Love Saves the Day

Later I would come to understand the technical aspects of what David Mancuso, the man who threw this party, had done. Most speakers back then had only one tweeter to transmit high-end frequencies. But David had eight JBL tweeters for his two speakers, grouped to hang from the ceiling in each of the four corners of the room. All I knew when I first walked into that loft, though, was that whatever I’d thought I’d been listening to, it wasn’t music. At least, not the way music was supposed to sound. It was like I’d been listening to music all my life with cotton in my ears. I felt like one of Plato’s cave dwellers (we were reading The Republic in my social studies class) who thought fire was sunlight—until they stepped outside and saw the real sun for the first time.

Everybody there felt the difference in the sound, even if they didn’t know they did. You could see it in the way their bodies reacted with varying levels of tension to a hi-hat versus a cymbal versus a guitar line. You could see it in the way David controlled the mood of the room with what he played, in the way he told stories with the music he chose. I’d never known that “Woman” by Barrabás could be followed by “More Than a Woman” by the Bee Gees and tell you things you didn’t already know about what it was like to fall in love. That night was the first time I had the sense of a record as a living thing. Seven inches of God. All that sound and all those voices compressed into its ridges and grooves, each song’s pattern unique as a set of fingerprints, awaiting only the lightest caress from that tiny needle to set its music free.

David gave us what we wanted before we knew we wanted it, except that we did know it with our bodies—when we wanted to speed up, when we wanted to rest. The music changed depending on how we felt, and how we felt changed because of the music. It was like being at a concert or in a crowded movie theater where everybody reacts as one—laughing, shouting, standing up to dance—except we couldn’t see the person who was making it happen for us. He didn’t have to stand, exposed, in front of a crowd the way somebody like Anise would have to when she played with her band. From his hidden booth, David performed without performing.

And before I knew it, I was dancing. I’d never really danced before, always feeling like I’d rather make my too-tall, too-skinny, and too-boyish body disappear than show it off in any way. But within seconds, the impulse to dance became irresistible. Anise and I danced together and then with strangers who swayed over to join us before dancing away again to form the core of a new group somewhere else. My idea of dancing was the way it was at the handful of school dances I’d gone to, always waiting alone in a chair against the wall for someone to ask me to dance, because dancing meant one boy standing up with one girl. Here there were no partners. Here everybody danced however they wanted with whoever they wanted, yet somehow each one of us was a part of the same whole. For the first time in my life, I fit somewhere. I’d never been much for dating, but I finally understood what girls at school had been talking about when they described the way boys they liked made them feel. It was the same way the music made me feel now—a hot-and-cold fever rush of tingles down my body that took the air from my lungs and made my brain buzz. I was hooked.

Like the store where I’d met Anise, the party was also called Love Saves the Day. Later Anise showed me her crumpled invitation that bore the inscription, along with images of Dalí’s melting clocks. She said there was no connection between the party and the store where we’d met. I never believed her. “Love Saves the Day” was obviously a code of some kind, a sign of recognition talked about among people who understood things I’d never imagined.

I’d been waiting my whole life for someone to talk to me.

I heard everything in disco’s four/four time after that. Walking down the street, I’d set the heel of each foot down before the toe to create a four-count that always sounded in my head like, “One two three four, one two three four.” But it wasn’t just what I heard, it was also what I saw. A chair was four legs with four beats, and the seat was a hi-hat crowning the third beat, for flourish. This was what I was always doing in my mind—counting words, syllables, windows, TV screens, people’s faces (which broke down conveniently into two ears, two eyes, two nostrils, and two lips—two full four/four measures). And where I couldn’t make something break down into a perfect four, I’d imagine anything extra as additional sound and texture—French horn, timpani, clarinet, trombone, harp, violin, anything at all—that transformed a four/four beat into a full, orchestral song.