Chapter 41
41.
Confessions, Part 2
“Upon their first Saturn Returns, the chosen one will rise up or fall prey to the Great Darkness. It is the Disco Witches’ responsibility to protect them.”
—Disco Witch Manifesto #122
“So? Are you going to answer me?” Joe asked, scrunching up his thick eyebrows in a way that made Howie think of the phrase rolling hills of puzzlement . “Do you, Lenny, and Dory call yourself witches?”
Howie recalled all the friendships and romantic paramours he had lost over the years when he revealed his true nature. Most gay men had no problem with the most lurid or complex sexual fetish, but tell them you follow an offbeat esoteric spiritual practice that enables you to sometimes levitate while wearing six pounds of ostrich feathers on your head and then boogying to Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” with dozens of other Disco Witches, and within a matter of minutes you’ll hear the screen door slamming behind them. Yet, if Howie wanted to make Joe a true friend, he had no choice.
“Yes, is the simple, unmediated answer.” Howie sighed. “Some of us are, or were, part of a spiritual cooperative—a dance-centered ‘religion’ if you will. Our faith is more like Quakerism or Unitarianism in that we all can believe whatever we like. Individually we follow a metaphysical hodgepodge of beliefs—paganism, folk witchcraft, Strega, Santeria, and so on. To be quite frank, most of our solo practices were just a bunch of silly superstitions.”
Joe just sat there, expressionless. Howie wasn’t sure if he was even listening, but it didn’t matter. The truth moved at its own velocity, and now was its moment. “It was in dancing together that our magic truly catalyzed itself. We experimented, testing various hallucinogenic infusions, both popular and esoteric forms of dance, all set against this or that track of club music. At first it was just a lot of fun, an extra layer to our creativity and dancing. But then one night we noticed little sparks of true magic happening.”
“What kind of sparks?” Joe said, sitting up and hugging his knees. That he spoke at all pleased Howie.
“Oh, nothing that crazy. Altering the flow of electricity to the lights, pepping up the mood of the party, inspiring the DJ to play better music. It was hit or miss at first, but bit by bit our craft matured. Max—who, besides being our best friend, is also our founder and high priest—began compiling a manifesto of our collective wisdom, as well as his private spell book of what worked and what didn’t. One of our greatest triumphs was called the Boogie Down Disco Love Ceremony. We’d use incense and this fabulous twenty-three-song disco diva set—Gloria, Donna, Nena, Nona, all the greats. Suddenly, all the ‘potential lovers’ in a club discovered one another. Of course, spells like that also have their downsides. We used them sparingly.”
Howie paused to see if Joe needed a moment to process, but after a few silent seconds, Joe tossed his head—a demand for Howie to continue.
“After a while we started experimenting more with our dance-floor magic—you know, testing out necromancy, psychic prediction, levitation, that sort of thing. And yes, it’s true, sometimes during our twirling trance dances we were able to even combust matter, but nothing extremely dense—only softer matter like wood and drywall. Setting fires requires intense concentration and an absolutely off-the-charts DJ set.”
“Did you burn down Asylum Harbor?” Joe asked pointedly.
“Absolutely not!” Howie crossed his heart.
“And you swear you had nothing to do with burning down that club in Rehoboth?”
Howie started to deny it again, but then sighed. “Okay, we might have encouraged a Wilmington witch, who allegedly had pyrokinetic abilities, to take revenge on that bigot of a club owner. But I swear we had no idea the witch would choose arson. That’s just so low-rent. Pah! And to be clear, no one died. We aren’t murderers. Ours is a craft rooted in peace, love, and dancing. We are generative , not destructive. By the way, that awful club owner got rich by opening a TGI Fridays in the ashes of the gay club, so everyone lost.”
Joe’s aura had become a murky kaleidoscope of emotion and feeling. “Go ahead,” Howie said. “Ask me anything. It’s okay. I won’t be offended.”
Joe looked up into Howie’s eyes. “So, if I asked you to heal someone who was sick or might get sick, could you do that?”
Howie shook his head sadly. “I’m afraid not. We tried. Of course we tried, but we don’t have that power.” Joe furrowed his brow, ready to speak, but then swallowed his words into silence. “What is it?” Howie asked.
“I understand you don’t have the power to heal people, but a few minutes ago you said you knew for certain not everyone who has HIV will die, so …” His eyes grew teary as he struggled to ask the next question. “So, will Fergal be one of those people who will survive?
Howie’s heart broke a little more. “I’m sorry, Joe. I can’t know that.”
“But can you try?” Joe begged. “You said you didn’t always know the power you had. Maybe if you tried—”
“None of us ever had the power to predict life or death, Joe. Not even Max. The Great Goddess Mother doesn’t allow that ability. Even at our full capacity, we’re limited to a handful of powers, like guiding people onto their right path in life or love, inducing healing dreams, intuiting disaster, lending aid to the innocent under threat, and sometimes altering electromagnetic fields and affecting the weather—though that’s very rare and not a hundred percent verifiable. Mostly we spent our time helping young people stay out of trouble and turning lousy dance parties into the greatest nights of people’s lives. But now we’d be lucky to summon a simple card trick. I will say, my aura reading has been a little sharper of late, but it’s probably sun flares.”
“I see,” Joe scoffed. “So, you used to have magic powers, but you don’t anymore? That’s convenient.”
“Joe, listen. Our sort of magic is never done alone. A certain number of souls are required. Eight years ago, we always had at least thirty-seven Disco Witches on the dance floor at any one time. Then the health crisis began, and suddenly thirty-seven became thirty-one, then twenty-three, then eighteen, then eleven, then eight, and until a year ago we were five. Max, Lenny, Dory, Saint D’Norman, and myself. The despair wounded our ability to dance, but we’ve tried to persist. Now we’ve come to a turning point. The one vital requirement of our practice is the need for a quorum of five members present to convene our holy twirling ceremony. If Max dies, it will be the end of us. We’ve vainly hoped that some previously unknown magical being might appear to restore our ranks, but so far …” A moment of light filled Howie’s eyes. “You haven’t ever noticed that you could predict the future, have you?”
“Nope,” Joe said.
“See colors emanating from people’s bodies?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Good with a Ouija board?’
“Look, I should get going—” Joe began to stand.
“Wait a moment longer,” Howie begged. “I want to tell you something. Sometimes certain loves just aren’t meant to work out in this life. But the only starting place for moving on is acceptance. The universe of love is large, Joe. Trust an old witch on that.”
“You don’t get it, do you?” Joe’s eyebrows curled petulantly. His lip fought against quivering. “I’ve only loved two men in my life, and I hurt both so badly that they ended up never wanting to see me again. I’m done.”
“Oh, for Chrissake, Joseph!” Howie slammed the table with the flat of his hand. “Can we please save the flagellation for Lenny’s sex dungeon?” Taking a deep breath, he began again more calmly. “What I mean to say is, just because a relationship ends doesn’t make it any less important. I encourage you to disabuse yourself of that stupid romantic Hollywood notion. It’s false and limiting. And to be quite honest, I have a strong sense that neither Fergal nor Elliot ever stopped loving you.”
Joe wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands and stood up. “I’m gonna head to the Morning Party now.” He crossed to the bureau and pulled a tank top over his head. Then, as he ran a brush through his hair, his eyes caught Howie’s reflection in the mirror. “Since we’re coming clean about who we are, I might as well tell you, I lied to you and Lenny about something else. I’m not really twenty-four.”
“You’re not?” Howie said, grateful that Joe was still talking to him, but feeling overwhelmed by the despairing auric fog that had filled the room. “I sensed there was something else off.”
“Yeah. Sorry about that. I started lying about my age when I first met Ronnie. He doesn’t even know. I actually turned twenty-nine last March.”
“Twenty-nine?” Howie’s heart filled with a momentary terror. The rubric!
But, he reminded himself again, the chosen one had to meet all five main prerequisites. And there was no flying heart mole on Joe. He heaved a private sigh of relief and smiled. “Ah yes. That makes such sense. Twenty-nine is your Saturn Returns year. No wonder you’re in a muddle.”
“What’s a Saturn Returns?” Joe asked.
“Oh it’s very impactful and can be wonderful or awful. Every twenty-nine and a half years, Saturn returns to the spot in the sky exactly where it was in the year of your birth. I, myself, am in my second Saturn Returns. No wonder I’ve felt so connected to you. You’ve probably been feeling the effects. The changes to one’s life can be quite significant during our Saturn Returns.”
Joe murmured in agreement as he pulled a black fanny pack from his bottom drawer and snapped it around his waist like a gun belt. The gesture puzzled Howie. Next, Joe picked up Elliot’s empty mixtape case, briefly looked at the handwritten liner notes, and then tossed it in the garbage. “I guess we all lie to ourselves sometimes, right? Don’t wait up for me.” Joe began to descend the ladder.
“Joe, if you could just wait one more—”
Before Howie could say another word, he heard Joe walk across the living room and then out the door. The vibrations of his pain lingered in the attic. That poor, poor boy, Howie thought as his foggy gaze swept across the ruined room. Something atop the dresser caught his eye: a single photo of a handsome, sandy-haired, dimple-cheeked young man playing the guitar on a beach. In front of him was a dark-haired man—clearly Joe—lying on his side facing him. This must be Elliot, Howie thought, taking in how he’d looked down at Joe with such love in his eyes. Why couldn’t love last forever? Why couldn’t lovers last forever?
It was rare for Howie to observe an object’s aura, but the photo was practically glowing. It must have meant a lot to Joe. Just before he set it back down on the dresser, he glanced again, and that’s when he flung his hand across his own mouth to silence a screaming gasp. There it was. Right there. The winged-heart mole on Joe’s back. Just to be sure, Howie wiped his thumb across the photo to make sure it wasn’t dirt. It wasn’t.
His eyes tore around the discombobulated room once more. It all was becoming apocalyptically clear—the mixtape case in the trash can, the egregore sighting in the Meat Rack, the half-packed suitcase on the bed, the snap of the fanny pack, the blackness of Joe’s aura. Howie grabbed Elliot’s mixtape case from the trash and stuffed it into the pocket of his caftan. There was no time to waste. He had to find the others and get to Joe as quickly as possible.
As he scrambled down the ladder, his right foot snagged itself in the hem of his caftan. His six-foot-three-inch, two-hundred-forty-two-pound body fell four feet, cracking his head on the hardwood floor. Just before oblivion descended, he imagined himself calling out Joe’s name.