spank

I was walking to this party last night, the Spank party, not too far from my house, a five minute walk, down some desolate blocks surrounded by warehouses. The only people walking on the block, all white twentysomethings surrounded by emptiness, were headed in the same direction. I came upon this pack of drunk girls in their early twenties, five or six of them, all dolled up, looking like your quintessential fag hags. I was walking behind them and could hear their loud conversation about the cost of this party, about how they should go to Sugarland instead, wondering to themselves if it was going to be fun or not. They were walking slow, stumbling in that direction and I was determined to pass them. I was too stoned to try to walk at a slower pace than them. As I came past them, they seemed a bit startled. One girl asked me if I was going to this Spank party. We exchanged a few sentences back and forth about wanting to dance. She tried to get me to confirm her expressed thought that it was such a sketchy walk there, and while that would have been easy to do, that the statement had truth to it, something about these girls unnerved me, bothered me, and I said that I lived five minutes away. An awkward, "Oh...," followed by her explaining that they live in Manhattan. No shit.

I passed these girls, smoked my cigarette, and looked at the night sky, at this industrial scenery surrounding me. I enjoyed this walk there so much. It actually made me really romantic toward my neighborhood. There was this narrow courtyard entrance to the party. The doorguy out front told me to go into the courtyard and not smoke on the street, that they didn't want to draw any notice from the police. I went through and queued up at the bottom of a set of rickety metal stairs leading up to the space. The space was huge, the sound was amazing, and it really reinforced to me that warehouse parties usually blow other venues out of the water. I was really high, too high really for the purpose of being in this large crowd of people I didn't really know. Diego was somewhere in the midst of these people, the person I came to meet up with. I found him at some point and he hugged me, fell on to me, I could feel how drunk he was in his hug, how much of his weight fell on to me, how little resistance his body had to gravity. He did his thing that he does and flitted from boy to boy, taking the attention of anyone that would offer it. I remembered why I was continually frustrated when we were dating, that I could never hold his attention, that there would always be boy after boy for him to get lost in conversation with. I was stoned and awkward and despite wanting the safety blanket of a friend in this party, I always knew that the good friend thing to do would be to give him space and let him get his game on.

I danced to the music and really got into it so much once I got over my awkwardness of dancing by myself. I weaved my way through the crowd to the front, danced against the speakers, near some other freaks voguing it out. I had a ball and soaked my shirt with sweat. After an hour or so, the music became too repetitive. I needed more variation in these beats, wanted some crazy female vocals to kick in and take me there. Not spotting Diego or anyone else I knew, which was weird in such an insanely huge crowd - or maybe not considering the strobe lights and the generally drugged out vibe of half the crowd - I left the space, walked down those same metal stairs, through that same long courtyard, and out on to the empty street. That transition was beautiful in its abruptness- the huge crowd, the loud music, and a minute later it all gone, an empty street and silent warehouses on both sides of it, the occasional person either walking to or back from this party. It hinted at a lot, the magic contained everywhere, that all these quiet, nondescript places may hold treasure. The buildings I passed on the way home all had a majestic quality that old buildings often will have and I pondered their history and their intersection with my own as I walked home, beautiful splotches of gray clouds passing swiftly beneath the dark and clear night sky above them, stars bright and vivid.