Dancing

A LONG TIME ago, in the years leading up to what was then called the millennium, I worked downtown in the corporate law department of a giant bank. I would drive in from Hollywood, leave my car at one of the five-dollar lots, and, clad in my suit, walk slowly up the street to my job. It was pleasant to be out then, the world awake but not yet frantic, the buses slowing with a screech, pausing, then roaring away, the sun in the east still hidden by the mass of downtown itself, the smaller buildings seeming large, and the really big ones huge, the morning air neither hot nor cool but perfect.

What is clear to me now about myself was only becoming so at that time, like a room at the beginning of day: that although anything still seemed possible, it was, minutely, less likely than before. At thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, I was still young, but old enough by then to be conscious that I was living, the clock was ticking, that I did have a life, of dreary office days, sure, wasted, meaningless, trite, but also of raptor nights—of dabbing on cologne, staring hard into the mirror, then speeding off on missions covert and important, west on the Boulevard, then plunging down Western, the car picking up speed, the city prostrate before me, sodium yellow lights streaking by as I flew ever southward, past the strip malls with their liquor stores, past the bodegas, past graffitied walls of nameless battles won or lost. As I drove I thought of all the women getting ready for their dates—dates like me—showering, drying their hair, trying on this, trying on that, while in soft focus behind them their apartments were tastefully decorated, sofas with the matching end pillows, beds on which lay comforters so soft I wanted to lie in them and sleep forever. It seemed then that these forays could have gone on forever, stretching on and on into some protracted youth, into unseemliness, I suppose, but that's not, as they say, how it all turned out.

During this time, two big things happened to me:

The first thing was the pain that arrived and ended parts of my life, stayed with me for years, and