A Tale of Two Parties

I love to party. It’s the thing that has been a constant desire in my life. If you told me today that I would never get to party again, life would still be worth living. I have a son that I love, a job that I love and friends who I love. All of that and more would make life still worth living but I would mourn the passing of another version of myself. I’ve been multiple distinct people in my life, all of whom have shared a common core. The love of partying has been an ever present aspect of myself. It has been a defining feature of myself and the pursuit of it has been such an ever present goal that without it I would be a distinctly different person. This is the story of two of the best parties I’ve ever been to.

One happened this past fall. The other one happened almost two decades ago. In one sense they were the same party. They were both attended by hip members of the counterculture with ages ranging from late teens to late thirties. Both had laser lights and electronic dance music mixed in with rock and roll. The people who attended the one last weekend are the same types of people who were at the one twenty years ago and I believe that the difference between those two parties speaks volumes. Hopefully by comparing and contrasting the two, one element at a time, I can convey some sense of what I’ve learned from them. Whether what I’ve learned is about how I’ve changed or how the world has changed, I’m still not certain.

I was an undergraduate at the University of Georgia in the spring of nineteen ninety-nine. A band whose name I’ve long forgotten was playing a Saturday night concert at a bar which, on Wednesday nights, would sell you any drink you wanted for any coin you offered. I was still eighteen and had gotten in by flirting with the door guy. I batted my eyes at him and waved my hand through the air Obi-Wan style and literally said, “You don’t need to see my ID.” He laughed and I walked in. I was there with several friends, all of whom were twenty-one or older. We partied for a few more hours and I caught wind of an after party. I flirted with the lady who told me about it but she didn’t have any extra tickets. I flirted with one of the band members but they had given the tickets to the venue to distribute. So I found myself once again flirting with the door guy and, after a few kisses, found myself in possession of two tickets to an after party in a warehouse in Athens, GA.

In twenty eighteen I’m a software engineer at Google working on proactive search and artificial morality. I love festivals of self expression and all forms of Bacchanalia. In my native Louisiana, the top end of that for me is Mardi Gras and I still go as often as I can. In the Bay Area, the thing that comes the closest is the Folsom Street Fair. I went last fall with several friends that I’ve made here and was having an absolutely great time with them. Most of them are lesbians which is only relevant because things got a bit rocky when we realized that they had been planning on going to an after party that was specifically catering to lesbians and trans women neither of which I am. They had been looking forward to this party for weeks but they didn’t want to ditch me since the one other cis male we were hanging out with wasn’t planning on sticking around. One of my friends had an idea though and took charge to resolve the dilemma. She called the venue and asked if it would be okay for her gay friend to come with them. After some amount of negotiation with the door guy she turned to me and said, “Okay you can come but tonight you’re gay.” I’m bisexual but I understood what she meant. That was fine by me. The women in that venue deserve a safe space to let loose and attention from me would have been unwelcome. I just wanted to enjoy the evening with my friends. A few hours later I found myself one of only about a dozen cis males in an underground club at a two hundred person plus Folsom after party.

The warehouse in Athens, GA had a similar number of people. Getting in required a knock on a metal door, slipping tickets through the slot which opened and waiting for the bouncer to decide if we looked like cops. Once inside, there were several small rooms connected by hallways and one main room where a DJ had set up his turntables. In the center of the dance floor, glow sticks on the ends of strings were cutting vibrant patterns through the air. Someone had set up a makeshift bar in one corner of the building and several people were sitting on wooden pallets passing around a bong. I was there with a friend named Phil Klippinger who has, unfortunately, passed away since then. We had failed to find any party drugs either at the previous venue or en route so we had taken what we had: ephedrine, ginseng and saint John’s wort. If you take enough of those three things you don’t exactly get high but they put your head in a pretty positive place and give you a lot of energy. We were feeling pretty good when we got there and joined a loose circle on the dance floor. The beat was catchy and as we danced we talked.

The venue hosting the Folsom after party is a great SF nightclub which I will leave unnamed. Getting in was just a matter of paying cover, showing IDs and my friend reminding the door guy that she had called about me earlier. Car trouble had caused us to be running a bit late and our buzzes were going away so we headed for the bar and had them line up shots. We toasted to good times and good health then I turned to survey the club. The DJ was performing from a raised booth out of which was flashing patterns of laser light. Leather couches lined the walls and people filled the dance floor. Between the heat, the press of the crowd and the overtly erotic nature of the costuming and dance it smelled like the party had been going for days with nary a shower to be had by anyone. A fact made all the more relevant by the necessity of getting within an inch of someone in order to talk to them over the music.

We definitely had more space in that giant warehouse. Phil and I eventually decided that we wanted to see if there was anyone else there who we knew so we split up with plans to meet up at the improvised bar half an hour later. I moved from group to group, dancing and chatting and flirting. Aside from the forty or so people in the central dance circles everyone else was spread out in cliques of five to twelve people. Most were having conversations while swaying to the music. Some were passing around bongs or handing out pills to their friends. A few in the side rooms were having sex on blankets they had brought with them. It didn’t seem like there was anyone we knew here so I started making my way back to the bar and stopped to use the restroom along the way. The line was long and slow moving for the single occupancy bathroom and as I waited in line I wondered if Phil had found anyone we knew or if he might have found some drugs. Almost as if in answer to my thoughts, a giant of a man in front of me started rolling a blunt. When he lifted it to his lips to lick it, his hands were completely above the heads of everyone around him. I loudly asked if I could hit it and the extra attention I drew to his already exposed drug preparation annoyed him. He looked at me and angrily said “No”. I must have flinched because he laughed and said, “Hey sorry about that” and then tossed me the remainder of the dime bag he had rolled it from. I thanked him and, completely forgetting my need to go to the bathroom, hurried off to find my friend.

Thankfully, the clubs in SF have more than one single occupancy unisex bathroom. They have many single occupancy unisex bathrooms. Bathrooms which, after a shot and a few beers, I desperately needed to use. The line was moving but not as fast as I wanted it to. All I wanted to do right then was not think about how badly I needed to pee. The guy behind me had a different idea though. There weren’t many other guys in the bar and I guess he had picked me to flirt with. I could tell he was flirting from his body language and facial expressions but between the loud music, my growing intoxication and my desperate need to pee he might as well have been Charlie Brown’s teacher. I tried to figure out how to respond and all I came up with was to put a finger to his lips, say “Shush” and then start kissing him. After several seconds I heard the door behind me open. I broke the kiss, waved and went into the bathroom. I was still giddy from the kiss when the smell of the bathroom hit me. No one had done anything untoward to the toilet. The walls were the source of the scent. They were covered in menstrual blood.

I am a very scent responsive person. I found Phil again while holding the bag of weed up to my nose for a sniff. He looked at me sideways and asked me where I got it. When I told him, he shook his head in disbelief and asked me how we were going to smoke it. My plans had been to use some of his rolling papers but he had a pack of Camels on him that day instead of his standard rolling tobacco. I left him again in search of anything useful for smoking weed. I must have asked fifty people before I came up to a man sitting on the edge of an old porcelain hand washing trough made for a dozen people to wash their hands simultaneously. He was a thin man with several women who looked like super models clustered around him. When I asked, he told me that he had rolling papers and as he pulled out a pack of Jester rolling tobacco I recognized who he was. I had just been given rolling papers by Michael Stipe, the lead singer of R.E.M. I told Phil he would never guess who I got the papers from and he said, “I don’t know, Michael Stipe?”. I said, “man how’d you guess? Let’s go find a place to sit and smoke this.” His jaw dropped and he followed me to get high on free weed rolled in papers we got from a rock star.

That’s a very different kind of excitement than what you feel when you’ve just been kissing a stranger and now are in a small room filled with the overwhelming smell of someone else’s blood. Sensory overload doesn’t even begin to describe it. The music is still pounding in your ears. The taste of him still in your mouth. You’re holding yourself ready to relieve yourself and the strong scent hits you as you recognize the marks on the wall are smeared bloody handprints. I can’t say that this is what anyone else would have thought but what immediately came to my mind was, “I can’t pee here. This is someone else’s place”. I turned to leave and realized that I was still holding myself and still needed to pee very badly. I realized how irrational I was being, turned and used the toilet. When I came out I was hyper aware of my surroundings as I made my way back to my friends. There were people dancing of course but also there was one woman leaning against a wall getting caned while wearing little more than a thong. Another woman was getting spanked while bent over a padded sawhorse. Across the room two of my friends were dancing and another had found a stranger of her own to be kissing. That’s when they started playing Tool and the spotlight lit up a bondage burlesque show that was beginning.

Sitting and watching thirty people dance with swinging glow sticks while you smoke a joint is much less exciting and your brain is much more involved. Phil and I talked about culture and our romantic interests. We talked about politics and we talked about our classes. We talked about the games we played and we talked about our friends. We talked about the problems in the world and how we were going to fix them. We had everything we could possibly need to fix the entire world except a plan. Sitting on that warehouse floor, smoking free weed and watching the dancing lights we worked on that plan. The nights I spent talking about philosophy and art with him were some of the best conversations I have ever had. I knew so little. I didn’t even know how little I knew. Each new thing he taught me was like an entire new world to explore. It was a time for raw discovery and naive ambition. Sitting and watching the lights.

There was no way to sit and watch the burlesque show though. If you sat on the couches you wouldn’t be able to see over the peoples’ heads and there wasn’t room to sit on the floor near the makeshift stage. Without looking away for more than a second at a time I walked towards my friends who had all stopped kissing to watch the show. When we were back together and the song ended we got another round of drinks, toasted each other and then lost ourselves again in ecstatic dance. An alarm from the phone of the friend who got me in is what broke the spell. She needed to go home to get some sleep before bringing her kid to school the next morning. One of our friends had found a police officer that she liked and had to be convinced that us leaving her with a drunk stranger that she had only met moments ago was a bad idea. We had to convince her three times. Each of the first two times we turned and found that she was back in the long arms of the law. That’s how I found myself covered in sweat with the scents of a bacchanal permeating my clothing, asking a cop to please just give her number to our friend so we could leave. We made it out on the third try.

Each of those nights the party continued until the dawn. In Athens we left the warehouse when it was time to get breakfast. Phil dropped me off at my dorm and we said our goodbyes until the next time we’d dance, smoke and debate the world’s problems. In San Francisco we got a room on the seventeenth floor of a fancy hotel room after our friend with a child went home. We walked the streets of the Tenderloin and I argued with the owner of a pizzeria while one of my friends tried to arrange a flight to her grandmother’s funeral. When we got back to the room we drank from the mini bar and passed out while watching Wonder Woman. We woke up naked watching the sunrise over San Francisco and ordered room service. As we were getting ready to leave we realized that the only clothing we had were the outfits we had worn to Folsom. I’ve never had a “walk of shame” before in my life. I didn’t know that shame was an emotion I was capable of feeling. That Monday morning, stepping out of the elevator in a leather thong may be the first time I ever have. The elevators faced the bar and it seemed only appropriate that we should have one last drink before we left. One of the hosts, understanding our situation, opened the bar an hour early just for us. He poured us our drinks and left us to them. As they drank their Bloody Marys and I drank my Gin and Tonic we looked at each other and started laughing. We laughed until we were all crying into our Monday morning cocktails. At no point did we try to find any solutions to life. We were too deep in it.