Steve Katz - The Compleat Memoirrhoids - 137.n

This Saturday night it’s Les Brown and his Band of Renown playing for the dance at the 92nd Street Y. Usually they bring in some unknown, or their house band, but once every couple of months they get big name bands, like Stan Kenton, Count Basie, Woody Herman. It pulls in crowds of kids from all over the city. The dance is mostly for us high school kids, but with the name bands a lot of people in their twenties show up too. The only band from nowheresville was Shep Fields and his Rippling Rhythm. Drag. People stayed away from that one, but not me. I went alone. I go to Stuyvesant High School, all boys, so a dance where you can body up against a girl is irresistible. This time I go with Ray Gangi and Bobby Freilich. We take the A to 42nd, then the IRT Shuttle to the East side, and back up on the 6 train to 86th Street. At the Papaya King on the corner we fuel up with large papaya drinks and hot dogs…

“So what is Les Brown? They do slow ones or what?” Gangi asks.

“It’s a swing band. It’s really big.” Freilich says. “They did ‘Sentimental Journey’ that Doris Day sang. And they did ‘I’ve Got My Love To Keep Me Warm.’ They jump. It makes you dance. So what, Gangi, afraid you’re going to spaz out on the dance floor?”

“You’re cruisin’ for a bruisin’, Freilich.” Gangi raises a fist. He has a tough time looking ferocious.

“Oooh. You got me scared, Gangi. Oh yeah, and they did ‘Joltin’ Joe Dimaggio.’ That was big. Dimag. The Yankee Clipper.” Freilich spins a few of his Freilich moves under the street lights, as we head to 92nd Street. He’s relentless. He’ll dance with the rats when they rise out of the sewers. He’s got no shame. I saw him boogie with a stranger, a fat lady unloading from a cab. He thinks he’s Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor. He dances with street lamps.

“I like some slow ones,” I say. “Because…”

Gangi finishes my sentence. “That’s when you get really close, and mmmph.” He makes some pudgy pelvic thrusts. We’re both a little chubby.

“I hope that girl, Sylvia, from the Bronx, is there,” I say. “I think that was her name, Sylvia. She was like a dry hump all over the dance floor. She crept her fingers down and touched my dick once.”

“No one gets pregnant on the dance floor,” Gangi says. He’d been warned by his mom about the dangers.

“Wiggy, man. Who thinks about pregnant?” Freilich says. “I just want to dance.”

Usually it costs a buck to get in, but because of the name band they take a buck fifty. It’s all I’ve got, saving a dime for the subway home. The dance has just started, in a large darkened ballroom, the band on the stage in an alcove of light.

“I can’t see anybody,” Gangi says.

“Just wait for your eyes to adjust,” says Freilich. “They’re all here for you.”

“No one’s dancing yet?” I say.

The clusters of girls around the room fill the air with giggles and the boys flex biceps, grunt, and swagger. The lights come up after the first few numbers. The ballroom is packed. “Look at all the cooties here. Cooties and cubes,” Freilich proclaims.

Les Brown takes the mike. “Hello, boys and girls, and welcome. I’m Les Brown, and this is my band of renown. We’ll do our best this evening to swing for you and get you to jump and have fun and get close to somebody.” A cheer goes up from all the guys.

In the dim light I think I spot Sylvia across the room, with a small flock of Bronx girls. You can always tell girls from the Bronx because they’ve all got perms and they overdress and wear tons of make-up. Not Sylvia, though. She dresses plain, in a tight knit skirt and sweater. Ready for business. She wears her hair down falling over her shoulders.

“I’m going over there” I tell Gangi. Freilich had already set out on his fishing expedition. He’s intrepid. He doesn’t mind fielding the inevitable snubs and dirty looks the girls are obliged to dole out. They look the guy up and down, and don that disgusted mask, wrinkling their noses to indicate the “What makes you think you’re worthy of dancing with me, worm?” response. It doesn’t bother Freilich. He laughs it off and goes on to the next. I wish I was that tough hearted.

Gangi comes with me. “I think that’s Sylvia,” I say, when we get close.

“You mean the skinny one? I like that one in the pink sweater, with the Dagmar melons.”

“She’s not skinny.” The lights go down again, and the band swings into “Woodchopper’s Ball.” Freilich is on the floor, his partner a big girl, a good dancing match for him, her loose skirt swinging around to flash her lace fringed white panties. The girl in the pink sweater gives Gangi the contemptuous once-over for daring to ask her to dance. He is persistent, however, and doesn’t leave. When I tap Sylvia, and she turns and immediately takes my hand and tugs me onto the dance floor, the pink sweater relents and dances with Gangi. I don’t know if Sylvia recognizes me from the dance two weeks ago. After the fast number the band slows down and does “The Way You Look Tonight,” and Sylvia presses her body against me as if she wants our separate skins to weld together. She is so far into me I feel like she can come out the other side. And she rubs all her girl stuff, everything, against my skin. I feel her nipples, the shrub between her legs. We do a slow grind, even to the fast numbers.

By eleven o’clock, when the dance is wrapping up, Freilich has boogied so hard his shirt is drenched, stuck to his body with sweat. Gangi had danced with several girls, but the last two slow ones are with pink sweater, and she finally gets close and cheek to cheek. I have been stuck like scotch tape to Sylvia all night long. We don’t say anything. We don’t even separate between songs, except for the intermission, when she returns to the chatter of her Bronx buddies.

The band leaves in a hurry for a midnight gig at Roseland. Kids spill onto the street and head for buses and subways, amidst a crowd of cops there to prevent teenage testosterone rumbles.

“That was too quick over. I could have danced hours into the morning with that redhead,” Freilich says.

“I hope… I liked,” Gangi tries to fashion a romantic reverie. “But I think they were falsies. Like they jabbed.”

“What God has forgotten, we stuff with cotton,” says Freilich.

I can’t say a word. I have to walk bowlegged, my legs spread. Descending the steps into the subway is torture. I feel like an old man. Blue balls. I never had them like this before. It’s some kind of lesson. Though the train is almost empty I won’t sit down. It’s too painful to sit down. I’ll never sit down again.

Steve Katz? PRESENT!Two feet. Five toes each foot. Hammer toes bunch back against high metatarsal, then high longitudinal arch. Heel and Achilles good. Ankles stiff from infantile paralysis, the bulbar polio that tightened it up, that made it difficult to swallow, made the voice growly. Left calf diminished from veins harvested for cardiac bypass. Right calf still plump and strong. Either prone to cramp during sleep. Knees still in service, never to extend beyond middle of foot during forms — tai chi, bagua, xinyi. Drumsticks thick, muscled, ready to work, to absorb the shocks. Hips so far so good, unreplaced. Perineum consciousness essential say the teachers of internal martial arts, to be raised slightly for the strike. I never strike. Genital package virtually irrelevant after prostate extraction, though both elimination functions almost back to normal piss and shit. Below navel tan tien collects chi, chi allocated from there. Above navel — abdomen, a one pack well cultivated, surprisingly hard after iron shirt training, that shirt now rusty. Spine expresses the length, the alignment of vertical me. Strong back, no pain. Ribs anchored to spinal column create the volume of torso, substantial, and embrace, protect organs, a squishy collaboration of kishkes on the wane. Shoulders, neck, once powerful, now less so. Sternum and collarbone, just to mention them. Biceps, happy elbows with funnybone, forearms into hands and fingers, left hand now often numb from diabetic neuropathy, away. Topping all is this bump — the head, the noggin, the old bean, the pimple, the wig, the belfry, the noodle, the dome, face white bearded, blue eyes that see less, ears hearing less, nose that occasionally erupts, lips tender and puckerable over full set of pearlies, with two implants. Skull around fatty brain meat that with the spinal cord extension more or less controls the catastrophe. Sometimes perturbation reigns, particularly emotional confusion, often trapped in the muscles, all wrapped by fascia, that membrane continuous around all muscle and organs, like one long pull of plastic wrap hugging all my stuff. And this skin is the interface, mine not tattooed, but somewhat scarred, with its sweat glands, its sudden warts and bruises and extrusions. This expresses my whole presence, my aging contraption, a receptacle for joy, for survival, for confusion, for pride and all etceteras. This skin presents me, displays my contents to the world.