In Santa Cruz, Thursdays meant one thing, especially in the fall when the school year was still young. Well, maybe make that two things, but they were very closely related. One, if it was Thursday, that meant it was 80's night at the Blue Lagoon, this seedy dive bar at the sketch end of Pacific Ave past the Catalyst. And two, if it was Thursday, that meant it was almost Friday so we might as well get lit like a Roman candle off cheap beer and take shots of tequila, competitively, before trying to stumble down to the bars and dancing away the night to 80's nostalgia. To those classics we all knew and just might have been conceived to. After Lovefest, that little redhead Monster had joined our ranks for this weekly event because even though she was only eighteen, her fake ID always seemed to work, and she always worked it, no matter how many shots of tequila deep she was. The salty dogs at King Street lived a mere five minute walk from downtown so we'd always congregate there for the race-drinking, twelve to fifteen of us on any given Thursday in the living room drinking Simpler Times and Red Oval in between shots of Jose Cuervo. Or Hornitos or Cazadores if we were lucky. Or Sauza if we were unlucky. At least we had the wherewithal to always have limes handy for such occasions, such days like Thursdays.
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Salt too. It didn't get us any less drunk, it just made it go down easier. Hell, maybe it even got us more drunk. But whatever, that was the idea wasn't it? And it certainly worked. As soon as 10:30 hit we were all snaking our way across Mission St and down the stairs to downtown, or at least we were trying to. Maybe more towards 11:00 a lot of times. Still, we always managed to get there, to Pacific. Past the Red, past Motiv and the Catalyst and down into that hippy-bin the Blue with it's old, wood bar and pool table. And in the back there was glass on all the walls of the dance-floor to make place look bigger and swankier. There was even a tiny stage on the far side. It wasn't a very high stage or a very deep stage, and we usually found our way towards it before too long because there was just nothing better than being sloppy drunk and movin' and twistin' on a dim-lit stage to old 80's dance tunes. If you stood in just the right place, the AC would hit you right in the face, right there at the edge where the stage steps down. And whenever I felt it, I'd close my eyes and throw my arms up, swaying, and shake my head and bounce on the bass with my whole body twisting. Every limb stretched for joy and all the day's worries and pains faded because the dancing and the friends were too fun, and our choice moves would never waiver and always seemed to attracted the silliest of companions and pretty faces. We made it a regular thing, and everyone else did too. Everyone we knew who liked to go for broke and dance drunk with drunk girls up against the glass or spin them under one arm. Or just dance at one another with silly dance moves we knew looked fly. Super fly.
Sometimes Monster wore her mother's old onesie with the nylon stirrups and the shoulder-padded denim jacket part that buttoned down half-way. It was still nice out in the fall so if it got too hot, she'd pull down the denim half and tie the arms tight around her waist and dance in her zebra-striped bra. She danced hardest. She didn't always make it all the way though, and one night she didn't, and had to take a piss on the way back while we were all walking so she pulled off her onesie to the ankles and popped a squat in a corner of the civic center entrance and let it go. Some ten of us stopped and waited for her, and she said in a loud drunk voice, "Hey, we should really do some more drugs someday! Like the molly kind!"
"Or the acid kind!" I said.
"At the King street!" said Max.
"Down."
"Yup." And everyone looked at each other with silly, dumb smiles and nodded in agreance, and already from that very moment, there was anticipation building and excitement.
"This Saturday?" Grant threw out.
"Can we get the stuff by Saturday?"
Conor scratched his chin, smiling, and mused, "Oh, that shouldn't be a problem, not a problem at all."
"Epic." We all jumped and hollered on that side-street Church until a police car slunk by and stopped in front of us while Monster's panties were still down. She got up quickly and after a short talk with the officer, she was let go, and we all promised to get her home safe. In the morning she woke up in Matt Swartz's closet bed upstairs at Western and vommed all over his pillow and almost his face.
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But that's something quickly forgiven and laughed off. Just never forgotten. Ever. It's something that's smilingly remembered forever. Something like that drug extravaganza, the molly and acid escapade that went down at King Street that weekend. We got the tabs and the powder Saturday afternoon, picked up some capsules at the Herb Room on Laurel, and poured the two grams of MDMA out on the glass of a framed meshed portrait of Tupac and Prince so BB could cut it up and divide it out into twenty little baby mounds. Then Minh would scoop them each up with a cut-open straw and capsule them. They were quite good, probably because they were both science majors so measuring stuff out and scooping with a scupula just came naturally.
The tabs we kept on ice. And that was to be a Western thing. Just me and Boom and Conor and Matt Swartz were taking that acid train to lala land. Everyone else took the molly route, but the trek was all the same. We all gulped 'em down, the both houses, after a countdown in the King Street living room.
"3... 2... 1..."
"Whelp. There's no turning back now."
"Oh, boy!"
"I'm excited!"
"This is going to be ridiculous." We cleared the coffee table out so we had space to dance in front of the television. The girls blew up balloons and put up streamers and tinsel everywhere, hanging them from the ceiling.
"Oh, pretty," said Dylan in the voiced he used to talk to Lizzie.
Then Grant had an idea. "Oh! Wait, I think I have something!" And he ran up to his room and came back down with a blue light-bulb and a box of glow-sticks. "It's a blue light," he said holding it up.
"Well, no shit, Sherlock."
He replaced the ceiling light in the living room with it, and the girls adorned it with a crown of tinsel, and when he flipped the switch back on the mood was markedly different. My eyes felt like they were laying back in lawn chairs. It was that kind of relaxing light that remained dark and seductive while still illuminating everything. It was dance floor lighting, and Grant plugged his computer into the television so that his iTunes was playing dirty, electro-dance music through the home theater system and the visualizer was displayed on the big-screen.
"Whoa, Richard! I'm not even high yet!" Matt got excited and popped open the box of glow-sticks, cracked them, and threw them all into the air yelling, "Here you go you fuckin' Richards!"
It was raining glow-sticks, and we all grabbed some and made ourselves crowns and tiaras and wristbands and elaborate necklaces of glowing green and yellow and blue and purple and pink wonder. "Is anyone feeling a little funny?" I asked.
"Hmm." There was a ponderance throughout the crowd, and everyone sat for a second, thinking inwardly. "Not yet," came one answer.
"I don't think so..."
"Wait! No..."
Maybe I was just farting in the wind at that point. Maybe it was just the expectation of what was to come. But we needn't have worried, because come it definitely did. Like a goddamn thunderstorm. Like the money shot at the end, and in the next ten minutes we'd all lost our minds. Not quite departed from reality, but certainly free and forgetful of its stresses. Everything that mattered was immediate and in the present, not the week past, nor the week approaching. We were just prancing that acid-molly hippy dance, the twenty of us in the living room, frolicking through the tinsel and massaging the balloons, kicking them up off the ground. It was a mind-racing riot in the blue light, and TV screen kept melting and swirling in some vortex abyss of rainbowed colors. It was wild and overwhelming, but we all kept each other grounded and laughing uncontrollably, especially us acid kids. And thank god for that, because that's something not too difficult to loose yourself in when you're all alone. It's easy to the untrained mind when the feeling's still foreign.
I was getting the grip of it though, and the lights from the glow sticks streaked through my dilated eyes as we danced. Others began to trickle in as the hour crept closer to midnight, friends who had gotten the memo. They joined our wild rumpus and meshed seamlessly, so that the group was just one dancing entity that kept growing bigger and bigger as the night progressed. Spliffs and blunts and beers, and Carnivale-esque masks and face paint came out of nowhere, and we reveled in everything, high and excited and in love the lives we were living and every friend around us. Time didn't stop or slow down so much as to just didn't matter anymore, and that night went on forever until it was over, and we were all laying in a dazed, face-painted heap on the living room floor, smoking spliffs and rubbing each other. Monster was in awe, with her shirt off, dragging her fingers back and forth from bra to waistline. Dillon was still up dancing because, well, as he put it, "I can't stop, not now. Just a few more songs."
They were all slow songs at that point, but he just kept rage dancing with that one-two step and his arms moving and his eyes bugging out of his head. He might've gone a little overboard. Not seriously, but in that silly way where he was sucking down water and beer like breast-milk mid-dance. And me? Why, I think I hit it right on the head, and I just laid there on my back with my eyes closed behind my sunglasses, smiling as BB ran her hand through my hair on repeat, as she did with Grant's. Sleep had lost it's way though, and wasn't even close yet.
