What is your ballroom, please?

Outside the ballroom hall, on a wooden bench near the waterfront, a youngish blond woman in a white dress and black shawl meticulously plops down and removes her shoes. She sighs once before drawing in a second, larger gulp of air, allowing her shoulders to slump and her head to gyrate a few rotations before hunching over and finally settling her chin against her neck. Beads of sweat have boiled up on her neck and under her bangs; her face is flushed. She feels sticky and wet.

After a moment she regains her posture to gaze out into the Bay, whose waters have turned a dark gray in the dusk light. The waves swoosh calmly; a nice breeze tickles the back of her neck as she removes her shawl. A rush of cool air suddenly pierces her warm, clammy skin sending a shutter through her entire body. She giggles abashedly and looks around to make sure no one saw the twitch.

She turns to see a man in a tuxedo plunging down the concrete walkway toward her. The echoing clunks of his shoes become louder as he approaches. When he has reached her, he is out of breath and leans his hand on the bench to gain composure.

She stares quizzically at him, with mock scrutiny, squinting her eyes and raising her chin as if to say, jokingly, “And what’s your deal, strange man?”

Between abrupt huffs, he manages to blurt out, “Lizzie,” huff, huff, “you just disappeared,” gasp, “I looked everywhere,” grunt, “in the bathroom, at the bar—“

“I was hot,” she retorts sharply, jeeringly, “I needed some air,” at which point she nods her head flirtatiously and fixes her gaze back on the Bay.

He slides in next to her and nudges her shoulder with his. She glares back at him with wide-eyed surprise, as if she has taken offense to this crude antic. She holds her keen glare for a long moment, staring him down. He is a little tipsy, wavering drunkenly as he stares back at her. He is in his middle twenties. His face seems worn and tired, ageing, yet there remains a cute touch of youth behind it all. She is still glaring at him.

“What?” he finally blurts out, throwing his arms in the air.

“What? What?” she fires back. “At least if I had someone who could lead I might be having a great time!” She sighs.

“Hey, at least I was out there on the floor dancing—“

“Yeah, for like five minutes. And it was like dragging a sheep across the floor dancing with you, Tom. A girl wants someone who can lead, she needs to be led, twisted, twirled, like a princess. She doesn’t need some flounder-foot puttering around like a monkey!”

They both burst into laughter after this one. In the chaotic guffawing that follows, he reaches out to embrace her and kisses her cheek, but then quickly recoils and makes like he is adjusting his cufflinks. The laughter dies down and there is an uncomfortable silence.

“Well, anyway, I need another drink,” Lizzie remarks.

“Definitely,” Tom says confidently, standing up, throwing his hand in the air and pointing toward the ballroom hall. “All this fresh air is killing me.”



Back inside the ballroom, the remnants of a feast were piled against every wall: plates atop plates reaching to the ceiling were stacked on carts; huge piles of grubby silverware in giant buckets were scattered throughout. Garbage heaped in bins as big as dumpsters sat in every corner of the room.

Still, the room appeared gargantuan, vacuous practically, even with the hundreds of people dancing in the yellow neon light beneath the chandeliers. The rounded ceiling was so high and the room so spacious that it took on an illusionary quality; dreamlike, surreal.

A rush of nausea overcame Tom as he stared out into the crowd. He took a breath, belched, and felt better. Lizzie smacked him on the back of the head for such an inappropriate act among all of these people in black tie dress, but Tom only chuckled and said nothing.

In a booth near the bar, DJ Chunk Dark, as the sign outside the booth announced, spun poppy hip-hop. He had ditched the “classic dance” tunes like the tangos and Charlestons about an hour ago. Truth be told, he had just swallowed a tablet of ecstasy and was hoping to earn the crowd’s favor with this teenybopper shit and then ease them into some funky House tunes, before leading them on a full-throttle expedition of psychedelic trance after midnight. He could already feel the MDMA coursing through his veins and shooting up into the neural pathways of his brain where it would reach the pineal gland and unfold worlds of hyper reality and visionary sublimation. It was gonna be a good night.

Outside the Chunk Dark booth, Lizzie thought it was funny watching all of these people dressed to the nines grinding and bumping in time to the primal rhythms. She didn’t think Tom shared the joke; he was staring so intently at the humping couples it was like he was taking in an opera.

Lizzie snuck into a spot in the crowded bar and ordered a gin and tonic. She turned, brushed some people aside and yelled to Tom, “What do you want?”

“Singapore sling, with mezcal on the side,” he shouted back.

Jeez, Lizzie thought, he’s really up for it tonight. She snuck back in and ordered the drinks.

“Don’t forget limes and chili salt,” she heard from somewhere beyond the crowd that surrounded her.

She grabbed each drink one at a time and blindly stuck her hand through the crowd. Tom was right there to meet her each time, peering into the crowd for daylight, seeing the hand with the drink pop out, and slyly snatching it up and swigging down a giant gulp just in time for the next drink to pop out.

When Tom was safely cradling all the drinks, Lizzie burst out from the crowd and took her gin and tonic.

“Hold this,” Tom said, handing her a lime slice. He poured some of the chili salt into his mouth and dumped the rest on the lime, spilling some on Lizzie’s wrist. He downed the mezcal, grabbed the lime and sucked.

“Ahhhhhhh, just a like a margarita with an extra zap!” he roared. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and took a long, hard swig on the Singapore sling.

Lizzie watched all of this with detached amusement.

In a slick mix, DJ Chunk Dark segued into “Girls, Girls, Girls,” and Lizzie nearly exploded. She grabbed Tom by the hand, spilling half of his drink, and began sprinting for the floor.

She found a suitable place with plenty of space and they started grooving. With their drinks in their hands, it made it difficult to shake and dance too intensely, as well as get too close to each other. But they did their best, not the greatest dancers on the floor, but by far not the worst. Even Tom seemed to loosen up and have a good time with it—a far cry from his former dancing self who stumbled across the floor like an elephant on a skateboard.

He wanted to move in, get closer to Lizzie, somehow work around the infringements caused by drink-in-hand dancing. He could grab their drinks and put them down on a table somewhere, but that would allow any one of the maggots from the swarm of guys that were surrounding them to jump in for the kill—and that might spell the end of any chance he had with Lizzie.

He could take her empty hand, twirl her (though he had no idea how, but he could improvise something in this state of drunkenness) and keep their hands connected throughout, moving closer with each turn of the dance.

All of this brought about a great amount of stress inside Tom, who with each thumping beat danced harder and harder until Lizzie could not possibly keep up—but he was beyond that now, reaching out deeper and deeper into the prehistoric, drunken frenzy whirl that is as old as Time itself, practiced for centuries, millenniums, eons even, by trillions of souls throughout history intoxicated by every plant, root or vine imaginable: the dance to set the self free, to lose the self, to become part of the pure energy of the universe—and he was out there, out on the perimeter, in that huge ballroom among those high society people representing the height of fashion, language and culture, he was out on the limit of—what?

He didn’t know. The song had ended and Lizzie was unimpressed—she didn’t like this song. They both headed back toward the bar and stopped for a breather by the DJ booth. Lizzie wanted to get Chunk Dark’s attention and request a song or two.

Right outside of the booth, a short, dark, little fuzzy man was bopping to the DJ’s beats, watching intently as Chunk Dark worked the dials, tweaked the knobs, added treble or low-end squelch, and with each musical decision Dark made, the little fuzzy man seemed pleased, igniting with laughter or joy. He pointed and pumped his fist at Dark when he beat-matched a tough transition, or when Dark threw in an unexpected vocal sample from some movie from the eighties, or some other cheesy move Dark seemed to be using to get the crowd into it. Dark just nodded back at each of the fuzzy man’s exclamations.

At one point the fuzzy man turned to Tom—Lizzie was still having a difficult time convincing Dark to play Woo Tang—and sang wildly, “dig into to, get on up.”

Tom seemed puzzled but shouted back, “yeah, good stuff,” as he started moving a little to the beat, nodding his head. The fuzzy man came over toward Tom.

“ ‘Sup man, what’s going on?” he asked, sticking out his hand for a low five. Tom obliged.

“Not much. Just trying to drag this girl away from your friend,” Tom answered.

“Oh him, Chunk Dark, he’s a loser. He’s not my friend, more like a necessary nemesis really, one of those people you need staring back at you so that you can prove that you actually do exist.”

This seemed a strange thing to say, but Tom smiled and nodded his head anyway.

By the time the fuzzy man had finished this sentence, Woo Tang came blaring on the speakers and Lizzie dragged Tom out for another round of the humps out on the floor crowded by well-dressed pigs.



In Tom’s car, Lizzie is tired, worn down. As Tom cruises through the urban streets, zigg-zagging down one ways, through tunnels, across bridges, Lizzie seems distracted. Tom wants to put the radio on, but thinks twice, feeling that the silence is a nice break from the chaos of the ballroom. It is 1:30 and by now Chunk Dark is well into his psy set, high on chemicals and music. Both Tom and Lizzie show signs of extreme exhaustion, but Tom is focused and awake at the wheel. Lizzie is slumping, struggling to stay awake yet noticeably bothered by the uncomfortable trauma brought on by aching heels, smeared makeup and tight clothing.

“Did you have a good time?” he asks.

“Yeah,” she responds with a long yawn. She is by now nearly asleep, caught in that strange place between dreaming and waking where you’re not sure if what your hearing is happening in your dream or in reality.