techno

Me and my homie had to drive into town because that’s how we dulled the boredom in 1991. Certainly, there wasn't anything happening in the country. Three straight weeks of watching the sky for UFOs. Lots of shooting stars, but, man, after a while, you kinda, you wanna do something else. The closest town to me had maybe three souls, and half of them went to sleep at sundown, but the next town over had stuff going on a Denny's, possibly get into some monkey business , people with apartments and bad ideas. So we decided to go there. I was a sophomore, nerd, trying to look like I belonged in the orbit of adults. My friend had just gotten his license, and we were driving around In this big town, and we were like, Hell yeah!

But when we actually got there, we were like, well, what do we do now? And I was thinking, I don't know. So we, went to Burger King and then he said, hey, my cousin lives here. I said, okay, let's go. She’s 19, which at  the time seemed super old, and she knew what was up.

We pulled up outside of her apartment then we walked across the dead grass to her apartment door .  The place had that hot, dusty, lived in air, stale smoke, somebody’s old pizza regret. And we were all sitting on the couch and then his cousin's friends came in, and they were all strippers, and they're all girls from high school. Like, I know them, like my high school. I mean, high school girls, like last year, but they had graduated and all decided to become strippers. I didn't quite understand they were strippers until I was on the couch and then people were kind of passing a joint around and they were talking, and I was like, okay. And then I was like getting the context clues, because I'm super slow anyway, and I was like, okay, context clues. And then, okay. And I thought, oh boy, this is, this is not, this is kind of getting too weird for me. So, so I thought, hmm, how can I just dip until I can, uh, try to figure out how to get out of here? It's a little, it's kind of uncomfortable. But I mean, like, I knew them. I don't know. It was weird. So I dipped to a bedroom. 

I found a bedroom where one of the girlfriends' boyfriend had a stack of records, vinyl, which felt insane to me because nobody I knew collected anything but rocks and 80s Metallica cassettes. I started flipping through them, expecting the usual hair metal, classic rock, maybe some half warped Skynyrd. But no, this was techno. Techno records. Names and labels that looked like they’d been smuggled in from a city that didn’t exist on our maps.

I knew they were their boyfriend's records, but I didn't see him. All of a sudden, he kinda started talking from the corner of the dark room, and I, like, jump 10 feet in the air. He started talking fast about where he got them, like he was explaining a drug pipeline. Detroit. Europe. Imports. Things I couldn’t pronounce. I nodded like I understood, but I didn’t. I just knew I was standing near something dangerous in a new.

Then he said, “Check this out,” and dropped the needle. And the room changed. Not metaphorically literally. The air reorganized itself. The beat came in like machinery waking up, like a factory deciding to dance. It was amazing, like something I had never heard. It hit me in the chest and rewired something. The stripper circus in the living room vanished. The small town life I’d been resigned to suddenly looked different, like scenery. I stood there, stunned, and realized I’d fallen in love with a sound I didn’t even have a name for yet.

Techno!