crab_traveler

Only people I’ve known who I’d say threw “ragers.” Every couple of weeks a few dozen people would crowd into their small apartment. Drink was taken in copious quantities, cigarettes smoked by the carton. At dawn the revelry was still audible, hacking in delirious death throes

Walking through the house without shoes was very much unadvised on account of the glass; the floor would remain sticky for several days. No evening could end without at least one catastrophic common-law-marital spat. Guests were often two or three degrees removed from the hosts

I attended two of these gatherings. In the first I sat and listened to the fellow and a guitarist riff and jam for a couple of hours. Honestly, they were really pretty good. Before that night I don’t think they’d ever met.

I remember him asking me at about 3 am one night if I knew where he could get some coke. Before I could answer he seemed to think better of it, making some unintelligible remark about a prior arrest and his visa

Even though the lady was the ostensible academic, the fellow would often dominate discussions. I’d never before heard someone unironically and emphatically use all of those Marxist terms of art, and even though a number of his historical claims were incorrect (my wife tells me),

I was still a little bit impressed by the whole thing. I’m not sure if drinking yourself to death in your early 30s while hanging out with a bunch of ostensibly wealthy 20somethings was really doing the work of so-and-so revolution,