Excerpt: When they lit the oil drums on fire it wasn’t so much to provide warmth. Rather, the psychological barrier between those coldly defending their bosses for pay, and those on the line for the cause, was made physical. Indeed, the physicality of the struggle was one of its selling points. It was deep in the race back then to lock arms with your side, and then lock horns with the other. It was how they recruited us back then. There was no internet trolling, there were no overseas bots. There seemed to be a sort of honor in this dangerous endeavor. Getting in close made the conflicts so much more vital, and perhaps, less frequent. They certainly seemed less petty. In the lines they fought for food, for jobs, for a shot at being a boss someday. And while adventurers bounded in on both sides, most on the side of the cause were true believers, although those beliefs fell just short of fanaticism.

However, when those fires were aglow, and the sparks jumped out of the drums like popping corn, the murmuring seemed to take on an ecclesiastical rhythm, and as it grew to surround the asphalt lot, a certain reverence captured the proceedings. Through the chain link fence, across the open lot between the workers’ cottages, and down the street a bit, a priest is moved by the sound, and opens the window of his second floor room. He too can see the pink firelights, and he too, can ascertain what they portend. He grabs his heavy crucifix necklace and a leather coat and runs toward the music.

–Danny Grosso

Available at Amazon Books. Nine short stories, each derived from and including one of my paintings or drawings. Very streetwise, very twentieth century, very noir. Visit my author’s page at Amazon.com/author/dannygrosso

From Chicago Gothic (2007), Available at Amazon Books. Artwork and text copyright Danny Grosso.

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

Instagram @artispolitics

Buy books! My Amazon author’s page: amazon.com/author/dannygrosso

The lights would get so bright on the pulse that for a moment it would look like the dance floor had been transported out of doors, to some English garden party when the late spring flora  had exploded with color. Color – that moment of transformation from blue and black to psychedelia, on the pulse of a two-second strobe, was not something he imagined to take from this less than fabulous neighborhood club. The bodies moving within that light, the multi-hued swirling of pegged pants and skirts, cravats and headbands, against a sunbox of light, approximated a Lichtenstein in a centrifuge. Inside of this ordinary brick building with unfinished walls was a living museum of modern art, a prescient multi-media performance piece in a place where few had ever visited an art museum.

We are all artists in our ecstasy, he thought, and then girded himself for the thrill of the next pulse of light.

-Danny Grosso

Instagram @artispolitics

Buy books! My Amazon author’s page: amazon.com/author/dannygrosso

Excerpt from the story Opening Acts:

…For ten minutes or so they just played around, fumbling really, trying to find a bit of harmony, until Shirley yelled over from the bar: “Why don’t youz find yourselves a song in all that noise.”

“Ok, well, that sounds like a request to me,” Martin said, “follow along with me and give us some lyrics, would ya’ son?”

It was only a few minutes after that when they were chiming like church bells, and Bryan was singing:

And I heard ye now/

come calling to me/

from the abbey ground/

beyond the sea/

and the companion cries/

of the wailing shes/

who’d lost their loves/

in the troubled eighties.

–Danny Grosso

In the depths of it she could barely breathe, and even her shallow respiration sounded ominous, as if a small elderly man had fallen asleep in her chest and was snoring. In the depths of it she was all dark, and she was in the depths of it mostly always. Her appendages would morph, her arms heavy hammers a’swinging, her fingers fragile glass tubes. Her eyes were burning embers, her hair a swaying anemone, tentacles black and greasy with the ink of the sea.

In the depths of it she was unapproachable at the times when she needed affection most, and even as the pressure enveloped her with its own estimation of care, she realized it was a poor substitute for a human touch. Yet, as she contemplated the possibility of reaching out, and of someone reaching in, she invariably felt her arms too short to reach the surface, and others’ empathy to shallow to retrieve her. She waited in this purgatory for the end, but though her will was already gone, she was not, and would not be. She feared that this was all she knew now, and because of this, she would know nothing else in death. She sank deeper and deeper, sleepwalking through her days and nights, praying for the fatigue, and the fog, and all the water to clear, for a night terror, or a slap in the face, that would wake her and send her chasing after the sun.

–Danny Grosso 

Merry Memories.

–Danny Grosso

Instagram @artispolitics

A nighttime explosion for kids who had no war, the flash of the black light strobe in a vacuum of darkness, started the heart and seared the nearest image into the cortex. No one ever dancing, or even just moving in such an environment will ever forget it.

The sentiment was difficult to comfortably convey to the older guys, who had been to Viet Nam or even Korea, who had seen actual bombs bursting, filling the night with horrible light, but it was all they had, these club kids of the 80’s, to stir the spirit, with Cold War as it was, stagnated into intransigence. Besides, reveling in the momentarily controlled chaos of an out of control dance floor was infinitely better than charging the enemy’s lines. That was something everyone agreed upon.

The staccato animation of dancers within a space that is filled with darkness and music, and every other second, light would prove to be, over that short period, an enticement and a unifying dynamic. It would be only a short time before all of this was gone; and, broken apart as if in a strobe, the movement lost its continuity.

-Danny Grosso