In 1977, I was freshly divorced and working in a high-stress job as a geologist - "A new drilling prospect every week or you’re fired!" Nights would find me in a disco called Clementine’s located in the basement of Oklahoma City’s Penn Square Mall. The place was dark, the music loud, the drinks and women loose. I was usually inebriated, or well on way to getting there.
Yes, it was in the post-Vietnam, pre-AIDS era. Practically every night I would spend hours line dancing to the anthems of Gloria Gaynor, Donna Summer and KC and the Sunshine Band. 1977 was the year I first saw the movie Saturday Night Fever and fell in love with the music of the BeeGees.
There were two ways to enter Clementine’s. You could walk down a narrow flight of stairs or slide down a chute. Either way you’d wind up in a huge open room that was illuminated only by a rotating disco ball, colored strobe lights that warped your reality even if you weren’t drunk or stoned, and a few discreetly placed floor lamps that provided little more than a dim haze. Most of all there was a pressing multitude of warm bodies and the sounds of disco, belting out the message of freedom, expression and free love.
A huge bar extended across the front of the room where three bartenders served drinks as fast as they could pour them. The dance floor of diamond-shaped black and white tiles was rarely empty, the occasional cooling fingers of vapor rising from grids in the floor making the swaying dancers feel like uninhibited creatures from Hell’s nether regions.
The dance floor was like hypnosis, insanity and blasting sound. Bodies crushed together amid the beat of drums as ancient as Africa. Once, across the crowded dance floor, I saw a beautiful young woman staring at me. Our eyes locked. We danced toward each other. She passed me a note with her phone number and when I called her the next day she invited me for spaghetti that night at her apartment. I showed up with flowers and a bottle of wine.
Marti was her name. A single mother, she had a five year old son named Chris. We ate our spaghetti and drank wine by candlelight. When we finished, I helped her with the dishes and then she put Chris to bed. Afterward, we made love in her bedroom.
"I want to thank you so much," was her unexpected reply as we lay beside each other in her little bed..
"My pleasure," I said.
"You don’t understand," she explained, sensing the flippant tone of my voice. "I’m in remission from cervical cancer. You are the first man I’ve slept with. I’ve been so worried that I would never have the feelings of a woman ever again. You proved to me tonight that I’m okay and I thank you."
Confused and too young or too stupid to understand the depths of Marti’s feelings, I contributed little more than small talk before saying good bye and disappearing into the night. I never saw her again and I don’t think she needed me to.
Those were the days of disco. My days of disco, for whatever that means. Some people have even suggested that disco isn’t cool and people that liked it were somehow less than intelligent. I don’t think so. I think we were all just as young, human and vulnerable as any youth today.
And I do know this. Whenever I hear Gloria Gaynor, Donna Summer or the BeeGees, I find myself back on that same dark dance floor with wisps of vapor cooling the sweat dripping from my neck and forehead as I pulsate to a hypnotic beat and message of love and coming together. It makes me feel young again.
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