dancing as therapy (the extension...like a prosthetic leg)

by chris.

I open the top drawer in her chest of drawers: underwear. I don’t understand women’s
underwear. She has this set for each day of the week and each one has something different
on the front. I can understand the Monday one, it says “Slow Mondays,” but take the
Wednesday one for example, it says “Medical Wednesday” and has a little red, medical “plus”
sign below it. What the hell does that mean? I pick up Thursday. This one just has the
word “Thursday” written like the word “Discover” is written on a Discover card.

“What are you doing?” she asks me. She had come in with a load of laundry and, after
dumping it on the floor, begins folding them.

“I’m rifling through your underwear. Can you explain to me what this means?” I hold
up Time For Golf Tuesday with a little golf ball on it. “Is there some panty language that
men don’t understand? Some sort of secret organization?”

“Put my underwear down,” she says. She doesn’t laugh or even smile at what I’d said.
She never really does. “Aren’t you DJing tonight?”

“Yeah, why?” I look down and Headphone Saturday drips through my fingers and into the
drawer like syrup, and for a moment I am sincerely terrified.

“Don’t you think you should have waited to drop acid for the first time on a night when
you weren’t DJing?”

*

At midnight the manager tells me to start spinning. I ease my first track over the tape
playing and eventually, gradually, turn the tape all the way down. I look down at the
record spinning before me.

“Time to bereave the fallen flashlight,” it says to me.

I hate this club. I’ve been spinning here off and on for three years. The people are
dicks, the owner is a dick. I hate everyone here. A girl with pigtails died purple runs up
to me.

“Hey, will you play 99 Luftbalons?” she asks me.

Her pigtails turn into snakes. “Sure,” I tell her, even though I have never owned this
song. It doesn’t matter. The snakes are going to have her soon enough. It won’t matter
what damn song I’m playing when she’s lying on the floor going into convulsions after
begging someone to suck the poison out of her face.

“Thanks!” she says, and bounces off back onto the dance floor. The snakes look back and
wink at me and for a moment I feel sorry for the clod.

It’s still early in the night, and I don’t know that later a girl named Karen will come
talk to me. It will be five in the morning and she’ll be sweaty from dancing all night.
Her mascara will be running a little bit, but not so much that you think she’d been
snorting coke (even though she had been all night). By the time she’ll come to talk to me
I’ll be on my last track.

“I’m Karen,” she’ll say. “I’ve been coming here for about a month. You’re by far my
favorite DJ. Seriously, you kick ass.”

I’ll take off my left headphone. “What?” I’ll shout.

“I’m Karen,” she’ll shout back. “You kick ass.”

“Oh, yeah, thanks,” and I’ll get nervous like I always do but may act a little more awkward
because her arms will have started to stretch out like putty, long flesh tentacles whipping
around the room and waving all over the place, knocking over glasses and people and machines.

She’ll give me her number and tell me that she wants me to play at a party she’s having.
I’ll agree, stuff the number in my shirt pocket, and look down at the record spinning.

“You’ve been baked into your shoes,” it will say to me.

But right now it’s early, and all I’m thinking about is how much I hate these people.
When I step outside for a Camel Straight, they’re out their with their tabs and needles and
all this other bullshit, talking about God knows what, as if what they’re saying is really
interesting and really important. They talk about what they’d do if they were drafted.

“I’d be fine as long as I could grow my own grass in my little tent or whatever,” says one
guy, and they all laugh as if what he said was truly funny. They hang all over each
other and tongue each other’s teeth and laugh with each other, as if they really enjoyed
one another’s company, but the only way they can enjoy one another is if they are on something.

I stand at my turntables watching all the people dance and writhe before me. They turn into
clay and their feet are stuck to the floor. They wave their arms and dance with one another and
wet clay flies onto the floor and onto the other dancers. When they touch one another they stick
and mold together into a single block. Eventually they’ve all touched each other and the room is
just one massive bubbling pile of clay, twitching to the music. They all separate and turn back
into lizards.

I go into the bathroom and open one of the stalls. There’s a guy and a girl in it. The guy
has his legs spread open with his dirty jeans and boxers bunched up around his ankles and the girl
is feverishly working around his crotch. Her pants are hung over the stall’s door and her
panties are wedged into her crack. As I close the door I see the spoon lying at his feet and I
realize she wasn’t giving him head but rather injecting into his thigh. I think it would have
been better if she were in fact giving him head. That would have at least been a redeemable
pleasure, but no, these people can’t do anything without chemicals humping their blood cells,
and I hate myself for becoming one of them tonight.

I go back to my turntables.

“I am a marble and you are my mistress,” the spinning record says to me. Its teeth are long
and sharp and yellowed with growth all over them, and snot or semen flings out from its mouth as it
spins, covering the room in thick goo. I put a different record on and sit in my own silence,
watching the lizards mate on the dance floor.

*

I tack Karen’s number to my wall when I get home. I wake up at seven that evening and call her.

“You were kickass last night,” she tells me. Everything’s so kickass with her.

“Thanks.”

“Could you play tonight?” she asks me. “I’ll pay as much as you want, it’s not a problem. Sorry
I didn’t tell you, you know, that it would be such short notice.”

I sigh. “It’s fine.”

A friend had sold me the two tabs of acid.

“It’s your first time, so don’t go sucking both of them in one night,” he told me. “And don’t do
that shit alone, okay?”

I agreed and shoved them in my pocket. The remaining tab was on the coffee table next to me in
the otherwise empty ashtray.

“Kickass,” she says. “Can you come set up around tennish?”

I stick the tab on my tongue (why the hell not?) and hold my breath for a second. “Sure, what’s
your address?”

*

When I walk into her house with my gear, I can’t believe how much it looks like my own home. The
layout is almost exactly the same and the only difference that I can discern is her choice of décor.
Giant octopi cling to the walls humming Beethoven and her floors are covered in rotting pig flesh. I
try to miss the more bloody spots as I walk in, but my shoes are already covered with the thick, dark
red.

“You can set up in here, cool?” she says to me.

“Sure,” I say, setting my stuff down next to a seething rubber plant that spits green juice all over
my gear.

“Kickass,” she says, and goes outside.

*

Everything starts fine and goes fine, until around three. My spinning record had been telling me
about his morphine addiction and his youth when he used to run along the banks of the Arkansas River chasing
fireflies when my throat runs dry. I go into the kitchen and open the refrigerator. I stand there looking
into it, the bright white light spotlighting my body, when I realize that I’m opening my refrigerator, right
next to my dishes, in my kitchen. I run to the bedroom and someone has taken out my desk and brought in a king
size bed. The bathroom towels have been exchanged with towels that all have “Bitch” embroidered on them.
My TV has turned into a plasma flat screen. And everywhere, everywhere, there are people I have never seen
before and my walls are bleeding jet fuel.

I go back to my turntables and put a new song on: “I am Star Wars!” by Smog.

“What the hell are they doing in your house?” the record asks me. I try not to look at its hideous face.

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“Something must be done! Listen to the music!” it shouts at me.

“You’re right. I am Star Wars today. I am no longer English grey,” I say to myself, half singing along.

It takes me a long time to move away from my table. My pockets are full of frustration and my brain is on
the stairs sitting and waiting to be splattered. Fingers beating on my countertop. I don't know whose
fingers they are but they feel as mine. All these guests, these freeloaders, in my house, my home!

“Le marin est dans la ville achetant vers le haut du TEMPS," a girl tells me. She had run into me, holding
a champagne glass full of fingernails. She walks past me sipping on the fingernails. They catch in her throat
and she gasps and falls to my floor grasping at her neck, coughing and choking.

These people these people these people. My sinks all have mucus-dripping socks plugging them up and the
showerhead is spraying in all directions. They've brought in giant hunting trophies now. Piss is everywhere.
The smell of rot, of my old high school's toilets. I promised myself long ago that I would never live in a place
that smelled like those toilets.

Everyone is dancing, so I dance with them as I slowly head toward the door. If I act casual I’m sure they
won't know what I’m...not the television. Someone spray painted my TV screen black. Knight rider is on, I
recognize the car's voice.

I dance my way to the door…

"Love the party!"

"I want your baby!"

"Where's the beer?"

…but I can't dance, so it looks horrid, it’s more like I’m waddling to the door, but they don't seem to mind.

I get there, and I go through the door, out into the night. My wooden shingles smile at me and they speak in a
British accent: "Come on, follow the music. Repetition is key!" These shingles are great.

I light one of the shingles on fire while I'm still dancing, going back and forth on either foot. Soon the
shingle next to my flaming one is starting to crackle, and the one next to that starts to pop.

"Good job!" the shingles say. Thank God for wooden shingles. I barricade all the doors and windows and I dance off
into the night.

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