The rain slammed down so miserably hard on the club’s back porch that all the people doing drugs had to crush themselves against the wall to protect their inebriants. Pints were tossed back, whiskey-drinks were inhaled greedily through straws, stoags flared up as they were lit, joints and one-hitters got passed to whomever held out two fingers. Molly was pitched down throats and coke was sprinkled onto the back of hands for bumping.

It was Saturday night at Cabaloosa’s, a small club in New Paltz. The ragers present were the hardcore ones, the weaker variants having been filtered out by the weather. The others were home tonight, maybe, watching a movie or doing something more logically congruent with the downpour.

But the people at Cabaloosa’s tonight had prevailed. Partying isn’t about logic anyway; that’s why they call it getting fucked up. They had called cabs, sprinted the mile in the rain, driven drunk anyway.

And oh, how it was worth it. The bass amped you up like amphetamine bumps as you strode to the club’s door, walking through slices of laser-beam that occasionally got lost outside and scanned around, lonesome, before they found their way back in. You yanked open the heavy metal door and the sound and the lights and the humidity and the joyfully schizing auras rushed out and enveloped you all at once because they were one thing.

I love dancing, and am exceptional at it…really just top-tier. Cabaloosa’s is the only proper club in New Paltz, so I go there once a month or so. Unfortunately, none of my friends hold the same passions. Or they complain about Cab’s itself. ‘Oh, I’m not going THERE,’ they’ll pretentiously bitch, ‘everyone’s like 17 and just make out all night.’

But pubescents making out in public has never stopped me from doing anything in my life. Not once. Neither has not having anyone to go to a club with, or getting vaguely judged for wanting to go to the club in the first place.

So I walked into the jungle alone. There were only about 100 people there, which is probably the amount that the fire code actually allows, but I’d been there nights when the attendance was triple this.

You were supposed to dress as bizarrely as possible for this particular show, which consisted of a series of Dubstep and Drum & Bass DJs, but people dress pretty crazy to go to Cab’s anyway, so it was impossible to tell if the message was received. ‘Or,’ I thought, looking around, ‘perhaps the flier said ‘scandalously.’’  A jacked guy with no shirt rolled his shoulders past me, his partial nudity seemingly justified by the vague body paint he had streaked across himself. I saw a petite blonde cocking and stretching her hips to the beat. Her midriff was bear, and looked like something Michelangelo crafted one night when he was horny. A girl danced on the stage wearing nothing but a thong, nipple pasties and body paint.

I stood in the middle of the dance floor for a couple seconds, letting the beat make its way through me. When it came out my other side, I started swaying loosely, and was in high-octane dancing mode a few seconds later.

I’ve never approached a random girl to dance, and always turn away when a girl approaches with that intent. Dancing is a personal experience for me. That doesn’t mean that I don’t WANT to stride up, pelvis-first, when I see some dollop of cute swaying her hips. I was thinking this while ogling a curvy, short-haired girl who was dancing behind me.

Dancing is a ‘personal experience’ for you? That doesn’t even make SENSE. Maybe you’re not approaching her because you’re horribly phobic about rejection, and the uninhibited you would be grindin’ on some CHEEK right now.

‘But walking up to someone you don’t know and rubbing your dick all over their backside is so CREEPY,’ I thought while dry-humping the air to the beat.

‘Well, here’s my question,” interjected a third voice. ‘What happens if you get an erection while grinding? Is it like, totally unacceptable, or is it completely the opposite, and if you’re not rockin a semi, the girl’s like ‘Oh man, I must be having a bad ass day’ or something?’

Before this increasingly Schizophrenic argument could be resolved, I turned back to see a guy latched onto the short-haired girl’s backside. It looked like he was trying to cover as much of her surface area as possible. He wasn’t even in the frame when I had looked over 45 seconds before, so there must not have been a very long conversation before this.

Even though the Town and Village of New Paltz is 55% female, and the college, where a plurality of the people at Cabs were from, is almost 2/3 girls, the majority of people at Cab’s were guys — where there are scantily-clad women dancing, guys will creep.

A guy was yelling into a mic about all the ladies getting on the dance floor. He wasn’t having much success, so went for a more aggressive approach.

“Alright! I want threeee ladies…three ladies to get on the dance floor for a TWERKING CONTEST!”

Everyone just kept on dancing regularly, so he repeated himself, this time with added incentive.

“LADIES!…I want three of you on the floor RIGHT NOW for a TWERKING CONTEST…the winner gets…”

I forgot what he was offering, but apparently it wasn’t worth it.

He tried a different angle.

“WHAT GIRL SHAVED THEIR PUSSY BEFORE COMING HERE TONIGHT?”

“YEEEEEEAAAHH!” A girl responded.

“YEAH! There’s one! Getting it nice and CLEAN for the show tonight…fukkin LOVE IT. Alright…THREE GIRLS…”

I went to the bar for water, tipped the bodice-wearing bartendress a dollar. I heard a whooping swell from the floor and scurried over.

I don’t know if the girl on stage had flipped up her skirt or had just taken her pants off. She had her hands planted on the wall and was waving her ass to the crowd. Another girl was sitting on the edge of the stage in front of her. As I watched, the be-thonged girl dropped her bare ass down onto the head of the seated girl, and started rubbing it all over her hair. The guy on the mic was ecstatic.

Any girl that wasn’t in actual physical contact with a guy was being scanned by every other guy in the club for a way in; I could feel it, and I’m sure the girls could. Guys would walk up to any girl unattached and throw game at them. I’m actually assuming they threw game. I never actually saw this part of it. I just would see the guy staring at the girl from afar, then I would blink and the two would be dancing the humpity-hump, as if the less-interesting part of the scene had been edited out.

I bumped into a guy I knew from back-when while getting a second glass of water. He was a firefighter now in Bloomington and was there with a couple of his firefighting buddies after dinner at the station. We yelled at each other over the bass for a bit. His friend walked off, and, literally seconds later, he was in his shirtsleeves, chatting up a lady. He scooped her onto the dance floor.

“Jesus…that was quick,” I remarked. (Was I jealous?)

“Yeeeah. He’s good with the women.”

Towards the end of the night, I dodged out to the back porch to cool down; it looked like I had just gotten out of a hot tub. I saw my friend Frank n’ Fries, who was a bouncer at the club.

“Yo, what’ve you been doin tonight? You workin?”

“Nah, just been here and upstairs at my place, doin drugs.”

“What kind of drugs?”

“Molly and Coke.”

Some nearby dude perked his ears at this comment and edged over. He apparently also knew Frank n’ Fries. It turned out that the dude had misheard what Frank n’ Fries had said, and wasn’t edging up to get in on some yay-o action, which is what Frank n’ Fries had assumed was happening.

“I mean, I know I probably do too much coke,” Frank n’ Fries said, his hands out concedingly, “and I’m not trying to be hypocritical, but I was all gonna be like ‘no,’ if you asked for some.”  Apparently The Edger used to have a problem with coke, at any rate a problem with coke worse than Frank n’ Fries’. He admitted that he’d done a little earlier. Fries looked supportively concerned, and said again how he might do too much coke, a little too much, and he didn’t like being hypocritical, but…

Frank n’ Fries’ girlfriend walked out of the heat of the club and up to him.

“I’d like you to meet my fiancé,” Fries announced, taking her hand romantically.

“Wait, are you being truthful?” I asked.

“Yep!” Fries looked happy.

“Is he being truthful?” I turned to his girlfriend, just to confirm.

“Yeah.” She stuck out her hand, revealing a thin ring.

It wasn’t one of those bullshit engagements either. They had set a date and everything. They met while Fries was working at Cabaloosa’s.

This actually wasn’t that strange. Because if anything had been imprinted on me throughout the night, it is that Cabaloosa’s is for lovers.