Electro [hs]

Seven

Seven  ♀ 

The sign out in the parking lot is half-broken; the part that says Complex is nothing but a twist of dead neon tubes but Electro  reads as aggressively illuminated, oscillating between light and darkness with a frenetic kind of energy that would have an epileptic on the concrete, frothing at the mouth.

There's this same intensity on the air too; I feel it from the moment we get through double doors and I find myself in a large room.  I see the bones of a building with a few scraps of meat left on it. There are old, smashed up arcade games, the carpet is worn down and fraying. There are no places like this in Minnesota, or if there are no one ever told me about them. Honestly it seems like this place shouldn't belong here; erupting like a neon zit on an empty expanse of the Florida coastline.

Most of the light fixtures hang low from the ceiling and it's filled with people. I'm reminded of a Mad Max movie or some kind of dystopia where everyone over twenty five is murdered and ground down into biscuits and this is what's left of society; girls with bare legs, boys with bare arms and that smell of sweat and lust and spilled energy drinks mixed with spirits. It's all color and skin and hair with soft spaces against strained muscle and hard bones and ordinarily I wouldn't have a clue where to look; lost in the sticky hormone fizz of it all. But tonight I do.

Trouble is, compared to him they're all just people. And once you've got Harry in your eyeline and had his arm slung around you and his smell is still clinging to your clothes, just people feels intensely ordinary.

Aside from him, holding the beer over his head, sluicing through the crowd on long legs, twisting his narrow hips in that ungainly, cool, beautiful loping jackal motion of his, the only thing that's enough to hold my attention is the building itself. I can see stained glass panelling with blocked off and twisting geometrical patterns like something out of the Great Gatsby right next to the gurning face of a muscle bound, army soldier who's been painted onto the side of a tipped over shoot-em up game with the screen smashed in.

"What is this place?" I ask Harry, marvelling.

"It was an amusement arcade, in the eighties- I think. Before that, I dunno. I think some property developer guy bought it and probably meant to restore it but he went broke and couldn't find a buyer. No one else wants her, so she's ours."

"She's beautiful," I murmur and I genuinely mean it. Broken down machinery and art deco fixtures and all this stuff slapped together into a Frankenstein form that doesn't seem to fit, that's decaying and smashed up inside. I kind of get it.

Harry furrows his brow at me, an amused smirk on his face as I realise that this is probably a really effeminate sentiment, "For, like, I dunno...a dumb old building or whatever."

I have made better saves in my life, his smirk wanes a little and he shifts the beer, "I dunno, a dumb old building or whatever, yah," he repeats, doing a Minnesota accent that is pure Fargo style caricature and much much more pronounced than my own. "I didn't  know you were so poetic, Charlie." 

He doesn't let it show, he's still measured and easy going and ready with a smile but I can't help but feel a little like I've disappointed him.

It's an awful feeling. I want to go back two minutes in time immediately, recall Love Among the Ruins by Robert Browning and talk about how it struck me the minute I walked in. Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns// Earth's returns. But then I'd have been trying way too hard, or being way too much like myself- whatever myself is- and I can't have that. I know I'm drunk when the poetry starts worming it's way into my brain. If tonight goes the way of prom then everyone I'm with had better run for cover. Especially him.