Ever get to a club on a Saturday night, dance for hours and hours, socialize for more hours and hours, dance for still more hours, and then, even though the party is still going strong and the music is perfect just decide to leave? Me either.That’s why I thought my friend was insane when he suggested out of the blue that we should go home.
“Why?” I asked. “Because it’s late?”
“No,” he said. “Because it’s Tuesday.”
It’s so easy to lose track of time when the room is really energized. I can’t talk myself into going home to bed when there are hundreds of guys around me still having a great time, and not one of them has yet agreed to come home with me—that last item is actually a somewhat important element.
Even so, my suspicion is that a lot of guys stay so long at a club because they have not only lost track of time but also space, dimension, their equilibrium, and the pants they were originally wearing. Add to that the large percentage of those who have also lost the ability to blink, pronounce consonants, and successfully identify their own species. Therefore, I’ve determined that everyone who stays really, really late at a club is not so much behaving indulgently as they are acting responsibly: They’re refraining from operating a motor vehicle until they’re either totally back to normal or they’ve been able to recall where it is exactly that they live.
Of course everyone knows there is such a thing as “staying too long at the dance.” A sign of this occurrence can take many forms, such as when our mail builds up at our homes for so long that realtors begin the process of appraising the property. Another sign would be encountering other drivers when on one’s way home early on Sunday mornings. These other drivers are normally on their way to church and tend to view club wear and glassy eyes on a Sunday morning to be a sign of the work of Satan. Sometimes they throw holy water.
I suppose it’s okay not to sleep very much when out of town on a sort of “party vacation,” a long weekend where there’s a new party starting every nineteen minutes over the course of three to five days. It’s at these times when it’s important to have a reasonable plan or else you could end up missing whole calendar days just trying to attend all of the best events.
“All right, we’ll start out at Shangri-La, then head over to Xanadu, after which we’ll try to get into Zombie Zone, then, if there’s a good DJ, we’ll go to After Puke, or maybe the Dawn of the Dead Dance, then the Cardio Hemorrhage Party, or the Chemical Coma Club, and then the Respiratory Failure Event, and the Kidney and Liver Damage Mixer.
During these kinds of summer weekends, it’s not uncommon for guys to leave a club and be utterly stunned to discover not only that they’ve missed the entire morning, but that they’ve also missed Labor Day.
It’s no wonder some local clubs are still packed when the sun comes up. We’re systematically training ourselves not to notice little indications of time passing, such as general fatigue, the position of the sun, or significant glacier movement. Instead, most of us have modified our concept of time to be sensitive to alternative indications, such as: The DJ is so desperate for material that they are playing KC and the Sunshine Band, or; you abruptly realize that all of the club lights have come on and you’re lying in a pile of empty water bottles being hit in the head with a push broom, or; you’re being sexually propositioned by Barney the One-Armed Barback.
One solution I have is to wait to go out until late in the evening in order to enjoy the highlight, or “peak,” hours of the event. One advantage to arriving late is that you won’t have to worry about being on the guest list as there will not be any line, with the exception of one person who cannot understand why his grocery store club card cannot be accepted as legal identification. One disadvantage, though, is having to park farther away from the club itself, such as in Argentina.
When I arrive late at a club, I won’t spend quite so much time getting schnocked. When proper planning like that is made, it’s far less likely that I might behave inappropriately by perhaps getting on top of something to dance, only to realize that I’m in the parking lot. Which wouldn’t be so bad if had been able to locate my pants.
What I do it this: I sit lazily around the house and don’t even begin to get ready to go out until Saturday Night Live is over. That way, I’ll arrive at the club smack in the middle of the prime of the evening when most of the guys have not yet had enough intoxicants to begin vomiting on each other—a significant advantage to arriving while still sober enough to move quickly.
Be all that as it may, it’s still a good idea to get home before too much time passes; Sunday’s T-dances normally begin around 4:00 PM.
Novelist Joshua Dagon is the author of Into the Mouth of the Wolf, The Fallen, and Demon Tears. For more information, please go to www.joshuadagon.com. To contact Mr. Dagon, please e-mail him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
