In Response to "Let's Go Dancing!"

          A beard is in the upstairs bathroom trashcan. It is in a clump next to the empty toilet paper roll. The empty toilet paper roll is cardboard brown. It is making love to the metal turnstile because they have known each other so long there is a necessary intimacy. There is a necessary need to get things out of the way and enjoy them at the same time above the toilet boll rimmed in red streaks. The rim of the upstairs bathroom sink is sprinkled in beard and neck hair. Un-May-like weather means the air conditioning is kept under the pit bull’s armpits. Her armpits so bald from run friction and humping differently, from humping the day out of the thrift chair. The chin and cheeks are the same kind of bald now, barren with the former beard in the trashcan and the ceiling fan swimming laps above the washer/dryer. Later, the hair will smell like chicken noodle soup to some, barbecue meatballs to others, and, to still others, one of the most convenient and cost-effective ways to live.

An authentic dance style comes out when the beard is in the trashcan, and the dance style reflects the problematicness of the word “authentic.” The dance style, in its leg movements and shoulder pops reminiscent of a small backyard hedged in bumblebees, itself challenges notions of authenticity while drinking one Corona beer because it has to drive international graduate students home after the night. The dance style is twenty-six-and-a-half years old and weak in the lower-body joints from penitent. A bouncer with a pectoral t-shirt told it to pull up its shit or it wasn’t allowed in with its tucked business casual shirt. The shirt was wrinkled from napping in it and writing in it with stiff arms and neck. The stiff shirt had nothing to do with the authentic dance style, or maybe it did. Maybe authentic dance styles stem from the stiffness of business casual, or the casual business of moving through the world in planned or not-meant-to-look-like-it movements.

The sad part was the people without the dance movement style standing in a rectangle spilling their drinks on the floor and watching dancers spill their drinks on the floor with ice. At one point, a dance partner slipped on the ice and said it felt like high school prom graduation all over again and again and again because she slipped three more times. I said the pounding from the DJ booth, high up above shouting the occurrence of birthdays, was the rose on a rented lapel. The pounding from the DJ was a scene from the television show Happy Days, where everyone knows that each other have not been virgins for some time. I watched people watching and watching with their arms folded across their pectoral t-shirts. To the folding I did a lizard neck movement and did not blend in with the Southeast Asian men in leather vests. These men, one of them, would tongue kiss a mirror before the night was through, and next to them would be a young woman treating her baseball cap like a wild horse. The young woman broke her baseball cap backward on her own head. She broke it tame and shook her own ass.

The other most sad part was the group dances played at post-collegiate weddings where people dance in a group and a group of lines. Think about a long game of bingo with ping pong balls read through a microphone and people sitting in their seats and making movements to the microphone’s instructions and saying in their minds, “Yes, I do know how to move after all now that the sounds overhead are familiar and in that dictatorial way.” To the music that was directions and also love letters to the sound of sampled disco songs sung by disco singers. I could not participate in the group dances because of the directions and the anarchy propaganda a woman in a long dress pulled out of her purse and read aloud to the people near our glass of water table. Near our table draped in leather purses and stacked with water glasses. She told us to rise up and she told us to rise up with her hips made of boxing gloves. She punched us with her boxing glove hips and we were sensical after that for the rest of the night. With the sensical vibration from the puddles of drinks we left at 1:30 in the morning and knew that we were much too old to style. We were this yelling thing after we got out into the street and saw a cigarette smoking on the ledge of a smoking shop selling smoke out into the street.

Ending in a rapper surprised by the internationalist nature of a peanut butter sandwich and an eyebrow ring. A duo of innocent teachers talking dirty in the back next to the box speakers. A drinking out of the vodka bottle with the help of a German woman and a concrete steps. Two bicycling women and their flashing lights on the not with the bicycle man. Two different purple eye sockets on the floor of a VHS tape and box of dirty laundry. Two women who went home from the dance style exhibition without their backbones or rational reasons for being without them. Thinking going on about those women and how they walk and what they will use to dance with later. To hold themselves up.

This all not being too much unlike the first time, in the cafeteria, planning diarrhea for a week over the talk next to the baseball diamond in the park two years before. All that diarrhea for the touching of a belly and the touching of the side of a belly from the side and from the front. Squares of men and women planning the similar touches and revealing those touches and the plans for them with a handful of bottle. Bottles and the old joints keeping things different from the diarrhea before, in junior high school. Still similar diarrhea the day after it all, or days after it all if relating to the newly pregnant woman on the way to her bathroom beyond the DJs. Her own belly something different from the earlier planned touches and friendly kinds of paranoia about all the things we’re going to need to read and remember for the week.