Menacing vibrations abound in Wrigleyville on a Saturday night. The neighborhood is full of dressed up mutants and dressed-down stockbrokers looking for women to marry and date rape. It had been years since I'd found myself in such a position, butI was useless against the winds, blowing me towards the basement of Spot 6 (and who am I to fight the elements when they send me into some den of iniquity where I'll be treated to bare breasts and free drinks all night long?
I was supposed to DJ a benefit for the Chicago branch of the Sex Worker's Outreach Project, which is working to liberate working girls and boys from the three-headed monster of patriarchy, which includes the beady eyed policeman, the stickyhanded pimp, and the bejowled visage of the city's mayor. Inbetween acts, the DJs represented a timeline of underground dance, each one of them a honkey aping the black man's devil rhythms, from prohibition-era jazz to black power soul, from crackden hip hop to nineties rave house and electro.
Girls raffled off their asses for lap dances in one of those confusing shows of empowerment that's so sexy it doesn't matter how little sense it makes. A dominatrix pissed into a martini glass as a million white hot eyes lit up the room. An anarchist band called Behold! leapt around in back-patched tuxedos. A woman gave birth to two grown men and sucked their dicks. A painted, smirking clown made a bridge of himself over broken glass for a handful of women to walk across.
Similar gender plays were in effect throughout the night. It was the type of thing that LSD was supposed to explain, but not the type of thing to be watched under it. It was weird, and it's weird to say now, but it wasn't the weirdness of the night that was so weird to me, it was everything else. It was my disconnect. It was watching everyone wearing their motivations on their sleeve. The slavish soundguy ran past carryng the entire show on his shoulder. One of the promoters seemed angry with the show's success and his small role in it, and everything he said seemed to drip with a call for respect. A woman walked by and everything she said, seemed to translate to a need for everyone to like her. Two performers argued backstage over their act. One was angry, and while the other sounded angry she was just responding in kind to preserve herself.
Behind the turntables I started to feel myself approach meltdown. I think it was the task of puytting songs together for the dancing people that kept me sane, but when it was over I was unclear on what role I was supposed to play. Was I one of the naked people, a photagrapher, the shmoozing asshole I had felt comfortable as when the night began? Nothing seemed to feel right. I needed fresh air, a soda and a pack of gum, which was in the end what drove me out into the neighborhood's plastic yuppie streets, and only then when I realized how much stranger the normos actually were.
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