King of Swords

He'd loved it and he'd loved discos. They'd been a great racial melting pot — whites, blacks and Latinos coming together for the single purpose of having a good time, everyone getting along, Dr King's dream in platforms, satin, sequins and on lots and lots of cocaine; and it had never been easier to meet black chicks, which was his main reason for going to so many, so often. Then Saturday Night Fever had come out and killed it. After that all you ever saw were random assholes in white suits and black shirts aping Travolta, while the women unfailingly wore red dresses and talked in phoney New York accents. He'd been glad when

the backlash had kicked in, with the 'Disco Sucks' campaign and the blowing up of a small mountain of records on Disco Demolition Night: it had cleared the air and the wannabe Tony Maneros had fucked off to Kiss and REO Speedwagon concerts, denying their past dalliance like Peter before the cock crew.

When he arrived, just after eleven, the club seemed strangely empty. The DJ was spinning the kind of salsified disco tune that was becoming all the rage in the city, but there were wide-open spaces on the dance floor and most of the people were standing on the fringes, looking on, barely moving.

Max got himself a beer from the bar. The music was too loud and the song was making him uncomfortable, nauseous almost. The bassy beat made the fluid in his guts slosh around, the squealing brass grated against his eardrums, and an adenoidal girl singer was belting out a two-word lyric — Vamos! Dana! — over and over and over in a shriek both pained and painful. Suddenly this wasn't music any more, but an endurance test in patience and tolerance, and he crashed at the first hurdle.

He lit a cigarette and checked out the women, but it was too dark to tell the shapes apart. Torture-by-saldisco segued into son-of-torture-by-saldisco. The crowd was still thicker at the edges of the dance floor, the vibe in the place curiously dead, frowns instead of smiles, stillness instead of motion.

He began thinking that coming here hadn't been such a good idea and wondered whether it was worth driving to his second favourite spot, O Miami in Miami Springs. He dismissed it as a trek too far and walked over to the dance floor, to see what was keeping the people at bay.

At first he thought it was some kind of competition, or maybe a 'couples only' segment of the night. There were maybe two dozen people getting down to the God-awful shit coming out of the speakers. Nothing special about them

at an initial glance, except for the fact they could all dance quite superbly, their movements at one with the musical squall, not a dip or turn out of time. You always got this at discos, the Cinderella effect transforming the drab into deities, deities to dust. But the longer he watched them, the more he realized what was happening: they were all dancing in the same way, and the dances were an incredibly complex mix of dazzling footwork patterns and unpredictable turn sequences. It all seemed pre-arranged, pre-planned and exclusive. To participate you not only had to know the moves, but know the dancers too. The couples were in a loose, tight circle, but were all interacting with each other, the merest look or hand signal announcing a switch in the pattern: perfect physical telepathy. And nearly everyone around them watched in defeated awe, as if suffering from a collective loss of confidence in their own hipster abilities.

A few men and a few more women were trying to copy the steps, but they couldn't keep time with the music, or were too uncoordinated to fuse feet and upper body, or simply glanced at the new masters of the dance floor and realized they'd never ever get it right.

Max moved around, beer in one hand, cigarette in the other, trying to find women as bored and pissed off as he was, but their attention was undivided, to the point that the two times he tried to strike up conversations, he was completely ignored, frozen out at the first monosyllable.

He finished his beer and went back to the bar. He didn't want another, but he bought one anyway, hoping the music would change and normality would resume.

Unfortunately torture-by-saldisco had come with her whole fucking family, and after forty more minutes the scene had become so unbearable he began to long for some locked-in-a-timewarp dickheads to stride in in cheap white polyester suits and force the DJ to play the Bee Gees at gunpoint.

m At around midnight he left. He'd had three beers and a shot of bourbon and didn't feel remotely drunk. Things had moved on and he was living out his yesterdays. He wished he'd stayed at home.

Driving back he realized he was hungry and didn't have any food at home. He drove to Cordova's on South West 7th Street, in Little Havana. It was a fast-ish food place with wooden tables outside.

He got himself a plate of picadillo — spicy minced beef with raisins, olives, onions and garlic — on white rice, with a side of fried plantain and a can of Colt 45.