Hella Nation - Evan Wright [24]
Earlier that week, a fourteen-year-old fan named Nick White had put his feelings for his hero into a letter he sent to Greco’s fan club: “Deep inside us, we all want to be like Jim Greco. A part of all of us wants to live that type of lifestyle. But only one person can live that life: Greco. His style is amazing. Jim Greco lives for the danger. He tests himself and realizes he has no limits.”
But even in the world of Jim Greco, there are limits. Like the one he faces now. Greco’s at the front door of his building and he doesn’t have a key. He studies the building directory a moment, telling me he will dial his apartment on the intercom and have Reynolds buzz him in, but he gives up. “I don’t know what apartment I’m in,” he says. Greco slumps on the ground and rubs his chin with a hand covered in scars from alcoholic fights and skating injuries. Greco smiles. “It’s a nice day. Fuck it.”
DANCE WITH A STRANGER
The taxi-dance hall can never be entirely satisfactory as a substitute for normal social life. . . . In its catering to detached and lonely people, in its deliberate fostering of stimulation and excitement, in its opportunities for pseudo-romantic excitements, it may be seen as an epitome of certain phases of urban life.
—Paul G. Cressey, The Taxi-Dance Hall (1932)
Priscilla wears a green floral dress that falls to her knees. She looks about twenty-seven. Her hair and eyes are brown, and her lips are painted rose-petal red. She has a wholesome, decidedly 1940s appearance—accentuated by her sturdy high heels, which she refers to as “my Ginger Rogers dance shoes.”
“Guys say they like me because I look clean,” she says as she leads me to the Club Flamingo dance floor. It is dimmer here, screened off from the rest of the hall by a rickety wooden trellis. A string of plastic palm-tree lights hangs from the ceiling. A Journey song blares. Couples sit on leatherette benches along the walls, talking, lightly stroking each other’s limbs, blowing into each other’s ears, sometimes kissing, or just holding hands and staring dreamily at nothing.
Out on the floor, a black man in a white fedora, white suit and crimson shirt stands with his arms raised above his shoulders. He is skinny and tall and undulating in a manner that brings to mind a snake that is somehow standing upright. Two blond Latinas, considerably shorter, reach up, clasping his fingers and spinning slowly on either side as they rub his chest with their free hands.
Most couples have gravitated toward the far end of the floor, as if it were tilted in that direction. A squat pillar with a sign reading “No Lewd Behavior” blocks the darkest corner from view, forming the ideal location for attempts at lewd behavior. Here the dancers grind tightly, or cease dancing altogether and simply lock bodies. I glimpse a tall Asian girl in a long silk dress slit up the side. She stands on one leg. Her other leg is wrapped around her partner, a silver fox in a leisure suit. She hangs from his neck as he pumps intently against her.
“We call those ‘corner girls,’” Priscilla says. Her own style of dance—draping her arms over my shoulders and swaying in a slow circle—is less vigorously sensual, yet there is an inescapable erotic charge. I find myself noticing that her perfume is pleasant. I enjoy the way her hair occasionally brushes my neck. It’s the sort of boy-meets-girl dream a junior-high dance might have offered had I not invariably spent them getting stoned in the parking lot with friends. As her hips slide in my hands, I feel the slip she wears beneath her dress.