LOVE STORY WITH CLOSING DOORS AND WINDOWS

The love story in The Last Rave is a warning.

But a warning for who?

From a gender perspective it’s a warning for women who want more from their guy.

Turns out some guys have bigger problems than women who want them to want more with them.

As a piece of writing in The New Yorker it makes the standard of excellence the magazine is known for?

All of the writers presented in each week’s issue are notable for their publication history.

Emily Witt is no exception. She even has a wiki page.

Witt is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Cambridge. She also graduated from Columbia’s graduate school of investigative journalism.

So she graduated from under-graduate, post-graduate, and is a graduate school graduate.

She’s done a lot of graduating. She’s good at it.

What else is she good at?

Partying.

On Friday night, before the party, I put a single drop of LSD into a glass of water. I drank half, and Andrew drank the other half.

In the end, he brought his sunglasses, keys, wallet, phone, and vape pen, and some ketamine. It was almost 2 a.m. To gather our thoughts, we did two lines of cocaine.

The bar was full, the dance floor frenzied. We ordered shots of tequila, danced, and stood around gossiping with friends.

At 3:30 a.m., we went outside and caught a car to the rave.

I smoked weed to turn up the acid.

I liked the day after a party as much as the party itself.

We would spend the day sleeping, having sex, watching television, drinking Gatorade, competing for the cat’s attention, and ordering Chinese food. All three of us—me, Andrew, and the cat—loved a day of being extremely lazy in bed.

It was one of the valued principles of our little family.

 

Those are excerpts from a longer story. I left the writerly parts out, the observations, motivations, and characterizations, to focus on the good shit, the drugs.

 

Our Little Family Love Story

I’m not a licensed marriage counselor, but I’ve been to more than a few over the years.

The husband rule is this: ‘if the wife wants to go to marriage counseling, you want to go to marriage counseling even more.’

With that enthusiasm, we met, we talked, and we all felt better.

I didn’t ask, but the marriage counselors had to feel better about not seeing some guy trying to help him do a better job.

 

We had fights that could get vicious, often about his daily cannabis habit and the frequency with which I had to travel for work, but we usually made up quickly afterward.

In the past year, we had started discussing having a baby.

 

Let’s get started:

Live it up while you; find your limits and push them; join with a group of friends and push more.

Look at the relationships around you that grow and shrink so you’ll know what’s going on with the growth and shrinkage in your own relationships.

Do the people who get high together, LSD, cocaine, weed, and tequila high all night, stay together?

I’ll break it down. No.

If your love story partner has a eye-dropper for a bottle of liquid LSD, and it’s not 1970-1980, I’d be wary.

And why a glass of water? Come on, find a sugar cube, hippie, or some blotter paper.

Besides, with a glass of New York tap water you might have unexpected side effects.

Do casual trippers have eye droppers full of acid, or that more a dealer’s deal?

Same with the cocaine. Do you share two lines of coke each, or two between you?

From careful research, 1 + 1 = 2, 2 + 2 = I forgot how many lines of coke we hoovered up, but one more can’t hurt.

Don’t forget the ketamine.

(Trade Names: Ketalar, Ketaset, Ketajet, Ketavet, Vetamine, Vetaket, and Ketamine Hydrochloride Injection;
Street Names: Special K, K, Kit Kat, Cat Valium, Super Acid, Special La Coke, Purple, Jet, and Vitamin K)

What happened to the party favorites of the past, the cross tops, the reds, the quaaludes; the uppers, the downers, the spin arounders?

Where’s the guy whose words lag behind their speed-racing mind but they’re trying to keep by talking as fast as they can; where’s the woman who sounds like she’s talking with a three pound tongue?

Where’s the horse tranquilizer, the peyote; where’s the mushrooms, the Molly, the amyl, and inhalers?

Where’s the cough syrup, bitches?

 

The Harder They Fall

The Last Rave is a take on the effects of the covid lockdown on people living in tight quarters, people who don’t know one another as well as they thought, people who are slip-sliding away from each other.

It’s long and thoughtful, maybe too long and too thoughtful considering the premise, but maybe that’s the drugs.

The rave boy cracks up, rave girl tries to fix him, a love story as old as raves.

What happens in the end? The usual moving on:

 

I was surprised how much comfort I found in solitude. Now that the whole thing had ended, I wondered what I had been doing all those years.

I never looked him up again. He receded into the world like someone lost in a crowd. He would know people different from the ones we had known, and do different things.

If I didn’t look for him, he would no longer exist, so I stopped looking, and my life took on its own character once again. The rest of it now stretched before me.

 

Now he’s just somebody that she used to know?

 

Now and then I think of when we were together
Like when you said you felt so happy you could die
Told myself that you were right for me
But felt so lonely in your company
But that was love, and it’s an ache I still remember

You can get addicted to a certain kind of sadness
Like resignation to the end, always the end
So when we found that we could not make sense
Well, you said that we would still be friends
But I’ll admit that I was glad it was over

 

Aging out of bad behavior is hard, but why not get it figured out and find some boring chucklefuck who likes to explain wine and terroir from grape to grape.

Move to the suburbs, get fat, and complain about your kids not getting playing time in their team sports.

Join a church, however that works, and show some community love and never under any circumstances talk about your wild past.

Or?

There was no social world to replace the one I had lost, just a shuttered city and the relentless replay of the summer in my mind. I had no plan, just a need to get out of town.

Girl On The Run.

I’ve met a lot of girls on the run.

My perfect date in my single man days? Apartment living women in my building who were leaving town.

I met a woman who was passing by once and we struck up a friendship.

After I asked her to marry me a few years later, I broke up with her in a case of cold feet.

She was still passing by and had a plan for the rest of her life before we broke up.

And I wasn’t part of it?

Instead of doing like Emily Witt and yearning for reconciliation, begging me to take her back under any conditions, my girl knew a waste of time when she saw one.

So my plans changed, and in a shocking development, I begged her to take me back.

I didn’t want her to be the one that got away and be somebody that I used to know.

Breaking up is never easy. Just ask Joyce Maynard.

A love story is never a straight line.