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August 6, 2001
4:00 a.m.
A rave. Downtown.
Manhattan. With us are two
six-foot Brazilian girls. Strippers.
From a gentlemen’s club. Called
Lace. In Wayne, New Jersey.
My friend has known these girls for over a year.
“Who wants some X?” asks the darker one.
Politely. Hyped up young
men and women dance in the zone to a driving electronic beat.
Most girls are clad above the waist in pastels.
Most men are not clad above the waist.
Everyone has bottles of Poland Spring in their hands.
It is hot. It is loud.
Everyone is awake. Everyone
seems to love everybody. People
wear glowing hoops around their necks and wrists.
Some wave glow sticks in their hands.
Purple, blue, orange, and red.
We
leave at 7:00. Coming out of the
dark building we are greeted by the gray daylight.
It feels strange. The way
it feels to walk a battlefield the morning after a battle.
I imagine. As we move to
the car, we pass a man wearing an over-sized sombrero. He is old and sun-baked and wrinkled. He is handing out leaflets.
These leaflets encourage us to enjoy breakfast burritos at a nearby
Mexican restaurant. In Spanish, I
ask the man if he is from Mexico. He
is not. He is an Indian.
From Peru.
7:20 a.m.
On the drive home, the two six-foot tall Brazilian strippers make out
with each other. They are in the
back of my ’94 mauve Subaru station wagon.
There is old dog hair on the seats and freshly crumpled breakfast
burrito wrappers on the floor. Hardly any traffic on these Sunday morning roads.
Glenn Campbell’s “Gentle on My Mind” plays on the tape deck.
My friend is asleep in the front seat.
I tap him on the shoulder. He
twists around and looks at the show. Then
he untwists and faces forward. “I
like it when girls kiss each other,” he says clearly and quietly with eyes
closed. He drifts back to sleep.
“Me, too,” I reply. “Me,
too.”
Broadway Jim Sosnicky
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