I had never been invited to a party before, at least not since my old school friends had their mitzvahs, so I understandably had no idea how to react when the news broke. One of my friends had received permission to extend his invitation to a dorm party to myself and a couple others. I eventually accepted, after weighing the outcomes of diving in and turning tail.
My eagerness and hesitation are flip sides of the same coin
, I reasoned, products of the dual outcomes of excitement and fear brought on by the unknown. Truth be told, I was terrified. Social interaction has never been my forte.
There were five of us when the time came, varying in anticipation and readiness but buzzing nevertheless. We assembled in one of the others’ dorms at around 9:30. I walked over with one of them, having dropped off my rain jacket at his place, where we were greeted warmly at the door. Smiles abounded in the dimly lit space as we discussed our days up until then, more than one of which had begun in the afternoon, and started to loosen up to the delights of our music recommendations played over laptop. I panicked when my turn came, as indecisive old me is wont to do under pressure, and selected something off of Can’s
Ege Bamyası
. Its anxious textures hardly fit the mood on hand, but I was relieved to see largely positive reactions emerge on my friends’ faces. Grinning nervously, I air-drummed to Jaki Liebezeit and willed my restless heart to settle into a similarly constant groove.
“Should we head out?” asked one of us. The rest assented to this move, and so we headed out into the darkness, which, as it turned out, concealed storm clouds not yet finished watering Hamilton’s extensive grounds. The rain was bitterly cold, battering us from both above and the side; consolation existed only in the minuscule size of the droplets.
“What’s everyone here’s favorite type of precipitation?” I inquired in a vain attempt to lighten our slightly souring moods, receiving a single vote for snow. I had asked the same question earlier in the day before a different audience, and I wondered for a second if any of them had been present then. Ever since my invitation, nothing leading up to now had seemed, on a conceptual level, remotely real.
Hurried by the unaccommodating weather, we reached the building in question without the rain significantly soaking us. Proceeding to the room of the party, we waited at the door for admittance, at which point we slipped off our shoes and into the fray.
A cursory glance around the room revealed that I knew only a couple of other people in attendance, including an old friend from an American history course. The others I recognized only as faces floating about campus. Heart intractably in my throat, I made no real effort to engage in conversation with them, and they largely reciprocated.
Some partygoer I am
, I mused with a hint of amusement. The other attendants were gracious nevertheless, and even invited me to join a recreational drinking game, in which I admittedly declined to participate. The social pressure to drink has dogged me even in the tamest of scenarios, and I certainly was not about to let convention make a mockery of my choice to remain temperate. Even so, there was an undeniable excitement to the whole spectacle. The old lyric of “these are the people that I get drunk with / these are the people that I fell in love with” unraveled in my head at one point, a peculiar thought to occur for a teetotaller, and I smiled sadly.
After a fair amount of time passed, which I spent mostly reconnecting with my old acquaintance and awkwardly admiring the dorm decorations, the dim drone of the party rose to a hubbub. One of my friends nudged me to get my attention; “I think we are leaving to join a larger party downstairs,” he informed me. “Are you coming with us?”
A shot of adrenaline animated my skeleton. Antisocial though I am, I had made it this far. “Sure thing,” I replied.
I heard the larger gathering before it came into view, a cacophony of squeals, screeches and sub-bass. I stared at my hands in disbelief as a box-like room came into view.
This is happening
. My friends and I approached this gateway to a different dimension steadily, borne by the rest of the crowd, but their faces displayed a strangely serene anticipation in contrast to mine. This was unfamiliar territory to me alone.
In all honesty, I cannot recount as clearly the events that took place inside the box; upon entry, the sheer ferocity of spinning red, green and blue lights, the deafeningly loud music and the hundred or more writhing, intoxicated bodies in thrall to them dissolved into an jarringly overwhelming Seurat painting. I hid along the side of the wall near the entrance, taking in my surroundings even as I drowned in them. There were figures dancing on nearly every square inch of the floor, as well as on ledges by the windows; I peered through the bacchanalia in an attempt to recognize any peers, but the faces of Tom Petty and Andy Partridge leaped out at me instead.
There was no ‘dance music,’ per se, to be heard; the selection seemed dated as if frozen in time, segueing through the very same pop hits that dominated the radio a decade ago. Just as I began to adjust to the volume and heat inside the box, Rihanna’s ‘We Found Love’ coursed out of the speakers, and the energy from the crowds ratcheted up to a chorus of shrieks and off-tune singing. The masses rushed to the front of the box, as if borne aloft by some massive invisible wave, and the mêlée intensified to a blur.
I caught only glimpses of action for the rest of my time in the sauna, catching whiplash from mis-identifying one dancer, entwined with a particularly inebriated young man, as my crush. I looked around further. A girl swayed not more than a meter away from me, strikingly beautiful amidst the fracas, before another partygoer danced his way beside her. His hand rested gently on her waist, a peculiarly comforting point of serenity in the oceanic tumult.
One of my friends beckoned me toward the back end of the box. “You wanna come dance over here, away from the music?” I nodded silently, following his lead until I was intercepted by the door by another. Commons was serving quesadillas for late night, and we would miss them if we delayed any further.
“You realize this is going in the article, right?” I quizzed him. He laughed. “Yeah, good!” We rounded up the friends who were willing to leave and quietly egressed the scene.
A few familiar faces finally stand out as I exit. They are all noticeably high.
The rain had picked up since pur descent into the first party, amplifid by cruel, whipping winds. Still short a raincoat, I suggested we leapfrog from building to building to avoid a thorough soaking, my freezing body the quivering Admiral Halsey to the sky’s Uncle Albert.
After recovering my raincoat, we made for a mostly-deserted Commons. There were quesadillas enough for all of us, but I was too frightened and excited by the night’s events for my stomach to settle. The presence of my friends was comfort enough.
As we sat around the table, returning too late to the party, as it would emerge, to rejoin the depravity, I questioned whether it even made sense to record the events of this night. Surely the late-night adventures of this anti-socialite, magnificently blown out of proportion, are far too insignificant to warrant recording. Perhaps I am being silly.
No, of course it is not silly. My generation finds the magical in the mundane. My generation spins the insignificant into the cosmic. I am okay.
There are two certainties that I can glean from my first time at a Hamilton party. The first is their disturbing tendency for them to dissolve into chaotic hedonism; the second, their inhabitants are the same good people I know from the civility of the weekday Hamilton campus. Whether out of a desire to let loose or mere morbid curiosity, I hope to attend another sometime.
