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The Morning Party

“Dance, dance, dance, as if tomorrow we all shall die!”

—Disco Witch Manifesto #10

When Joe walked into the Morning Party at eleven fifteen AM , he was hit with an overwhelming blast of energy from the ecstatic, sun-drenched crowd. Every man, woman, and drag queen was wearing some sort of spangly, skimpy thong, swimsuit, or jockstrap—with or without headdress. Several people wore matching outfits signifying the comradeship of that summer’s house share. There were shiploads of sailors in short shorts, blister packs of Judys in various incarnations (Oz or overdose), pools of synchronized Esther Williamses. Former bar patrons shouted:

“Hey, Joe! Yowza! Look at you!”

“Save a dance for me, Joe!”

“If you wanna use the VIP tent with me, Joe, just ask!”

When DJ Michael Jorba blasted “Get On the Dance Floor” the crowd cheered, arms raised, heaving like the ocean.

Joe, however, didn’t move. He scanned the crowd to see if Fergal was there. Not that he wanted to see him. Did he? He didn’t. He did. He didn’t. What would be the point? He knew what he was there to do: Just for one night, do whatever you have to do to get out of your head. And then, in the morning, if you make it that far, you’ll get your things and catch the earliest ferry from the Grove. Tell no one. Just vanish.

“Looking good, Joe! Love the white shorts!”

“Wow! Someone is looking for trouble!”

“Get a load of you! Now we know why your bar burned down! Hot stuff!”

Joe forced a smile as he swerved and dodged his way to the beach side of the dance floor, longing for anonymity, still searching (but not searching) for Fergal. He steered clear of Dory and Saint D’Norman dancing in their glimmering silver and white costumes near the stage. He saw Ronnie and Vince, wearing wrestling singlets, pouring drinks and joyfully squirting each other with water guns. Next to them were Elena and Cleigh, drinking Tab and bopping to the music. At least they were able to find love on Fire Island.

Joe pushed deeper into the crowd, not wanting to be seen by them or anyone he knew. Although that would nearly be impossible since a Who’s Who of his Fire Island summer was swirling around him—the Graveyard Girls (with bumpers stuffed into their nostrils), Chrissy Bluebird, Ace Dandridge, Trey Winkle, Tommy Tune, Jerry Herman, a bevy of Brians, a gaggle of Gregs, all shouting their hellos.

“Hey, Joe! Hey!” a familiar but unexpected voice called out.

Joe turned to see none other than Frankie Fabulous with his broken neck.

“What the hell?” Joe muttered as he stared in shock at Frankie, who was wearing a huge metal satellite ring around his head, held in place with metal pins sticking out of his skull and stabilized with a vest around his naked, chiseled chest. Despite the massive, neck-stabilizing headgear, Frankie was shirtless and wiggling his see-through-mesh-covered hips while waving his arms to the music.

Despite being dumbfounded why anyone in that condition would be there, Joe shouted, “Hey, Frankie! Looking good!”

Then a thought flickered across his brain— Frankie Fabulous looks like the planet Saturn has come to dance. Is this what Howie meant? Saturn returns for all of us. Are you my broken-necked Saturn, Frankie?

Joe looked around at several attractive men who were staring at him, their half smirks sending an invitational signal. Given another place and time, they might have been worthy of his love—if he were capable of it. Darker thoughts stabbed at his brain. How many of these men would be dead within the next ten years? Would Howie, Lenny, and Saint D’Norman be dead? Would Fergal be? How many times could a heart break until it could no longer be a container for love? Come on, stop it, Joe, stop it. It’s a party. Try and smile. Today you escape from your head, tomorrow you escape for real. No looking back. No quitting now.

He fished into the black fanny pack that clung around his waist, his fingers caressing the little mottled merman’s head from the burned clock. Pushing it to the side, he felt for the three pebble-smooth, brown glass vials and the little baggie he had promised Ronnie he’d throw away weeks before.

So, where would he go if he made it until tomorrow? Move to New York? Or maybe even Los Angeles or San Francisco? You know you won’t go to any of those places, and you won’t go to med school or even take the MCAT. You’re a coward, Joe. You’ll move back into mom’s house in Bucks County and get your old job back cleaning toilets at Friends Hospital. He’d start pretending to be straight again. On weekends he’d go to Philly and hook up with random strangers, checking their bathroom cabinets for AZT, avoiding anyone who might get sick or break his heart any other way. He’d spend his thirties, forties, and fifties remembering this summer and what he could have had with Fergal, and how he’d hurt both him and Elliot. Eventually he’d die miserable and alone, and they’d only find his body because of the smell, and no one would come to the funeral because there wouldn’t be a funeral.

“You okay, Joe?” Frankie Fabulous screamed into Joe’s ear—or as close as he could get with his satellite neck brace.

“Huh?” Joe realized he had been standing frozen in the middle of the dance floor.

“You look like your dog just OD’d!” Frankie Fabulous wildly wiggled the lower half of his broken body. “This party is tubular! Come on, smile! If I can smile, anyone can!”

Saturn returns! Saturn returns! Saturn returns!

Joe smiled as broad as Frankie Fabulous, then made his way into one of the porta potties and locked the plastic hatch. One by one he pulled the brown glass vials from his fanny pack and checked their contents. Two were half full and one was completely full. There was also the little packet with the star-embossed blue pill. He remembered hearing a Promethean bartender calling X a bliss rocket. That was exactly what Joe needed. He tossed the X into his mouth, making spit to swallow it down. He waited five minutes but felt nothing. Fuck this! Joe poured a tiny white mountain of coke onto the meaty part of his hand behind his thumb, exhaled all his breath before snorting the powder as deeply as he could. Zing! A slight burn, a bitter taste, and his nose felt immediately clear. A second later, tiny explosions ignited inside his brain.

“Holy shit,” Joe said, carefully shoving the vial back into his fanny pack.

He burst out the door of the porta potty to an entirely different world. All his dark musings had been subdued. It’s really not such a bad party! In fact, it’s a really, really nice party! The music seemed better, the weather seemed perfect, and everyone appeared way more fascinating than only moments before. This shit really did work. He ran back to Frankie Fabulous and started dancing wildly underneath the man’s scaffolded neck brace.

“There ya go, Joe!” Frankie cried. “That’s the spirit!”

“You’re a really great guy, Frankie!” A lightning bolt of bliss surged through his veins. “That you can have that kind of accident and come back and dance! It’s incredible! You’re such an inspiration!”

“Thanks, Joe! I just love to dance!”

Joe blew Frankie a kiss and bounced off deeper into the crowd until he found the perfect spot to dance alone. Fifteen minutes later something felt different—the coke zing grew quieter. Suddenly he was overcome with the most sublime feeling, as if little rays of light were shooting out of his pores. The bliss rocket. He stood on his tiptoes, closed his eyes, and stretched his arms up toward the sun. The warm breeze blew through each hair on his body. When he opened his eyes, the sky was bluer, the sun brighter, the dune grass greener. Everything was sparkling, including him. He grabbed his pecs and biceps. The feel of his own flesh turned him on.

“Yeah, that’s right!” he yelled. “I am Falafel Crotch! That is who I am!” He reached into his fanny pack and lovingly grasped the brown vials and empty cellophane baggie in his hands. “Thank you so much!” he told them. “I understand now! I can get through life like this! I can be brave! I can do what I came to do!”

In one giant, loud, harmonious, electronic voice, the vials and baggie began to sing “This Is Acid” by Maurice Joshua. “Bah bah bah-bah bah-bah-bah-bah!” Joe shoved the singing drugs back into his fanny pack and began to dance with his two thousand dance partners, all stomping on the makeshift pool-top dance floor that bounced to the throbbing dance mix. So many hands groped Joe’s chest, his cock, his ass. He felt so loved, so happy on his final day. Everyone’s eyes sparkled. Why had he waited so long?

“How’s it, Joe?”

“You look great!”

“Didn’t know you could dance, Joe!”

“Wow, it is big!”

Joe’s grin strained the edges of his face. He was in love with every single person on the dance floor. One middle-aged dude began rubbing his hand down the center of Joe’s sweaty back until it reached his buttocks. Joe’s skin leaped to meet the man’s touch. He wasn’t even attracted to him, though he ruminated on whether he might be the love of his life. If only the world could feel like this forever.

“Thank you!” Joe yelled into the man’s ear. “I have to go, but I love you very much! But today is the ending! The big finale! And I have to find someone first!”

And it wasn’t a lie. Joe intended to find someone … or rather someone else , someone with a big, muscled body and a handsome face. Someone who wanted to have sex with Joe but at the same time hated him. Someone who could never be wounded or hurt.

He had to find the Gladiator Man.

Joe slid around the dance floor as if it were a giant flesh jungle gym, kissing this one, dancing with that one, using all the beautiful bodies like slippery water slides to whatever beautiful man was next. When he finally paused to look up at the sky, the sun had fast-forwarded itself to the far west. How long had he been dancing? He glanced at someone’s watch—hours had vanished. He felt a sudden swoop, like an airplane losing ten thousand feet of altitude. He looked around. Nothing seemed to have changed, yet everything had. Eyes no longer sparkled. The music was no longer magical. The groping hands were attached to men he no longer found attractive. Dark, pickax-carrying thoughts floated across his brain. Is it right to be dancing when so many others are dying? Did Fergal already meet someone else? Will he die without ever finding love? Will Elena? How are you supposed to be brave enough now?

Joe hoovered his way through the rest of the coke vials, and for fifteen-minute bursts he got a little of his zing back, but then the swoop down would return, the dark thoughts. Finally, he stood stone still in the middle of the dance floor, shoulders slumped, his face a mask of despair. All the brown vials and the baggie in his fanny pack were empty. The Morning Party would be ending in a matter of hours. Howie’s blood moon would rise, and all the people would leave for dinner or go to the Promethean, partying until Monday morning, cuddling with someone they were capable of loving. By then Joe would be gone. But before then, Joe needed to find the Gladiator Man—and more drugs—to be brave enough to do what he intended to do, to be brave enough to escape.

He unscrewed each of the empty coke vials and tapped them on his tongue, hoping orphaned grains would fall out. None did. He licked the inside of the X baggie. Nothing. He pulled out the little burned merman’s head and looked at his tiny, manly, bearded face, still black with soot. The face that had once looked like Fergal’s.

“What am I going to do now, little merman? I’m drowning again, and you don’t even have a tail anymore to save me.”

The little merman’s black dot eyes stared back at Joe coldly.

“Fuck you.” Joe tossed the charred head high up into the air over the dancing crowd. Once he saw it drop into their midst, he returned his own head to his knees and prayed for the day to finally end . It was the strange vibration of the floor that made him look up.

“What the fuck?” Joe stumbled up from the floor. “Did you feel that?” he asked a man, sweating with a rapturous look on his face.

“Feel what?” the man said, dreamily pulling Joe’s hand toward his crotch. “Wanna feel this?”

The floor rumbled louder. It felt as if Fire Island was being hit by an earthquake. He heard the sound of wood splitting. The floor beneath his feet dropped to a tilt. The crowd fell into one another and erupted into screams. Joe, realizing the pool-top platform was collapsing, ran toward the temporary fence that surrounded the party. Just as he landed on solid ground, he tripped and fell, scraping the heel of his hand. When he turned to look back, he saw the entire middle of the dance floor crack, split open, fold inward, and collapse. Bodies fell into one another and then into the pools.

Some people screamed for help, as if they were Shelley Winters in a seven-foot-deep version of The Poseidon Adventure . Some people laughed at the absurdity of it. Others whined loudly how the disaster had killed their high. A few simply floated dreamily on the sinking debris, cocktails still in hand. The DJ never stopped spinning.

“Quite a shit show if you ask me,” a voice from behind Joe said into his ear. “Wouldn’t have happened if I’d been in charge.”

Turning around, Joe saw that it was Scotty Black, the person he hated most in the world other than himself. He appeared unfazed by the dance-floor disaster, as if he had seen things like that happening every day.

“What do you want?” Joe said coldly. “Wasn’t burning the bar down enough?”

“Don’t believe the rumors.” Scotty laughed. “Need anything?”

“What do you mean?”

“Party favors,” he said, winking and patting his white fanny pack. “You look like you could use something.”

“No thanks,” Joe said, turning away.

“I know what you think of me,” Scotty said, “but I’m on your side. I want hot studs like yourself to have a good time. It’s good for business.”

Scotty handed Joe what looked like a small conical seashell. But it wasn’t a seashell at all. It appeared to be a fancy little glass bumper encased in a highly decorative silver sheath.

“What is it?” Joe asked. “Coke? K?”

“Nope. It’s my own special mix. A combo of this and that.” He winked again. “Mostly that . Not something I do myself, but it helps my staff keep up their energy for long stretches. Better than coke. Makes you forget all the sorrows of our world.” He gestured to the carnage in front of them. “It’ll also give you some pep. Gotta have pep at a party, right?”

“Will it make me brave?” Joe asked, screwing off the top of the bumper and peering at the mottled yellow-gray powder.

“It will make you the bravest you’ve ever been. You’ll be superhuman for a little while. It’ll be fun. I’m gonna open the Promethean early to give these folks a place to party. You should come by and brighten up the place. I promise, you’ll have the time of your life.”

Normally, Joe would never take anything Scotty Black offered to him. But right then, the thought of staying sober was unthinkable. Before his mind could catch up to his hands, he was pressing the bumper to his nose. “Ow!” The bitter powder burned a fiery trail from his nostril all the way to the back of his soft palate. Every hair on his body leaped to attention. A dark, rushing, sexy sensation rocketed throughout his brain and limbs.

Less than twenty seconds later, Joe’s relentless thoughts of yesterdays and tomorrows had been extinguished. No Elliot. No Fergal. No AIDS. No fear of dying or losing others. For the first time in his life, Joe felt truly brave.

“Feels good, right?” Scotty sniggered.

“Something like that.” Joe offered the bumper back to Scotty.

“It’s okay.” Scotty smiled. “Keep it. It’s the end of summer. Let loose. Maybe next season you’ll be ready to work for me. I better go open the club. See you there in a bit.”

Scotty kissed Joe on his lips and walked away. Joe wiped his mouth, then loaded up the bumper and napalmed his throat and sinuses again with the yellow-gray powder. When the pain subsided, his skin felt as if it was liquefying into molten honey while his viscera filled with the most ravenous sexual hunger. Despair? What despair?

But where to have his night of abandon before whatever came next? The Promethean? No, no, no. He’d know too many people. He didn’t want to be reminded of the real world or its heartbreaking inhabitants. With his newfound, drug-induced superpowers, he took a running leap over the beach fence, landing in the warm sand. The Meat Rack, he thought. If Gladiator Man is anywhere, he’ll be there. It was the only answer. Gladiator Man needed to pound the memory of Fergal and Elliot from Joe’s body and heart. He’d have his wild, dark Fire Island moment, then be gone forever.

“I will be brave,” he muttered. “I will finally be brave.”