My friend DJs at this bar called Okay? Not that I know this for certain—it’s what she tells me, I mean, she speaks of it constantly, of ‘[her] night,’ though I have never been to see her perform and, for all I know, this could be an elaborate delusion or bit on her part. And is that what DJs do, do they perform? But really, I have never seen/heard any direct evidence of the existence or occurrence of these performances of hers, no mixes, no photographs (though I’m on permanent sabbatical from the socials), no flyers, no record sleeve lean-to’s in her bedroom or den or anywhere else in her apartment. The lavatory. I asked her to name an artist she liked to play and she would not. She refused to on mysterious grounds. She would not tell me the grounds, is what I mean, hence their mysteriousness; I was to infer them, these grounds. My first inference, the most obvious one, I felt, was that the grounds were sexist, that the implications of my sudden quiz were rooted in the problem of gender, but she said, No, that’s not it. Which was a total relief! Her building has those magnetized fire doors—in its hallways, I mean. I find it extremely satisfying to think of these heavy steel doors’—at least, I think they’re steel? for fire retardancy—swinging release from their executive magnets. Though this swinging release would imply my present doom, because I’m typically in there when I’m thinking about them, and also present doom for all the rest of the building’s occupants, who certainly spend more time there than I do, they live in there. Which is not to say that I’m not a regular presence—certainly, I am.

I had a friend—this is a different friend, but he lived in a similar building across town, with similarly monolithic and forlorn steel fire doors—who hated music. We were much younger, our brains not yet developed—well, I’ve never really been able to tell if my brain has developed or not; in many ways, I felt better back then. I was less fat, certainly. This friend, he was a dancer—I mean professionally—but he hated music. Music is like a game to me, he said. Don’t you like games? Not really, he replied. He took me dancing. He had this one move, I believe he’d invented it, where he licked his own toes. Standing up, I mean. Which is hard to do to the beat, let alone to the syncopated beat, and this was the era when all the beats were syncopated. Mostly we as a human musical community have moved on from that, we are wiggling more normatively now. When my friend’s enthusiasmlessness for music began interrupting his dancing career, he matriculated to a psychiatrist who sent him to a therapist who passed him onto a hypnotist. (Passing the buck, is what this is called, according to my energy worker.) The hypnotist would play my friend vinyl, a lot of vintage disco, rediscoveries, there are labels specializing in this. In San Francisco. And elsewhere. But the important ones are all in San Francisco, I am told—I was told this by this toe-licking friend and by other, less limber friends. And this’s the only positive stuff happening in San Francisco these days, by the way, everything else happening there is destroying the world, everyone agrees. Anyway: the treatments didn’t work on my dancing, limber friend, he was more agitated than ever, he began to dance to whichever sounds were around, garbage trucks, cicadas, slammed doors. The whoosh of the ceiling fan, which, after a while, becomes a hum. Then it was too cold for the fan and my friend stopped dancing. Then he never danced again, to my knowledge—we don’t talk anymore.

I told my DJ friend about him; she said, He should come to my night, do you have a way of getting in touch with him? I lied and said I didn’t. You should track him down, she said, I’m pretty sure I could sort out his life. He doesn’t want to be sorted out, I said, he wants to disappear for good down a crevasse like you or I do, only he’s brave enough to do so for real. Sorry? I wasn’t listening, said my DJ friend, who was frying an egg now, sprinkling some dried Thai chili flakes and tears of pecorino onto it with her unspatula’d hand. The odor in here now being what is often referred to by the experts of wine and cheese and oysters as barnyardy. What will you play tonight? I asked her, changing the subject. I couldn’t make it that evening, I had a real excuse for once—I was going to my boss’s wedding. My boss didn’t give me a plus one, because he wanted me to marry his brother, because his brother and I are the only gay men he knows, he wants to clank us together like dollies. My DJ friend said she wasn’t sure what she’d be playing. Maybe some Georgian techno, she said. Like, from Tbilisi? No, she said, like from Augusta. I wasn’t familiar with that musical paradigm. She split the yolk with the lengthy nail of her middle finger. Taste it, she said. I told her I was good. Fuckin’ taste it, she said. I licked the brightness off the black-painted nail. (Now don’t get like that, there was no tension in this act.) Delicious, I said. See? She plated the drippy cells beautifully, I snapped a picture. I didn’t say you could do that, she said. I’ll delete it, I’ll delete it. I’m kidding! she replied.