take me higher

It’s Spike Lee-movie hot again but our new air conditioner, handed down from the same friends who gave us the TV, actually puts me in a somewhat less comfortable state. My most pungent air conditioner memories involve exes and cheap hotels; the least contentious tale is about Ezra and I, on our ill-planned but idyllic road trip through the American South, when we pulled into Baton Rouge as a serial killer stalked through the LSU campus, raping and stabbing his female victims. We checked into the Vacation Inn and posted up at an old style, walk-up Dairy Queen near a swamp, dripping vanilla soft serve down our hands and onto a picnic table; the dining area was in the open air and perpendicular to those peculiar driftwood markers that jut out from water in Louisiana like suspended-motion alligators, and I kept imagining the killer sneaking out from behind the trees–maybe it’s because of the movies, but there is something about swamps that inspire a teetering in your own safety.
The “concierge” back at the Vacation Inn warned us to lock both our locks because the serial killer was still loose. We cinched the deadbolts, showered off the heat, and discovered the only thing worse than the stale-pool oxygen of an air conditioner is that and cheap sheets. I couldn’t sleep; even in the comfort of Ezra’s wondrous strength and baseball reflexes, my killer dreams sat low as swamp light. It was also the summer of Elizabeth Smart, the papers screaming about baby girls gone for naught, and my OCD had manifested itself in a decidedly unhealthy missing persons fixation. In a year when a lot of people left me, I was desperate to know how anyone so loved could simply vanish.
So it’s the humid stick that I like, not so much the artificial coddling of the cool air box. So at 1 am, hot and wanting a smoke and with slightly more than $.54 in my skirt pocket, I hoofed up Vanderbilt to Ft. Greene, passing other sweaty people, cop cars, taxi cabs and a mirrored vanity discarded on the corner a block from my building. Up the way to Ebenezer’s, who promised a cigarette even though I quit and some company and some compare/contrast about our collective summer dates from Columbia, the university. But he didn’t tell me about the dance party, population: three. I slid through the door and up the steps into a closed circuit moment of spazz, where no one felt too self conscious to flip their shit. We danced to English Beat and Slits 7-inches and popped our lungs singing to “Tainted Love,” the original version by Gloria Jones, shadowing the heart-wrenched wails of a woman on the verge–and The Police and Neil Young and Neil Diamond, James Chance, Soho “Hot Music,” oh god, Bad Brains, Biz Markie, Kurtis Blow “The Breaks.” I took photos of records I wanted to remember with my phone. Siouxsie and the Banshees picture disc. Sly and the Family Stone. I felt spiral-eyed with desire: Play another. Play another. Play another. I could listen to “Hot Music” and The Slits, only, forever, now, the moment without rule. Where is the repeat button.
Eben and I interpretive-modern-danced to the floor, intertwined in mock-fight like statuettes, me making wave motions to his feet with my fingers and the right side of his body slightly twitching. I left with Young Marble Giants on the stereo, but that is not a commentary on how I feel about their music.
At three a.m., on the walk back home, feeling safe but also imagining I was probably being reckless, I saw a man who’d tried to take the free vanity, but was instead struggling to free himself. His shorts had snagged on the mirror’s beveled edge and he was nigh depantsed, grunting, possibly high. Got an eyeful of white Hanes before I made it back to my own stoop.