I enjoy the way her hair occasionally brushes my neck. I find myself noticing that her perfume is pleasant. Her own style of dance - draping her arms over my shoulders and swaying in a slow circle - is less vigorously sensual, yet there is an inescapable erotic charge. “We call those ‘corner girls,’” Priscilla says. She hangs from his neck as he pumps intently against her. Her other leg is wrapped around her partner, a silver fox in a leisure suit. I glimpse a tall Asian girl in a long silk dress slit up the side. Here the dancers grind tightly, or cease dancing altogether and simply lock bodies. A squat pillar with a sign reading “No Lewd Behavior” blocks the darkest corner from view, forming the ideal location for attempts at lewd behavior. Most couples have gravitated toward the far end of the floor, as if it were tilted in that direction. Two blond Latinas, considerably shorter, reach up, clasping his fingers and spinning slowly on either side as they rub his chest with their free hands. He is skinny and tall and undulating in a manner that brings to mind a snake that is somehow standing upright. Out on the floor, a black man in a white fedora, white suit and crimson shirt stands with his arms raised above his shoulders. Couples sit on leatherette benches along the walls, talking, lightly stroking each other’s limbs, blowing into each other’s ears, sometimes kissing, or just holding hands and staring dreamily at nothing. A string of plastic palm-tree lights hangs from the ceiling. It is dimmer here, screened off from the rest of the hall by a rickety wooden trellis. “Guys say they like me because I look clean,” she says as she leads me to the Club Flamingo dance floor. She has a wholesome, decidedly 1940s appearance - accentuated by her sturdy high heels, which she refers to as “my Ginger Rogers dance shoes.” Her hair and eyes are brown, and her lips are painted rose-petal red. Priscilla wears a green floral dress that falls to her knees. In its catering to detached and lonely people, in its deliberate fostering of stimulation and excitement, in its opportunities for pseudo-romantic excitements, it may be seen as an epitome of certain phases of urban life. He taxi-dance hall can never be entirely satisfactory as a substitute for normal social life.
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