Disco, or how to say "I love you."

Imagine for me, if you will, a bottle of salad dressing. Dealer's choice – I’m partial to a classy vinaigrette, myself. It's been sitting forlornly in your fridge for four or five months. The oil has separated and the solids have long since drifted to the bottom. But now it's the day after New Years and you're determined to start eating healthy. You bust the bottle out of the fridge and what do you do? You shake it up. Bust out your widest bell bottoms and your wildest dreams, because it's time to get groovy.


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Last night's music was still pumping through Jim’s ears as he halfheartedly dragged his mop across the frankly anticlimactic daylit floor of the discotheque. The typically neon tiles were shut off for the morning, and the scuffs of platform shoes and the stains of beer, vomit, and other indiscriminate fluids were painstakingly visible. The warmth of the sun filtered through the stained glass skylight and created faint kaleidoscopic patterns on the walls and filled the liquor bottles behind the bar with a gentle glow.

Jim rested his chin on the top of the mop and sighed. A new DJ had played last night and the club felt electric. Even from behind the bar, Jim had felt the passion pulsating across the floor. That was why he had taken this job, not to swab the deck like some sodden sailor from the 1800’s. He was here for the energy, the rhythm, that lightning in his veins. He was here for the unforgiving bursts of color, the sensually-draped swaths of clothing, the rose-colored visions of camp. He was here, above all, for freedom. But this wasn’t free. This was damp and minimum wage. This was disco’s crusty underbelly. This was truth, and nothing is uglier than the truth.

Jim’s boss barged out of his office, face somehow redder than usual, hairline forever receding, spittle in the corners of his cruel and thin lips. "I don’t pay you to stand around, do I?" Garrett grunted as he stormed past Jim. "You barely pay me at all, Garrett." Garrett stopped at this and looked Jim in the eyes. "And I’ll be paying you nothing if that stage isn’t spotless by tonight." With that, Garrett resumed his path of destruction towards the door, almost tripping over a stray cord.

"I wonder what’s grinding his gears," Alllie chirped from across the room. "Oh, who knows. Frankly, who cares?" Jim wiped the sweat off his brow and started pushing his mop again. As he cleaned, his thoughts wandered back to that DJ. He was headlining tonight. So many people had packed into the club last night that Jim had thought he saw an actual smile on Garrett’s face. DJ Discipline. It seemed a weird name for someone at the center of such debauchery, but perhaps disco is a hurricane, and the booth is the eye.

The silhouette of Discipline shimmied across Jim’s thoughts while he scrubbed. The DJ’s effortless swagger, effervescent smile, and efficacious sound all floated and fomented off of his deep bronzen skin, and hair that seemed paradoxically puffed up and slicked down. His clothes were all in earthen tones, though punctuated by flashes of gold and silver on his fingers and wrists.

JIm’s cleaning efforts were not in vain and the dance floor began to regain some of its luster. As the grains of time trickled through the bottleneck of the hourglass, people began to line up around the block and trickle through the bottleneck at the entrance. Jim dutifully took his place behind the bar alongside his coworkers and prepared himself mentally for the flood of sensation. But before he could fully turn himself off, a familiar face walked into his periphery.

The cool voice of Discipline floated over the mahogany bar. “Could I get a Whiskey neat?” Internally, Jim froze for a moment but his muscle memory quickly took over. He grabbed the bar’s best bottle of Old Fitzgerald, and poured the man a drink. Discipline took it resolutely and sat down into the squeaky pleather swivel chairs that were bolted to the ground along the bar. “I’m Oman, I’m playing tonight.” Jim, still a bit flummoxed, took a moment to reply. “Yeah, I remember you played last night too, right.” Oman half-smiled and looked up at Jim “I did, but it wasn’t my best set”. Jim interrupted him, saying “Are you kidding me!? I’ve never seen the club move like that! The mood was electric”. Oman leaned back in his chair. “Alright, if you say so, but tonight is going to be different. I finally got my own discs delivered!”

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Once again, the club was thumping, packed wall-to-wall with aimless bodies. Ambient music louder than the thoughts in your head, and liquor flowing and spilling over the rims of crystalline glasses. At the head of it all stood Oman, directing the pulsation of the crowd like a conductor overseeing their orchestra. This was not music, it was art, and Jim was entranced. His body served alcohol in reflex, while his thoughts meandered and his consciousness frolicked. Twice throughout the night, did Oman make eye contact with Jim, and once he even winked. Jim savored that wink like a child might savor a lollipop. To him it was everything. It was a connection across chaos. It was a key to the house he’d been squatting in for months. It was the wholesale feel of belonging.

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It was 4am. The last drunkards had staggered their way out of the club, and Jim and Oman collapsed onto a couch in the backrooms. “You were right, that was amazing.” Oman looked up with a glint in his eyes. “It felt right.” They stared at each other for what felt like aeons. Empires rose and fell, ice cream cones melted, the galaxy expanded evermore, but Oman closed that distance with a kiss. Jim held it, held him. Time came to a standstill around them. Jim had never kissed a boy before, but at this moment the thought didn’t even cross his mind. This felt right.

They fell asleep in each other's arms, finding solace with each other, amidst the blaring sirens and busy streets, in the backroom of a basement smack in the middle of the greatest city that ever was.

They woke up entangled, Jim’s head cradled by Oman’s chest. As those first kaleidoscopic rays of light kissed their heads and lightly woke them from slumber, Jim uttered three fateful words: "I love you." Oman jolted, knocked out of his reverie. "No, you don’t."

"You don't want this. You don’t want me."

"You only see the glitter and the glam. You see everything I let you see. You're hypnotized. You're a fucking moth to a disco ball. You don't want me."

"You just want the idea of me. I know how people see me. They see my broad shoulders and my bruised knuckles and they cross the street. They see my calloused hands and my so-called caramel skin and they consider me less than them. They treat me like an animal, Jim, and so do you."

"You see me, in my disco booth, and you stare, rapt. You look at me the way a toddler looks at a tiger in the zoo. You want the semblance of sophistication that comes with having seen me. You want to feel the adrenaline, the energy, you want the lightning I create, but you want nothing to do with me."

"I… I don't know what to say. That's not true. I swear it's not. I love everything about you. I love the music you make. The community you've built. The joy you create for this world."

"What's my last name?"

"What?"

"What's my last name, Jim?"

"I don't see what that has to do with anything."

"You don’t love me because you don't know me, Jim. You never have."

"…"

"Man, fuck this."

Oman stalked off. Jim sat on the mildewy, tan couch and held his head in his hands.

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After much thought, not all of it conscious, a surge of energy forced Jim off the couch, out the door, and down the street towards the little park on the corner. The bench was a bit wet with morning dew and stained with coffee, but Jim didn’t care, couldn’t care. His energy gave out and he collapsed again. A breeze blew by and he realized he was frigid, but he just let the wind pierce him, grateful for anything to remind him that he was alive. The sun was out, but not too many people were. He admired the sky as the sun peeked out from behind the mostly impenetrable wall of grayish clouds. He watched the light as it refracted off of windows and he watched as the owners of all the little shops began to drag open the metal gates protecting their storefronts and unraveled the cutesy little awnings that distinguished their stores from the rest.

He watched a gaggle of pigeons enter flight and murmurate in the air before settling atop a power line, content to watch the city pass them by. The cold air began to needle and knife at his skin, t-shirt and flared jeans doing nothing to keep it out. He shivered and looked for the first time at Oman, who was sitting on a bench opposite him, making no effort to close the distance.

They stared at each other for a while, as Jim gathered his thoughts. The sensation was familiar, this ocean of distance between them, usually populated with a mass of uncaring flesh doing its damndest to escape from the cruel bounds of consciousness. Now all that stood between them were eight granite tiles, roughly hewn, with weeds poking out of the seams. The tiles were stained with bird shit, but so was everything else.

With a deep breath, Jim got up and sat next to the man who had shown him the stars. Oman rolled his eyes, but didn’t say a word.

“Once again, you were right.”

“I am here for my own self-interests. I am here for that semblance of sophistication. I am here to stare at you while you move the masses.”

“But I’m also here for you. I know the world does you wrong at every turn. I understand that it endeavors to pull you down, and I get that you struggle against gravity as you pull yourself up”

“I want to make that struggle change. That’s why I took this job at this greasy and grimy and glorious place. Where else in the world could I meet you?”

“I want to fight, and I want to fight with you. When I said that I loved you, I was not dizzy or dreaming or delirious. I was telling the whole and unadulterated truth. I have never, not in my life, felt like I was at home. Not until you fell asleep in my arms and I woke up in yours. You make me feel like I belong, and I want nothing more than to make you feel the exact same way.”

Oman took a deep breath and said “Do you know why I named myself Discipline?”

Jim shook his head and looked expectantly back at Oman.

“Well, for one, it’s a pun: DISC-ipline” Oman chuckled to himself. “But for real, discipline is all I have.”

“Growing up, I had to work twice as hard to get just as far. Even now, at the discotheque, seemingly the epitome of freedom, I still have to work. I’m the one guy at the club who doesn’t get to enjoy the music.”

“I work so hard so that one day, I won’t have to, so that my kids won’t have to.”

“If we’re going to try this, I need you to promise me that you’ll work for this even when the music isn’t playing. When the times get hard, and all that jazz.”

“I promise that I will never stop fighting for you”

“Alright”

“Oman, will you tell me your full name?”

“Oman Levensky”

“Well it’s nice to meet you Oman Levensky, I’m Jim Thompson.”

The sky was still gray, the air was still freezing, and the ground was still coated in bird shit, but as Jim took Oman’s hand into his, neither of them could even pretend to care.

As they gazed into each other’s eyes, faint sounds of life became audible. Music played, people chattered, cars clattered, birds flapped their wings, the breeze pushed the last of the winter’s leaves off their respective trees, and the pitter-patter of footsteps punctuated this story.

The camera zooms out from our star-crossed lovers and lands on top of a high-rise office building staring out at the city. We see the lights, blurred as if seen through astigmatized eyes. We see the motion, though from here the people seem inconsequential. Finally we see the colors, too many to describe succinctly, but I’ll give it my best try. The neon maude of the matinees clash with the muted green of pine trees along the polluted and murky brown iridescent rivers that hold the city in place. The bright red of stoplights hold no one in place, and people of every subculture and denomination flood the grime-darkened streets. An aboveground train rumbles across the bridge, light bouncing off of its shiny matte silver cover, and filling the interior with an ambient yellow glow. All this color abounds, and no one really cares, and that’s beautiful.