SoMa Literary Review - Ten Years in a Trance: Prologue

Ten Years in a Trance: Prologue

By Cheri Lucas

I felt a familiar anticipation in the pit of my stomach and the nerve endings in my fingers as I followed the girl up the wide staircase to the bathroom. Two wobbling girls, leaning on each other for support, descended the steps. Cheeks flushed and pupils dilated, they stumbled forward. I maneuvered around them.

At the top of the steps, we turned down a long corridor.

"Where is it?" I asked.

"You've never been here?" she replied. I shook my head.

I followed her down a hallway lined with teenagers. Some were collapsed against the walls. Some crouched on the floor. Others were making out, their twisting tongues exposed. A pixie with pigtails and bloodshot eyes, staring ahead at nothing, sat alone.

The girl I was following looked about twenty, which I estimated from her doe-eyed, fearless glare. I hadn't asked for her name because I knew I wasn't going to see her again.

She leaned into me. "It's going to last until five o'clock," she said with assurance as we dashed down the hall. I said nothing and followed her into the restroom.

She stepped into the stall at the end of the row, and I followed her in. She locked the door behind me and placed her hand in her pocket. I heard girls peeing in nearby stalls, and others chatting at the sinks. She pulled her closed fist out of her pants, reached toward me, and dropped two pills into my hand.

"You need a bag?" she asked. I rummaged in my purse and slipped off the wrapping from my pack of cigarettes. I didn't examine the tablets—though noticed they were pale green, and one was bitten in half. I tossed the goods into the plastic.

"No, I got it." I twisted the opening, melted the end with the flame of my lighter, and shoved it inside my cigarette pack.

We left the bathroom, strolled down the corridor, and reentered the warm, dark core of the stadium-sized building, onto the dance floor where I'd left my friend Greg. Neon green lasers spattered light onto his impatient face in the distance. Our eyes met, and I recognized his inquiring gaze. I nodded my head. I had the ecstasy.

We met our friend Margie, and she flashed her VIP pass dangling around her neck to a security guard. She led us down a hallway, past dressing rooms where slinky girls in white mini-skirts zipped white boots up their slim legs. We entered a small room, and Margie hopped on a counter, awaiting her prize. I ripped open the plastic and exposed the pills under the bright light, accumulated spit in my mouth, and gulped the bitten half. Greg and Margie split the full one, throwing their heads back to swallow their portions.

"Here we go," I said.

After the bitterness dissolved in our mouths, Greg and I wandered outside. We sat against the wall, smoked and talked, and watched a guy who twirled a glow stick in front of his own face for forty-five minutes.

Later, we went back into the auditorium. We weaved around dancers who played with blinking, glow-in-the-dark toys. A layer of fuzz had coated my vision, and I stumbled over a step. We climbed and sat in a high section of bleachers, and faced the tiny silhouette of the DJ on stage. There were thousands of packed seats to our left and right, and a gyrating organism on the floor below, growing from the vibration of the music. "PAUL OAKENFOLD" flashed on enormous screens hovering above the stage.

My eyelids fluttered. I relaxed my body as a warm surge pumped in my chest. I looked at Greg, his wavy brown locks falling around his face, and he narrowed his eyes and smiled. We recognized the anthem, Three Drive 's "Greece 2000," that the DJ, Paul Oakenfold, mixed and blasted into the arena.

Greg nodded his head up and down. The break—the drop of the beat—was so close. He raised his hand above his head and threw it down as the song ruptured into a climax. The swarm went wild. Whistles blew. Glow sticks flew into the air. Margie waved her arms and swiveled her hips on stage. The lasers and spotlights went crazy, shooting out from different angles in the dark. Every perspiring face faced Oakenfold like a hypnotized soldier.

I didn't recognize anyone in this place, and I realized it'd been a decade since I first entered this world. It was different from what I remembered, but the sea of dancers that moved together as one, and this moment, was familiar.

"This song is it," Greg yelled.

"I know."

A few days passed, and I was still thinking about that night. That was September 2006 at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, one of San Francisco 's primary concert venues next to City Hall. It was my first "rave" in six years, although today's gatherings are promoted less by the label "rave" than euphemisms like "festival" or "conference." Like many ravers, old and new, I remember raves as "parties," and that party was different from the ones I used to experience. Still, I knew and understood that world, even though the on-stage spectacle of DJs and scantily clad dancers confirmed my suspicion: the rave scene of the Bay Area had evolved into a world with which I no longer identified.

But when I walked past teenagers strutting on the dance floor, I saw vestiges of my seventeen-year-old self in each of them, and I wanted to understand what had attracted me to this culture. These days, I rarely take ecstasy, but that night, I'd swallowed a half of a pill because the recklessness and fearlessness of those ravers enticed me. I wanted to remember why I'd been lured into this world ten years ago.

By four in the morning, Greg and I were exhausted, and we embraced near the entrance and said goodbye. As I walked down Grove Street in the chilly air, I realized I hadn't spent time with Greg like that since we wandered empty warehouses in Oakland and San Bernardino , away from this world "above ground." I reached my car, and my windshield was covered with colorful rave flyers. I brushed them off.

But then I remembered the thrill I once felt—the chills down my back—when I collected flyers. I remembered when being a raver was once all I wanted to be—when techno, ecstasy, and dancing were all I cared about.

I could still hear the pulse of the music from blocks away. I felt the tremble of the bass against my skin. I had no plans to go to another one, but I picked one of the flyers off the pavement, got in my car, and drove off.

I've crawled out of that world, but there are still times, like that night, when I survey a crowd and feel that recognizable yet inexplicable connection, just for a moment, to something exciting, something bigger than me, when the music reaches a crescendo, then slows down, and all that remains is a solitary beat, while the bliss—and the meaning of the moment—both pass. These days, I sift through debris floating within my memories to hypnotize myself back to those nights, to ponder, and try to understand, what it all meant.

Cheri Lucas is an award-winning print journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area hoping to maintain a living as a professional Twixter. A model product of the quarterlife crisis, Lucas is trying to balance her obsessive-compulsive traveling tendencies with a growing desire to stay in one place and fatten her savings account. In recent years, she has been unsuccessful.