From: jtrue@acpub.duke.edu (John True)
Subject: Slow Night at Slig's - by J. True
Date: 22 Feb 92 03:21:16 GMT


Slow night at Slig's

	By the time I got to Slig's that night everyone was already
gone.  Everyone except Slig himself, hanging clean beer mugs behind the bar.
Slig was a large wide man, perpetually clad in an overstretched white
t-shirt and brown polyester slacks and low-rise Captain Kirk boots.
Sitting at that bar and not having either Slig or his part-time helper
Karinne there would have been like travelling from the fiftieth floor to
the sub-basement on an elevator that had just shit the bed.  At least
for me.  I considered myself a regular.  I frequented this place
primarily because it was never crowded.  Well, that was one
of the reasons.  Slig was always near to assure one that s/he had not
yet achieved "human as island" status.  Not that too many words were
ever issued between Slig and anybody at any given time.  But his role
was that of a sort of surrogate mother, administering ethanol in all its
forms, like formula.  Except Slig seldom tested the temperature against
his wrist.
	I would later find out that Karinne had gone with the others,
leaving only Slig, as a bon voyage party of one, seeing us all off on
our journey.
	Slig's famous Ric Ocasek retrospective tape boomed through the
place, through speakers mounted up in the rafters somewhere.  Slig
rarely had use for a DJ.  The sound and vid systems were controlled
entirely from behind the bar.  There were no house-mixes, no scratches
or digital sample envelopes.  Just compilation tapes of rare old music.
Most of the time Slig would just play entire LPs (on tape or disc, of
course; the collectors had snatched up all the vinyl).
	As always, the place was a cavern.  Slig's was a converted
hangar-style storage barn.  It stood on the outskirts of an expansive
northern Fairport industrial park, embedded in old Eastside suburbia.
For a kilometer in any direction, what used to be pristine, productive
farmland now sprouted small, high-tech manufacturing concerns, which had
leveled most of the intervening treelines and filled the ponds and
streams with toxics.
	Depending on where inside the club you were, the floor consisted
either of cold concrete, creaking wood, or plain hard dirt, except the
dance floor, which was smooth, worn linoleum.  From any given spot on
the floor, the ceiling was invisible.  All you saw were black tube-metal
rafters rising through the smoke.  Randomly placed colored floods
illuminated the various important regions of the otherwise cthonic
ground level.  Around the ten meter square dance space were arrayed
mostly floor-level strobes, currently inactive, irradiated by
fluorescent blacklights from above, about where the PA speakers were.
Neither Slig nor I had an old-style tobacco habit, so all the smoke that
was currently convecting around up there was from the dry-ice units
stashed in dark areas behind the light racks somewhere.
	Mt Rolling Rock slowly effervesced in the shine from a blue
light can above.  The straightfour beat pulsed and drops of condensation
occasionally rolled down the sleek green longneck.
	"So where is everybody?"
	That was another thing about Slig's.  The most expensive piece
of equipment in the establishment was his whitenoise system.  So
anywhere other than on the dance floor, the music was salient, but you
could still hear yourself think.  And you could carry on a conversation
without making yourself hoarse.  Old retros like me had lost too much
hearing in the clubs we had haunted as youths.  Now, we were much closer
to the sentiments of our parents' generation: "Turn that Rock and Roll
down!  It's too damn loud!"  On the dance floor, however, where I had
been occasionally, it was a different story.  There were no cancelling
waves.  You got to flail in the pure decibels of the music, just as
always.  And the old stuff we all came to hear didn't pull any
compressional punches like the contemporary hyper-produced shit.
	Slig shrugged, pulling his lower jaw under his upper, giving
himself a brief underbite, the distortion of his jowls emphasizing that
there was more stubble there than on the top of his crewcut head.  "They
all... left."  His eyes darkened and he looked down again.
	"But it's early, isn't it?"  My watch read 11:30.
	"Yeah."
	I slugged the beer and wiped my mouth on the back of my hand.
"So where'd they all go?  The Drain?  Morral's Kiosk?"
	"Nope."  Slig was polishing an ashtray that clearly had not
touched any butts this night.  "They... kind of went... well...
nowhere."
	"Huh?"
	He glanced off into the infinity of the far side of the dance
floor.  "Let's just say they didn't use the door."
	Even before I looked in the direction of Slig's glance, I knew.
But before I joined them I wanted a few more beers.  I needed to catch a
buzz before I stepped out/in.  And I wanted to be with Slig awhile
longer, even if we had no further words for each other; like hanging out
with St. Pete for a bit before heading on in.
				***

	The mixtape was winding out, concluding with material from
_Panorama_, easily the most interesting of the Cars discography, and
finally with what arguably was the most successful of Ric's AOR-targeted
singles, "Something to Grab For," off _Beatitude_.  Tight guitars
emanated through the black Bose midranges, to a straight rock 4,
quickened and differentiated in the signature American New Wave rhythmic
simplicity.  Most of the keyboards were still analog.
	The tunes were synergistically reacting with the ethanol to
evoke images of metro-suburban twilight boredom, a landscape defined by
commuter patterns and the dynamics of traffic light switch algorithms.
Freeways pulsed between the attraction domains of malls, separated from
each other by median groves of evergreen shrubs and zoned residential
developments, two dimensional matrices of pastel variations on the
canonical split-level raised ranch, in the living rooms of which
everyone's parents and grandparents were falling asleep to the Discovery
Channel.
	In this nightrealm, the males wore black plastic wraparound
shades and leather pants, all the better if it was synthetic.  And the
only thing with higher glare than the candy-apple and cobalt metalflake
on their gasoline powered American musclecars was the Alberto copiously
applied to the sides of their trapezoidal heads.
	Women in spandex and abbreviated versions of 3-years-gone Milan
fashions perched in sophistication on chrome barstools, wondering if
their mauve lipstic had smeared yet, trying to determine the answer from
the ring left on the butt of a Benson and Hedges.
	Ambivalence was the currency and what it bought was desperation,
the more uncut the better.  The highest form of expression was
Narcissism; the most important fixture on the wall was the full-length
mirror.
	The entire mentality was overtly ephemeral.  It had planned for
its own obsolescence.  And sitting there, it was the easiest thing for
me to do to fall in.  It was utterly believable that this world was all
that had ever mattered.
				***

	When the tape expired, Slig started throwing on Church and
Sisters of Mercy standards.  He usually didn't cater to his audience.
Rather, he preferred to expand our minds by playing whatever the fuck he
felt like.  But tonight he had a crowd of one, and he knew what I liked
to get drunk to.
	At some point, beyond beer 9, the tunes started to blur into an
archetype, that had the power, alcohol or not, to magick knee, ankle, and
elbow joints into motion.  Not that I was
ever a tough subject.  I danced around my apartment all the time.  And
uncrowded clubs were the perfect venue; I was self-taught and
uncomfortable maneuvering in MTV Dance Club size throngs.  I preferred
open, blacklit spaces in which to thrash, oblivious.
	But this was somehow too uncrowded.  The presence of a few
disinterested women would have been nice, if only to reinforce the
notion that the sheer pretention it took to even set foot on those tiles
safely conveyed nothing in affect.  At least nothing that any casual
bystander/observer would admit to.  Dancing by one's self, which was all
anybody ever did at Slig's, was truly like the proverbial tree falling
in the forest with no one around; it was a spectacle, but only in
theory.
	But soon, as always, my inhibitions went the way of the dodo and
the bullfrog.  I pounded the rest of the final Rolling Rock and stepped
out.  Any sense I had, back in reptile-brain, that time was exclusively
monotonic, or ever linear, was now gone.  For good, I would later
discover, happily.
	That first feint, the initial fall from a conventional upright
stance for walking, into the angular pose in the new dancefloor
threespace coordinate system, was always elegant in its abruptness.  And
in the translated space abruptness _was_ elegance.  Your body was both
the antenna and the translator.  The mindset was one of concentrating on
the elegance concept from the old coordinate system, with all the
erratic yet adroit moves, as language, in the new reality.  I liked to
think that my dance vocabulary reflected my notion of wisdom: know your
limitations.  Nothing flamboyant; nothing you'd see on the vidscreen.
It would be hard to describe the effect I was looking for; for all that
mirror-watching, I never noticed the whole, just parts of it.  Maybe the
mirrors were never large enough.  An important aspect of this sort of
dancing was that no-mind could be reached.  The strobes and backbeat
helped a great deal.
	I didn't reach no-mind that night.  Before I could completely
erase my consciousness of the space around me, that space changed.  At
least from where I was standing it did.  As the rhythm throbbed and the
guitar-synthed strings progressed through their hooks, the floor itself
became a singularity, jutting from the center of the normal cartesian
plane down the z-axis into negative infinity, a black, gridless, hollow
phallus probing the depth of the mother-abyss.  I was somewhere inside
that singularity, dancing up and down the valley of the black hole, a
particle-in-a-box that used to be the dance floor.  Light became
irrelevant.  Gravity became meaningless; the hole was whorling through
n-dimensions, precessing like a child's top just before it wiped out.
The music was torque.
	I have no doubt that I died that night, in the old world.  But
it never mattered.  Consciousness back there was only a larval form of
what it can be.  And words became as useless as a set of Advents in a
vacuum.
	And I disappeared into the new night, where I found the rest of
the regulars.
				***

	Escape itself wasn't the goal.  Escapism was now the mode of
living for the entire population of corporation-governed Western
civilization.  Ninety plus channels of cable television had achieved
this.  And even at work, all we ever did was push around arrays of data
within and among our bosses' CPUs.  None of these alternative realities
were interesting, not to me or anybody else who hung out at Slig's.  We
had always wanted something else, and we had been waiting.  Slig's was a
bus depo.  The gamble we had made was in what direction to look.  The
future, we figured, was on graphics tablets in design studios around the
world.  Hell, most of it was already gathering dust in old film
warehouses in Jersey City.  It was already figured out.  The little
machine generating reality, at least the consensual version, had already
been programmed and was running an infinite loop, with the programmer
asleep at the console.  So what we hoped for was to escape the consensus
by taking ourselves off line, for good, like the old AT&T 4425s
installation artists were now buying up by the dozen at corporate
liquidation sales, not to diplay data on, but to epoxy togther and
spraypaint.
	Slig himself never came.  He's still standing behind the bar,
polishing glasses and spinning old Bauhaus EPs.  I've come to believe
that his role is to guard the gate, make sure no assholes get in.  He's
doing a good job.  I haven't found any here yet.

John R. True
12/16/91
Durham, NC USA
(c)1991 John R. True
					
comments welcome, either on alt. cyberpunk. chatsubo or via e-mail
jtrue@acpub.duke.edu