And I'm home. Not at all unusual for the last twenty-five years. Ben is out at the moment doing his Lyft thing to pay some bills. I don't expect him back until around 3 am, by which time I will be deep asleep and probably won't even hear him come in. I'm listening to some classic jazz on the radio while Bobo is sleeping in his bed and Sammy is running around the living room like a maniac.
Forty years ago however, at 9 pm on a Friday night I'd be heading out the door to go dancing. (We didn't call it clubbing.) I'd most likely start out the evening by meeting my friend Kent at His Co. Disco because the cover charge between 9 and 10 was only a dollar. If the crowd got boring or if certain B-list DJs were spinning, we'd then head over to The Forum. But His Co. always seemed to play better music and have the new stuff sooner. It also had a slightly raised, lighted dance floor and a much better light show, so whatever else happened we'd always start out there. I can't say I ever reliably got laid on a regular basis via either place (it wasn't until many years later that I discovered The Connection and all that changed), but His Co. was where I met the great unrequited love of my life Steve Golden, and where I connected with Paul Bayfield and Ken Coyer, the two doormen—with whom I did have carnal relations on multiple occasions. Separately. (They couldn't stand each other and were each aghast when they learned that I had slept with the other.)
Oh, and there was the boy who'd driven all the way into town from Gilbert (which was to hell and gone in relation to the club's location back in the day and still is—just not out in the middle of nowhere like it was in 1978). My buddy Chas was up from Tucson that weekend and since I was still living at home he let me borrow his hotel room for a few hours to entertain Mr. Gilbert. "Don't get anything on the sheets! I have to sleep on those!"
And come to think of it, His Co. also served up Craig—and his lover—whom I'd encountered at work as customers in the housewares department at Broadway Southwest just that afternoon. "You really should wear underwear with those Angel Flights," Craig told me later that evening. "I could almost see veins!"
Good times.
Anyway, I bring this up because my previous post about Live and More triggered lots of memories of my wonderfully misspent youth.
And speaking of 3 am, forty years ago if neither none of us was busy getting laid, I'd probably be at breakfast with Kent and a drag queen or two before heading home…
In a soulmate we find not company, but a completed solitude." ~ Robert Brault
There were people who called themselves Satanists who made Crowley squirm. It wasn't just the things they did, it was the way they blamed it all on Hell. They'd come up with some stomach-churning idea that no demon could have thought of in a thousand years, some dark and mindless unpleasantness that only a fully-functioning human brain could conceive, then shout, "The Devil Made Me Do It" and get the sympathy of the court when the whole point was that the Devil hardly ever made anyone do anything. He didn't have to. That was what some humans found hard to understand. Hell wasn't a major reservoir of evil, any more than Heaven, in Crowley's opinion, was a fountain of goodness; they were just sides in the great cosmic chess game. Where you found the real McCoy, the real grace and the real heart-stopping evil, was right inside the human mind." ~ Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens
