Postaday for January 14th: Connect the Dots. Open your nearest book to page 82. Take the third full sentence on the page, and work it into a post somehow.
Disco sucks, apparently, if you listen to the people who like, what AC/DC? Old AC/DC? And what did disco ever do to them? It got a lot of people killed, is what it did, in the summer of Sam. Not the people Sam killed, no, but the people who thought they knew who Sam was. Sympathetic murders, all fixated on Reggie Bush. New York Yankees, no. 44. Had a bat like the forearm of a longshoreman. No longshoreman ever listened to no disco. Stevedores put on black knit caps in any weather, hulk down to the docks and hump crates, and come home and watch the ball game on tiny TVs. While long hairs listen to AC/DC and their upwardly mobile Latino cousins go to discos.
A guy with perfect hair and perfect knowledge of Brooklyn’s two dozen bridges. Knocks a girl up and she commits suicide off one of those bridges. The last thing she sees: a wadded up copy of Mad magazine. Wadded up like a discarded porn rag on the side of a Midwest highway. Suicide, cause her fat ass was good enough for Johnny’s little man but not enough for his big heart. 40 years later what would have been her grandson’s best friend pulls an old Saturday Night Fever LP from a bin in a Salvation Army and realizes: you can’t buy record needles anymore.
He’s a lonely type kid. His grandfather literally worked on the docks and so didn’t teach his own kid how to be a good dad. An almost good dad buys his son whatever he wants and watches Rodriguez apologize for taking steroids. The kid watches Saturday Night Fever on Netflix, asks his dad for a camera. His hobby is photographing bridges. The ones that disco danced in Brooklyn in 1976. Little proto-hipster.
Peering up at girders and beams. Little man overhears an argument at a bodega. Every sports got its crooks, a voice hollers. Baseball’s got the dope heads and football’s got the wife beaters. That’s different a voice hollers in reply. Proto hipster goes home, dumps his camera’s memory card, cues up a Spike Lee joint on Netflix. Where’s dad. Murdering someone for suspicion of pederasty. Witch hunts don’t go after women anymore. That’s progress. Disco sucks.