I know why she’s sore about this. Disco is her music. Black. Queer. A reflection of her world. Over fifty thousand twats blew up disco records just a few months ago in Chicago. Disco Demolition Night. It was during a baseball game. America’s pastime is burning us down. London’s no different. Perhaps nowhere is. The powerful always want to destroy the powerless when their dominance is at risk.
“Good, because I’m going to put a record on and get to work while you shower.” She reaches into a hallway closet. Hands me the striped towel she pulls out. “Here.” She eyes my filthy clothes. “Do you have something to wear that doesn’t smell like a rubbish bin?” I shake my head. “I’ve got some for you. I tried my hand at menswear a few years ago and the results were terrible, but they should fit.”
“Thanks.”
“Go wash up. You smell like a sewer and I’ve got deadlines.”
She picks out Donna Summer’sOnce Upon a Time...record. Donna looks like a goddess on the cover. Hair like ocean waves. Lips parted suggestively. Eyes soft. Skin dewy. Lily holds the record up next to her face. “Do I look like her?”
“You do. A little.”
“Why? Because my skin is black and my hair is big?”
I feel my heart sink. I’ve upset her. “I— No— Just—”
She cackles. “Relax, kid. I’m teasing.”
She puts the needle on the record. Approaches the sewingmachine. I enter the bathroom. Close the door behind me. The opening strings of the title song lead to her crystalline voice.Once upon a time there was a girl, who lived in a land of dreams unreal.I imagine Lily is that girl Donna is singing about. It pleases me to think of her story being told by her goddess. I turn the shower on.Family in name alone, no place left to hide.I think perhaps the song is about me now. Family in name alone. Exhausted by hiding. Escaping. Creating new identities.
The shower feels heavenly. The warm jets relax me. Lily has a seemingly endless collection of bath products. Lemon shampoo. Lavender soap. Some kind of shampoo with nine herbs in it. Rainwater-soft rinse. Antiaging this and that. Even baby shampoo.
That’s what I choose. Shampoo for a baby. I feel like a kid again. Like someone else is taking care of me.
The song changes as I linger in the shower. The next song is far more dramatic than the first. It’s about the city closing in on Donna.Help me. I want to get out.I think to myself that I never want to leave this place. I wonder what Oliver thinks of disco music.
Do they play it in Buenos Aires?
Does it remind him a little of his beloved classical music with its instrumental breaks and recurring motifs?
Does he go out dancing?
Does he have a dance partner?
My mind has worked this way for fifty-nine years now. Always wondering after Oliver. What was he doing when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated? When Kennedy was shot? When Marilyn took her final breath? When Judy died? During the Stonewalluprising? What does he make of jet engines and the atomic bomb? Of birth control pills, Barbie dolls, heart transplants?
When I first heard that a successful heart transplant was performed...
I dreamed that they could take my heart and transplant it into his body.
Make us one forever.
Did he have the same thought?
Does he think of me like I think of him?
Has he loved another?
Does he feel like I do? Desperate to love. To be cared for. To find his place in the world. To belong. To be of his time. Not out of time.
I make the water as hot as it can possibly get without burning me. Let the heat bring me back to life in some new form. I don’t know why I first came back to London. It wasn’t to see any of my old schoolmates. They would all be over a hundred years old at this point. Either they’re all dead or they’d think they were suffering from dementia if they recognized me. Perhaps it’s the haunting memories that brought me back. Some need to track my past. To reconsider it. See it in some new light. I needed to see the streets where James and I walked. The hotel where my father burned me into youthful immortality.
A knock on the bathroom door. “You all right in there?”
I turn the water off and yell out. “Yes, sorry, I didn’t mean to use so much water!” I wrap myself in a towel and open the door a crack.
“There are clothes for you outside the door. Breakfast is ready. And please moisturize your skin. You’re cracked all over. You’ll look my age soon if you don’t take care of yourself, kid.”
I dry my body. Rub myself silly with lotion that claims to have egg yolk in it. Grab the clothes she left out for me. A pair of boxer shorts. Baggy cotton pants with two strings near the waist. A white T-shirt. A light denim blazer with bright graffiti on the back.The National Front Is an Affront.
