dance

January 18, 2015

La Casa de los Marinos

Friday night I went out to what was billed as PACHANGA, an evening of Latin dance at the Blue Rooster.  It promised me pachanga, cumbia, merengue y más, la música de mi juventud.  And it delivered magnificently—to a room of young folks who knew what they were doing.

It was almost overwhelming to watch them dancing with expressions of glee, passion, and beauty, and to relive the rapture of those rhythms of so long ago.  Fifty years…  My eyes flooded with the body memory of all those wild dances with my beautiful Jane.

Though only couples were dancing, just as I’d do back then, I started dancing by myself to a splendid cumbia, and soon some other exuberant guys joined me.  I wanted to shout out my joy.  There followed some heart-rending merengues and a boisterous pachanga that almost did me in.

Once, the DJ called out something about la casa de música, and for a blessed moment I was back in La Casa de los Marinos   I was again a demented dervish in the House of the Sailors in that ruinous building at Toulouse and Decatur, a waterfront dive aka La Marina.  Vamos a La Casa!

La Casa de los Marinos - New Orleans

La Casa de los Marinos – New Orleans

Sorry, but I feel an elegy coming on.  For the legendary La Marina was swept away by the relentless tides of years.  Many others besides me must still remember the glory of that dark and disreputable Latin sailor bar, that temple of dance lost forever. (I’ve celebrated that long-lost glory in my autobiographical novel DIVINE DEBAUCH.)

I don’t know when the bar first opened, but my blessed time to carouse in its three mystical rooms was the early 60’s.  By the later 60’s I heard it had been written up in some big magazine as the chic lowlife place to go, and very soon thereafter La Marina ceased to be.

Those three rooms were steeped in darkness and wrapped in music, tremendously loud Latin music, and the roar of voices and laughter.  High above the crush of carousers and dancers, in deep shadows by the ceilings, blades of fans slowly swam around like circling sharks.

The three rooms were each special shrines.  In the first more or less civilized one, you’d socialize with drinks and shouted talk.  The second room was the place for group celebrations, being less crowded than the third and better for a formal dance like the pasa doble or the leaping pachanga.

The third room had its own even more powerful juke box and a hallucinatory mural on the walls over the crowd.  Around the room in a dreamlike swirl ran a dark flood of writhing nudes, racing motorcycle, matador with sword, and charging bull.  As above, so below.

It was here in the dense throngs of the third room that the ecstasy happened, the Dionysian transports of merengues and cumbias.  The clock was forever stopped at ten of three, though that was usually an early hour in an evening’s revelry.  We’d dance till dawn, even after.

A few years ago, when I visited New Orleans again, I lunched in the stylish Café Maspero  that used to be La Casa and sat in what once was the be back corner of the second room.  I told the waitress about its history, and she remarked that they had thought it had been a pirate joint before.  In a way it was.

December 31, 2014

More Auld Friends

Arriving in Seattle in the middle 60’s, I found no lasting friends, but my family, about whom I’ll write something soon, found me.  For the rest of that decade, besides my academic career, they were the focus of my life.  I do regret not having even one close friend from those years, just the family.  At least frequent letters to and from Lee in New Orleans were an emotional connection to the world outside the ever-growing family.

In Milwaukee in the summer of 1970 when my wife and I split up, I rather quickly I found gay friends.  Make that lovers, who became lasting friends.  They’re gone now, Ken and Kenny, my simultaneous loves.  Ken and I were close through many decades, particularly the 70’s in DC, until he passed away around 2010.  My dancing boy Kenny only survived until around 1994.  The plague, of course.  Both will be in a future memoire about my Hippie Poet persona.

As far as the 70’s in DC went, Lee/Chas and Ken, from New Orleans and Milwaukee respectively, were my old comrades.  As was Charles from Tulane, my platonic partner in the house and myriad interests.  I had some very special lovers then, but either the affairs or they themselves ended far too soon.  I hope someday that all these lost friends can live again in a memoire about my Courtesan persona.

After a brief sojourn in New York, I arrived in Santa Fe in 1981 as a mature gay gentleman and ran smack dab into my lover/partner of the next 11 years.  That’s also a tale that must await a memoire—if I live long enough and the creek don’t rise.

As you may notice, my two high school friends, Cookie and Dennis, and two “lady friends,” Jane and Frances, all mentioned in the previous post, are my only surviving auld friends. However, you couldn’t really call them close after so long and across all the distance.

Besides my family, here in Santa Fe I now have newer close friends.  Don, now 83, may qualify as auld, or at least old.  He and I met at a gay dinner group years ago and started our own dining tradition most Monday evenings.  We share many opinions, concerns, perspectives, previously married backgrounds, and a healthy appreciation of nubile youths.  Don is amused that I go out dancing and imagines that some night some guy is going to snap me up.  I don’t.

There is one other amigo here in New Mexico you might call auld, or at least viejo, though he’s a bit younger than I.  Douglas and I met back in 1981 when he was the roommate of that partner mentioned above, and our friendly association drifted lackadaisically along through the 80’s.

After I got single again in the 90’s, we forged a real, warm friendship, sharing events, trips, and outings all over the place.  Witness the silly fact that I call him by affectionate nicknames.  He calls himself Doogie, but I’ve gone through Doogaloo and Dugalug to Great Doogly-Moogly (per The Simpsons).  All along I’d considered the Dugless One an appealing and interesting Santa Fe new-age type, not too whacked out, and charmingly peace-love and nature connected.  Doogie’s spiritual enterprise has long been running a program of intercultural outings called Earthwalks, and he’s focusing on it again in his retirement.

Well, I guess that’s it for any auld friends.  Thank goodness I haven’t lost them all yet.  Those lost ones are always with me, be they long-time or only temporary human connections.  Often when this old dame goes out, like I will tonight to Molly’s Kitchen, they’ll come and ride with me in this old but still kicking body, living again in our dance.

 HAPPY NEW YEAR!

December 29, 2014

Auld Lang Friends

Like always, as I wind down this Old Year, I’m mindful of all the wonderful friends and lovers in my life.  Of course, many of them have gone to their rewards, but they still live on in me.  Fortunately, some from my past still live on in fact.

Just the other day I phoned Cookie, a high school neighbor friend in Arkansas, and we happily reported that we’re both still kicking, though as she said, not very high.  She married my best friend in junior high, who deceased several years ago.  My best friend in high school was Dennis, and we’ve been in loose touch again since our 50th Reunion back in 2010.  After the Navy, he married and, like Cookie, made a full life in those woods I left behind in 1960.  I visited them a year or so ago and hope to do so again this spring coming.

Lasting friends from New Orleans were fewer than one might think, given my social history there.  Those still kicking are actually women friends.  I’ve never “dated” a girl—just “went out” with them.  Gorgeous blonde Jane and I spent most nights in La Casa de los Marinos dancing mad merengues—or resting in the Gin Mill a few blocks away, and saw countless dazed dawns over Decatur Street.  She now lives in San Miguel de Allende and visited with me in Santa Fe some years ago.  We email periodically.

Another from that period is Frances, now living in Seattle.  She was an Art History grad whom my beloved Indian Desai and I met one night in Cosimo’s, a jazz place on Burgundy, and took to the Gin Mill to see the lowlife.  They got together, and I got alone.  Frances and I have kept in touch through the other chapters in our lives with visits, cards, and emails.  Desai went back to India where he married, and we lost touch in the 70’s.  I sure hope he’s still kicking.

I also “went out” to La Casa de los Marinos with another woman, Martha, a student from Southeastern in Hammond with wild blonde hair and arresting blue eyes.  She and I created a leaping dance we called “The President Kennedy.”  Martha lives (I hope) in Arcata CA, a militant vegan lesbian grandmother known locally as Granny Green Genes.  We haven’t been in touch for a few years, but at this late date, I’m afraid to check on her.

A platonic friend from back then was Lee (later Chas).  Faithful correspondents through the rest of the 60’s, we hung out together when I moved back to New Orleans in ’71.  In ’72 we moved to Washington DC together and were close neighbors throughout that decade.  But when I moved off to New York, we lost contact for some fifteen years.  In the late 90’s he got back in contact, and we resumed our old closeness.  For several years he came out to Santa Fe in the summers for the Santa Fe Opera  season and would stay the weeks with me.  He died in 2003.

Not quite so lengthy was my platonic friendship with Charles, a faerie sister from Tulane.  We weren’t all that close in New Orleans but accidentally re-connected in an elevator in a Chicago hotel some years later.  When I went back to Ann Arbor in ’72 for dissertation work, I moved in with him and his lover for a couple months.  Then Charles moved to Washington DC right after Chas and I did, and we wound up buying a Victorian house together at Logan Circle.

1320 Rhode Island Avenue NW--The Four Belles

1320 Rhode Island Avenue NW–The Four Belles

Charles is a special story unto himself, a tragic drama lasting till he passed on in 1992.  On that sad note, I’m getting all choked up, so let me save other memorials for another time.  Sniffle.

 

 

January 28, 2014

The Motto

Welcome, readers, to the inaugural issue of my blog.  First, I must deliver a

MESSAGE FROM ALPHA CENTAURI

I want to have come unto your world
Like a comet, or better,
A wandering sun,
Spark of invisible systems,
Flashing a solar radiance
On the night sides of your eyes.
I want to burst through your bonds
Like a bullet, or rather,
A vagrant ion,
Quark of divisible atoms,
Leading fission’s chain dance
Out the rare earths of your arms.

1969

#

So, hello.  Next, you should know that the motto in the banner above is my new one for this eighth incarnation.  For years I’d affectionately applied it to my mother, who square-danced vigorously into her nineties, and when she passed away recently, I had to accept that I’m now the old dame.

This motto was inspired by a small book by Don Marquis called “Archy and Mehitabel” (1927), the title characters respectively a free-verse poet reborn as a cockroach and an alley cat who is Cleopatra reincarnated.  It’s adapted from a line in “mehitabel sings a song.” (Archy can’t type caps or punctuation.)

I first started dancing as a teen to the rock and roll of the mid-fifties, a rabid fan of American Bandstand with all the groovy moves.  In my early sixties debauch in Latin and Greek bars, I danced mystical rituals in Dionysian ecstasy, proclaiming:  TO DANCE IS TO REJOICE.

In young adulthood, comic-strip beagle Snoopy gave me a new motto: TO DANCE IS TO LIVE, which served well through the seventies.  In my mature partnered years in Santa Fe, dancing was rare since nightlife wasn’t part of domestic routines.  Once again a free (old) agent, in the early nineties I started dancing disco with the philosophical motto:  I DANCE, THEREFORE I AM.

Now it’s:  THERE’S DANCE IN THE OLD DAME YET!

For some years I’ve been going to the Rouge Cat and hoping my favorite DJ Oona’s “spinning.”  For many years she did Trash Disco on Wednesday nights in various clubs, and I merrily did my thing wherever she reigned.  Now she only does Saturdays and plays the good trashy stuff early on, switching at prime time to the contemporary style of music.  (It sounds like a pile-driver on speed.  Small wonder the young folks can’t seem to find a rhythm to dance to.)

Consequently, I sometimes resort to dancing to CDs at home in the hall, but I miss the synergy of the dance floor (and the volume).  Curiously, there are some great dance rhythms in classical music, but a Beethoven symphony is exhausting for an old dame.

HIGHLIGHTS IN MY DANCING HISTORY

In high school in Arkansas, I appeared on the local television station’s teen hop.  Somebody took several of us, including my sister Judy, to Texarkana to KCMC-TV.  I was thrilled to dance in front of TV cameras just like the kids on Bandstand but didn’t feel any different for being televised.  I now find a smug comfort thinking that those images of me rock and rolling are still radiating out through the universe, by now maybe approaching Alpha Centauri.

You wouldn’t think that in three years of almost nightly debauched dancing in New Orleans, I’d be able to pick out a highlight.  But I can—it shines in my memory like a baroque altarpiece.  Must have been Mardi Gras of 1962 when I went as a Cossack (actually the Russian poet Sergey Yesenin, husband of Isadora Duncan).  At the end of the Third Room of La Casa de los Marinos, I danced transcendent cumbias and merengues on top of the roaring rainbow Wurlitzer with a beautiful Mexican boy in full mariachi finery—against a wall of swirling, dreamlike murals.  Maybe I glorify it a bit, but that night was a joy one doesn’t experience twice.

After some years of marital immobility, in 1969 I suddenly found myself briefly alone and on the town in Washington DC.  In a basement gay bar called Lou’s Hideaway right on Pennsylvania Avenue, next-door neighbors with the new FBI building and the National Archives, I danced with an exquisite Latino boy called Bolo to “The Age of Aquarius” and forgot all about being a married man.  Again an unrepeatable joy.  Let the sun shine in!

About a quarter-century later, after sublimating my dance first in running and then in working out at the gym, I met some young guys who took me on a trip to Key West.  We went to a big gay bar—not the Monster, but which one I can’t recall—and I had an epiphany.  To my utter amazement I found it now completely comme il faut to dance all by oneself.  That night I danced up a seriously memorable storm of jubilation, and I’ve ridden its winds ever since.

Another night like no other was in 1997 after my younger daughter Aimée’s wedding when the party moved to the Drama Club on Guadalupe Street, then the hot gay spot in town, and made a splash in our gowns and tuxedos.  The father of the bride danced solo on one stand, his nephew up on another with a drag queen named Gina, and his mother up on the stage with an older lesbian lady, while bride and groom and other family members kept lower profiles on the floor.  Too bad no one took pictures!

Just one more.  It was early on in this new millennium when the Paramount was still open, (its site now obliterated by the Santa Fe County Courthouse).  For maybe six years it was the most fabulous dance bar with incredible Trash Disco on Wednesdays and wild weekends.  Once I found myself more or less dancing with an attractive blond guy who never even looked at me, but his moves were finely in tune with mine, an exquisite communication.  After a while I looked at him more closely, appreciatively, and recognized Leonardo DiCaprio—who danced away into the crowd without look or word.  Silly as it sounds, I felt blessed.