Alpheus Williams

La Danse Apache

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apache dance

1a: a violent duet dance of the Parisian underworld

b: a subdued version of such a dance in vaudeville, burlesque, and revues

2: a ballroom dance with close contact, jerks, and spins

Merriam Webster Dictionary

 

In 1967 Armstrong and Aldrin walked the moon.

 

In 1968 the My Lai Massacre and  Vietnam War rode our collective consciences like a festering boil. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated.  The Chicago Democratic Convention ended in shambles, hope was gossamer, peace was out of reach and Richard Nixon was poised to become president.

  

In San Francisco the Zodiac Killer captured the media. It was as if there were no other murders in the City because the Zodiac owned the franchise.

  

Those who came for love and peace arrived too late.  The Summer of Love was done and dusted and the Haight was filled with wannabes, hollow replicas who looked the part but couldn’t live the message. The real thing wandered off to the Santa Cruz Hills and elsewhere. Eschewing cities, they embraced nature, communes and home grown vegetables. Bus tours haunted their ghosts. Gawking tourists swallowed tour guide narratives, hyperbolised and absurd. Pulp mags and comics advertised hippie kits for two dollars.  Those of a more entrepreneurial bent moved from selling the sweet serenity of marijuana and acid dreams to pushing the shackled nightmares of harder stuff.  Predatory capitalism discovered the Haight. Love and peace didn’t fit the business plan.

  

Weird, wonderful and viscerally dangerous belonged to the Tenderloin. 

 

Tame and vapid during the day, it shuns the sun and comes alive to celebrate night with the dazzle, danger and exotic in a cornucopia of smells, flesh, neon and glitter. Denizens of darkness emerge from dim corridors of colourless apartment blocks and the Tenderloin springs to life. Shiny Cadillacs with leopard skin trim cruise streets like metallic sharks, pimps in broad brimmed Fedoras and silk shirts flash pearly teeth in predatory grins.

 

Trans and hookers sashay flinty walk paths in sleek dresses, bouffant hair, butterfly eyelashes, glittery eye-shadow and stiletto heels, towering under neon lights exhaling misty clouds in the foggy chill of night, shadows shifting and snaking on the pavement with life of their own.  Penumbras and lightless alleys form margins of mysteries, straight razors, Mickey Finns, Friday night specials and mercenary sex.

  

Smoke drifts in lazy spirals from Spider Kool’s cigarette. A man in a leather apron shines his shoes  while Spider waits for young runaway girls outside the Greyhound bus station.

  

Strangers, outsiders, interlopers, sojourners look for sex, dope and a walk on the wild side.  With enough money they can find them all.  And Sometimes. Sometimes. Things they aren’t looking for find them.  

 

*

 

Diamond is a reinvention.  A woman trapped in an androgynous male body. An unspoken cliché. A platitude. A truth. A taboo.  As Daniel she survived her small town upbringing, came to terms with her body and her family’s shame.  She survived beatings and taunts of crew cut jocks. Survived alienation and dreams of suicide.

 

Leaving dropped an anvil from her back and promised wings.

 

The Tenderloin is closest to family and home she has ever known.  There are those like her who share stories of beatings, alienation, shame and shunning.  They celebrate who they are. Their joy is visceral. Their support is solid.

 

*

 

Down the peninsula is Bucky. Football hero. Fraternity kingpin.  Campus god.  Women gravitate to him, young men want to be him. He’s Newton’s apple, a force of nature. He maintains a wonderful superficial charm accompanied by winks and shoulder slaps that suggests it’s all a fine lark and nothing really matters beneath the surface anyway and why should it, if the glitter is strong enough who needs depth? He keeps a scoreboard of female conquests on the Fraternity House wall.  His brothers revere him, hold him in awe.  No one has scored more trophies than Bucky.  His success is beyond envy.  There is only room for idolisation.

 

But the sex is empty. There are hungers he can’t assuage. Thirsts he can’t quench. Secrets he shares with no one.

 

He pulls his collar up, combs his hair into a fifties waterfall, slips on aviator shades, does James Dean with a cigarette.  No longer the letterman, fraternity brother, super athlete. No longer the chisel cheeked Adonis.  Something different.  Something wild. Something dangerous.  Something dark and tortured. The hidden insides, like dark cream, floats to  the surface. He revels in the role.  Drives his roadster north to the City.

 

*

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The cafeteria on Taylor Street is a refuge from neon and street lamps spotlighting street corners.  Clashes of china, scraping chairs, staccato heels on tiles, buzzing voices, cigarette smoke and coffee.  Bucky swaggers into the room like the gunslinger in black through the swinging doors of a saloon in a dated Western. He gifts the denizens with a lopsided grin that’s never crumbled beneath doubt or ridicule. He sits with his back to the window watching the talent under fluorescent lights, his legs spread, boots flayed outward, dark glasses and greased hair, the promise of rabid sex and brutal hurt. Advertising.

 

She drifts towards him, like a moonlit tide, a moth to flame, a lemming to a cliff edge, curious, hungry. 

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*

 

They love on the rooftop beneath a blanket of fog.  It belongs to them and becomes their place. They pull apart. Separate. Disappear into the damp night.  She feels desired, replete.  Knows he will return.

 

Bucky satiated, tormented and ashamed.  It’s an ephemeron, a one off, never to happen again.  He flees the City like a thief, heart pounding, laughing maniacally.  He’s never felt more alive.

  

But he can’t forget.  He renews his  campaign of female conquests with passionate vigour, amazes his Frat brothers by doubling the marks on his trophy board. He’s frantic, worn and unsatisfied.  Diamond rises in his fantasies. Forbidden. Hidden. Cursed. Addicting. He embraces the guilt, loves the torment, relishes the danger. 

 

A dance haunts his dreams, from an ancient black and white movie on late night television,  details forgotten except for La Danse Apache.  He dreams it now, but it’s him and Diamond, a street drama ballet of passion, brutality, dominance and control acted out on a Tenderloin roof top.  Only Diamond would understand.  Only Diamond could pull it off.  Only Diamond fills his vision.

 

He lasts fourteen days then returns to run the roadster through Tenderloin’s canyoned streets seeking her out.  Finds her in the cafeteria on Taylor Street.  She’s with friends, smoke rises and sucks the ceiling under long fluorescent lights.  She sees him enter,  the swagger tempered with doubt and fear and want.

 

They dance the dance, La Danse Apache, a mime done to the ambient sound of traffic and city noise muffled by fog.  The violence stylised, slow and soft.  Slaps are pulled. It’s an act. It’s a dance, erotic, orgasmic.  

 

He returns more often. They dance the dance on the rooftop.   He’s possessed.  Wants her. Wants to be free of her.  The mime becomes physical.  The violence and hurt real.  He fights for control, his and hers, with pain and power. 

 

She knows he’s trapped, addicted.  His only release will come once he finishes the dance with her death.  Each visit become more visceral.  He leaves her with broken skin, bruises and blood.

 

*

 

She prays to her own gods.  Stands on her toes until her calves ache and cramp. Lifts her head to the sky. Pleads for wings.  Pleads for freedom.  Pleads for strength.  The bruises and scars pulse beneath her porcelain skin in supplication.  She can stand no more.  She stops trimming toenails. They grow hard, long and horny.  Her back begins to stoop, her shoulders hunch. She dances and skips across the cold coarse surface of the roof in offering.  Strips and struts unseen in the chilly heights and shifting fog.  Pleads for a predatory otherness.  

 

She goes to the rooftop.  Stands among the exhaust vents, paces the tar-papered roof.  Looks down over the streets, the skimpily dressed hollowed out eyes of hookers strung out on smack, the lone boys looking for action, the pimp cars and Johns cruising the streets, pelagic predators in an ocean of asphalt, concrete and glass.  The unbridled business of lust. She waits for him.

 

He plans his final visit, buys cheap brass rings for knuckles, brutal punishing bling. He arrives in night, a pre-arranged meet.  Races flights of stairs to the rooftop.  He finds her changed, naked, and haunting. Her back rises in rounded hump and knotted spine.  Her eyes glow in the fog bound dark. Something wild. 

 

He has to end it.  End her.  He grips his fist, feels cheap brutal rings on his hands.  He drops into a low crouch, makes slow choreographed steps of the predatory dance, hands make fist, eyes brutal and determined.

 

She rises on tipped toes, her hunched back breaks open and sprouts wings.  She grasps him in taloned feet taking him over the rooftop and down towards the street below, releases Bucky into the oncoming windshield of Spider Cool’s ride.  Bones break and glass shatters.

 

Diamond lifts into the sky on giant wings.  High over the City, she views the lights through a veil of fog , joins the constellations and the land of myth in the night sky.

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