In Palm Springs, we find out we are 2 miles outside the center of town. That, and the town is a hotspot for Pride. Lying on the bed, after having bought a cheap bottle of white wine from a cooler in the lobby, I sit and read ads in the guidebook: “Where men meet men for 30 years”…. “We’re not so innocent here”… “The largest clothing-optional men’s resort in the southeast” written on the bare back of a man lying face-down on a massage table, his towel sliding off his ass. You laugh as I read them out loud to you, each one more suggestive than the last. “Come here,” I tell you, “look at this.” And I point to a text logo where the negative space in the “C” has been turned into a dick, and the apostrophe just above it has been made to look like shooting semen. “Oh my godddd,” you laugh.
I shut the pamphlet. “Should we go?” “Sure,” you say, “I’m ready.” And you spend the next 15 minutes getting ready. Fortunately I have the rest of the wine to occupy me as you do. By the time you’re ready I’ve finished most of it, and a nice buzz helps me forget that I have to walk 2 miles with achilles tendonitis.
The night is warm. It’s not LA, this is a desert evening – cool but comfortable and nice enough to leave your coat. As we walk, we pass a no-man’s land of a few empty lots, and a few hotels, and the undeveloped area makes it easy for us to see the surrounding mountains, black against a purple sky. The way they thrust themselves up like a set of fingers, to the left, the right, it’s easy to see why early Spanish explorers referred to this place as “La Palma de la Mano de Dios,” or “The Palm of God’s Hand.”
“Look!” I say, pointing about halfway up the mountain, and you look and see a very small light. So small. Stationary. “Maybe a camplight of some sort,” I say. “Wowww,” you say, “that’s real camping.” I point higher. “And up there too!” And we both stop and stare, marveling at the vastness of the scene – the distance between us and this pinhole-sized star-like flicker thousands of feet above, and the distance between the type of people who climb mountains on Friday nights and the type who stay 2 miles outside downtown because a Motel 8 sounds too much like roughing it.
About a mile in, we reach the beginning of downtown. There are lots of small galleries mostly closed, an ice cream place, a few luxury weed shops, and eventually I see a large blue awning that reads “Santorini Restaurant.” “Look,” I tell you, “not that I want to be walking around with Greek food in my stomach right now, but it looks like a nice enough place to eat, and I’m hungry.” “Fine with me,” you say.
As we’re seated, we walk past a man playing guitar. It’s not a bouzouki, but I tell myself it must be possible to play some Greek music on the guitar – so I should reserve judgment. Five minutes of Spanish guitar later, I look around to see if anyone is as disturbed as me by the bait-n-switch. They’re not. Not by the music, the vaguely middle-eastern menu, or the comically tacky Greek decor. In their defense, a non-Greek trying to decorate a restaurant to make it look very Greek is exactly how a Greek decorates a Greek restaurant.
But there’s Retsina on the menu, and despite a street vendor in Athens once telling us that Restina is a Greek-American scam, I feel very Greek when I have it, very in-touch with my roots, and it’s all I need to get over the feeling that I am the only one in the restaurant who knows we were all being lied to – musically, culinarily – even the continuously scrolling images on the TVs at either end of the restaurant are of places in Turkey and Italy and Spain. But it’s OK. A second glass of Retsina, and we are trying to figure out what language the waiters are speaking. Not English, but not Greek either. We pay the bill and walk unsteadily back onto the strip.
People are out. The city lights surround us like sconces in an old lounge. We are herring moving with the crowd. Within three blocks I’ve already seen 2 bachelorette parties – brides with frilly veils hanging down to their necks, wobbly friends in tow like the train of a very drunk wedding dress. They all have matching shirts. We follow one bridal caravan to a nearby Mexican restaurant where I can hear live music playing. “Hey!” I say, “I think this is the place we had dinner last time we were in the desert.”
I pull you by the arm out of the parade of divorcees, aspiring divorcees and Hawaiian shirts. “We were just hoping to sit at the bar,” I tell the hostess. “Go right ahead,” she says. “Down the hall and to the left.”
The closer we get, the better we can hear the music. By now we can tell it’s the music we grew up with, and by that I mean the music our parents grew up with. Billy Joel’s “Movin’ Out” is playing when I wedge myself between two Hawaiian shirts and ask the bartender for two margaritas.
“SMALL OR LARGE?” he yells over the music. I shrug. “LARGE,” and in thirty seconds he comes back with a fishbowl’s worth of alcohol, so much I have to reach out with two hands, and when I hand it to you like a live warhead, I tell you with big eyes to find us somewhere to put them down.
Luckily you’ve found a table by the time I pay the tab. We sit up against a railing that overlooks the band and a small dance floor below it. The average age of the band is probably 65, and the people on the dance floor, not much lower.
But I look closer and there are thirty- and forty-somethings among the group, dancing on their own together, stepping, swaying, jabbing their elbows into the air – unlike the older crowd who dance a more connected dance – holding hands, spinning, twisting with their partners. They lean away from each other with hands held, way back, and then pull each other in close, chest to chest, cheek to cheek, bouncing left, right, and another spin, an occasional dip.
The dim lights and big drinks are enough to get all kinds on the dance floor – patrons who only came for drinks and music, diners who between courses leave their belongings strewn across the table and chairs, people shaped like carrots shaped like pears shaped like bags of flour. Men with men and women with women, men with women and everyone dancing together somehow – undulating like a single organism as graceful as a New York City block, where somehow despite armies of pedestrians marching at each other all day long, nobody seems to collide. Everyone on the dance floor fits together, slides through and between each other with flash-mob precision. Elbows flailing. Legs kicking. Hair whipping. Backs rubbing up against each other. It’s too chaotic to be choreographed, but too flawless to be random. And that’s not to say that everyone is particularly good at dancing – where some dance, others just keep moving – but it’s the energy, the unfuckgivingness of anything other than having a good time and not getting in the way of somebody else’s – that is particularly beautiful about the scene.
La Palma de la Mano de Dios(!), I think, shooting from my seat as the band begins playing “The Twist.” You see me stand and jump to your feet soon after, as though you too have been possessed by the spirit of this place and know exactly what’s coming next.
“WE HAVE TO FINISH ENOUGH OF THESE SO THAT WE DON’T SPILL ON EVERYBODY!” I yell over the band. We start chugging until there’s only about a quarter left – the amount of alcohol in a normal margarita – and step from our perch down to the dance floor below. The bride and her drunk wedding dress arrive just as we do, and they begin forming a conga line at the other end of the floor. You and I hold our margaritas in one hand, and facing each other, do whatever seems like the Twist. My hips swivel, I balance on the ball of one foot and lower myself to the ground. Next to us, an older couple dances close, and grins as they see us in unison. I nod and smile in their direction, and backing up, notice we are nearly dancing in someone’s meal. When I look back at the diners to apologize, they only laugh and clap and give us a thumbs-up. I laugh and give a thumbs-up back, move closer to the middle of the dance floor, and put both our margaritas on an empty table nearby.
You look at me confused until I grab your hands and start moving them back and forth. We mirror each other, grinning stupidly, and I yell over the music “LA PALMA DE LA MANO DE DIOS!”
“WHAT?!”
“I SAID ‘COME ON LET’S DO THE TWIST!’”
“YEAH!”
As the conga line approaches I spin you away from me, then pull you back just in time.