Excerpt from The Hour of Lost Boys by Matthew Aquilone
Matthew Aquilone’s excerpt from The Hour of Lost Boys is one of two pieces selected as an editors’ choice for the 2025 Memoir Excerpt & Essay Contest. This year our editors were drawn to work that demonstrates excellence in prose and innovative approaches to difficult subjects.
Dancing for a cause while a world is dying—in Matthew Aquilone’s excerpt from his memoir The Hour of Lost Boys, “Palladium, 1990,” an AIDS event is the scene of gay men celebrating in the face of a lethal pandemic, joy mixed with loss, fear, and anger. Memoir and creative nonfiction can have a powerful ability to take the reader to a time and a place that they will never directly experience. In Matthew Aquilone’s excerpt the time is 1990 during the peak of the AIDS crisis and the setting is an AIDS fundraiser at the Palladium in New York City.
In “Palladium, 1990,” Aquilone begins with an explosion of sensory information: “At the nightclub with my brothers Michael and Vinny, everything dissolves inside the eruption of sound and light.” The reader is pulled onto a dance floor crowded with sweaty shirtless men. Grace Jones, the lead singer, is a “strutting white filament” in her designer dress. It’s a world of music, shimmering color, and the joyful abandon of dancing. It’s also a world of fear and grief; the event, in memory of Keith Haring who had recently died of AIDS, is a benefit for the AIDS activist group ACT UP. As Aquilone tells us, at the Palladium “no one is brooding and everyone is afraid of dying from AIDS,” including the author and his brothers.
In “The World is Not Vague: Nonfiction and the Urgency of Fact,” Marya Hornbacher argues that “the most powerful nonfiction reaches beyond the facts of the matter to get at something like truth. As both readers and writers, we turn to nonfiction with the abiding hope that it will help us understand this particular reality, this peculiar world.” In this memoir excerpt, a singular dance at the Palladium is a moment in time that not many will have witnessed, but through the vibrant writing of Matthew Aquilone, we, as readers, have briefly been there, shared in the joy and tragedy of the event, and walked away changed. —CRAFT
Palladium, 1990
At the nightclub with my brothers Michael and Vinny, everything dissolves inside the eruption of sound and light. Whatever membrane that once held my place in the world now dematerializes in the collective rapture of the crowd. My heart is every heart in the place. It beats in the slick, shirtless torsos of men by the thousands flashing red and white and blue and velvet black. I understand now that the atoms that tingle along the surface of my skin and pulse in my blood have made their way all over the vast former theater. They have visited the balconies, bars, broad carpeted stairways, the teeming dance floor, and returned to remake me. Earlier, just a couple of hours ago on the subway from Brooklyn, I was sure of who I was: a typically twisted up twenty-one-year-old, a wannabe writer still living with my parents but well on my way to knowing it all. I am, however, by the chest-cracking basslines, given a vision of the world as it really is—gem-like and darkly divine—and myself in it, different. I am, in my brothers’ strobing shadows, reshaped. I didn’t come expecting to be transformed, but I am helpless against the onslaught of joy.
It comes in the form of Miss Grace Jones. She is a strutting white filament in a shapeshifting Issey Miyake garment. She is a temple gong, the vibrational center of this muscular mass hysteria. Michael had told me about the legendary performances she’d given back in the day at long lost clubs like Paradise Garage and the Saint. Tonight’s show, a benefit for the AIDS activist group ACT UP, is a memorial for the artist Keith Haring, who had succumbed to the disease that February. Haring had famously painted a nude Grace Jones. She’d worn a hat he made: tall, Seussian, papal. He’d adorned her body with painted figures and glyphs. It was the union of two bright creative spirits. Visionaries of a joyful and sexy world.
The show will be one for the record books. I’d had my mind blown by bands in the middle of the night before, but the dark, bombed-out Alphabet City venues my bridge-and-tunnel “nuclear waste” friends and I haunted didn’t have drag queens or bodybuilder bartenders or rotating video banks over the dance floor. There really wasn’t any dancing except slam dancing, and even that was never as much of a thing as people made it out to be. At the Palladium it’s a different world. No one is brooding and everyone is afraid of dying from AIDS.
“Isn’t it great, Matt? Isn’t she fucking amazing!” Michael shouts as we stand in a VIP area, an opera booth with a high, privileged view of the stage. He turns to me but doesn’t wait for an answer. “Yeah! Fuck!”
He’s been worked up all night, more than I’d ever seen him, his face radiating red and hot outside its usual boundaries, the way the picture sometimes splits on the television suggesting a multiverse of dimensions organized by color, each one assigned to a pure state of being—lust, fear, bliss, rage—each too strong to be experienced unalloyed. Michael is so excited by the possibility of the moment, I think his heart will break. Or maybe, considering his tight and grinding jaw, he’s just very, very high. I worry that he’s too turned on to stay in this world, that he’s going to disappear in a puff of smoke. It feels like anything could happen. Michael has already been transformed, inexplicably, from pretty-boy coke dealer into an activist—one of the organizers of this benefit. “Matt!” he calls. My name means nothing. It’s just a syllable, a raw morpheme unattached from sense, a bark of joy or pride or something else just as pure and dangerous, like faith, which I think would be colored blue. Michael has AIDS, too, and—yes—all of this is indeed great.
Afterwards when Michael, Vinny, and I are standing near the lobby, two girls try to leave with some of the Haring-style decorations that Vinny and his friends and I had volunteered to make in the weeks leading up to the benefit: Haring’s iconic dancing figures drawn with inch-thick magic markers on clear sheets of acetate. We attached them to the front of lighted panels that ran up the columns alongside the dance floor. They had flashed and changed colors for hours. Michael now stomps over to the girls and yanks the rolled-up drawings out of their hands.
“You should be ashamed! How dare you!” he shouts.
Haring’s estate, which had blessed the benefit, stressed how easy the work is to counterfeit. We had been given entry to his studio after his death. It was mostly empty, but there were still a few remnants of him left around. A penis-shaped canvas. His hand-drawn graffiti on the wall. There’s an awkward, searching moment as the girls, barelegged and identical in heels and hairspray, realize that they have lost their party favors.
“What the fuck?” one of them says.
Music and art and love, maybe they really can save everyone’s life. Maybe we really all can come together. We can believe in second chances. Gay, straight, male, female, young, old, sick, healthy: together our power is unstoppable. Earlier, Freddy Mercury and David Bowie had asked, again and again, why it was so hard to just give love? Tonight, there’s no reason for us to do anything else. They are part of the love too, those girls, as thunderstruck and helpless against it as I am.
“You should be ashamed!” Michael shouts again. His face, already the slightest bit whittled down from his disease, noticeable only to someone who’s journeyed with him for a lifetime, contorts with rage. It locks into the agonized grimace I remember from our childhood when our anger, young and familiar, was always unchecked. No matter the upset—a disaster at a birthday party or a teary, honking meltdown over legroom in the car on the way home from our grandparents in Massapequa—it always felt so raw and desperate. But this is something new, and terrifying. Michael’s indignation roars like an oil well on fire. Vinny and I look at one another as both girls grip the drawings and Michael tugs with two hands from the other end.
“Let go!” one of the girls shouts. “Take your fucking hands off!”
Michael pulls harder. The other girl has had enough, so she summons up her spiteful secret weapon and just goes ahead and says it.
“Faggot.”
The Palladium was first built in 1927 as an opulent movie palace. Later, it became a live music venue showcasing just about every popular rock act of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, from Bruce Springsteen to the Grateful Dead to The Band, Blondie, Patti Smith, the Ramones, Zappa, Iron Maiden, U2, Duran Duran, Motörhead, and so many more. Later still, it became a nightclub under the direction of Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager of Studio 54 fame. When it reopened as a nightclub, because of its enormous size, a lot of the smaller downtown clubs were forced to close. For years it ruled at the indisputable top of the nightlife heap. Just like AIDS, it changed the city. It rewrote the rules according to its own needs. Eventually, Palladium would be demolished and an NYU dorm with a Trader Joe’s on the ground floor would be built on the site. I would study writing at NYU as a graduate student but would not think to write about this night for many years after. The university would, at the same time, spread over Lower Manhattan like a virus, appearing at times like a real estate development corporation that also offered degree programs. Later, thanks in part to the largesse of a conservative billionaire, NYU would become best known for a modern and efficient hospital system. By then, HIV will be a manageable condition, medication suppressing viral loads to undetectable levels. By then of course, it will be too late.
“Faggots!” the girls say again and again. The word rings out like a church bell announcing a new part of the day, a call to prayer in the deepest, dark night when even God isn’t awake. “You’re all going to die of AIDS!” they shout, showing us their flimsy hypocritical hearts, as unsurprising as their little black handbags. Vinny and I are shaken, alert as deer on the edge of the highway. Michael, drawings crumpling in his hand, is near raving. The girls have made a terrible mistake. We didn’t come here for a good time. We came to live.
Giant security guards bearhug the girls from behind and drag them kicking and screaming to the curb. The raging rupture is dissolved by music and light. Like a hungry cell, the nightclub absorbs everything again, the shimmering membrane intact once more.
“Well, that was fun,” Vinny says on the cab ride back to his apartment. He lives in Manhattan now, the first of us five brothers to move out. We are under the covers literally fifteen minutes later. My ears are ringing. In bed next to my snoring brother, I realize I’ve left some of my atoms back at the club. The unfinished story of my family is told in strobe effects and multichannel mixes. It is joy layered on top of terror crossfaded with dreams and outrage. “Palladium” is what they now call the NYU dorm that stands where the nightclub once had. Also lost, though long before the building was demolished, was a mural by Jean-Michel Basquiat, accidentally painted over in the VIP room that had been named for Mike Todd, one of the many former husbands of Elizabeth Taylor, herself one of the heroes of the AIDS crisis. Life gets crowded with ghosts.
She was right, that girl. Michael will die. Maybe Vinny too. I shut my eyes, but they flash with the fierce apparition that is Grace Jones, they flash with a thousand faggots dancing on the edge of death, they flash red and white and blue, and in each interval there exists a mirror of will go on forever.
MATTHEW AQUILONE’s first novel, The Stager, will be published by Delphinium Books in November 2026. Other work of his has been seen in Bellingham Review, The Rumpus, Open Doors Review, Tendon, New York Daily News, The Nervous Breakdown, Christopher Street, Hyperallergic, South Dakota Review, Theater for the New City, the Ensemble Studio Theatre, and elsewhere. He’s been awarded fellowships and residencies at the Ucross Foundation, the Norman Mailer Center and Writers Colony, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild and the I-Park Foundation. He was finalist for the Tin House Debut 40 Residency, longlisted for the DISQUIET Prize, and was a member of Brooklyn Writers Space. He is a graduate of Vassar College and the NYU MFA Program in Creative Writing. He lives in Brooklyn, where he was born and raised. Find him on Instagram @maquilone.
Featured image by Aleksandr Popov, courtesy of Unsplash.
