“P.L.U.R.,” spelled Nic, pointing to the letters painted vertically on the wall. “It means ‘Peace, Love, Unity, Respect.’ It’s iconic for ravers everywhere: It’s what we live; it’s what we breathe.”
Nic was studying interior design at Columbia College. In fact, everyone here was studying interior design—at Columbia, at the Art Institute, at Loyola. Interior design, architecture, or the visual arts at these or similar institutions of higher learning. The exceptions were the individuals who choose not to attend college at all and, instead, drifted from rave to rave every weekend. They made friends with strangers who would drag them to all four corners of the city until, finally, somebody would decide that the night had to end (no matter where the sun stood in relation to the moon). For a group of people who were trying so hard to burst through the seams of conformity, they did a excellent job of portraying a single, homogeneous mass.
“We’re creating a community, man,” Nic explained (as he is wont to do). “Here, right now, with these words, these actions. With each and every night of raving, we step closer to creating something bigger than ourselves.”
Something didn’t sit well with me (Perhaps it was just the music, which I thought was causing irreparable hearing loss, or maybe it was the heat and humidity, which I thought was causing cardiac arrest). Laura also looked puzzled; she crossed her arms, and I peered around the miasma of smoke that hovered over the crowd. There was a pointed lack of judgment and cynicism that I wasn’t quite used to. In its place existed an unqualified sincerity and a genuine, unfiltered generosity. What, I had to ask, was the purpose?
All the rave’s disparate elements merged on the dance floor. Afforded the largest room in the warehouse, it sprawled the equivalent of three tennis courts and endured the abuse of hundreds of dancers under a noble, twenty-foot ceiling. The lights were streaming, bursting between my fingers, and yet I was also awash in darkness. Sweat gushed from every pore, and the cold, bottled water that the D.J. continually shook into the crowd seemed to be baptismal, as if it were about to seep through my skin and purge me of the crowd’s infernal heat. We danced as if separate from time, our limbs seeming to fuse together in the ellipse of the strobe light, which freezed drops of sweat and water mid-air. The ravers transcended their bodies; names and identities peeled away like old stickers, and the music and pharmaceuticals fashioned them a single body.
“You become a stranger to yourself,” Nic declared enigmatically, in the haze of smoke and shadow. He seemed to be perpetually speaking in aphorisms and absurdities, in false memories and random facts. Nic was not a person but a caricature; they all were—none of them seemed real.
Laura stumbled up to me, already gone, shouting, “Do you see that girl over there?”
“What?” I asked, brining my ear to her mouth.
“That girl, over there.” She thrust her finger into the crowd, pointing at a black woman with long, tentacle-like dreadlocks that bounced in the air with her trance-like movements. “I made out with her!” The woman turned her face to me in the repeated pass of an overhead light, and I saw her features were masculine.
“Laura, that’s a man.” She creased her forehead, looking more closely. Nic came over after noting her distress, and Laura explained her confusion. He examined the person in question.
“No, Laura; he’s right. That’s a man.” The person continued to dance, like some androgynous deity, as the crowd ebbed and flowed around it in a tide of mechanical precision.
“No, guys; I’m positive that’s a woman. Look at those tits—what do you call those?” As the deity hovered closer, I saw that its loose blue shirt flapped around simply because it was poorly tailored. The figure then drifted back into the crowd and was lost for good. Laura paused for a moment, stared at the lights leaping across the ceiling, and then began to dance again, allowing the confusion to seep out of her body. Once more we felt a sensation of detachment, as if something was pulling us up and away, out of our skin.
Eventually, the flickering lights began to fade. Nic waded through the crowd and pulled us aside.
“We should go; it’s getting late.” Laura and I looked at each other, confused. How long had it been? An hour? An excess of two seemed impossible.
We emerged from the warehouse, and the night – and everything about it – was in a quixotic blur. It was five in the morning, meanwhile, and the Blue Line had stopped running. We decided to flag a taxi; but, as Nic said, shrugging, “They don’t drive on this side of town.” Laura grew worried. Cars were speeding past, the passengers inside waving their fists and spitting incomprehensible words into the void.
The ravers stumbled out into the night—most of them drunk, none of them sober. Removed from the magic of the rave, they were ordinary individuals once more. The ripped V-necks and the stained Converse, the exotic wings and the fuzzy slippers—all of it seemed droll and childish, while in the darkness of the warehouse their trappings made them as gods and goddesses. Now, as the sweat pouring down their tired faces glimmered under the streetlights, all of their pretense and insecurity was readily apparent. Their allure dissipated as quickly as the heat from our skin.
And so they took themselves out of their hovel and returned to the posh apartments they inhabited across the city. Laura, Nic and I eventually slid onto the cushioned seats of a cab we had summoned by phone. It shuttled us promptly home, away from the buzz, the glitter, the heat, and the haze and back to our comfortably quiet lives.
“I don’t know what that was,” Laura said, gazing out of the window as we drove through the heart of the city. “Was that real? Was what we just experienced truly real?”
The taxi driver laughed as we drove along the lake shore. “Oh, I’ve heard that one before.”
The vibrations in my toes seemed to have traveled with me, but then I realized it just the motor of the car; perhaps I was suffering a kind of shell shock. On the horizon, meanwhile, the sun was already rearing its judgmental head.
