Spirit of '87

Fiction: A break-in and a strange romance at the eighties-revival Formosa Club.

The girl in the center of the dance floor moved like an electric dream. Cathode ray light from the wall of old televisions threw orange, red, and violet across her pale, bare arms. Her hair was feathered short, brown and healthy and rich. She wore a black tank top with Springsteen jeans, somewhere between a ballerina and a glam rocker in physique. Every half-second pulse of the strobes in the Formosa Club saw her striking a new pose, a new flash of ecstatic frenzy. Bowie, The Cure, ABBA, Queen. Each song was a three-minute rapture crossfading into the next.

Her friend, Paige, pulled out an iPhone at the tail end of Karma Chameleon. “You good?” said Rosemary, stopping a moment to check on her companion. Rosemary Carson was five-foot-ten in thick-treaded Doc Martens, reigning club queen by at least a few inches. Phone-illuminated Paige Lomell was significantly shorter.

“There's gonna be surge pricing,” Paige yelled over the crowd.

“Yeah, but it’s just getting going!” Rosemary shouted. She grabbed Paige’s hand, distracting her from Instagram, and led her into an ecstatic belt of Your Love by The Outfield along with a chorus of frat guys. “You know I like my girls a little bit older…”

“You know, like, all the words to everything!” Paige exclaimed, astonished.

“Nineteen-eighty-six, this is my jam!” said twenty-four-year-old Rosemary.

She knew she was the jewel of the dance floor on those nights. She didn't care, and it was the uncaring that made her the jewel. She danced for herself, playful and intense and expressive and joyous. Her plain, boyish face turned upward to the lights, eyes shut, as she smiled and swayed in reverie.

“Nothing I can say, a total eclipse of the heart,” a hundred young patrons drunkenly bellowed at two as the lights went up. The music drew down, and Paige blew a kiss to the Beastie-Boy-looking DJ as he waved the masses outside. The passion of the dance floor disseminated across LA’s Koreatown into a haze of dreamy vape and cigarette afterglow.

Rosemary and Paige wandered six blocks in a fruitless attempt to outflank the two o’clock Lyft upcharge. “We’ll wait it out,” said Rosemary, and in the end the comfortably exhausted girls settled on a residential hill behind the Bauhaus Hotel.

The Bauhaus was a huge slab of trendy concrete-cube hotel rooms, each one graced with a floor-to-ceiling window that revealed the scene within. From the hill behind the hotel, the girls stared up at the building like it was a giant Connect Four lattice.

“What's she doing?” Paige asked, pointing to a sole Filipina woman wrestling a suitcase on the top floor.

February mud where they sat stained Rosemary’s jeans. She accepted a flask of Tito’s from Paige’s jacket pocket and drank. It was warm from body heat, and tasted vaguely like Paige’s mint lip balm. “She’s packing,” said Rosemary, gazing up at the woman in the concrete cube.

“At two in the morning?”

“Maybe it's an early flight.”

“Ope, penis,” said Paige, “two down, far right.”

“I see it,” Rosemary laughed, watching a middle aged man stand nude at his window and stare north toward the Hollywood sign. “How are the prices?”

“Better,” Paige, taking back her flask. “I’m calling one now.”

A shifting of dark silhouettes in nightstand lamp light caught Rosemary’s eye. There was a woman in her forties, naked on her bed with long, black hair. A naked man was with her. “One down, middle,” said Rosemary, just as the man pushed up against the woman from behind. “They’re screwing. Yep. They are.”

Paige adjusted to see, and her hand brushed Rosemary’s twin-cherry wrist tattoo—a memento Rosemary had collected in her short stint bartending at Circus Circus. They watched the man and woman in strange silence for a minute. “I’m kind of jealous,” said Paige, remarking with quarter-life wist when the man was through.

The Lyft came, and the two slept together that night at Rosemary’s place. It was intimate and warm and convenient and awkward and hollow. There was no kiss goodbye in the daylight. Paige left for her Carthay Circle apartment, and Rosemary stayed to clean up her rented room in a Sherman Oaks ranch home.

The owners, a doughy millennial couple, were smoking weed and watching a kids’ show about a space cowboy and his alien baby spreading the power of friendship. They charged Rosemary a decent rate, and they always left her well enough alone. That was all she could ask for in a landlord.

Joan Jett and the Thin White Duke, oversized posters purchased at Amoeba, watched over her as she vacuumed. There wasn't much floor to clean. She tidied with Ultravox spinning on the turntable, dreaming of Vienna and the skinny young men of arts scenes decades gone. The afterimage of The Formosa Club lingered in her heart like residual H-Bomb glow.

All through the next week of work in the Sony Pictures art department, Rosemary dreamed of an eighties she’d never seen. She dressed in thrifted crop tops and JNCOs, arms and abs exposed in a way that set the guys on fire. They knew better than to make a move on company time, though, and she’d mentioned a nonexistent ‘girlfriend’ enough that everyone left her be.

By Thursday she knew she was headed back. Formosa was only open Fridays and Saturdays, a post-pandemic soft-launch of the analog revival scene. It hadn't been open the rest of the week since October of nineteen-ninety-one. “Formosa tmrw?” she texted Paige, at risk of sounding too hung up on their occasional encounters. She didn't want the Idaho girl to get the wrong idea about possible coupledom.

Paige responded with a thumbs up a few hours later, suitably aloof. That Friday, Rosemary blowdried her hair with Irene Cara blasting. She did a ruby lip with a shredded New Order tee, arms and legs newly shaved and nails painted black. It wasn't until she got to K-town that Paige texted and flaked.

It was fine, after a moment's sting. She would go it alone. The music was enough. Shaking off a February chill, she waited in line behind some Persian law students and quickly made it to the front. The club routine was second nature now. She showed her California driver’s license, vertically aligned to indicate she’d been underage when she’d received it. Born October 11, 1999—the last autumnal cusp of the magnificent twentieth century.

There was no cover, no metal detector, and no search. The crowd of the revival scene was by-and-large preppy and harmless. Passing through a dark hall, she arrived on the floor as Heroes blared, immediately joining the crowd-sung refrain.

Three hours passed like one euphoric line. Dancing alone was nothing like dancing with Paige. It was freeing, untethered and unaccountable. The occasional guy would maneuver her way, and she’d give him thirty seconds’ time before engaging in strategic repositioning. Her feet barely touched the ground as every synth and guitar went through her like a lightning rod.

Past midnight she saw the unusual boy. He was tall and dusty blond, not muscular or thin or fat but perfectly standard. He wore a well-fitting collared shirt with a loosened red silk tie. In the club light, he looked straight out of the Brat Pack lineup, an Andrew McCarthy ingenu face pushing twenty-five. He wasn't dancing. He stood still, staring at her.

A wash of teal from a programmed spotlight crossed him. Rosemary stopped mid-leap in When Doves Cry, panting, wiping sweat from her brow. “Come on,” the unusual boy beckoned to her, waving with a soft smile. He turned toward the smoking section doors as a white strobe flashed in Rosemary’s eyes.

When she blinked away the strobe-blindness he was gone. She pushed through a gaggle of Korean trust fund kids, following him into the smoking section, but when she arrived on the outdoor balcony he was nowhere to be seen. “Hello?” she said to no one, confusing the three beanied smokers braving the mid-fifties chill.

The only other door from here was a ‘staff only’ hallway. She pushed through, singular in mission and curiosity. A dark hall where the music was muffled quickly swallowed her up.

She advanced until her eyes could barely make out the wall ahead. Did the staff here travel with flashlights? Had there been some switch she’d missed? How could the boy see in the dark, if he really had gone this way? Would she be in trouble?

Rosemary put her fingers through the holes of the car-eared brass knuckles on her keychain. It was more of a residual precaution than an act of acute fear. “Hello?” she said again, over the deadened low-end of Personal Jesus through the wall.

“Hi,” said a friendly, breathy voice. She knew from the tone that it was him.

Rosemary spun around to see him, but only saw black. “We’re not supposed to be back here,” she said, squinting in the dark.

“What do you mean?” he asked. Still unseen. “This is how you get to the Chinese restaurant.”

“The Chinese restaurant that's been closed for ages?” said Rosemary. At that moment her eyes adjusted enough to make out the blond boy in the hallway. “I’m not trying to get into anything sketchy here, dude.”

“No, not sketchy, it’s just loud in there,” said the boy. “I wanted to get to talk to you. I love your dancing. You’re so cool. I’m Will.”

He reached out to shake her hand, and she almost took it. Then she jumped like she’d seen a snake. His skin and sleeve, in the near-nonexistent light, were translucent. “What in the fuck,” she said, not angry but reflexive. “You’re pranking me. You’re pranking me.”

The partially see-through boy looked hurt and confused. “I didn’t mean to startle you,” he said, withdrawing. “It gets lonely here, is all. I think I’ve been, I mean, I think I’ve been here a long time.”

“I would say,” said Rosemary, extending her fingers to touch the trick-glass causing the illusion. She connected with only air. “Are you supposed to be, like, a—”

The door to the staff break room flew open, spilling ugly fluorescent light all over the hall. In that instant the unusual boy disappeared. “Hey!” Rosemary snapped at the black-clad Latina staffer leaving the break room.

“You can't be back here,” said the staffer, confused.

Rosemary realized that she was confused as well. “I was talking to someone,” she said, irate. “I was talking to someone and now he’s gone.”

---

Rosemary went home rattled and perplexed. Her father had imparted to her a deep, conspiracy-minded skepticism over the years. She wasn’t sure whether this doctrine of paranoia should lead her to believe or disbelieve the concept of a nightclub specter. She tried to bring it up over breakfast with her thirty-something landlady, but quickly came to regret it. “You know, they put all kinds of things in those vapes, from China. You’re young enough, you’re at that age, for psychotic symptoms. It can trigger that.”

She was not ready to entertain the idea that the occasional blueberry Elf Bar was making her schizophrenic. Compared to that, a ghost encounter sounded far preferable. She also knew what it was like to feel reality slipping in the throes of a drug-addled maelstrom. This was not that in any sense. Last Friday she’d been stone-cold sober.

By the end of the week she had a stupid, embarrassing trespassing plan. She arrived late at Formosa in a shoulder-padded jacket, biding her time on the smokers’ balcony as she scoped out the staff door. When she was reasonably confident in a traffic break she snuck inside, trying each handle. It was already nearly closing time. At the second handle she found a janitor’s closet and wedged herself behind a plywood cabinet.

She shared the space with cobwebs and sheets of dust. There was no light save the green blink of a surge protector at her feet. Someone came in, but did not see her, and left with a purse shortly thereafter. She hoped that she would not be locked inside the closet overnight. If she was, at least her phone was charged, and she had brought a screwdriver to pry the handle open. That provided only small comfort.

Half an hour later the music was off and everyone seemed to be gone. Trepidatiously, she moved from behind the cabinet and found the closet unlocked. From that moment on she breathed easier. “Hello?” she said softly to the cold night of the empty hall. In a horror movie, she knew she’d be the first to go.

“Hello, Will?” she spoke again. Advancing in inches, Rosemary placed her hands in the warmth of her thrifted jacket pockets. How long would she wait, calling out with no reply? Till dawn? Would they catch her on the cameras as she left empty-handed through the downstairs emergency exit?

“You’re back,” said the young man. His voice was some distance behind her. She turned, pointing her phone light at the sound. It cast a white glow across the blond hair, white shirt, and tie she’d seen the week before. Ageless. Unchanged. He stood there as if he’d never left.

She approached him, and as she neared he seemed to flicker from view, fading back into the realm of unseen memory. When she retreated five feet he rematerialized. “That’s a little bright,” he said, shielding his eyes. “I don’t do too well with the bright lights, I’m sorry.”

She locked her phone and let her eyes readjust to the ambient dim. He was still there, oddly clearer in the darkness. “Will,” she said. “That’s you.”

He let out a breathy smile of surprise. “Someone remembers me,” he said. “Gee, that feels good.”

“I’m Rosemary,” said the girl from nineteen-ninety-nine. She was only taking half breaths now, her chest tight from the strange surrealness of the encounter. “Do you live here, Will?”

“Do I live…” he trailed off, confused. “I live in the valley. I’m just here to dance.”

“Me too,” said Rosemary, “but everyone’s gone now. The club is closed, it’s three in the morning. Don’t you think you should get home?”

Bill pushed his hair back and chuckled, disbelieving. “Whaddaya mean everyone’s gone? You’re still here.”

Rosemary opened the door to the empty dance floor. He neared her to see out, flickering but not disappearing in proximity. “See?” she said, stepping onto the floor. Someone had recently mopped, and the concrete was wet. It was good that she hadn’t interrupted any late-night custodian.

Will followed Rosemary onto the floor, lagging behind. “Huh,” he said, observing the DJ deck and wall of decorative televisions. “That’s new. That’s got to cost a fortune, all those TVs. Aren’t they worried about a break in?”

“Will,” said Rosemary. “When were you born?”

“Sixty-three,” said Will, and Rosemary let out a breathy reaction.

“Like my boss,” she said.

“Why, is that too young? How old are you?” he asked, his voice pitching up in playful, insecure protest.

“I’m twenty-four,” she said.

“Okay, so we’re not any different,” said Will. He seemed comforted at this. “Are you some kind of punk? I didn’t think punks dig New Wave.”

“No,” she said. “I’m just me. I… Will, there’s something I want to tell you, but I’m worried you might not want to hear it, or it might upset you.”

He looked more concerned about her feelings than her own, like he couldn't quite clock what was coming. “What’s wrong?” he said, adjusting his stance.

“I think you’re dead,” said Rosemary.

“Oh,” said Will. He did not argue.

“Do you remember anything? Do you remember how you got here?”

“I was trying to get home,” said Will, furrowing his brow and thinking back. “I was crossing Western. It was so stupid. I never made it back to my car, I… This was the last place I’d been. I guess I just kinda drifted back.”

“And you’ve been here all this time,” said Rosemary. “Why?”

“I guess I wasn’t ready to let go,” said Will. “I still had so much to do.” He lingered on this thought, then looked to her. “How did you find me?”

“You found me.” She pointed to the spot she’d first seen him. “You were on the dance floor. Just for a moment. I followed you.”

Will paused. “You said, ‘all this time.’ Do I want to know?”

“It’s twenty-twenty-four,” said Rosemary.

“Whoa,” said Will, with an astonished guffaw. Making his way to the bar he sat at a stool and held his head. “I need a drink.”

Rosemary wandered to the opposite side of the counter, playing bartender. The liquor was all unlocked. “What can I get you?” she said, almost a whisper. It was vexing trying to look him over as he waxed and waned from existence. She wanted to grab him, to drag him to the dance floor and soak him in her sweat, but there was nothing to grab.

“Jack and Coke,” said Will. He smiled and winced like a million thoughts were hitting him each passing second. “I can’t believe I’m getting a drink from a girl in the future. I’m like Buck Rogers.”

There was no ice, so she set about making it neat. “Do you think your parents are still around?” she asked.

“My dad, born in twenty-four. He’d be a hundred. Mom’d be ninety-eight. I don’t want to think about that. You tell me something about you.”

“I was a bartender,” said Rosemary. “I’ve bounced around a lot. I’m from San Diego. My world, I don’t know, things have changed and they haven’t. The eighties stuff is kind of my thing right now. New Wave is the coolest.”

“I buy that,” said Will, “we are the coolest. Hey your, your tattoos, and your nose thing, I don’t mean to be rude, is everyone like that now? It looks good, I mean, it looks good.”

“Not everyone,” said Rosemary. “Some people, though. There’s no one way that everyone is.”

He asked her more about the future, and she started to explain various digital progressions that up till now she’d considered endlessly dull. Then she noticed him bowing his head and weeping. “What’s wrong?” she said, unable to comfort him with touch.

“I, I…” he stuttered, but could not finish the sentence. With mournful eyes he directed her to the counter, where his hand was hopelessly passing across the Jack and Coke without being able to grasp it. “There’s nothing left of me,” he said, trying to hold back a sob. “It’s all gone. I’m just a trick of the light.”

Rosemary didn’t know what to do. Nothing except her own stories seemed to console the boy, and even that was only momentary relief. After two hours of shared, sad laughs and smiles the dawn began to cut through the skylight. “I need to go,” she said. “My plan kinda required that I not be seen when I leave.”

“Text me,” said Will, seeming to think that this alone constituted a joke. “That’s how you say it, right? ‘Text me?’”

“Yeah,” said Rosemary, hiding the material evidence of her liquor pilfering. “I’ll try to get back here tomorrow. When I get home, I’ll… I’ll think of you.”

Think of him she did, that morning and in afternoon dreams. She didn’t want to look him up. She didn’t want to pry, or to hunt down his graying older cousin out in Bakersfield. There was a pureness to the surreality that Facebook and Ancestry.com would only desecrate.

Roxy Music looped on her phone. “More than this…” she murmured, eyes unfocused. She didn’t want to get up to use the turntable, too busy puzzling and yearning and getting herself tangled in her sheets. Finally at dinner time she rose and made herself a meal. Plans were being made for a football game, the landlord in the Ocarina of Time tee told her. Tomorrow the house would be full of mid-thirties guests.

Just then Paige called. It was astonishing for her to call without a prior text. “I thought you should know,” Paige confessed, a few minutes into tense rambling, “I’m seeing someone. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about you and me.”

What a joke. Paige was always the one crawling over to her place. Always the one venting about work and her mom and her job. Always taking and taking and then just sliding away. “I’m seeing someone too,” Rosemary said, and after faux congratulations on both sides the phone call ended.

She got her chores done from eight to midnight, and by 1:30 a.m. she’d caught a rideshare back to the red facade of The Formosa Club. She had a secondhand red prom dress, long gloves, and short heels on. A tan trenchcoat covered up the outfit, which was by her nightclub standards unusually femme.

“‘Bout to close,” said the doorman, putting up a hand to stop her.

Rosemary jolted. “I know, I just,” she started, pointing to the door. “My phone is inside with my friend and I’m about to leave.”

This satisfied the man in the RUN DMC hat, and she entered the packed dance hall. “Come on, Eileen! Too-loo, loo rye aye,” a college boy beamed, grabbing her hands to leap with her in a giddy circle. He was a perfectly acceptable young man. He would do fine, she knew. But she could only think of the boy out of time.

She nearly missed her chance to hide, with all the delays compounding. It took two false attempts to steal away inside the janitor’s closet. Her coat, this time, kept her clean from the oublié dust. She still had to fight the urge to sneeze as the bartender picked up her purse and turned off the lights.

Twenty minutes went by for mopping, then the temple of synths was once again deserted. Rosemary knew better than to use her phone light now. “Will,” she said, and found him leaning against the DJ’s pulpit. The whole of the club was theirs.

“Rosemary Carson,” he said, tapping his head in recollection. “You came back.”

“It’s only been a day,” said Rosemary, removing her trenchcoat and letting it fall from her shoulders. He watched her every step, every heel-click, grinning like a kid. “Was it one day for you?” she asked.

“It doesn't really work like that,” said Will. “I dunno. I can’t explain it. It’s hard.”

Rosemary did a turn on the slick floor, hands raised above her head. At the end of it she spun to a hovering stop and lightly put her teeth on her tongue. It was a pensive, mischievous expression. “What?” said Will. “What is it?”

“Music bother you?” she asked.

“No, I love the music,” he said. “I live for it. Well, not ‘live,’ but—”

Rosemary shushed him as she futzed with the DJ deck. Someone would kill her for touching this, she knew. Luckily, that someone was driving home and none the wiser. A burned CD marked ‘Jams / Ballads’ sat on the table behind, and she loaded into the soundsystem while turning the volume to half. “Compact disc,” she said, noticing his gaze.

“Is that new?” he asked.

“No, it’s old,” she said. “But some people still love them.”

The Boys of Summer swelled to fill the room with warmth. She’d never noticed how full the instrumentation was, before this moment in a perfectly silent club. With the flick of a switch, she kicked the ‘low/moody’ house lights on.

“Dance with me,” she said, and he did. Eyes closed, she fully felt alone, no trace of human heat or breath against her flushed skin. Then she’d open them up again and see the specter before her.

He sang along at times, and other times stopped. “You don’t know this?” she panted, astonished, as The Look hit its chorus. “Roxette! Come on!”

“What year?” he asked, looking self-conscious. “I… it happened in eighty-seven. Me ending up like this.”

“I think eighty-eight,” she said, swaying with eyes shut. Then she felt a brush against her elbow. “Hey!” she shouted, causing him to jump back. “Did you just do something?”

“I’m sorry,” he stuttered, unsure.

“Did you just try to touch me?”

“Yes.”

“Where?” she pressed.

“Your arm.”

“My elbow?”

“Yeah,” said Will.

“I felt that!” Rosemary exclaimed. “I felt it, I had my eyes closed, I swear. I felt something.”

“It’s a little easier to stay here, I think, like, to appear, when no one’s watching,” said Will, rubbing the back of his head.

Rosemary removed the sash from her waist and tied it over her eyes like a blindfold. It was opaque enough, with the tiniest traces of club light only on the edges. A new ballad crossfaded up from Roxette. “It’s funny,” said Rosemary, letting it move her, “I’m such a weirdo for getting hung up on this stuff, but for you… It’s just the regular music of your time. Normal as air. I feel like I’m tricking you, somehow, into thinking I’m well-adjusted.”

“I’m a sixty-two-year-old ghost living in a nightclub,” said Will, unseen and seeming closer now. “I’m not the normal one, I promise.”

Alphaville took them deeper into the night, Forever Young. “It’s good we didn’t bomb ourselves to dust,” said Will, moved by the song. “We were really scared of that, you know. Real scared.”

“I know,” said Rosemary, and she felt him. She actually felt him. He was cool but not cold. Not gone. His nose touched her cheek and his tie pressed between as they slow-danced. She didn’t dare open her eyes, even with the blindfold on. He walked her backward, guiding her gently, until she felt the backs of her calves brush against the enormous floor-standing subwoofer.

She let him ease her down onto the hip-high subwoofer. It rumbled, and he kissed her, and she braced herself against the DJ pulpit with a tight grip as her breath grew fast. “This is what I was waiting for,” she thought she heard him say, shivering with the rhythm. “I didn’t know it till I saw you, Rosemary. Thank you.”

“I,” she said, swallowing to get her focus back, “I was waiting for it, too.”

There was no response. Even as Absolute Beginners soared, she knew something had changed in the still of the room. “Will?” she said, raising the sash from her eyes. “Will, hello?”

There was no Will, in vision or in touch. Wherever the boy had come from, he was gone. Rosemary pushed to her feet, breathless, straightening her hair and staring out into emptiness. In time she would come to doubt it all, to let time and reason and therapists imply it had all been a quarter-life fiction of untethered longing.

Perhaps it had been. A stillness, though, lingered in the air as she looked both ways before crossing Wilshire south to her double-parked rideshare. The stillness was a sense of rest, she quietly decided. She hoped, wherever he had gone, that Will had found it, too.

---

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