Bad

One day in San Francisco my girlfriend Erin and I were going to this rave in 3-Comm park. But first we were stopping at this get-together at her friend Sarah’s. On our way to Sarah’s we rode our bikes across the bleached concrete and hot sun of that sort of industrial part of the Mission, which boarders South of Market. It was a Sunday. I saw this familiar face standing by the side of the road, she was like a pilgrim, a vision even. It turned out to be this girl we knew, one of Erin’s friend’s. She was standing there next to a banged-up chain-linked fence, and a vacant lot, on like 16th, and like, nowhere. Just her and the sun. I guess she was waiting for the bus. Or maybe she was a messenger from God, saying, ‘Chris, Erin, yes, when you actually leave your house to see other people, you will find other people. The bountiful world can be yours if you only just go out and get it..’ I had noticed this girl a few days earlier, we had noticed each other, I think. She was smokin’, like, Amish-style hot. Today she was wearing a plain, white cotton button-down shirt. Her eyes were blue and so clear. She reeked of responsibility and self-care. She was like child-bearing hot, it was biological. Her skin and her hair were so soft, like go-to-bed-early soft, maybe even work-at-a-health-food-store soft.

Erin told her that we were headed to her friend Sarah’s, and that then we were going this rave thing. It sort of sucked standing there at first when Erin had said that, I mean I wanted the girl to think I was hot, I didn’t want Erin to blow my upstanding facade with all this rave business. I didn’t want the girl to see through my own button-down shirt, through my own subtle earth tones and mild manners to the fact that at core these days I was really just a slobby stoner boy. The girl was quite surprised by our plans but pretended to think raves were cool.

I wondered, ‘was I already no more the Amish husband of this girl’s dreams?’ And now it seemed like Erin and I were both already pretending to be totally awkward and ignorant about raves and such things. Raves? What are raves? It was like now we were now suddenly both British tourists who had just come from a bird-watching book store, or church, on to who-knows-what-next in this crazy world. The mention of the rave had changed the dynamic between us and the girl and now we were more dangerous and edgy. Maybe we’d jump her, or slip her drugs or something.. Maybe we were on drugs right now. I couldn’t really tell what she was thinking of me. ‘Respect’..

We made our way to Sarah’s too awesome, tv-sitcom-nice apartment. Once inside I was immediately reminded of how ridiculously hot all of Erin’s girlfriends always were. Sarah was a knockout. All these girls had such incredible taste, just like Erin. Sarah’s apartment was all beachy faded white and creme painted wood with just the right one broken antique bench or chair whatever. Her kitchen had this nice view and a chalkboard and a simple wooden church pew type bench. It was like we were in a grange hall on an island off the coast of Maine, just back from swimming, all laughing and tickling each other, and squeezing lime into our Cerveza’s in the afternoon sunlight while Lauryn Hill sat with us smiling, singing us her favorite songs on an acoustic guitar.

Sarah was all smiley, and standing there so cute in her perfectly faded Levi’s and blonde hair. (Her apartment was across the alley from the original Levi Straus building from the 1800’s). She laughed and was so nice, ignoring me just the right amount, as if to indicate that there was sexual tension between us, or could be. Or maybe she was one of those girls that was so nice and so confident that she was able to embody all of this subtle body language just to make me feel a little good, just because I was her guest and dating her friend. She asked us what we wanted to drink. Erin said a beer. I think I said ginger ale, or seltzer or something.

"Are you sure you don’t want a beer?" The eye contact was just devastating. The attention was all it took to throw me into a whirlwind of fantasy:

Sarah and I were dating, we were engaged. We were head-over-heels in love. She would do anything for me, and I for her. She cared so much that she would weep for me every minute in her cable-neck sweaters while she wove, and played the harp, in our cottage in Glouster by the sea, while I loved her back by risking my life all the time on my dangerous whaling trips, supporting our family; her, me, and our unborn child. Or maybe I just imagined us having awesome blushy, crushy, romatic sex in some church somewhere.

"Uh, yeah. I guess I’ll have a beer."

"Sure?"

"Yeah." I noticed her body as she went for the fridge. Wow, Sarah was an uncommon beauty. She could totally be in one of those commercials where just the right subtly hot, interesting looking girl (Sarah) throws a balled up paper napkin at the just-right, rugged kind of guy, in the pizza place. He opens the napkin up to find she’s scrawled a set of latitude and longitude coordinates on it. So drives his new jeep (or whatever) up the mountain and finds her, and they laugh and spend the rest of the day swimming and partying in paradise or whatever..

I’m standing with Erin and Sarah and their friends in the kitchen, and I’m trying to act how I imagine Sarah would want a man to act, sort of rugged and dreamily present, and only half interested, like the guy in the jeep commercial maybe. But I bet I probably came off more like more of a stilted C3PO though, who had just asked for a ginger ale.

To qualify, it’s not that there was something so wrong with my relationship with Erin to make me lust after all her friends all the time. I didn’t even lust after all of her friends all of the time. And I thought Erin was totally hot. It was just that she just had some extremely hot friends. And you know, I’m a male. And I have distress. I’m a hunter-gatherer, an honest hunter-gatherer.

Erin and I went into the other room and we sat on the carpet with other pretty girls, and maybe a guy or two, who were also really nice to us. It was hard not to break into a shit-eating grin at this point, I think I might of. The room itself just blew me away. The wind was lightly tossing around the off-white linen curtains, and the warm afternoon sun played in the 1920’s leaded windows, which were cranked open at different angles, like there was a party going on. It was just a few of us there on the floor, and we were all like attracted and interested in each other. We could hear each other speak. I looked at the half-open nice windows and I imagined that if we kept living moments like this, then we would truly be living, we would truly be living like I always imagined people truly lived, like at the turn of the century, and in the 1920’s, when so much of the nice things in this country were built. All the money and the nice architecture, people enjoying their time with others who were just like themselves. And that was the thing, Erin’s friends were so familiar seeming. So rugged and relaxed, so friendly and not pretentious. They had such good taste. I guess Erin knew most of them from this summer Unitarian youth group thing she used to go to in Massachusetts. They were back-East people. They were just like us.

I kneeled on the off-white canvas type area rug next to her friend Jenna. Jenna was wearing this catalogy nice-fitting pink blouse which happened to really showed off her nice smallish breasts. She had long brown hair and all these freckles, and these little circles under her eyes that made her seem so human. So much of my life in San Francisco seemed to be spent around people from cultures that were so widely different than my own. Make-up, cologne, and people always bragging about themselves, constantly bragging. Seriously, the bragging never stopped. I hated it. And here I was finally, with these people who wore clothes I liked, and who weren’t bragging, and who were even telling stories that were self-effacing in ways. Erin and I never had friends enough in San Francisco, or we had them but we never hung out enough, or we never quite identified enough, or followed through enough. We weren’t really part of a regular social community. And here we were at Sarah’s, and it felt so nice.

But we had to leave soon. We started telling people about the rave that we were going to. I was wearing my bright, unusually yellow sneakers, and I remember that as we talked about the rave my sneakers seemed to take on more and more prominence in the room. Finally it seemed like maybe there was like light shining from them. Erin had on these noticeable light blue sneakers. Were Erin and I cool? Maybe I was doing the thing that I often did, of joining with the Protestants until they trusted me and sort of liked me, and then breaking their rules of conduct by being kind of overly flashy and entertaining, maybe making some of them like me even more, and maybe leaving some of them in the dust. I couldn’t help it, I was a half-Irish class clown. We told them we were thinking of riding our bikes to 3-Comm Park(!). This girl immediately told us this story of friend of her’s who had gotten badly beaten and robbed trying to ride her bike home from that area one night. You did not want to be around Hunter’s Point at night, I guess, not on bicycles.

It was crazy that we were leaving such a good time but we couldn’t waste our 45 dollar tickets, plus we had been planning on going to the rave for so long. Leaving that apartment that evening felt so very, very wrong, like this familiar mistake that I make over and over again in my life, leaving the breadbasket of community and connection and things good to go to attend some two-dimensional prior obligation, some old habit of entertainment and consumption.

Riding our bikes home I felt so alive and sensitive in my body. I had been opened up to those people, it was like the cells in my body were all pushing up to my skin to kiss and receive their nourishment.

We got home and Erin called us a cab. I took like ten or fifteen huge bong hits, seriously. We arranged our outfits a little (I was still wearing the same button-down shirt and corduroys). And I duct-taped my weed to my inner thigh, which hurt a little.

Being that stoned and being in a car (neither of us had a car then), and being driven by someone else, was almost just too much. The ride was so smooth, I could barely tell where my body ended and where the seats and the cab began. Luckily I didn’t have to pee. The seats were this warm, jet black vinyl. I imagined I was like in a dark coffin-limousine-cab, being driven under the bright green trees of central park on a humid late afternoon in August, the kind of ride where you specially treasure the warm wind in your face.

We pulled into the parking lot of 3-Comm and I immediately realized I was in a different country. Zillions of young Asian kids. No white kids. No white people anywhere. Tricked out cars. The most incredible music coming out of the hugest, most carefully separated car stereos, like super tweeked late ‘90’s jungle with like the most buttery resonant bass imaginable. South Asian rap music. Dancehall. What Cd was that? Wo, what Cd was that!?

We got out of the cab and it drove away from us. We stood there like the two most out of place people in the world, like the American Gothic couple standing right in the middle of the Potrero Hill projects, with guys like actually tapping their hands with tire irons, and people getting robbed at gunpoint. I was kind of scared. No one looked like us. Everyone was street. Everyone was Asian. Everyone was like, 15.

As we went through security I noticed all the kids had these highlighters on strings around their necks. Lots of visors, weird baggy pants, achny, t-shirts I didn’t understand, groups of kids not speaking English. Girls were getting the contents of their purses thrown out, fake lipstick and perfume that was actually drugs, things like that. I wasn’t even slightly scared about the weed taped to my crotch. In this crowd? We made our way through, and we were walking by this group of pretty innocent looking schoolgirls. They were giggling in Thai or something, and suddenly one of the girls’ eyes rolled completely back in her head and she fell face forward, smashing her face and body flat on the concrete. All I saw were the spooky whites of her eyes when she went.

We kept walking in this slow sea and I looked around at everyone, their brown faces and their dark eyes, their hard to understand strain of drugged-out, street, deep teenage apathy. I mean these kids did not care. They were doing drugs I didn’t even understand. I suddenly had this flash that we were walking into the stadium among thousands of the living dead.

When we got in we walked around to see what all the areas were. Some parts were really crowded, and we were going from one area to another in these really crammed concrete tunnels. Crammed with warm sweaty bodies, and not much talking. There was a huge main stage area that was mostly happy hardcore mixed with some cheesy big name elctronica (I can’t remember, the Chemical Brothers or something). This area had lots of glow sticks and white girls with bleached blonde hair etc. It was the area where the stupid people came to party, not where the people who really were into the music danced. Then there was this sort of psychedelic merchandise area under the stadium. Then we made our way back through the tunnels to the areas around the stadium where the better music was.

There was a big psych trance tent. Here you had the cool, more enlightened set, maybe we had seen them before in San Francisco or whatever, painted bodies and somatic awareness, etc. There was the breaks area (dudes), there was this like electronic funk-jazz area with some hippy types and more regular festival-goers types, who maybe drank or whatever (no we were not stopping here). And finally we made it to the drum and bass area.

To get between the areas you had to walk under these concrete arches, and with all the partying and debauchery going on in this August setting sun, I got this distinct impression that I was somehow in ancient Rome. I also couldn’t shake the feeling that everything was empty. It didn’t matter how good the music was. I felt empty inside. Everything seemed like this big giant empty.

In the drum and bass area there was this giant blown up Nintendo-style gorilla next to the dj, and this green laser that kept writing out the words ‘concrete jungle’ on this giant triangular concrete wall that we were next to. This area had a mix of different people. Certainly a lot of Asian kids. Lots of dudes. Surprisingly a lot of girls too. The music was absolutely bangin’. Deep over-the-top bass. It was so loud that you had to stand pretty far back or the high end would hurt your ears. The music was twisting in and out of focus in this really nice way because of the wind. The wind was nice. I watched this group of girls right up at the speaker stacks. There were seven of them and they were all dressed in yellow super hero outfits and were wearing no ear plugs. They were karate fighting and dancing and laughing together. I looked around and saw other groups of girls with matching costumes, three blue super heros, some goth princesses, all kinds of candy-visor raverettes. Danny The Wildchild was spinning and it was an absolutely blazing, heavy set. I watched this one couple dance together in these striped shirts (striped like the canals of Venice or Olympia). They were doing this super fly rock-a-billy type ballroom dance right on top of the regular rhythms that everyone else was dancing to. That was about the best thing I saw all night.

When the set ended Erin and I sat down and talked a little, enjoying the nice evening breeze. Pretty much immediately several teams of huge yellow-shirt security guards swooped in on us. They would like haze us, flanking us every few minutes with their V-formations of their huge suspicious bodies, as if to say (in the voice of a robot), ‘Do not relax and enjoy yourselves. Do not smoke pot or consume any alcoholic beverages.’

Eventually I retreated to the porta-poddies and smoked. I smoked for like, ever. It was clear that the porta-poddies were conspicuously not patrolled, and that this was the place where you were supposed to do your drugs. There were no lights on in this area and it was this really sketchy, dark, dusty scene. It was really windy that night. It was nice to be inside the porta-poddy and have the windbreak for smoking. Of course it was so dark that you would like drop half your bag in there if you weren’t careful. It was quite except for the nice wind whistling and howling through the slats of the porta-poddies. There was the occasional blinding flash of the lighter and the nice glowing orange orb of the kind ganja being toasted, the occasional crackle or snap of the odd stem or seed. I finally re-emerged, totally baked. There were rows of porta-poddies and rows of guys re-emerging from who knows what, all ignoring each other because drugs are illegal. I always found it ironic that when you really start living the high life, you so often find yourself in like dark rows of porta-poddies, or in bushes with really sketchy people around, or in urine-soaked alleys. I looked around and I was pleased, because how was now seeing everything immediately indicated to me that I had managed to get myself really, really high. The sodium lights and the stadium, the wind and the hills in the distance, the birds, the whole scene was like perfectly digitally electronic, a digital master of a nature that was so fluid, analog, and complex. The shading and the texture, the sounds and the meaning of objects, it was all so specifically refined and blended, designed just for my particular psychology, my particular taste, my mood and temperament. I was in like Morocco now, or Bagdad, or maybe on an oil platform on some warm breezy equatorial sea somewhere. The stadium looked.. nuclear. Like it was a giant stereo, or a government weapon, designed to provide me with the best drum and bass that money and technology could buy.

I came back and Dieselboy was already underway. Erin was a little upset that I had taken so long. His set was really tight. Highly detailed and pretty smokin’, but a little too tinny for my taste, a little lacking in the low-end. It was dark now and everywhere we looked people had these surgical masks on, or else bandanas, and they were all inhaling something. It was kind of freaky, like they were all these medical zombies who might kill us..

I think the last thing I remember was being in the back of this tent where the Black-Eyed Peas were playing. I liked their music but it was late and I was so tired and stoned. I remember just wanting to lie down on the grass and fall asleep. It seemed like I could just do that, in just my thin cotton button-down shirt and corduroys with no blanket, and with the wind blowing over me from under the flaps of the tent. I felt so human and cuddly, so tired. I wanted to be reconnected to the earth. There was this other couple there in the back of the tent with us. I was looking at them and they were seeming so familiar to me. I think the girl commented on how tired I was. I guess it really was time to go home..

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 9th, 2005 at 6:59 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.