Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane

I dreamed of dancing.

Here’s the thing of it: although the makeshift stage were small and we had to move through nervous event-goers and stacked crates, the music was good. Despite there being only two other folks up there, when certain songs come one, you have to move. It’s got to be some kind of universal rule (looking at you, Boney M). I don’t now remember whether this was some kind of celebration, or a conference, or just a bunch of people hanging out in an ancient hotel’s somewhat renovated conference centre.

You know the kind; what was once a grand ballroom, likely with wood floors and heavy drapes on the walls/over windows, possibly even with carved or molded plaster on cornices and pastel colours interspersed with gold or silver highlight paint. High, maybe domed ceiling. Maybe even a stage! But the gorgeous wood or tile floors have been covered with cheapass shitty carpet with hallucination-inducing patterns designed so you can’t tell how filthy it is. The heavy curtains which once likely were brocade or heavy silk have been replaced with rayon, if they’ve been replaced at all. Maybe they’ve just been removed and blinds installed, or maybe the windows have been covered up. If the walls aren’t painted in some inoffensive beige or ecru, you might still see some of the original decor. But because the renovations were done in the 80s, back when people could (and did) smoke wherever and whenever they wanted, the whole room smells all the time of stale cigarette smoke, scented cleaning products that do nothing to remove or mask the tobacco stank, and some loser’s bad cologne.

If you have the misfortune of having to touch the carpet for any reason, you know it feels a little greasy and is absolutely full of dust. If the original drapery is still there, you don’t want to move it because you know it’ll rain dust for hours. This is the conference centre.

When I was 17, the person I was dating collected me from home and took me to the city for a concert or a weekend or something I’ve since forgotten. What I do remember is that we needed to book a hotel room for the night, and my paramour was having a v difficult time because all the hotels wanted credit cards and neither of us had one. We had loads of cash, but no credit card. So the only hotel we were able to book was one of the downtown ones. She’d been grand in her day, and our family had actually spent a lot of time there when my grandmother was getting cancer treatments at the hospital. But by this time she was a little down at the heel. Still had a great cafe, though.

Anyway, the point is we finally were able to book a room, and the “room” they put us in was a conference room. There were tables and chairs stacked up everywhere; the room itself was enormous, with an entire wall of windows. Behind a couple of wheeled room dividers and circular tables folded up to provide similar ‘separation’, there was a double bed (maybe it was a Queen; I don’t rightly remember). There was a sink on the wall by one of the doors. I legit don’t remember if there was a toilet and shower in the room or if we had to use a common washroom up the hall. It looked like this had been at one time two corner rooms – one on each end – and a centre meeting room, but at some point someone had knocked down the walls at either end to open it up so there was a BIGGER meeting room.

It was eerie. All that space, and just the two of us. I’m talking the room echoed when you talked, if you spoke above a low level. I could’ve ridden my bike around in there and clocked a number of kms. It could easily have been ten or more double rooms. So we did what any couple of randy teenagers would do: we opened up the temporary wall dividers, pushed them in front of the doors, and we fucked EVERYWHERE in there. Like. Everywhere. They made those sinks to last, boy howdy.

Back to the dream though; the place was kind of like that room, with things in storage but also tables set out and fully dressed. There were dozens, if not hundreds of people in attendance. The ‘dance floor’ was a piece of heavy industrial fabric attached to a frame that could be unfolded and placed on the floor. Once the frame was tensioned like a drum, the thing became a kind of stage. There were strobe lights and a disco ball and theatrical smoke and when the music started, I leapt over a table and joined two other people on the makeshift stage.

I danced.

Not ballroom, not nighclub, not jazz or tap or two-step or line dance. I shimmied my hips and kicked out my feet. I writhed and gyrated and shook. The room fell away until it was just me, the beat, and the smoke swirling around my ankles and rising to envelop my waist, my shoulders, my hands. I danced incognito, wrapped in solitude. Eventually more people joined us and somehow the dance floor kept expanding to accommodate everyone. I traveled in rhythms, kicking at the upbeats. This was no dance for the faint-hearted; mine was about conquest, the strength of conviction, and generations of my grandmothers blasting their power through me.

Around me I heard voices, a low rumble of conversation punctuated with laughter, confessions, and some drunk asshole shouting In vino vertias. I was pleased not to see who that was. I danced until the music ended and the first streaks of dawn filtered through the tall windows. As I left the stage, I saw all the tables were arranged neatly, the ballroom had been returned to its former glory, and the people there were watching me as I walked past them. Between ladies with long skirts and crinolines and gentlemen in broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted suits, I made my way through the crowd, knowing they were people out of time; ghosts made flesh come to witness.

Witness what, I had no idea, and I didn’t care. I dreamed of dancing, and it was very good.

“Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.”
― Howard Phillips Lovecraft