The Drift

West Hampton, 2009

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I said I really wanted to go home with Dave and asked Alicia if she was offended. I wonder whether Jenn wanted to be in Dave’s car more than she let on. I wonder whether she would have said so if she did. I was so fucked up, in his car driving back to my house, that I ran my mouth off about Cliff, saying, “You want to know a secret, not because I want you to know as much as that I want to bond with you?” and he said, “Do you want to know a secret, for collateral? I had sex with Jenn.”  So fucked up that the next day at work when Dave asked how I’d felt when he picked me up for work that morning, I went off about Suicide Tuesday and how I was still fucked up- not fucked up like when I was in his car, but about as fucked up as when we were at the beach.  I laughed at simple things from time to time . I was sad when Dave left without me knowing, before Jenn even finished, and so I left too, before shift drinks, saying goodbye to Jenn for the real last time before she moved to California.  

There is one particular creepy, middle-aged, bald man who sits- or rather stands perched, even when he eats, though from behind the bar he appears level with the people sitting on bar stools- at the bar everyday, with whom I spend all my time talking whenever he is there. I wonder whether he prefers the corner spots near where the bartenders enter and exit because it’s where we pick up our drinks and it gives him a chance to greet us. He is a lawyer who specializes in international law and asks how my international development job hunt is going. He works at nearby Brookhaven National Lab, as do many of our regular customers,  in a hidden cluster of FOB intellectuals that has brought physicists including my high school friend Alex D’Masi (whom some might remember from his 2000-2004 tenure at Risley) out to this wasteland of wetlands and rock sand. The lab lawyer bar regular, who taught me the German word for God Particle, says the scientists call themselves gods and call him overhead. He spends his days on the phone with Paris and Zurich, negotiating international compliance for the work the US does with the new particle accelerator in France. He said CERN is located half in France and half in Switzerland, and I was like, wow people must think all the time about how someone somewhere’s job is a whole lot harder because the physical location of this institution straddles a national border, and that guy is you. The international compliance lawyer for a foreign physics lab, Mikey Avalanch, who used to be a coke dealer in Miami.

One of the girls told Mikey Avalanch that a couple of nights ago she took ecstasy for the first time, and I guess he makes inferences about the rest of us the rest of the time.  Two nights ago I met a bunch of the girls at Phil’s around 11, went back there, after getting off of work at 5, in the pink dress I wore on Slope day and the night I carried that giant pink picture frame from Ithaca through NYC up to Maine, and drank while we waited for some of the others to get off. Earlier that day, Dave and Eric were calling our plans “girl’s night,” saying they weren’t going to go, but Eric I think really wanted to. Guinn, the one who told Mike she took ecstasy, and who has (her words:) dated everyone in Shoreham-Wading River (she even dated Dave in high school) is now dating Eric. Eric is the coworker of mine who describes a band his own band often covers saying, “I went to their show over the winter, the one where Kirby’s boyfriend broke his-“ and by then I have usually cut him off and said it myself.  I thought of wearing shorts because Guinn said she was, and because in the photos my Mom found online of the bar we planned to attend, it looked like Girls Gone Wild meets Sigma Phi meets late-1990s Knitting Factory Raves meets MTV Spring Break. I wore the pink dress because I thought having a high, mock-turtle neck made it classy, even though it’s bubblegum pink micro-snake print spandex and I cut five inches off the bottom five minutes before walking out of the house.

We went to this place in West Hampton called the Drift, which opens once a week, Saturdays at 10, costs ten dollars to get in to, has drug sniffing dogs lined up along the cue of people waiting to get in, is owned by the mob, is the scene of known drug deals and drunk driving hit-and-runs ( including the near-death last week of three of Alicia’s and Dave’s friends, who got hit by in front of the Drift by the bouncer, who blew a .16 and right now is out on bail), is owned by the mob, and is next door to the old MTV Beach House, where they filmed MTV Spring Break.  The half facetious conundrum of a dress code reads “no hats/ no camouflage/ no bedazzled shirts/ no exceptions,” and bouncers confiscate glow sticks at the post where they check IDs.  We arrived to find there was no parking, a precious hundred parking spaces for VIPs only, and were told to go back to the neighboring barrier island and take a taxi over the bridge. We parked at the Beach Bar, where Kristy feebly flirted with the attendant to try to get a closer parking space, after being told she could park there if she was dating the owner. She flatly told him we were only parking there and then going back to the drift, and by the time we walked out he was threatening to have our cars towed.  We took Molly in the parking lot and scouted a cab for the five minute trip from East Quogue to West Hampton that can cost as much as $15 per head. The seven of us shared a van size taxi with boys from Ireland who came to work as waiters in the Hamptons for the summer. The one next to me was disappointed I wasn’t friendlier and it made me embarrassed. We paid five dollars each.

Past the wall of cops, waiting on line to get in, we danced and played with the glow sticks littering the ground, having been tossed over the balcony by the bouncers at the entrance. Amidst the packed crowd we managed to run into other friends from Phil’s, embarrassing themselves,  the bartender with whom I would be opening Phil’s the next morning, and flashes of friends, at first glimpse jumping and pumping their arms in the air with squinted eyes and screaming faces, then obfuscated by the crowd, then appearing again, feebly texting or trying to light a cigarette, then hidden, then half bent backwards shimmying as if they’d never left that spot, and they hadn’t, the crowd had engulfed and released them in gulps. Ifollowed Guinn in pursuit of a boy Phil Junior set her up with until Igot separated from all my friends and was unhappy for a while. I found one girl I thought was Ashlee, and yelled over the music, “Oh my god there you are!” and she smiled genuinely, deafly. When I really found Ashlee she was crying, standing between her on-and-off boyfriend and the boy I had seen her dancing with, who was now dancing with another girl.  

The Drift is as crowded as possible. All outside, all porches drenched in flood light. You can discern the faces of the strangers who rush you and grab your hips and try to kiss you. You can see the terrain of crushed beer cans and plastic cups. The girls dancing on the bars have a comical rather than sinister aura. The girls I know who go to the Drift all the time said they had never seen it so packed, that maybe if we got there before 1:30 it would have been better. I guess it was kind of nice to get constantly groped, in a way, guys would come out of nowhere and grab me and rub up against me and it would send me into fight or flight mode, they held me firmly enough that I had to struggle and use scared force to get away, but they always left me alone after I was free and on my way, just obstacles in a circuitous path around a game board. Maybe I kind of get off on it, on turning them all on. I don't mean to imply that these boys have standards, or weren’t drunk and high and contextually motivated when I say they never did it to my friends,  that I saw, only me. One boy stood with his mouth open as I walked by, then turned and held his arms straight out, palms up, gesturing at my ass, facing the crowd with a face full of shocked admiration, as if to say, behold. And I was in flip-flops and one piece of cloth I was barely even trying.

The floor of the Drift has all different levels so you feel like you’re either matted into a sea of people or looking down on one from above, and everywhere there could be a wall there is instead a bar with wooden palette barriers the bartenders use like tunnels to enter and exit without getting trampled. When I found Jenn we grabbed each other tightly and absconded arm-in-arm to find a drink.  Squished against the bar, Jenn found $20 on the ground, and for a second we looked around, as if anyone had a face or a name or a clue whether they had just dropped twenty dollars, and laughing like the stars shined just for us, we had instant free booze, we were young and in love, I commanded, “Buy me a drink!” and with a silent soundtrack screaming baseline nighttime, I watched her pay thirty dollars for our two drinks. One teenage bartender turned to show Jenn the back of his The Drift t-shirt, which says, with quotations, “I just work here,” (shirts which, I suppose,  keep a staff totally unable to go ten seconds without rubbing their hand across their nose, or to hear anything a customer says above the music,  indemnified against accidents) while he poured our $14 Dixie cups three quarters full of vodka yelling, “I don’t even really work here!” and then throws his head back and laughs, “I am so fucked up right now!”

Walking back to the central dance floor every person you pass pours their drink on you. Jenn and I found an enclave where we could smoke without burning strangers and she texted Alicia, who responded that she was having a terrible time and had already called Dave who was coming to pick her up. Jenn and I wanted to go, too. To my house, in two cars, to meet my brother’s friends who came to chill because we were alone in the house that week, to show my Wading River friends my bedroom for the first time, to see the view from the roof, to get a blanket, with grey ribbed fabric on one side and a bubble gum fleece and pink satin Nine Inch Nails appliqué, to lay it on the beach and line up on it four in a row and look at the stars for hours, to go to bed when Jenn and Alicia went to meet the other at Guinn’s house, to wake up, to get called by Dave from my front yard a few minutes later and taken to work.

I saw Mike Saturday night at Phil’s, while buying a drink and waiting for Guinn and Mary to get off of work ,and he looked me up and down and said knowingly, “I hope you’re not working tomorrow.” “I’m opening tomorrow,” I said pointing an extended finger at him while he moaned oooh nooo, “I’ll be opening this restaurant and feeding you lunch twelve hours from now.” Dave picked me up, we opened up, and Mikey Av came in for lunch. He said, “Not in your stripper Barbie outfit today?” I choked a little. He said, aaw, you’re turning red.  One of the afternoon bartenders said something about my dress. Then the other. A regular bar customer who saw me running once and wants to talk about it every time I work said something lewd but the bartender Adam intervened to say that I was “smokin,’” and that it was supposed to be a compliment. I mumbled that I wasn’t sure whether I should wear a tight pink dress to Phil’s but then caught myself and thought, no one cares what you wear, said I thought I could walk in for ten minutes and it wouldn’t matter what I was wearing, and Adam said, “No.” He said I turned a lot of heads the night before, and that every guy in the bar was looking at me.  A bartender sitting at the bar before his shift that night asked what we did the night before, and said he heard Eric had to come to pick us up, had to drive that highway as wide as the island supporting it out to flooded, crowded South Hampton at 5:00 in the morning. “He made the second trip,” I said, “Dave came and got some of us first.” “They both had a better night than I did,” the bartender said. Pete said something about my dress. Annie asked whether the dress caused me to “meet any boys.” Even two days later people were still talking about it. Phil Junior said, “I heard you were dressed like a flamingo.” Days later, over a drink on the back deck, in white thigh high stockings with little white bows, I said I should be more careful what I wear when I stop into Phil’s, that the not-even-half-as-revealing-as-most-dresses-seen-at-club-scenes pink dress had caused more of a disturbance than I imagined, and Dave said, “There was a bar full of hard-ons that night.”

I’m glad I saw the Drift but I think it’s the kind of place where one visit per lifetime is enough, the Hamptons hotspot it is. My friends went back the next Saturday, and I’ve been subjected several times to the recording on Dave’s iphone of Guinn and Mary wasted, getting scooped into the car by Dave and Eric, who came to pick them up at five, which actually is quite funny for a recording of a group of wasted people that doesn’t include yourself, and includes instant classics such as “I have a number one question to ask- are we almost home?” while pulling out from in front of the club, and Guinns continued insistence that she is wearing pants, though she was not, as Dave drives through East Quogue to get home from the Drift, because the bridge was closed earlier that night after a drunk bouncer hit three pedestrians in his car.