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In high school, my english teacher liked to describe the great indignity I seemed to write with. She feared I was always looking at the world with a battered eye, and spoke of it with too bitter a tongue, and, "for such a sensible young man, I just don't understand why." We still write to each other.

My first year in Valparaiso, my friend asked me to escort her to her sorority's winter semi-formal. Even though she knew how much respect I had for our campus' Greek life, she thought I'd be a discerning date, someone that would keep his eye on her and other people, and report back with some integrity on the state of the human scenes at the little gala. Also, I wouldn't try to have sex with her at the end of the night, which, it seems, a lot of people get too anxious about.

The dance wasn't very fun. All the guys were too drunk to talk to, and if they weren't drunk they acted drunk. The cleaning staff for Casa del Roma, the venue for this affair, must dread the clean-up after opening their doors for the kids in our University because all we do is puke in their bathrooms, in the stalls, in the urinals, and fill their wastebaskets up with shit when the toilets get taken over by people passed out.

It's an impressive space—faux-glamorous, faux-Italian—with columns and a balcony area, and a dark cherry hardwood dancing floor, then vine-trellises, and cut-glass chandeliers. Jake Gatsby might cut-loose here. But it isn't a complete space. Usually, whoever is on the decorating committee for these events, they string up white Christmas lights, and billowing swaths of maroon fabric, because nothing quite catches your eye in the big rooms. All atmosphere, no ambiance; all expectation, no catalyst. And there is never enough privacy. To have an intimate moment, a grope or two, or get in fight, you have to take it to the parking lot. (But no one ever takes it elsewhere: formals, inherently, formulate a preposterous stage for the melodrama of good manners and fake smiles riven down their centers, so the guts can pop out, and coil around all.)

Dance halls must succeed only is much as they can make their captives anxious. It's implacable, uncanny, that a bus full of sorority sisters and their fraternity boyfriends, once peaceful, once so diligent at compromise and placation, air months-long grievances and secrets out on the dance floor. Two years ago, it was the vague hostility of rival lovers blooming through amaretto sours. Then someone dropped their champagne flute on the dance floor, and those girls who had relieved themselves of too-tight pumps, they got glass in their feet.

Such insanity—what triviality, arcane abuse, we will do one another when a transient location (that is, where you will only stay for a few hours) is filled with desperate intentions. Last night, after promising myself to never attend these ridiculous farces, I was feeling a lot more apologetic about my criticisms. So I said yes.

And it ended in tears again. But this time, I was mostly outside, out of contact, lying down on a concrete recreation of greco-roman ruins very exhausted from dancing and pining, but thrilled to be living through the drama of the night—a lesbian couples' outing; at least three people escorted back to campus, too drunk to talk; and a beserk ping-ponging of betrayals, accumulating then leap-frogging from one body to the next.

—

'Hey--hey guy laying on the concrete...?'

What.

'Hey--are you okay?'

Perfect.

'Yeah you are, guy-laying-on-the-concrete. You want to smoke?'

No.

'Your date ditch you?'

No.

'You drink too much?'

Could you ever?

'Ha, that's right man, that's right.'

I'm just looking at the stars. Trying to stay outta trouble.

'I hear ya, man, I hear ya.'

Nice and cool out here.

'Yeah, man, it's a real nice night.'

Yeah. I guess it really is.

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