By the time I left the Chambers movie that night it was nearly ten o'clock, exactly the time my informant told me things began to hum out there. I was so tired from too many sleepless nights that the only thing I could think to get into would maybe be a little nap. But there was a story to do and it seemed stupid to quit when the time was right so I paid my five and hit a movie joint on Forty-Deuce. I sat down and in ten minutes I was asleep. When I woke it was midnight and a nameless couple on the screen was doing something ridiculous with a radish.
I stared at the crowd, my eyes slowly focusing in the dark. Nothing. I watched the movie awhile and then looked around again.
Just then a couple came in, he in a business suit, she in skirt and blouse, looking to be in their mid-thirties. They sat down. Within five minutes like the shifting of atomic particles around a splitting nucleus the theatre began to stir and move. The place was crawling with them, the Flashers and the Freaks.
The night was off and running, the game was on.
BAD GIRLS, SAD GIRLS IN THE HEART OF DISCO
Suppose you're out in Secaucus, New Jersey, on an "even" day with an "odd" license plate number and there's barely enough gas in the Pinto to get you through the Lincoln Tunnel, let alone to 2001 that night or even to Studio 45 which is closer and where you've occasionally been able to gain admission by dressing up like Rudolf Nureyev who you slightly resemble. Faced with a night without big-city disco, what do you do? It's dusk and withdrawal pangs start to render you frangible and forlorn. You can feel Donna Summer sounding to the depths like a whale in your veins. For the first time, you ponder the lyrics to Sylvester's "I Who Have Nothing."
Cheer up for god's sake. There's nightlife out here too. And in the suburbs of Chicago, Detroit or Los Angeles for that matter. But here comes the really pertinent question—can you get laid out here?
Absolutely.
Remember, disco is subliminal. It works on the pleasure centers of the brain—all those thump-thump-thumping woofers and squiggly tweeters do it—get the juices running without you even knowing it. There's also something nicely wanton about clouting a woman over and over for a full ten minutes with sentiments like "I like to do it, do it, do it/So let's get to it, to it, to it" or "Push, push, in the bush." The ladies get the message and the odds are on your side.
Just to be sure, I drove out to Jersey with Cousin Willie from Detroit a few nights ago to check it out. We had a copy of New Jersey Monthly (every state has one of these guide rags), a pocket full of quarters for the telephones, a Toyota and a driver—me with a miserable sense of direction. We got lost a lot. So what? We were all right. We were searching for the heart of disco.
We used the Monthly's "Nightlife" section to locate some likely places. I got on the pay phone because Willie hates to dial, he will only use push-button phones although he can't afford one. Back in Detroit he will use his telephone only for incoming calls. Otherwise, when he needs to talk to somebody he runs out to the corner to use the phone there. It's push-button.
So it was me on the phone and the first thing I found out is that there's quite a variety of places to choose from. Dry discos for eighteen-and-under. Places that offer a disco breakfast at six in the morning. Discos that brag over the phone about their $500,000 lighting equipment. Discos that ask you to dress neat. After-hours discos. Jacket-and-tie discos. Over thirty joints. And a lot of discos with live bands.
"What do they play?" I asked the woman—suspicious that any disco with a band is not a disco at all.
"They play everything, sir."
"They play disco?"
"Everything, sir."
"But disco too, right?"
"Everything."
"Leave the old lady alone," said Willie, listening in. A habit of his. He could hear she was at least forty-five. "She probably don't know rock from roundeye anyway."
We decided to steer clear of places that played everything. It was disco we were after. Unadulterated, deejay at the helm, lights flashing, bad girls sad girls beep beep, the heart of disco—the loins too.
And Willie wanted the thighs.
"Look at that one," he said, nodding toward a blonde a few stools down along the copper-covered bar. She was thumbing through a TV Guide and the color of her drink was pink. She was wearing a slit skirt, very big this year. And there was thigh all right.
"Not bad, right? But what's she doing with that TV Guide?"
"Stuffing it into her purse," I said and she was.
"Think I'll buy her a drink."
"Let me buy. I'm the one gets expenses on this. I'll just ask her a few questions about the action out here."
"Sure," he said. "And I'd never see her again. You know these Jersey broads. Half of 'em would rather talk than fuck anyhow. The other half would rather drink. That expense money makes you bad competition on both counts. Talk to the barkeep."
I did for a while. The place was an old riverboat lying deep in the muck of the Hackensack River. Chauncy's. Below us was a restaurant. The barman wore a black vest over a white puffy-sleeved shirt. So did the barmaids, with black shorts and black stockings. All the barmaids looked good.
It was the kind of place where you saw a lot of neatly trimmed beards and guys who wore big gold rings and their collars turned outside their leisure suits. The women favored Danskins with bras underneath. So far it looked like mostly couples. Beside me a woman kept licking her lips distractedly at the man she was with, a big guy in a plaid jacket threaded with bright red and gold. Across the bar another woman was caressing some guy's face. There were a number of surprisingly pretty women around even if most were coupled up. It looked promising.
Around ten o'clock the deejay turned up the volume on Desmond Child and Rouge's "Our Love Is Insane," the lights in the bar area went down and the lights on the dance area went up. By eleven, I guessed, it would start popping. I noticed that the solo women kept entering in groups of four while most of the men straggled in alone. Was four some kind of safe number? Or just socially the thing to do?
Willie seemed to be doing fine with the pair of thighs down the bar. He had her laughing, anyway. He wasn't much of a dancer but he could talk them up pretty well. I saw that a lot of the men were huddled toward the back of the bar so I went over. I wondered how they ever intended to interest a woman, hanging out in big groups like that, so I asked somebody.
"Look," the guy said, "you ever meet a woman who could hold her liquor?"
I said I knew a few.
"Well, not out here you don't. Been coming here for years. The thing is to outlast them. By one, half the broads in here are soused enough to go home with my father, for chrissake. So you just sit here and have some good conversation and outlast 'em."
But what about the other guys—and here I pointed to Willie—who were already in there hustling?
"They take their toll. They do. They thin 'em out some. But don't forget that a lot of them fuck up along the way too. They move in too fast or slow or whatever. I figure that if a broad is still talking with a guy by one or so you've got just as much chance with her as you do with the ones who are alone. If she was going, she'd be gone by then. So you move in on her."
"And if all else fails," said another guy, "there's always Paula Balla. See that girl there?" He pointed to a tall woman in a floral blouse.
"I went to school with that one," he said. "In a pinch, there's always her. Back in high school we used to call her Paula Balla. One summer she lost about fifteen transistor radios. She'd come down to the sand pit all the time where the guys were playing baseball and she'd always have a little transistor radio on her. She'd sit on the sidelines and make eyes at everybody. Then when the game was over the guys would rush her and grab the radio and they wouldn't give it back unless she went back into the woods with them and took off all her clothes.
"She'd complain and scream and all but shit, she'd always go. And then when she was naked we'd run off with the radio anyway. One time we ran away with her clothes. But she kept coming back e
very goddamn time and every time she had a brand-new radio. You could count on a broad like that. Still can. Last week she blew me in the parking lot of JP's."
I didn't stick around long enough to find out if the wait-and-see strategy really worked though these guys seemed pretty confident it would. Pretty soon Willie came over.
"That girl is fucked up, man," he said.
"How do you mean?"
"Remember the TV Guide?"
"Yeah."
"She can practically recite it to you, man! Like it was the bible or something. It's scary. She wants to be an actress, that's what she says. But she can't seem to get up the nerve to make it across the river. She's damn near crying in her beer over there. I told her all the usual—you know, move to Manhattan, get yourself a job, some pictures, an agent. You know what she said to me?"
"What?"
"'Don't you tell me what to do!' Real hostile. Then she asked me what I did for a living. I told her I cleaned fish. Fuck her."
We moved back to the dance floor and had a look around. It was small by New York standards but the dancing was pretty good, a little too good in a way, practiced and partnered-up with routines and all,) But there were solo women sitting there too so we found a pair of them and the deejay played "Hot Stuff" and all was merry for a while. The girl was a brunette with great legs. Good to look at and good to touch. Not exactly the heart of disco and certainly not the loins but pretty neat.
When it was over we sat down and truer to my assignment than I'd really set out to be, I started to pump her. What was she? Secretary. How long had she been coming here? Six months or so. Before that she went to the Palladium. Did she usually arrive alone? Always with girlfriends. Did she leave alone?
And that was where the trouble started. She looked pretty damn pissed at that one. I tried to tell her I wasn't trying to lay some crude make on her, I was only doing my job but I think that offended even more. As though she'd rather I were hustling her than what I said I was doing, asking questions for a New York skin mag. A lot of women like to be interviewed no matter what the magazine, no matter what the subject. Not this one. Did she leave alone? That night she did. I tried reversing directions midstream, told her to forget that I was supposed to be working, we'd just dance some more and have a good time. No such luck. She left and took her girlfriend with her.
"Thanks a lot, asshole," Willie said. I couldn't blame him.
We danced a bit more but we were just marking time. The incident had soured the joint for us. I thought maybe a change of scene would brighten things up a bit. I decided to find out where this place JP's with the valet parking and the blowjob was. We got directions. We climbed into the Toyota and got lost in five minutes flat. Pulled into a gas station and got found again.
Ah, I thought, walking through the door, heart of disco. The place was packed, the music blaring, lights flashing with abandon. Again the bar was long and narrow but this time the dance floor was big and crowded. There was a pinball machine against the far wall. In the john guys were lined up two-deep, combing their hair in the mirrors. I had a flash of sock-hop déjà vu from the Fifties.
The look for guys was Greek-Italian, tight pants and print shirts open nearly to the waist. Out on the dance floor the girls still favored Danskins but there were fewer bras now to stymie the gaze. The dancing was less showy but more interesting. We were not watching routines. We were watching serious preludes to fuck. You didn't need to know how to dance much, only how to move it as well as your partner. It was a sleek good-looking crowd but not entirely so, fatties and pimply-types out there boogying with the cream of the Jersey crop. Nice mix.
Back at Chauncy's it looked as though about half the crowd had come there just to dance and drink. Not here. What you had here was a pickup joint, classic. In a place like this if you sat at the back of the bar with a bunch of guys and waited things out you were going to go home soused and lonely. Here it was the girls who inhabited the back of the bar, shadowy unhappy girls who could or would not dance, palpably sick at heart at being there while others swam the current. It was Sock-Hop City again—the girls waiting along the sidelines bound to go home waiting.
"I bet you can't get laid here, can you," I said to the guy standing beside me. He grinned.
"If you got feet you can," he said.
I decided to watch his action. There was a small group of men standing together over by the pinball machine. Nobody bothered playing. It was a good place to stand and view the floor. He walked over and joined them, talked for a while and then turned around to watch the women. For a good five minutes nobody spoke, just watched.
Then when the tune was over he made his move.
The girl was a little redhead and she was dancing with a guy in white pants and white shirt but you could see she wasn't enjoying it much. From the minute my man touched her on the shoulder to turn her attention away from her partner he had her. She smiled the way a woman smiles when she's glad to see you and her eyes went wide open in a long steady gaze. The music started and they began to dance.
The guy wasn't particularly good but he had the good sense not to try anything flashy either. He let her do all the work—which was just what she wanted. They moved gradually to the center of the floor and soon she was the star of the show. She had a loose slim body that danced as though it were born to dance, intuitive and cunning, impatient with formal style. Never made the same move twice. He simply watched her while she lost herself in some internal mirror image, breaking away only when he'd move in and match her for a step or two. Then she'd smile at him, seeing herself through him for a moment, maybe, then go back to her own personal mirror. An hour later I saw them leave together. No surprise there at all.
A woman asked Willie for a cigarette.
"Menthol okay?" he said.
"Love menthol."
He lit it for her. "Do you come here often?" he said.
I'd still like to think he was kidding.
"My boyfriend will be back in a minute," she said.
"Jesus," he said to me," how do you do this interview stuff, anyway? Did you hear that?"
I'd been watching the man in white the redhead had abandoned. I looked for disappointment on his face but there wasn't any. He was evidently an old hand at this—you got the feeling there were a lot of old hands here tonight—and one thing he knew was that you didn't look down at a disco. You'd get nowhere. He wasn't much to look at and there was something institutional about all that white but he kept pitching, kept smiling. He tried a few women but nothing seemed to work out for him. A refusal here, a dance there.
He disappeared for a while and I watched some of the other guys moving around the edges of the crowd for a better look at the women, navigating the dance floor like skippers trying to pull their crafts out of a whirlpool.
Then I saw all that white reappear again and moving along in front of it was one of the girls from the back of the bar. Only moments ago she'd been sitting alone with the rest of them in grim pairs. Now she was smiling. Weaving slightly. A little drunk, I guessed. They started dancing and she was a terrible dancer but very enthusiastic. She had a good tight body with big breasts and you could see the guy admiring them now and then. At the end of the set she was in his arms laughing and they made a beeline for the bar. When I did a round of the place a few minutes later they'd both disappeared and I never saw them again.
Closing time was two and I decided to wait it out.
By one-thirty the place got feverish. The men moving in concentric circles around the dance floor moved more swiftly now—heads darting out to view some woman or other and then darting back again, passing her by. Voices got louder, much louder. Between the voices and the music the joint was roaring. The doors swung open constantly. Latecomers arriving at a run, couples leaving together, drunks weaving their way toward the parking lot.
Willie had found himself a blonde in an Elvis tee-shirt.
"Too bad about Vernon," I heard him say.
I wasn't crazy about the
line but it worked. She stayed put.
There was a groan that wafted high and clear above Dee Dee Bridgewater's "Bad For Me" when the bartender yelled last call. Sorrow and high spirits. Then the deejay put on Donna Summer's "Last Dance"—back in high school it was "The Party's Over" by The Lettermen. People were streaming out the door now. So I stopped one guy on his way out. He was alone and sober so I figured he knew where he was going.
"Where to?" I said.
"Little after-hours place."
He named the bar and said there was disco there till dawn. No booze, though. Dry. I got directions. I went back to look for Willie. He had his hand over Elvis' broad crooked grin on the tee-shirt. The girl looked a little woozy and quite content. I kept my distance and caught his eye and motioned him over.
"Has she got a car?" I asked him.
"Wait a minute."
He went back to her and awhile later he returned to me at the bar.
"She's got one," he said. "And an apartment in Hoboken and I'm invited. I can take the bus back to town in the morning. See ya, cuz."
The bar was a few miles up Route 3, beyond the Totowa-Wayne exit on 46, a couple hundred yards past the Two Guys From Harrison on the left. The usual happened. I got lost. I drove around for half an hour or so and finally stopped in a burger joint and asked if there were any good bars around, preferably disco. I got addresses for two of them.
I couldn't find either one. I decided to call it a night, found Route 3 again and drove back to Manhattan.
Next day I phoned Willie. I reached him about four in the afternoon.
"How'd it go?"
"She wanted to stop one more place for a couple dances before we went to her apartment," he said. He named one of the bars I'd been looking for.