Disco Inferno
Just before dawn Jane descended into sleep, in the quiet that she
hadn’t believed
would
come. The Country Fair was starting tomorrow, or had started today,
with thousands of people moving into their aged wood booths along the
dirt paths. Ten feet from her head passed a river of excited people,
mostly under thirty, prowling the darkness for possibility. They
caffeinated up the street at Liberty Coffee, and cruised down to
Dana’s for desserts. Maybe they didn’t need fuel, propelled by
desire and held up by each other until they dropped, or maybe they
didn’t know where their beds were.
They would suddenly howl like young wolves, connecting with old
friends or new lovers, and it was catching, that exuberance. The
howl spread up and down the path and one time Jane joined in. They
were irresistible, and if it were not dark and she were not
exhausted, she would go out to the front of her booth and watch them,
their young smooth faces in the moonlight, beaming and blank, in
their bliss.
Of course they had no idea what it was to be old, and to need sleep,
to be thinking about selling tomorrow and how hard it would be, so
tired. Some of them could sleep in their tents most of the day, or
go around in spaced sleep deprivation. Jane would have to draw on
all her resources, to keep working for a few more days with no hope
of real rest. She stayed in her sleeping bag while the birds
replaced the revelers, until the Recycling Crew in their garbage
truck came by, until the Holy Cow Cafe across the street started
ringing their blasted cowbell. Perhaps some lukewarm, weak coffee
was ready, which would almost be adequate. Jane pulled on her pants
and shoes and stumbled to the outhouses, then wandered up the path
for the stronger stuff at Liberty.
The old folks complained, like they would about the weather,
standing around in the morning with their coffee. Jane and her
neighbors, Don and Lou, and Tim and Paula who camped in the woods
behind Jane’s booth, and various friends and acquaintances who
happened by, gathered in the one sunny spot they had been standing in
for two decades, one weekend a year.
“Geez, they were noisy all night. Did you hear that one woman who
couldn’t stop talking? Her friends kept trying to quiet her down,
but nothing worked.”
“Until you told her to shut the hell up. That was effective!”
Jane’s neighbor Lou was the neighborhood mean Mom. She could
always be counted on to get to the point.
“Then there was that little bluegrass band who set right up across
the path. They said, “Here’s a place to play!” like it was the
middle of the day. It had to be three in the morning.”
“They were actually kind of pleasant,” Jane said. “And when
you told them to move it on down the path, they actually apologized.”
“Yeah, but they probably just went and woke up some more people.”
Lou was a musician herself, but between the two Parades and the
circus shows, plus the evening gigs in the food booths, she found
plenty of music during the day and didn’t need to play all night
too. But of course, she was old now, at forty-five.
Ron wandered up, already dressed in the total American Flag outfit he
wore every Friday for some obscure reason. “You know the rules.
One, we don’t come here to sleep, and Two, we don’t come here to
be alone.” They all laughed at the simplicity of it.
“You can sleep when you’re dead. Somehow that had a different
meaning when we were thirty. Now we seem to want to do it every
night.” Jane shuffled off to get in the coffee line for a second
hit.
It was indeed a grueling day, hot and dusty. Jane scrambled to get
shelves arranged and kept neat and labeled and pointed out to the
customers who came in waves to buy gifts and souvenirs and
back-to-school clothes. She was so much less interested in the sales
than in the passing streams of costumed people, who might be
accountants or veterinarians or teachers but were masquerading as
hippies and fairy people. Women wore see-through tops or none at
all, with painted breasts or strategic flowers. Men wore loincloths
and kilts and sarongs and barely anyone was dressed in just regular
clothes. Sometimes she thought people bought her t-shirts so they
could put on something normal again before they lost their composure
altogether. It was a hippie theme park, where it seemed the tourists
were stranger than the residents. It was a zoo, where the visitors
were the show and the attractions were mirrors.
Finally evening fell and the tourists were swept out in a long,
complicated process of checking wristbands and gently pushing the
swell of humanity in the direction of the front gate. The din damped
down only slightly as the prowl continued. Jane and Paula closed up
with curtains drawn over the front of the booth, and sheets pulled
over all the displays to catch the damp and dust. It was well past
dark when the neighbors gathered in front of the booth again, cold
beers in hand, thinking about dinner.
“What’s still open? We had chalupas last night.” Tim and
Paula’s two boys were chomping on pizza but that was a last resort
meal for adults. “I had the philly cheesesteak for lunch, so
that’s out. I say Golden Avatar.” Tim was used to directing the
action but everyone was comfortable in the lawn chairs they had
dragged out from the deck in back. There would have to be some real
impetus to move. Glow sticks and other raver bling were coming out
and it was endlessly amusing to see how people would decorate
themselves with the flashing LEDs and fluorescent plastic tubes. The
darker it got the more interesting the interactions were, as people
peered into each others’ faces and recognized each other by tribal
clues. The energy was ramping up again, with snatches of music and
loud conversation bouncing around above the heads of the streams of
people. At home it would be bedtime, but here that was an
impossibility.
“We could go for ravioli. Rising Moon has that Friday night meal
thing, in fact Lou is playing there now,” Don told the others.
“Too bad we’ve eaten Holy Cow’s food so many times. I see they
finally figured out their light-glare problem. It really isn’t bad
this year.” Paula drew their attention to the food booth across
the path but Jane noticed that the brightest light in the
neighborhood was the full moon coming up behind it, through the
trees. No wonder everyone was so amped.
Jane was munching crackers with her beer and didn’t care too much
about dinner. She considered going to bed, maybe going up for a
shower first. Maybe she’d sleep better if she went to bed clean.
But when the group decided on ravioli, is seemed like a good idea to
wander a bit with them.
The meadow on the other side of the Fair was a soft panorama of
colored glowsticks, with small groups of people gathered in circles
on the ground, and a low hum of music and laughter floating like a
mist. It was gentle, like an eddy where the river slowed and pooled,
the hot pursuit of the prowlers caught here for a spell.
“Here’s where our kids hang out.” Don and Lou and Jane all had
teenagers who didn’t spend much time at the booth. Paula and Tim’s
were younger, but only by a few years. “What did they do before
there was the meadow?” It was easy to see the exponential of
population growth here, with the rest of the Fair just as full as it
had ever been.
The friends drifted off to Rising Moon. It was still lit up, but
only one man stood behind the counter, with a look of amusement. He
shoved a plate of chocolate sauce and a chunk of bread across the
plastic surface to a crusty guy in a battered felt hat. “Try it,”
he said. “Who doesn’t like chocolate.”
The man grunted as if to argue, but took the plate and sat at one of
the tables.
“So, no food?” Don asked.
“No food.” Behind this man two others were dressing, one
applying torn pieces of duct tape to the ruffles of a huge yellow
petticoat, seemingly to make it stay up in front like a can-can
dancer. His head was bald, his legs in striped stockings. Pirate
night? We looked around for Fellini. The man at the counter was
speaking in slow motion to another wandering couple.
“No-o-o fo-o-o-od.”
“But there’s bread,” Don said, indicating a large steel bowl of
chunks and slices of rough wheat sourdough. “Pesto?”
“Pesto. Pesto and bread, we can do.” The counterman emptied a
container of pesto onto a paper plate. Everyone took a handful of
bread.
“How much?” Don took out a pile of small bills.
“No charge.” Don shrugged, looked at the others and took the
food to a table. No food. No money. They ate but didn’t get
full.
The pirates finished dressing, grabbed large knives and faded out the
back of the booth. The counterman strung up sheets and turned out
the lights, still smiling graciously to the succession of two-and
threesomes approaching the counter. When it got dark no one even
looked toward the booth---just kept walking toward the next light.
Jane licked her fingers and stood, and the group rejoined the flow of
people shuffling in the darkness. The moon wasn’t making it
through the trees here in the deep woods. She kept sight of the
others, just barely, and walked slower.
Around a bend, in a clearing, she saw the scatterlight of a mirrored
ball. The Disco Bus! The Disco Bus was back! Jane started to
groove to the beat of the familiar song, those silly Village People,
singing YMCA. A syncopated crowd was packed in around the bus,
moving as a unit to the pounding bass, arms in the air, some spelling
out the letters, singing along. Red and blue lights pulsed from the
bus, which was more like a cart this year, carried by a quartet of
young men, one at each corner. A framework like roll bars supported
the disco ball and shiny streamers and flags. It was moving slowly
toward them, the groovers stretching from side to side, completely
covering the path. It was a portable crowd, moving together, lost in
the groove, a party you wanted to be in.
Laughter was immediate. Jane and Don looked at each other and cracked
up, but they didn’t hesitate. Tim yelled “Disco Salmon!” and
they waded into the crowd, dancing upstream, fingers pointing up,
crying “Hoo,Hoo” with the rest. The crowd allowed them in, and
Jane’s body pulsed with the music and the lights and the contact
high from the young bodies all around her. Her hips met their hips,
their shoulders curved smoothly past hers as they danced one foot and
the other up and back, side to side, dancing all directions, spinning
like the disco ball. Each time she caught sight of Tim and Don and
Paula, they laughed harder and danced with more ease. Burn baby
burn, Disco Inferno!
On the other side they watched as the crowd of dancers detached from
them, laughing again as they reluctantly let go of the groove. The
Bus would keep on going around the long path, crossing the figure
eight at the junction and around again, all night long as it had last
year and the year before. The outrageous Disco Bus that you just
couldn’t get mad about when it woke you straight upright out of
sleep. It took away your tiredness, it carried away your dull old
self, it brought you back to the land of fur hats and tight pants.
You could get with it, get by it, or get on it and go with it all
night, but you couldn’t get along without it.
The old folks hobbled home and went to bed, but when the bus came by
her booth two hours later and woke her up out of a deep sleep, Jane
got up and went out to have a last look. The crowd pulsed by like a
river otter or a friendly dragon. The party moved by and down the
path, a chatter of conversation trailing behind, a bit of hypnosis in
action, like the Pied Piper. It was taking those young folks for a
ride. As it flowed on past, Jane wondered how long it would be
allowed to exist. Surely someone would complain about the noise,
want to move it to the parking lot like the drummers who used to keep
everyone up all night at the junction.
It came around again Saturday night, but Sunday night she saw it for
the last time, and there was a strange change. The ball was
spinning, the glitterlight was falling all around on the groovitude
of the surrounding crowd, and it was all moving in unison at the same
pace. Fingers were in the air, shoulders humping to the same beat,
but it was all silent. Each person had a wire to their ear, an
earbud inserted. They were all synched up to the same broadcast,
something only they could hear.
The future of the Disco Bus was assured. Nobody could complain about
a silent moving rave.
Jane let out a howl, that echoed in communal response up and down the
path. She didn’t want things to get too quiet.
