Once in a Masonic temple in Rialto, Calif., a young man approached me in a dark room. The techno was booming throughout, and we were surrounded by young people wearing fairy wings and neon furry pants.
“Where’s your candy?” he asks, pointing to his piles of glow-in-dark beaded necklaces and bracelets.
“Oh, is this your first time to a rave?”
“I don’t have any.”
“Nope.”
He slides a bracelet off of one of his wrists and hands it to me. “Here. My name is Peter Pan.” I said “thank you” and smiled politely, not really sure if I heard correctly. Peter Pan?
That was several years ago when my boyfriend was still DJing at underground, often illegal parties, and until last night, I haven’t been to any illegal or underground raves.
At about 9 PM myself, my boyfriend, and his two friends, Jerry and Ryan, all pile into my car and head over the Golden Gate Bridge into Marin county. We have no idea where we are going. Ryan calls the info line in order to find out where the map point is located – some random spot where we are supposed to pick up a piece of paper from some random guy, so that we will be able to find the secret location. “Go to the Seven-Eleven,” the voice of the recorded message says. “There will be a guy standing near some pay phones. This is your guy. Get the map from him.” We had to get to this guy by 11 PM otherwise we were out of luck and wouldn’t know where the party was.
Shortly after crossing the bridge, we find the phones, and the guy, except we don’t know if the guy standing by the pay phones is “our guy.” Because, you know, it’s so uncommon to see random guys hanging around the Seven-Eleven pay phones on a Friday at 10:30 PM.
But he’s our guy, and we were able to get the “map,” which is really just a page full of text. “Continue on HWY 1,” the directions state. We do. We drive on the curvy, nausea -inducing road, yelling whenever we see a deer. ”Go until you see the white road marker with 11.0 on it. When you see this IMMEDIATELY begin slowing down. There will be a white gate to your left.” This is where we are supposed to park before crossing the highway. The directions warn us not to cross the road if there’s a car approaching, because it might be a cop. Once we traverse the highway, we follow a hiking trail into the dark, dark woods.
Although we have three flashlights between the four of us, they aren’t enough to compete with the blackness of the night that swallows us as we make our way down the narrow dirt path. To the left I hear the trickling of a stream, and I can slightly make out that if any of us were to lose our footing, we’d fall several feet down into the unknown.
After walking for five minutes, the bass of the music grows louder. We stumble into a clearing of trees and we can suddenly see. White circles of light swirl on the trees, the large boulder stuck in the side of a hill, and on the forest floor. The trees near the turntables are red. The moon peaks through the leaves of the canopy, but its no match for the white and blue rope lights and other lights placed on the perimeter of the clearing.
In the middle of the dirt dance floor, a man in a black lacy skirt, four-inch platform boots, and the hair on his head sticking up in pony tails, is dancing. He spreads his black and white stockinged legs wider than his shoulder width, and stomps the ground in time to the bass line. “I don’t want to be Peter Pan, and I don’t want to be in Never Never Land,” I turn and whisper into my boyfriend’s ear, although my whisper is more like normal voice volume as I battle the music.
It’s midnight, so he leaves me and wanders off to the DJ “booth” and waits to begin his mix. I stand, mostly alone, toward the back. One guy with purple and green glow sticks around his neck, who had been sitting at the base of a tree earlier, bobbing his head, decides it’s a good idea to climb the side of the hill to my right in which a large boulder lies. He disappears behind the boulder for half an hour, and while he’s gone, a large burly man moves the red dots of two laser pointers on the ground. These two red points of light, dancing according to his hand movements, are the only things that matter to him. It seems that as he’s in his trance-like state, he could forever be happy just watching these two red dots among the smell of pot, cigarettes and beer.
More people appear from the dark path from behind – some young girls dressed in their Hollister outfits. A skinny man walks up to me, a white bandana around his mouth, and asks me something I can’t quite make out. “Where’s tha booze?” I thought he asked. “I don’t know. I don’t drink,” I reply. “No. Pills. You want one?” I vigorously shake my head. He scampers off to take quad stacked E pills with his girlfriend. A big guy, probably in his thirties, is dancing, his legs going a million miles a minute in every direction.
It’s now 12:30 AM and the kid that took an adventure behind the huge rock slides back down the steep hill. He’s just in time to see a short guy with black hair slicked over his eyes swing balls of fire through the air. I turn around to watch, thinking “How stupid can he be? He’s going to catch the whole forest on fire!” He swings the chains with the fire balls at the end around himself, and over his head, where they almost touch the dangling leaves of the tree above. I’m amazed at his confidence as he circles the fire behind his back, that is until he catches his pants on fire. I’m just glad there was someone who was smart enough to be standing by with a fire blanket.
The crowd is thick at 1:30 AM, although there aren’t more than 30 people. My boyfriend zig-zags through the stumbling dancers, and joins me. Time to go!
Once again the night of the woods engulfs us as we return to the path in order get back to the car. A quarter of the way into our trek, we hear an animal in the bushes to our right. It sounds large, and it retreats from us. But then, we hear it coming back up the side of the hill – back towards us. “That has to be a predator,” my thoughts race. “A rabbit would have kept running from us.” I was so scared, my breathing became fast and heavy. All I wanted to do was get back to the “real” world. To get back to where my cell phone would work.
