we lived for music

"She has her solitary meal, as spartan an athlete's before a race (some say to avoid occlusion of the drugs she plans to take), as they scream drunkenly. And then, just as the Polish barbers who stand all evening by the stoop are turning back to go upstairs to bed, she slips out of her hovel - for the queen lives among ruins; she lives only to dance - and is astride the night, on the street, that ecstatic river that flows through New York City as definitely as the Adriatic washes through Venice, down into the dim, hot subway, where she checks the men's room. An old man sits morosely on the toilet above a puddle of soggy toilet paper, looking up as she peeks in, waiting himself for love. The subway comes; she hurries to the room in which she has agreed to dance this night. Some of the dancers are on drugs and enter the discotheque with the radiant faces of the Magi coming to the Christ Child; others, who are not, enter with a bored expression, as if this is the last thing they want to do tonight. In half an hour they are indistinguishable, sweat-stained, ecstatic, lost. For the fact was drugs were not neccesary to most of us, because the music, youth, sweaty bodies were enough. And if it was too hot, too humid to sleep the next day, and we awoke bathed in sweat, it did not matter: We remained in a state of animated suspension the whole hot day. We lived for music, we lived for Beauty, and we were poor. But we didn't care where we were living, or what we had to do during the day to make it possible; eventually, if you waited long enough, you were finally standing before the mirror in that cheap room, looking at your face one last time, like an actor going onstage, before rushing out to walk in the door of that discotheque and see someone like Malone."

-Dancer From the Dance, 115