Lovefest and the Gateway: Part 2

Standing, no longer walking.  Jenn was living in a cozy, three-bedroom, third-floor flat just north of the park off Fulton.  It consisted of a single hallway (arrived at by a single, straight staircase that angled left at the very end) that reached all bedrooms and cul de sac-ed at the living room and kitchen.  It was the kind of flat you would think to see a small family living in, but instead, it housed three girls all recently graduated from USF.  Their minds were focused on grad school and work and cleanliness and were, for that matter, understandably high-strung.  And the flat reflected that.  The kitchen was clean, with new pots and pans (Jenn worked part-time at Sur la Table).  The bathrooms were that girly kind of clean that you see in interior decorating magazines, and remarkably dustless.  The living room furniture set was something handed down from a grandmother of somebody's; solid wicker couches with too many throw pillows.  And the whole place looked quaintly and comfortably colonial; luxurious, but not lavish.  From the street, there were steep stairs up to a small landing with three weathered, but refined, heavy wood doors.  Her's was the middle one.  And there we were, just set at the top of those stairs on Jenn's welcome mat.  Taylor and I passed a few moments silent, eerily aware of each and every breath we took.  It was now an hour or so after sunset and that cold autumn city air blew down the deserted street in gusts; a stark polarizing sensation compared to the wild raucous of the day.  Orgasmic euphoria was replaced with a primitive, animalistic alertness that I was unfamiliar with.  We were both in shorts and sleeveless t-shirts (I had on some pink tights as well), and we were shaking, but it was not a shiver from the cold.  It was from an inability to stay still.  The shaking was more of a sway as the heavy beat of bass still reverberated through my eardrums.  I never wanted to stop dancing and moving and my eyes flitted this way and that looking for something curious to focus on.  We both rattled off silly, forgettable inquiries at each other, about our moods, about the sensations of this new reality and how it felt.  I don't remember a word we shared, but the general consensus was that we felt good.  Like really good.  The best.

And as each car we saw approached and pulled up to the stop sign at the corner, we thought aloud to each other, "Is that Monster?"  Five minutes passed.  Ten minutes.  The first handful of times our hopes were dashed as some nameless BMW or Mercedez passed by without stopping.  Then a Camry came to a stop at the corner, but it wasn't her.  A tinge disconcerting, it was.  And as the minutes fell away that fear that had subsided at her phone call was slowly creeping it's way back to the forefront.  Then some skinny guy in a in tank-top and a white minivan pulled over to the other side of the street by the corner, right after coasting through the stop sign.  Taylor and I looked at each other and then back at the van just in time to see the flash of Monster's red mane and her blue tutu as she stumbled out on the passenger side and crossed the street into our open arms.  We gave the driver an acknowledgment and a thanks with a wave of the arm as cordially as we could.  He looked the part of a tweaked out tweaker so much so that he put our previous gay antics impressions to shame, made it look like whimsical child's play.  And as he drove off the two of us looked Monster squarely in the face, trying super hard not to laugh, and said, "Seriously?  You got a ride with that guy?"

"Ughh, don't get me started," replied Erica.

"Well, you really can pick 'em.  I'm pretty sure that was the only guy in a 'Hi, can I rape you?' van that's been down this street since you called." And we all laughed and we opened the door and bumbled up stairs to Jenn's living room, and I said to myself, "Thank God you're alive, Monster."

I'm sure Taylor was saying the same thing.  We wanted retribution for this unwonted anxiety, and so we got her started.  All the couch space was taken, so Taylor and I took seats on the floor.

"Tell us a story child," demanded Conor regally.

As her story unfolded, the scene in Jenn's living room became something of a madhouse.  It was like the party scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.  Just a bunch of crazies laughing without control or care for anything except the hilarity of it all.  The all of life, and those lives being acted out around us in some grand comedy.  Jenn, always the gracious host (even when drunk), got beers out for everyone, and if she was at all put off by the presence of seven strange, crazy men now whooping and walloping in her living room, she hid it well.  Dylan sparked up some fast talking, overly engaged conversation with her on the couch.  You know the one.  That "Hi, we don't know each other at all and I'm here in your living room now high on acid.  So like, where'd you go to college?  Who do you know here?" conversation.  Meanwhile, on the other couch (the love-seat of the pair), Cameron, Conor, Uncle Jack, and Sam Hillard had all mashed themselves into a human acid melt belting varying degrees of devious and maniacal laughter as Monster carried on before them.

"Ok, so.  Yeah, I got a little lost maybe. So I just dgaf-ed ("don't give a fuck"-ed) it and tried to get on one of those floats.  Which I did.  But then I fell off and I think that's how I got this boo-boo," she said pointing at her bloody elbow.  "And then it started getting dark and I started sobering up a little and was like, 'Fuck, where the hell am I?' And I didn't have a phone because... well, you know.  So I just kept grabbing random guys' phones, calling Corinne trying to get Taylor's number.  Which I did.  And that's when I called.  But then all the cabs were packed solid and I didn't have any money so I just kept trying to jump into cars asking for rides until that sketchy dude said he'd take me.  By the way, super sketchy.  He asked me if I wanted to hit his pipe, but fuck that.  I just made him give me a cigarette.  And then he asked if I wanted to make out with him.  Ugh, no.  And then I finally saw Taylor and Brian on the steps and - and I'm just so glad to be back with you guys!"  Who was this girl?!  Regardless, it was one of the best stories I'd ever heard from an eighteen-year-old skinny redhead girl in a black onesies bathing suit and a blue tutu.  And Matt was just jumping up and down, bouncing off the walls like a goddamn super ball.  He was in tears from laughter.  And so was I.  My sides hurt from laughing so long without a proper breath, but I couldn't stop.  None of us could.  The whole thirty-minutes of Monster's montage was ridiculous to the utmost.  And we loved her for it.

[stop]

But there was a new storming brewing on that midnight horizon.  An after-party.  And Monster wasn't coming.  She was on a group-imposed timeout under the watchful eye of dear Jenn, who was taking the rest of the night easy.  Captain Jack and his swash-buckling crew of merry men, myself included, were off, on to adventures unknown, pointing our compasses towards the city center and a little dance joint called Ruby Skye.  We took off on foot down the skinny park peninsula, the whole time Taylor and I talked madly, asking each other if we sounded cracked out.  We were headed east towards the city's soul and about a block or so down a taxi pulled over, and Conor and Dylan and Jack jumped in.

"Catch the next one lads!" said Conor hanging out the window.  "Driver!  To the Ruby Skye!"

The rest of us would catch the next one.  What the rest of us didn't know was that there wouldn't be a next one.  Not another taxi stopped for us in the next forty-five minutes.  Maybe it was because our ridiculous garments.  Maybe because we were still wearing sunglasses.  Maybe it was because Matt and Sam looked like two blonde-wigged trannie hookers.  Maybe it was because Cameron looked like a blue dot on the Megan's Law website.

"We're not pretty enough!" Sam would curse at the misting night sky after each taxi sped by.  It was really quite depressing considering the fact that Conor, Jack, Dylan were probably gallavanting around Ruby Skye like a bunch of giddy little school boys that got Lunchables for lunch instead of peanut butter sandwiches.  And what were we doing?  Getting rejected by taxi after taxi, pouting under one of those portable orange arrow signalers the city uses to to merge lanes for construction, and finally finding our way to a bus line that would take us to where we needed to go.  I would've been sad, if only I wasn't so awesomely high and entralled by the whole scene.  The bus was mostly empty, and the bus driver chuckled as we stumbled aboard and took seats near the front, giggling and swaying and moving in our seats the whole time.  It'd hit a bump and we'd bump.  The thing rounded a turn and we went falling into each other like a bunch of bowling pins on laughing gas.

Our stop was a couple blocks from the club, a nothing walk compared to the night's previous travails.  Still, we didn't make it without Sam getting stopped by a bachelorette and her friends and convinced to pose for a photo with all them while holding a giant clown-balloon penis.  To our wondrous surprise, the other boys were still in line at Ruby Skye.  They had gotten more drinks at Slide bar before (it was a bar with a slide entrance, no big deal).  We were reunited, and it felt so good.  Good enough for the last dosing of the night.  This time we all chomped down little capsules of white powdery Molly about ten or so minutes from the front of the line.  At the entrance, Uncle Jack got turned away because he was wearing shorts, not the long-legged attired required by such a pristine establishment.  It was awful news, but we were all really too high to argue, and the thing about that high, is that nothing really matters.  So Jack hailed a cab, tail between his legs, and hung up his yellow and green Brazil speedo a little earlier than expected that night.

The rest of us romped inside and made a right proper night of it, and to be honest, it wasn't nearly as fun as the day.  ATB was spinning. He's been around for a while, and the vibe was different.  You know, club-like.  And when I say club-like, what I really mean is mob club-like.  All button down shirts and cologne and huddled groups of menacing, older Asians and Eastern Europeans.  We still danced our faces off, which included blonde wig hand-offs and hair-flipping and jumping with our hands in the air because it felt so good.  But we were becoming deliriously tired, worn thin by the day, and I couldn't tell you how Taylor and I got back to Jenn's place because I don't remember.  I just remember trying to fall asleep on the couch in front of the television and all the late-night ESPN highlight reels looking like they were in fast-motion.  It was a trip.