retrOrlando

There’s something about approaching a city skyline at dusk that just gives me the feeling of an endlessness to the night: that there are infinite possibilities in life, innumerable destinies to be searched out, found, lost, rediscovered, and lost again, all in the streets and alleyways at the feet of the great concrete and steel monoliths of our cold, modern civilization. The height! I see the outline of those tall buildings, all different shapes and sizes and I see the unknown. I see the future. Long glowing lights climbing up the gray and blue faces of skyscrapers from the avenues below cast undershadows on the sills and overhangs, gloom like a campfire storyteller with plastic flashlight held beneath ghoulish, spooky chin. Random room lights, some on some off, leave you shivering in paranoia about being trapped in vacant hallways and isolated stairwells, alone, while secret secretarial rendezvous occupy the corner office when everyone has gone home and the Mexican cleaning staff are still three floors below and it doesn’t matter anyway because they can’t hear a thing over the roaring of decades old Hoovers and violent floor buffers, ‘so come on baby my wife won’t find out, what’s to worry?’ And up top, on the roofs where the cool evening breeze flows over glass pyramids and rattles red-tip flashing antennae, the multicolored signs shouting names into the night bright enough to be read from airplanes, with floodlights beaming cylinders of white lasers straight into the sky as if they were trying to get Heaven itself to notice and come down and ‘Bank with Barnett.’ So there we were, Chaos and I, and Chaos at the wheel cruising across the highway night from the east at eighty-five miles an hour in his black Firebird, the windows open, T-tops dropped, and the stereo blasting the Brian Setzer Orchestra from all ten speakers of a mean, beefy Monsoon sound system (swing making a minor comeback that year, ’98). Jump, Jive, and Wail! Prima did it better, but who cares? We’re both pumped and full of juice so sing it you beautiful bastard, SING IT! Horn bliss and strumming swing bass kicking us through the blackness, heartbeat, balls and drum. His eyes were narrowed and glued to the red tails of the traffic ahead that he deftly wove in and out of, one hand knuckling the top of the wheel, the other resting coolly on the shifter knob with his elbow bent and situated on the console, his whole body leaning into the spine of the car with that perfect amount of James Bond casualness that only the immortally cool can compose while they teeter on just this side of catastrophe. The wind cycloning through the open roof and typhooning in the back seat, ruffling not a single strand of his perfectly quaffed hair ; causing not one unwanted crease in his sharpened collar, black and plasticy as the night. Even the wind, the very night itself, parting around us when we roared past. We rode on like that, the Orlando skyline just starting to creep into view over the horizon as the Firebird crested a hump in the highway. Chaos was in his groove, the music running through his blood, his heartbeat racing to match the fierceness of the engine firing on all cylinders not two feet in front of us, a hungry shark streaming through the undercurrent, devouring the darkness. And as he plowed us on to our destiny, I sat beside him, my eyes fixed on the lights in the distance and the infinite possibilities that lay beneath them. Years later, when all of this was behind me and I found myself rolling into bigger places like New York or Philly, and even later into Osaka and Seoul, in that dreamy purple futurenight of the city light multiverse, I still reflect on those rides into Orlando, when the long black hood of the car knelt down and the expanse of that navy inkiness exploded Big Bang from behind the trees and Lake Underhill, Eola Heights, downtown, all of it suddenly laying out before me, moving slowly across the horizon while everything else went zipping past in the blurry machinegun fire of my periphery. We were simultaneously driving and being driven. There in the distance lay it all. At the feet of those great stone and iron monuments, beneath the lights, behind guarded doors watched over by grim faced gorillas in black shirts, black pants, arms crossed and bulging biceps in the dark corners of the city skyline night; that is where we were headed. To hear the music, to drown our brains in the warm embrace of wine and liquor, to chew our lives to the quick. And for me, to her. We zoomed on.