop discouraging michael. "he is a dancer-let him dance," they implored. that was enough for me. i got up and went into the house to get my groove on. as usual it was me and about five or six girls and i had no complaints.

dancing was always good to me. the moves never made any sense really-there was no discipline or learned steps involved. but feeling the beat always came naturally to me and the idea that i should get out on a dance floor, perhaps with strangers, often with hotties, in public places, and bop to the beat and shake my ass and flail about a bit as if immune to ridicule or criticism, well, that always felt like good health to me. i could sense the stress slip away from me with the inhibition. the bounce in my stomach felt like a connection to my ancestors in caves around fires, or to my species, so naturally attuned to music.

it felt that way last night, too. half of the crowd jumped up for the b-52s and grooved while the other half of the 40-somethings stayed seated, sipping their glasses of wine, enjoying the flashback evening with slightly more reserve. as for me, i had to get up. i had to just dance there in front of my seat. it felt good. it was good.