Disco Desperados

by Ann Levin

The day began like all the others as I flipped on the radio to listen to NPR. Without the slow, calm voice of Robert J. Lurtsema nattering on about Bach, I was too depressed to move. I’d even written him a letter that fall, saying he was the only reason I bothered to get out of bed. He wrote back and thanked me for being a listener.

By the time I got to the dining room, Eileen was already there. So I went straight to the buffet table, broke apart the clumps of scrambled eggs in the chafing dish, and spooned some on my plate. Then I poured coffee into a red-and-blue flowered teacup, the signature pattern of Smith College, and sat down at her table.

Eileen was my best friend that year. She lived down the hall from me on the second floor of an ivy-covered dormitory that had the genteel vibe of a Jane Austen novel. We were like Mutt and Jeff, Oscar and Felix, Thelma and Louise. She’d graduated from a public high school in Newark, New Jersey, where her mother was a traffic cop. I’d gone to a private boarding school picked out by my parents, who owned a thriving furniture store in western Pennsylvania.

Somehow, I gave her the confidence that comes with wealth and petit bourgeois status, affirming her decision to attend an elite New England women’s college on a scholarship even though she always felt out of place. And she was teaching me about how to do the bump and the hustle and the thrill of driving into New York City through the Lincoln Tunnel to watch the Knicks play at the Garden.

Late at night in our dorm rooms, when we practiced our dance moves, Marvin Gaye or Al Green blasting away on the record player, she’d say with a knowing but affable smirk, “Go on with your bad self,” thus demonstrating through common usage and example how to form sentences in which “bad” meant “good” though, to be honest, the lingo never came very naturally to me.

That year, we’d also started jogging around the quadrangle right outside our windows. Since she’d been on the track team in high school, it was a natural thing for her to do though recently, she’d started smoking heavily and now she wanted to cut back. But I was the most sedentary of creatures, content for most of my life to curl up in an armchair and try to read some 700-page book my father was raving about, taking a break now and then to make buttered toast fingers with jam.

Long after everyone else left the dining room that morning, we talked and talked as if we’d never run out of things to say. Eventually, I had to drag myself away for my 9 a.m. Shakespeare class. It was a ten-minute walk to the center of campus, and I didn’t want to be late.

I had a big crush on the professor, a tall, thin, bird-like man with a chronically worried look on his face. He wore the same set of clothes every day: black suit, white shirt, and dark skinny tie knotted tightly at his throat, an image of rectitude and forbearance straight out of Hawthorne except he was Jewish.

He liked my papers well enough—I’d had him the year before for Introduction to English Literature, which is why I’d signed up for his seminars on T.S. Eliot and Shakespeare— but he told me I didn’t always state my views with suitable restraint.

That semester, I’d turned in a paper on The Tempest that began with a line from a Stevie Wonder song: “The many sounds that meet our ears / The sights our eyes behold / Will open up our merging hearts / And feed our empty souls / I believe when I fall in love with you it will be forever…”

 It was blindingly clear to me that both poets, the Motown prodigy and the Bard, though separated by four hundred years, had similar beliefs about nature, empathy, and the transformative power of love. He, on the other hand, thought it was essential to understand the Elizabethan point of view if you wanted to thoroughly grasp Shakespeare.

I tried to. I worked hard at it. But it didn’t stop me from dragging all the antique writers we studied—everyone from Shakespeare to Eliot, including the Counter-Reformation poets—into the tawdry American now. What he may or may not have realized (though certainly every professor who teaches undergraduates must) was that I was scouring the texts for clues about how to get happy and lose weight.

After morning classes, I walked back to the dorm on a winding path that led past manicured lawns and beautifully maintained old buildings that practically constituted a museum of architectural styles. There was Haven and Wesley, two bright yellow houses with black shutters where Sylvia Plath once lived, and grand, gabled Chapin, built in 1903, with its wide front porch and imposing white columns. I’d gone inside only once, to buy a $30 bag of pot from an acquaintance who lived there, duly noting the staircase said to have inspired the one at the Tara plantation in Gone with the Wind.

My dorm was part of a complex of ten Georgian-style buildings constructed out of red bricks and laid out around a large open space where commencement was held in the spring. A lot of students used the paved perimeter as a track, including Eileen and me.

Late that afternoon, we got ready to run. She smoked a cigarette. I listened to my disco queens. Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive because I needed the reassurance that I would. Sister Sledge’s We Are Family, as rousing to me as the St. Crispin’s Day speech in Henry V: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…” except from a female point of view. And finally, Shame by Evelyn “Champagne” King, singing about the No. 3 condition of my life after anxiety and depression. Though at some point I realized, after listening to it a hundred times, that she meant “shame” in the other sense of the word.

“Burning, you keep my whole body yearning / You got me so confused / It’s a (shame) / Sometimes I think I’m going insane…” But those lyrics worked too because often I believed I was.

In the midst of my reverie, Eileen stuck her head in the door, wearing her Chucky Ts and a pair of shredded denim shorts that came up to her crotch. I had on baggy gray sweats and a long-sleeve cotton shirt, the uniform of my life when I wasn’t wearing ratty jeans.

“Ready?” she said. “Let’s go!”

She led the way down the stairs and out to the quad, where we briefly stretched, then started out at a slow jog. After half a lap, I wanted to quit. My body felt stiff. I deeply resented the fact that I’d committed to doing this at all. Everything, absolutely everything, seemed so unfair, including the fact that my body was failing me, and I was only nineteen.

The previous year, I’d doubled over with severe menstrual cramps in the middle of a freshman history seminar taught by the college president. Lying there on the cold tile floor outside the chilly classroom, I sensed how embarrassed he was—and impatient—as I moaned and groaned and the winter light poured in through the stately double-sash windows.

Three quarters of the way around the quad, I slowed to a crawl. What was the point of even trying when my body, for as long as I could remember, was always letting me down? As far back as sleepaway camp, when I was eleven years old and would write plaintive letters home to my parents, I feel so uncomfortable in my body, I’m developing faster than all the other girls…

Then, when I got home, the humiliation of being put on a diet by my mother, supposedly for my own good, with my father’s full support. And then the onslaught of puberty and the shame of hiding soiled Kotex in the closet, not knowing what else to do with it.

In that moment, on that serene, cloistered campus, I hated everything. I hated the concrete pavement, I hated the grass growing through the cracks, I hated the decorous young women going to and from the dorms, arms laden with books.

The second lap was even worse. Blood rushed to my face. My cheeks got hot. I felt a prickly sensation under my skin. I gasped for breath, remembering the time I hyperventilated at the beach and my parents called a doctor, who told them to put a brown paper bag over my head. Remembering the dark, suffocating, thick paper moving in and out with my breath. Then the short drive to his office and the shot of Valium, which worked better than the bag, but at age seventeen, wasn’t really an option.

Okay, that was it. I was done. I was really and truly going to abandon all hope and resign myself, once and for all, to being the world’s biggest loser when Eileen flew past me, her red hair flapping in the breeze. Without even thinking, I picked up the pace, one leaden leg at a time. Stretched out my stride, leaned into the curves, and suddenly, from out of nowhere, I could hear Barry White crooning in my ear: “Girl…every time you’re here, I feel the change, huh / Somethin moves, I scream your name…”

He was singing Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe, the first cut on the second side of his third studio album and one of the songs that Eileen and I danced to late at night, imagining every good and sweet and wonderful thing that could ever happen in our lives. And he was right: Something moved. Something changed. Even stranger, I felt weirdly good. So, I ran another lap just to see if I had it in me. And I did. When I rounded the final curve, Eileen was already standing in front of the dorm, knocking a pebble out of her shoe.

“You looked baaad out there!” she said with her characteristic smirk, her eyes crinkling up at the sides. But I knew she meant good.

That evening after dinner, we spent a couple hours on our assignments. A Latin American studies major, she was researching the dirty wars and the military coup against Salvador Allende. I was working on a paper about Burnt Norton, the first of Eliot’s Four Quartets. This sequence of poems moved me deeply even though they were chockful of Christian symbolism that was utterly alien to me, even though Eliot himself was notorious for hating Jews, which meant hating me. But none of that mattered or mattered much. Though I hated religion as much as he hated Jews, I had the temperament of a nun. It was enough for me that the poems were about epiphany, revelation, the hope of finding “the still point of the turning world.”

A little after nine, we got ready to go to Rachid’s, a disco that had recently opened in a new mall on Route 9 between Northampton and Amherst. It took me five minutes; it took Eileen forever. First, she had to wet her hair, even though she’d washed it that morning, and blow-dry it again. Then she tried on all her platform shoes with different skirts and tops, turning this way and that in the full-length mirror on her closet door while waving a cigarette in her right hand and complaining about her bulging calves, which she blamed on running track in high school. I told her they looked fine.

In between, we smoked a joint and practiced our dance steps in the hallway as all the well-behaved Elizabeth Bennets on our floor went back and forth to the bathroom in their Lanz nightgowns, carrying cosmetic bags with herbal conditioner and shampoo. For me, it was a novelty just to be wearing black flats instead of my customary tan work boots, part of the uniform of the burgeoning lesbian population in the Pioneer Valley. I wasn’t a lesbian, but as a girl militantly opposed to the patriarchy, I appreciated the fuck-you attitude of their footwear.

Finally, after one more cigarette, Eileen was ready to go. She was one of the few women I knew at Smith who owned a car. Not a shiny new thing that her mom and dad bought her when she went off to college—her parents were dead. It was a used car with lots of miles that you’d be able to buy for not a lot of money if half the men in your family worked in a garage.

It wasn’t so easy to find it because we were stoned but after what seemed like an eternity, we retrieved it from its parking space on a somnolent street near the campus and drove to Rachid’s. In rural western Massachusetts, disco was still not a big thing except among gay men, who showed up in force on Wednesday nights, when same-sex dancing was allowed.

Even so, it was crowded. We ordered some drinks, milled around, and looked for Mark and Ken. They were Eileen’s friends, almost certainly gay but still in the closet, Mark more so than Ken, who even then was wont to wearing eyeliner and a touch of blush.

The three of them danced while I stood off to the side, thinking about Eliot and what I’d say in my paper. Describing all the false starts and the torturous route that had led to his epiphany at Burnt Norton, a manor in Gloucestershire, in the first section of the poem. “The dance along the artery…figured in the drift of stars…” That’s all I thought about as I stood there in the shadows, watching these beautiful, lithe bodies boogie-oogie-oogie and get down.

It was so different from the kind of hippie moves we did in high school, all that bending and swaying, arms and legs waving, Neil Young silhouetted against a harvest moon. No, this was something else entirely: a thrust of the pelvis, a half step forward, a half step back, everyone moving in time to a deafening beat. It was all about the choreography, the release through control, the whole room, the whole world, pulsing with light and sound.

 “How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world / That has such people in’t…”

Oh, how I wanted to be Miranda, to have revelations every day! But I worried I was more like Caliban, the sullen, misshapen creature who lived all alone on his desert island until the exiled duke and his young daughter were washed ashore in a tempest.

When Funkytown came on,Eileen grabbed my arm and pulled me out onto the floor. The song was magnetic, a force unto itself. That cowbell, so silly; the car horns, so New York! But it was the driving beat, the up-and-down of the bassline, that sent a charge through my body and electrified my soul.

The lyrics weren’t much: “Gotta make a move to a town that’s right for me / Town to keep me movin / Keep me groovin with some energy…” But they were enough, with the added virtue of being true. This, after all, was the reason I was here, a sophomore at Smith College, taking classes in Shakespeare and Eliot, reading The Four Quartets. To find a place that was right for me—a town, a city, a vocation, a life. Like Eliot says, in a later section of the poem: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time…”

As the song wound down, it segued into another, then another, in the heedless, bacchanalian way of discos. There was Vicki Sue Robinson with her “syncopated rhythm” and “rat, tat, tat on the drums.” And Teddy Pendergrass, with all that aching sorrow in his voice, capturing the desperation I felt every waking moment of my life: “Don’t leave me this way…a broken man with empty hands…”

And Alicia Bridges, furious at the man who betrayed her, telling him ever so politely to fuck off: “Please don’t talk about love tonight…” Telling him in no uncertain terms what she planned to do without him: “I want to go where the people dance / I want some action, I want to live!” And pronouncing it ack-SHAWN, like the diva she was.

Time passed. I got bored. Everyone else was busy dancing, this kind of wiggle up, then wiggle down, then, on the way back up, ever so gently, ever so slightly, hitting their hips against someone else’s. That brief touch of butts underneath high-waisted polyester pants.

Sometimes I just shuffled my feet to be in synch with the others. Then the deejay queued up Let’s All Chant by the Michael Zager Band, and the crowd erupted in a great noise, like birds singing at dawn. First, the long, insistent intro, the repetition of words, lines, hooks: “Your body, my body, everybody work your body…” Over and over until you couldn’t help but perform. Simple melodies, simple words. Like nursery rhymes. But that was enough. “Ooh ah, ooh ah, let’s all chant…” Up and down; down and up; one, two, three; one, two, three. “Ooh ah, let’s all chant…”

Then, halfway through the song, that weird classical riff. Was that really a baroque fanfare? Yes, it was. Despite all the funk and the raunch and the descending bassline that drilled into your core, there was an elemental sweetness and innocence and silliness to the song, just kids having fun.

That song in particular struck a chord. Not of sorrow, like Teddy Pendergrass, but of gladness and cheer. Mark and Ken put on their best disco faces—”I’m too cool to react”—but Eileen and I and half the other dancers on the floor threw back our heads, lifted our arms, and exploded with joy. Long before disco, Eliot nailed it in Burnt Norton: “Desire itself is movement / Not in itself desirable / Love is itself unmoving / Only the cause and end of movement…”

On that night, the deejay played the long version, which seemed to last forever. There were drums, a piano line, a clarinet, a piccolo trumpet. Enough beats per minute to revive a failing heart. Then I had to excuse myself and find my way to the bathroom.

I went into a stall, sat down on the toilet, and wept. “Your body, my body, everybody work your body…” The words reverberated in my head and overwhelmed my senses. That was it, all it was, all it ever would be. Your body was just a way to get around in the world. A physical thing. You moved it and moved it until it wouldn’t move anymore. “Your body, my body, everybody work your body…” Just flesh and bones, a sack of water and blood. I didn’t hate it or love it. It was just there. Like a jiggly piece of chicken you buy at the store. Just a way to get around in the world. After a lifetime of shame, it was almost too much.

BIO

Ann Levin is a writer, book reviewer, and former editor at the Associated Press. Her creative nonfiction has been published in Coachella Review, Craft Literary, and many other publications. She has also read her stories onstage with the New York-based writers group Writers Read. You can find her at annlevinwriter.com.