10 February 2001

It's 11.55 on a Friday night, and Helena is sitting at her boyfriend's computer, being contemplative.

Helena's boyfriend, Norman, has a gig tonight: he is playing his guitar with a couple of Ritalin fiends at a keg party a few streets away.

Why is Helena not at the keg party with Norman?

Why, because Helena doesn't LIKE kegs, that's why.

Seriously, I'm no fun at parties. I'm just not. I can have fun if there are at least ten people I know, nobody's throwing up, nobody's ABOUT to throw up, and there's alcohol that isn't beer. Otherwise, I cower in a corner being contemplative.

This evening, at the keg party, I contemplated perception. And the human body. And drugs. And my fingers, which were peeling the filter of a Camel menthol into little pieces of fuzz. When I was done contemplating those things for the moment, I realized I needed to urinate, quite badly. So I grabbed Norman's guitar -- the good one, the one he wasn't using for fear of getting trampled by keg-partiers -- whipped out a tiny pair of scissors I've attached to my keyring, and made a beeline for Norman's apartment, at which I dropped off the guitar in the middle of the kitchen, and threw myself into the bathroom, after which I threw myself at the computer.

[The scissors was because my knife was stolen out of my coat pocket, and the idea of walking even two blocks with a gajillion-dollar guitar, alone, cute and harmless-looking in my dorky little Converse sneakers and dorky little white tank top, and getting robbed, raped, killed, and maimed didn't really appeal to me... Not, of course, that anybody's going to be afraid of a scissors on a keyring, but, as one keg-partier said: "man, do whatever makes you feel good, man."]

What makes me feel good is contemplating, at least right now. And urinating, although I think I'm all good in that area for now.

Silence. Solitude. The dim glow of a lamp on Norman's green desk. Some sheet music I can't read, a silent phone, an empty pack of Camel Lights... A couple of emoty Saranac bottles... This is a good evening to just breathe...

* * * * * * * * * * *

The last keg party I went to was in the middle of nowhere, and I mean that QUITE literally. The directions were as follows: take Cerrillos Road out to the highway and head north; turn left at such and such exit, turn right at the light; take the dirt road until you've driven past three cattle-guards; when you see the bonfire, you're there.

Three cattle-guards, my friends, means, roughly thirty miles, give or take. On a dirt road in the desert, where you have to go, like, two miles an hour or your car threatens to lock itself in your garage, write a suicide note, and turn on its exhaust. We Binghamtonians do not even know what cattle-guards ARE, and yet there I was, in the backseat of a car, heading out past three of them on my way to a keg party in the Middle of Nowhere, NM, popularly known as Diablo Canyon.

The thing about a party in the Middle of Nowhere is that the cops do not bust you. The thing about a party in the Middle of Nowhere, is that the cops CAN'T bust you, because their cars can't get out that far without croaking. It takes a special kind of car to make that kind of a trek. A Plymouth Sundance, for instance. Plymouth Sundances are apparently invincible; the one Brian was driving had, it was rumored, survived being driven into a river, and had also survived an eight-hour, hundred-and-thirty mile-an-hour journey to Las Vegas. Plymouth Sundances cannot die. Anyway, the thing about a party that will not be busted by the cops, is that you can do damn well whatever you want.

It didn't occur to me that this might not be the SAFEST thing in the world. The only thing that occurred to me was that I was with friends: Jane, Claire, Brian, and Damian, and that we were going to a party, where I could make new friends and have a beer or two.

We found Diablo Canyon. Rather, we saw it in the distance: a small flickering light about half a mile away. The canyon was U-shaped, as many canyons are, and in the "U," one could see half a gajillion stars in a black sky. Everything was utterly and completely black except the stars and the firelight. Where you didn't see stars, you had to assume there was a rock in front of you. The desert is pretty damned cool sometimes, lemme tellya.

We crawled under the fence, my posse and I. Jane and I led; Brian followed up. We walked and stumbled and dragged and crawled our way to the bonfire, which had been set in the canyon. The canyon itself was solid rock, and the floor was sand: real sand, not shitty kinda-sand, like in the city of Santa Fe.

I didn't know how to work the keg. I pushed on it, and tapped on it, and flicked it, and hammered it, and flung the hose around, and kicked it, and FINALLY got some stuff to come out. Most of it was foam, but at leas6t I'd gotten some beer, which was cool, even though I despised beer. (Brian later taught me to like beer one night with a couple bottles of Dos Equis and a long conversation about porn, Seattle, and "Wild At Heart.") I got my beer and went to sit by the fire.

Jane and Brian disappeared. Almost immediately. I don't know where they went, and I surely didn't know why. And I'm not sure I want to know.

So there I was, alone and sipping a foamy beer (Bud? Surely something nasty...) in the Middle of Nowhere, among fifty or so people I'd never seen in my life. WHERE do keg-partiers come from? Supposedly, these were all kids from MY college, and it wasn't a big school, and I worked in the freaking post office, so I KNEW everybody, but somehow, even though it was supposedly my classmates, I didn't know a SOUL. Until, that is, Damian showed up and began telling a little tale. Damian, who was maybe 5'7" and weighed 40 pounds soaking wet, was quite the lightweight, and had about half a swallow of beer before he was trashed enough to tell the following tale:

"...Well, I knew this girl, and we were both really young, like five or so... And she was really small, and she had a Barbie dollhouse, and she could fit inside it! So she took off all her clothes, and got inside it, and her cunt was like, right at where the door to the Barbie house was, so me and this other kid took turns poking at her twat with Q'tips until her mother came in and yelled at us and we weren't allowed to play with her anymore."

[At this, Damian seemed notably sad. Damian is one of exactly two people I've met from Oklahoma City, and both of them are wonderful, and sick, and strangely obsessed with vaginas and all their many functions... I believe it may be something in the Oklahoma City water...]

Directly after telling his Q'tip tale, Damian ran off.

Claire appeared, and was too trashed to be much fun. She said she was cold and was going home. She offered me a ride, but I declined, saying I had to wait for Jane and Brian so they wouldn't worry and spend the next three days searching the canyon for my dead body.

[It WAS cold, and I was a little miserable, but Claire, a fellow East-Coast Bitch, was a lot whinier about the whole thing...]

I waited for Jane and Brian to reappear. Now, I very easily could have gone up to somebody, introduced myself, and started a conversation, but keg-partiers don't WANT to have conversations, at least from my limited experience. THESE keg-partiers looked very much as if they might murder you if you attempted to talk to them. A bowl was passed around. Eight bowls were passed around. I declined. All I fucking needed was to get a bowl full of pot and PCP -- and with my luck, I would have -- in the Middle of Nowhere, NM, start hallucinating, and dive off the top of the cliffs. I was considering it anyway.

It was cold. I was alone. I had on a jacket, a sweater, and two shirts. I was sitting beside a huge roaring fire, among a hundred, two hundred people, and it was still DAMN cold. I decided to drink. I chugged my foam and got some more. I was still cold. I began to think about people who think it's a good idea to drink in order to warm up and end up dead of hypothermia. This did not help ease my displeasure with the world at large. I looked for Damian. Someone said he'd gone home.

Two hours later...

Jane and Brian STILL have not returned. Where is there to fucking GO when there is absolutely NO light? You couldn't see two feet ahead of you unless you were directly next to the bonfire. There was no moon, there were no city lights, it was pitch-black, and they'd managed to disappear among the rocks. I began to presume they'd died. I began to plan a rescue party. Finally, I was so pissed off that I began to plan a search party for their bodies so that I could find Brian's car-keys, drive myself back to Santa Fe, and go on happily with my life.

A fight broke out. There was a racial slur. Somebody got pushed. Somebody else pushed back. There was a sudden blur of motion, and somebody fell at the very edge of the bonfire. "Hey, man, hey man, HEY MAN, that's not cool, that's NOT COOL!" came a voice or two. I watched, invisible, from quite near where the guy had fallen. I guess a Hispanic guy called a Native American guy something. Maybe it was the other way around. Maybe it was two Hispanic guys calling each other things. I don't remember. In any case, it was really stupid. I looked around me. Suddenly, I was absolutely THE ONLY white person around the fire. The College of Santa Fe had like, maybe 5% minority enrollment, unless you count weird hippie kids from Nebraska who convert to Judaism in their first semester away from home and think they're Jewish. So, I don't know where all these people came from, because it certainly wasn't from CSF. THEN, I realized that maybe only half of the people around me were even speaking ENGLISH. And of course, no one was talking to me. Dude, I wanted to leave.

I chugged a third cup of foam. It was definitely some pretty raunchy beer, but all I wanted was to warm up.

Jane and Brian appeared. They looked unhappy. After all their time spent Somewhere In The Rocks, I would have expected them to emerge with huge grins, but they appeared unhappy and ready to leave. I said the "Our Father" perhaps for the first time in years, followed by "Glory Be."

Brian was drunk. Probably too drunk to drive safely, and CERTAINLY too drunk to pass a sobriety test. I didn't care. Neither did Brian or Jane. I told them about the fight and the guy getting pushed into the fire. We headed for the car. Jane was shivering. I wanted to grab both of them and snuggle into them, share their body heat, if they had any left. But then again, they'd ditched me, so I didn't really want to have anything to do with them, except, you know, maybe get a ride home...

So we staggered, stumbled, crawled, groped, and trudged our way back to the little blue Sundance with the little yellow origami flowers hanging from the rearview mirror.

I tripped over a fence. Jane tripped over a rock. Brian was not so lucky. Brian tripped over a cactus and immediately let out a howl.

I giggled. I couldn't help it. It was too Wile E. Coyote for me. There we stood, Jane and I, picking cactus prickers out of Brian's butt, until he could sit down in his seat without lodging the prickers permanently in his ass. He yelped a few more times, and I could tell he'd really done some damage, so I giggled to myself. I suppose if I emailed him and said, "hey, remember the cactus?" he'd laugh, but at the time, it wasn't supposed to be funny.

By the time Brian's pants were free of prickers, Brian's ass had gone numb.

Did you know that some cactus prickers are poisonous? And in fact, can cause numbness, and maybe paralysis, seizure, coma, and death? I wasn't really worried about that at the moment; I was just hoping Brian could still drive home. Luckily, he could, and the numbness wore off within a day or two. (And in the meantime, once he'd talked to the school nurse or someone, and had found out he wasn't going to die, I laughed hysterically about my friend's numb ass.)

Okay, okay, it's not that funny. And even though I was cranky and miserable and cold, I really was worried about Brian. I'm really not so heartless as to feel no sympathy for a friend's numb butt. Heh.

We drove back to town. Luckily, we drove at two miles an hour most of the way along the dirt road, because Brian really had had a few. Oh yeah, and on the way out, we passed a HUGE truck that had gotten itself lodged in the sand in the canyon. This was a big bad truck. This was a truck that drank testosterone instead of gasoline. It was stuck. The Sundance, however, made it out. If cars could be saints, that Sundance had performed enough miracles to qualify.

We went to Denny's. Where the hell else do you go after a party? Where the hell else do you go at ALL when you're a college kid in Santa Fe? OR a college kid anywhere, for that matter?

Jane ordered something weird. Jane ALWAYS ordered something weird. Cheese fries, key-lime pie, mashed potatoes, an English muffin, and a dish of hot sauce, or something to that effect. Jane was weird. Gahd bless Denny's. To this day, I cannot go to a Denny's without ordering SOMETHING weird in honor of Jane. Usually I just go with extra hot sauce and an English muffin. We didn't talk about the party. After all, Jane and Brian had MISSED most of the party, and I honestly didn't want to know why. I also didn't want to admit that I'd learned how to work a keg for the first time.

It was six or seven in the morning. The sun was rising. And as the sun rose, a ribbon at a time, a pain arose with it, its epicenter directly behind my ear. When, two days later, bloody stuff was coming out of my ear, I decided to go to the emergency room, where I was diagnosed with a double ear infection, probably as a result of exposure to desert wind and bad beer.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Norman and I arrived at the party this evening and were immediately greeted by a gentleman who introduced himself as Adam. ("Dude, I'm like, Adam.") He asked us if we were going to have anything to drink, handed us a couple of cups, and asked for "contributions" toward the "cause," (translation: money for the beer). Norman politely mentioned that he was, ahem, the entertainment.

"Dude! Dude! No, dude! I'm SO SORRY, man! I didn't know you were With The Band! Dude, man, I'm sorry! It's cool! What do you drink? Wait, are you Norman?"

"Yeah, I'm Norman; nice to meet you, Adam."

"Dude, I didn't know it was really you, man..." (In the background, Helena was trying not to giggle...) "Because they talked about you, man, but I didn't recognize you, man. They don't call you Norman."

"They don't call me Norman? Well, what do they call me?" (Helena cannot hold back the giggles anymore...)

Adam apparently forgot someone was talking to him and wandered off toward the beer without answering. It was at that point I think I decided, maybe once and for all, maybe just for the evening, that I'm not made for keg-parties. But for a little while, I chilled in a chair, sipping an orange juice and Norman's Killian's, which was quite a bit better than Bud, which, come to think of it, tastes the way I imagine a numb ass tastes. Not much happened. The band played, and they really did sort of kick butt, although I kept picturing the drummer and the keyboardist leaning over a wall-mirror snorting Ritalin, which caused me to giggle, which caused a kid with a KISS shirt and a bandana to look at me as if I was Helena-the-succubus. KISS Kid was licking his chops at me. I giggled harder. Giggling reminded me that I hadn't urinated for awhile.

And so, back to the beginning of the story: I grabbed Norman's guitar and sped back to his place, wielding a scissors.

It is 1.28 in the morning, and I'm not tired yet. Hungry, yes. Tired, no. I'm not in a contemplative mood anymore (nothing like writing a little tale -- heh, tail -- about a numb butt to ruin a contemplative mood), and I think, now that the guitar is safe and I'm no longer contemplative, I may try my luck back at the keg-party.

Fortunately, it's only two blocks away.

Love,
~Helena, official Friday-night dork-supreme*

"Yeah, baby, I'll watch your guitar... I like your guitar..."
"But not as much as you like my cock, right?"
"Right."
--stimulating conversation, pre-keg-party this evening...