Alien green lasers shot through the undercover darkness of a sugary-scented machine-made fog blanketing the warehouse space, the spot rented for the night’s rave in an industrial neighborhood in Boston. The “four-to-the-floor” house and techno music thudded in my already-overwhelmed ears, increasing from 135 to a constant 140 Beats Per Minute, BOOM! BOOOM!! BOOOOM!!! BOOOOOM!!!! on and on, repeatedly, never-ending, unstoppable, over and over and over again. On the dancefloor, I picked up confusing shadowy glimpses of bodies gyrating to the beat, but I was in absolutely no mood for dancing. It was all I could do to just walk around, feeling like a fish out of water, nervously taking drags off a lit cigarette, trying to calm and contain my anxiety.

As I paced, I peered at and inspected my wristwatch, the time barely visible in the blinking laser lights. In the last half-hour no spiritual awakening had overcome me, nor had any ritual conversion happened to me. I had washed down a quarter of the scored XTC pill 30 minutes ago with a swig of bottled water, then another one-fourth 15 minutes after that with even more agua, and yet I still wandered around the tame outskirts of the party, feeling so out-of-place lonely, like the only uninitiated virgin in the entire red-light district of Amsterdam. I flicked my still-lit cigarette butt off into outer space, followed its orange glow down to the floor, and ground it out under my foot before lighting up and chain-smoking another one. I was running out of drugs, out of time, out of water, out of cigarettes, and out of patience…

Admittedly, there was something there, an underlying current of elevated mood, stirring from the depths, as if something were ready to punch through the floor of my ennui and despondence, a muted sign that something was in store for me. I kept walking around the warehouse space, so as to stay busy and not seem like a loser. I had just taken another drag on my cigarette when, from out of nowhere, Sam suddenly appeared.

“Hey, man, I took half and I don’t feel anything yet!” I yelled above the noise, starting to wonder if he had sold me short.

But he stood by his goods, yelling back at me: “Just take the rest of it!”

Knowing that he wasn’t about to back down, and that I had no leverage over him, in desperate resignation I pulled the remaining half-pill from my wallet and—down the hatch!—chomped with vengeance on it. I involuntarily retched at the sheer bitterness of its purity, very glad for the last of the bottled water to wash all of the disintegrating particles out of my mouth and down my throat. I tossed the empty plastic bottle off into a corner of the stage, towards the stacks of speakers which emitted painfully loud melodies of fighter-jet sonic booms and the rattling of machine-gun beats.

Now that I had sealed my fate, for better or worse, like it or not, I parked myself off-center on the dancefloor, surrounded by sweaty hot strangers, all by myself in the middle of a crowd. I didn’t know where anybody was. I had lost touch with my crew, I had lost touch with my dealer, I was lost, lost, completely and utterly lost...

And then, amidst all the confusion, suddenly I sensed a sharp crack towards the back of my head, as if a wave of white-hot fire were sweeping upward from my medulla and through the layers of wrinkled cerebellum to the enveloping cerebrum, forcing me to suck in air deeply. I squinted inwardly as my brain began to cave in under the pressure, like a galactic supernova collapsing under its own weight, until my gray matter imploded completely under the force and then reverse-exploded outward, radiating white-hot Jesus rays in all directions.

I doubled forward to brace myself, hands on knees for support, and held my breath.

Wait, I can’t see!

In my hollow chest, my pounding heart thudded mesmerizingly and at one with the dance rhythm, the very same BOOM! BOOOM!! BOOOOM!!! BOOOOOM!!!! that had been so unenthralling and out of sync just seconds ago. A wellspring of pure joy began to inch way up to my neck, elevating to over my chin, until it contorted my lower face in a Cheshire Cat’s gleeful grin. An unbearably intense 30 seconds later, the tidal surge was replaced by a less extreme but more constant stream of chemical white-hot radiance. My vision returned, and I exhaled with a WHOOSH!!! and picked myself up, my hands-on-knees becoming a hands-in-air while I yowled wildly straight up to the ceiling and joined the rest of the revelers at the smackdab center of the crowded dancefloor.

The high perfectly cured my afflictions: visions of and longings for Seventh Heaven shot through me as my petulant irritability melted away into energized serenity, and my moroseness and sadness transitioned into delirious bliss. I skipped around the dance floor like a carefree youngster on a children’s playground, and regrouped with my now “Dealer-For-Life” in the main arena in front of the DJ booth, bear-hugging and high-fiving him. Sam lifted his hockey-mask off his face and guffawed silently in the ultra-loudness, the lasers making his sweaty pale face glow alien green in the subterranean seascape of that dark patchily lit warehouse, then wagged his finger, vindicated, all smiles now and all good, and yelled, “See? I told you so!”

*****