Daytime was disorienting for club kids. You’d see them moving around in the streets to the same rhythms that pushed them around the dance floor the night before. The echo of the club sounds and the general morning grogginess of nighthawks conspired with the eyes to produce strange effects. Like jellyfish below, or angels above, their movements left tactile waves or visible auras; halos perhaps, extrusions from the abject joy overflow. Maybe it’s true that any vista of any crowd would produce something like this to the reddened eye, but it was certainly more evident with club kids, because of the latency of the party, and the muscle memory of musical beat that still governed their limbs. Their bodies had become dedicated to the rhythm, like good spouses, or addicts. It was what moved them physically and emotionally. It was what allowed them to dance three hours straight without a break in a smoky club, and compelled them to go back again, night after night. The clubs were not elite salons. Many were very seedy places where danger held the first table. All were expensive in a time of Reaganomics, where jobs were hard to come by in rust belt cities, where the factories just kept closing. Yet, the outside world seemed to matter little on the dance floor, so they came, poor, bucking danger and ruin, ducking bookies and exes to satisfy the craving for that certain euphoria only found where the music enters your body and you surrender. Better than drugs they’d say; and they were right.

-Danny Grosso