Wet Wonderland

A sprawling story of friendship, madness, and cosmic adversity in an upside-down Wonderland that I think I overheard at a party once.

 ​​One fateful St. Patty’s day a few of us piled in for the latest Insomniac Wonderland shindig in San Bernardino.

We rolled out from the AV on the 138, cruising beside the aqueduct under an uncharacteristically cloudy sky. These were mean, misanthropic clouds, soaring past like a hostile army marching ahead to mass at our destination. It was an ill omen.

Tyra was driving her hooptie, a late 90’s magenta sedan with no make or model besides Tyra’s Car. The weather was bringing Tyra down; this was a rare mid-semester break and she was determined to enjoy a day without neuroscience. She begged the clouds to clear. Ten thousand other kids were likely offering the same prayers as they descended from the woodworks of Southern California.

Miki sat in the front. She was the manager of the Palmcaster Cinnabon, and every hour or so she would suddenly start talking to one of her bun girls on the phone. There was no audible ring, and her underlings needed frequent coaching, so she launched into random conversations and it took a minute to figure out if she was talking to someone in the car or not.

Lucille and I sat in the back, Lucille assembling kandy art with a big bead kit on her lap, me deeply considering the back of the mauve-and-greyhound-hair upholstery (I always snuck a weed hit in my driveway before a trip. I’d be toast all the way to the little restaurant on the mountain ridge that separates the AV from San Bernardino County, where I’d remind everyone that my family ate there once for my great aunt’s birthday when I was a kid).

The details might not be entirely accurate. Lacking the benefit of photos or gratuitously unforgettable moments, I might estimate details that are highly probable composites of similar experiences. If the grand tapestry of our adventures has a few threads loose, well, you can still make out the pattern.

What is a sure bet is the radio tuned to an unbroken stream of colorful pop trance and big room cheese, and Lucille busy in her vast kandy bucket. She’d acquired scores of the little bracelets from the events we’d been to in recent years. She made some new ones for us and some to be exchanged in deep moments in stage crowds or portapotty lines or on the grass with the rollers.

Despite the clouds, the hype train was on the tracks. The lineup had dropped on a drive home from Vegas six months earlier, and I remember Lucille read off names like Magnetic Man and Andy C. Now here we were, charging back to the NOS—a venue where only vibrant sunshine and flawlessly produced massives could exist.

We landed at Subway around noon. The place was already circulating with costumed kandy kids and fairy folk, but the real fun was watching the muggles frown over their sandwiches at these characters, unquestionably thinking another goddamned rave.

We hopped over to the Knight’s Inn, our eternal base of operations. The Knight’s is cheap, it’s a fifteen-minute walk to the NOS, and in those days there was a Denny’s in the parking lot. We got there early; the more time you spend in the motel, the sillier the evening’s outcomes.

​And so we sat around eating sandwiches in the dark and watching TV and summoning our courage. I was still as toasted as my sandwich, but I cracked the first Joose and drank it with my food like a soda. It would be a number of years before I took to heart the lesson that drinking all afternoon in the motel does not necessarily provide one with reserves of electrical hype energy to burn into the evening, but my twenty-something self was capable of powering through conditions that would leave my thirty-something self in the gutter.

I plugged my ipod into the portable jambox and played that fire. The girls started getting ready, a process they’d gotten down to a clockwork three or four hours of makeup and costume construction. This left me a lot of time to get privately drunk, have deep thoughts that I resolved to one day write about but have now forgotten, watch random TV shows, and float around the room pushing Jooses and selecting beats.

Tyra was on board with the Jooses. She kept one by her workstation to swig with one hand while the other flat-ironed her hair into Alice shape, getting amped as her costume came together and the music got louder. Lucille and Miki sat on the bed drinking and jamming and somehow applying makeup and costume lashes without gouging each other’s eyes out with their deadly pronged instruments.

I lurched into the bathroom every hour or so and lured one girl or another away from the mirror with a drink so I could wiz or take a shiznit. I had to be careful not to knock over the bags and bottles and tools laid out on every surface like the Mad Hatter’s teaware. The air grew thick with sprays and polishes and pheromones and a muggy moisture–the rain had begun to fall. A dark omen still hung overhead. The girls took turns peeking out the window, sipping and cursing the weather. The soft drumming of the drops was like the rattle of bones churning under the tide of fading dubstep outros.

I went outside to fart and pick my nose. In just about every doorway of the motelplex leaned costumed ravers and black clad dudes, grimacing and smoking cigarettes like sailors about to steer into the heart of a storm. A few colorful huddled groups raised anchor and embarked, charging and screeching behind umbrellas against the rain’s blinding lash. It was really pissing now, but it was after 4; the gates were open, somewhere in the mist.

“Are we really going out into that?” Miki joined me at the door. She was a sexy Mad Hatter with a giant costume afro.

“Oh my God,” said Lucille, the White Rabbit, drinking a Joose.

“We’ll just have to drink until we don’t feel the rain,” I resolved. Maybe that’s where it all went wrong.
​
“I’m down for that plan,” Tyra said from inside, batteries charged, finalizing her leggings and tall black boots.

And so we continued to Joose and jam, and soon the rain let up to a drizzle and we struck out.

​It was a long, wet power walk, the girls under light jackets and an umbrella, me in a thin button-up shirt. The sky was tarnished steel and the streets were empty as we approached the soggy NOS. The sidewalks and entry lines, normally overflowing with a parade of loaded ravers, instead sucked scattered groups to the gate like discarded flyers and titty cards swirling down the hose-blasted pavements and into the gutters of the Las Vegas strip before the dawn joggers arrive. No intoxicated bros, no crying acid kids who came up too fast, no thumping bass from the stages. It was downright eerie. We quickly circled the drain and entered Wet Wonderland.

Inside was as you’d expect from a setup like that. The decorations were subdued, tied down, or curtailed entirely. Paper lanterns looked like they blew into the trees and got stuck. Many of the typical hanging lights were probably taken down ahead of the wind and rain. The crown-jewel pond was a dull Mirkwood bog full of dead Hobbits, and raindrop ripples were multiplying on its surface. Across the water, one of the stage hangars stood dark and lifeless. We took it all in, a Wonderland drowned and denuded, and steered toward the only music we could hear, picking up the pace in the drizzle, passing wandering ghosts in full-body plastic ponchos.

“Faaauuucckk,” Tyra yelled periodically as we walked. She’d been doing that since we left the motel. That and other things. I was resigned to just being wet the whole time, but half the stages being off was a beating and she was taking it hard. Fortunately, the Madhatter’s Castle stage was slamming; Treasure Fingers was mashing two Empire of the Sun tracks as we approached, and morale immediately improved.

There was a bar with no line nearby, and Miki and Tyra went right back out in the rain for drinks. This may not have been necessary; I’m told we ran into a classmate of Lucille’s around this time, did a whole effusive greeting and kandy exchange, and were already so charged that none of us have any memory of it.

By now everybody in the fest was seeking shelter under that big white tent, but it was still early and spacious. Miki and Tyra came back with vodka Redbulls and we huddled for warmth in the back and gang pressed passerby to take pictures of us while all costumes were at full glory. Feeling revived, we started considering moves of action. Treasure Fingers yielded the stage to Norman Doray. Would we stick with house music, in relative comfort, or dare the elements in search of bass? No victory is without risk, but there were rumors that the bass stage was dead. Workers were bringing in generators, some said. Were the artists bumping to later times, or just not playing? Nobody knew.

“We have to see Crizzly! Crizzzzlyy!” Tyra yelled, her volume knob broken off at 10. So we struck back out into the rain, full of hope and caffeinated liquor.

We passed the Cheshire Woods stage, dead and dark and locked up. Chess Village, where the bass would normally be melting the atmosphere, was silent as Davey Jones’ watery grave. A big security dude guarded the door. People were leaving in disappointment. Crizzly was nowhere to be found.
​
This was the moment Tyra lost her mind.

“CRIZZZLLLYYYYYIIIEIEEEEIEIEE,” she wailed into the rain. It was becoming clear she was on another level. The confluence of Joose and calamity had short-circuited her brain. The rest of us wanted to be on that level too, so we went for another drink. If the whole festival was going to shiver under the house and trance tents, we’d drink enough enthusiasm to sail our boat into the long rave night.

But that’s not how it went. As we stood in the rain-soaked drink line, slumped and stoic and trying to becalm Tyra, the queue was suddenly perforated by hustling bass heads. They were converging on Chess Village. The stage was on. “Oh shit,” I declared, and we booked it after them.

That dark damp aircraft hangar was already rattling. Crizzly picked it up somewhere in the middle of his set. The pit was barely starting to coalesce. You got the impression that somehow the ear-splitting volume was even more punishing on such a porous, defenseless crowd. Tyra started mingling with random groups and making friends. We got down.

The stage’s lineup was legend and we could have easily stayed there the whole time, but as soon as Crizzly stepped off there was conflict in the crew. Maybe they had to go to the bathroom. Maybe they wanted to get a drink. Maybe Tyra was doing something that Miki and Lucille didn’t think was a good idea. My brain only knew that Mistajam was opening with the hits, and my brain was raising its hackles against distraction. I moved up into the crowd as Midnight Run came on, nodding along with all the goofy stoned heads, but I wasn’t there long before I had to admit the volume was probably mowing down all my inner ear cilia. I went to hover on the far side of the hangar, next to an open exit leading into lashing rain and cold. I watched in awe as a trio of skinny mostly naked tutu girls locked arms and strode heedless into the maelstrom, and the image bore itself into my permanent memory.
​
Then Lucille found me. They wanted to go see if the other house stage was on, but Tyra was running amok. Manager Miki was used to handling chaos and wrangling Tyra, but apparently our girl was beyond reason. “Leave her,” was my savage reply. “She’ll follow us if we go.” I didn’t even want to go, but I was trashed, and with a vague direction calling and no higher mental faculties left as ballast, the boat was leaving the dock.

Halfway across the NOS, it was clear the lure didn’t work. Lucille wanted to go back and get her. Miki was over it and said Tyra’s new friends could have her. We were deadlocked in what was perhaps the strongest recorded instance of what scientists would later describe as “Tyrarism,” a phenomenon in which Tyra becomes so blacked out drunk that no rational argument can persuade her and simultaneously so ebullient and that no social decorum can limit her passions. While Tyrarizing, her primary directive is to socialize, spread love and stir up everyone’s secret sauces. Looking back, I don’t have room to talk; I was in a fugue state of single-minded determination to get to the music that would characterize many salty experiences at many festivals.

Lucille, a kind soul, went back to get Tyra. Miki and I pressed on. The Caterpillar’s Garden stage was indeed alive and crowds were pressing to get in for the Dim Mak takeover. We squeezed in and hung by the entrance so Lucille and Tyra could find us. Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike were on, and it was fine. Miki and I danced to some big room and had fun.

Eventually Lucille found us with Tyra in tow. Tyra had become convinced that Miki and I were back at the stage that Lucille was taking her away from and that they needed to go and get us, and it took all of Lucille’s psychology tricks to get Alice to follow the White Rabbit across the venue. The ordeal left Lucille thirsty, so she and Miki wanted to get drinks while Tyra stayed with me at the stage. We explained the plan to Tyra. They’re getting drinks. Stay here. They’ll be right back. Ok. Traffic could only flow in one direction in the hangar, so it would be a mission for Lucille and Miki to get to the one exit in the back and return through the front. Tyra and I stayed put and danced.

The DJs churned through eight or nine bangers. The rain must have picked back up, because the hangar was quickly filling with soggy ravers. Tyra and I got pressed in but held our ground near the entrance, and I kept an eye on the door while we danced.

“Miki and Lucille are gone,” Tyra noticed.

“Yeah. They went to get drinks. They’ll be right back!” I had to yell over the music.

“Do they know where we are??”

“Yeah. They just left. They’re coming right back.”

The crowd was piling in, but we held our ground and danced.

“I don’t think they know where we are,” she worried.

“They do. We’re staying right here so they see us. They’ll be here in a minute.”

“They’re probably outside looking for us!”

“No, they know where we are! They’re coming right back!”

The crowd was getting so thick we could barely move.

“They’re not going to be able to find us!”

“They know where we are! We have to stay here!”

“We have to find them!”

And with that she was diving into the outflowing crowd and streaming toward the exit in the back.
​
“NOOOOO!” I yelled, plowing through people after her. Somehow the raw inertia of Tyrarism carried her swiftly through the crowd like a leaf in a stream while I struggled over logs and brambles. I watched her head bob in the current as we reached the exit, locked in the flow of outbound traffic and washed into the pissing rain.

I finally caught up with her where the crowd thinned behind the hangar. I said some stern things and took her by the hand to steer us back around the building to the entrance. The rabble was exponentially more dense around the front door, a press of people 30 deep trying to squeeze in and escape the rain and falling darkness, but we made it through and found Miki and Lucille and they had my drink.

As daunting a task as it seemed, it was already time to go back to the Chess Village to get a good spot for Magnetic Man. Miki and Lucille wrangled Tyra as we jumped back into the outgoing people stream and back into the rain.

Now it was fully dark and getting cold. The grounds were soaked and muddy, but kids were laying in the grass around the pond nonetheless. The way was lit by sparse halos of colorful lantern light.

Back in the bass stage, Camo & Crooked were kindling DnB heat like a comfortable fire in the hearth. We had some time to spare, so we sat against the wall and watched Tyra wander back into the crowd. One of us kept an eye on her as she floated around and pollenated various groups. That the Tyrarist state could last so long and at such intensity was a miracle of physiology. What other esoteric chapters of neural plasticity have been written and forgotten on nights such as these? We watched her pick up trash from the ground and, not knowing quite what to do with it, stuff it into her shirt. When she returned, she offered handfuls of trash to us as a gift, with a face of childish innocence. Lucille took her to a garbage can to throw it away. Some of it Tyra folded up and put in her boot for later.

Then the moment I’d been waiting for since Lucille read “Magnetic Man” from the lineup in the car half a year ago arrived. There was a brief changeover after Camo & Crooked, and I dragged us deep into the crowd. The first skull-crushing note of sub-bass dissolved the adversity of the day from my brain. “We brought some real UK weather with us today,” the emcee joked as Skream, Benga and Artwork came on. Hahaha. Yes. All right. Let’s go. Boom, bass so heavy it scrambles your eggs and mutates your DNA. Flash, white strobes like deep space pulsars, activating the prefrontal cortexes of primitive life on distant planets, turning space monkeys into space men.

The onslaught was so pure that it reinvigorated Tyra’s hippocampus. She was in the crowd next to me, dancing away, face blank like a wax figure, and suddenly I saw her astral-self return to her body. She blinked, still dancing, looking around, awareness dawning but with no context for the dense crowd or the crushing sound she awakened into. She realized I was beside her.

“Where are we?” she asked in genuine confusion. Still dancing.

“Magnetic Man.”

“Oh. Where are Miki and Lucille?”

“Behind us.”

There they were.

“Oh. How are we here? What did we do?”

“We went to some stages.”

“Did we already see Crizzly?”

“Yeah. You had fun.”

“Oh. Why don’t I remember anything?”

“You were drunk.”

“Oh.”

And so we were each contented to be stretched and compressed by 90 minutes of superior UK space-time manipulation. We stayed in the thick of it until High Contrast took over, then went back to the rest wall. Tyra was trying to understand how she got to this point in time, and wondered why we were all giving her a cold shoulder. Lucille told her we’d tell her about it later.

Andy C wasn’t on for an hour, but the weather outside was merciless, so we sat on the floor through High Contrast and gathered our strength. Tyra discovered trash in her boots and boobs and started pulling it all out piece by piece, more confused than ever. The brain is an amazing thing.

Then the lights went down and we reentered the fray as Andy C’s live stage rolled out. The massive “A” was something to behold, a control booth like the pilot seat of a Gundam from which the man could shred eyes and eardrums, one of the first large-scale traveling A/V DJ shows and probably the most grandiose a DnB DJ has ever had the audacity to construct.

​By the end of that nasty set we’d been in the bass stage for over four hours. Our ears were devastated. Tyra was ready to get started. We decided to brave the elements one last time and end the night at Steve Aoki.

We took one step outside and screamed. It was 1 a.m., drizzly, and freezing. Our only choice was to huddle and keep moving, back to the Caterpillar’s Garden. The sky was black, the ground a shimmering Van Gogh painting. Tons of dark figures were already pouring out of the exit gate.

The Garden was dark and smelled like wet dog, but the crowd was much more porous than before. Aoki came on and played the hits, and we borrowed energy from our future selves to dig it. My head bobbed but by my shoulders sagged under the weight of 1,000 Jooses and vodka redbulls. The whole crowd was in a similar state. Aoki deployed his crowd-surfing raft and I was surprised he didn’t just flatten the poor kids he landed on. We tried to stay out of the way; if Aoki tried to sail over us we’d be crushed. Cakes were thrown, Warp vocals were screamed, and Travis Barker came out to do the drum part of their new collab. Rad.

The lights and music faded. Grim reality waited outside. One last time we left the body-warmth of the stage and entered the unforgiving night. Our clothes were all soaked, and the cold at 2 a.m. chilled our souls. There was the usual bleak procession to the gate and over two miles between us and the Knight’s Inn. To wait in the cab line would be a sure death, so we marched in silence over muddy grounds and littered streets. I was as cold as I’d ever been. I willed my mind to wander outward and insulate itself from my body’s desperate reality, aware that this was how lost Everest climbers and Antarctic explorers slipped into the warm embrace of an icy grave.

The big Denny’s sign in the distance was neon salvation. We didn’t have the strength to get food, but it showed us the way. Crossing the threshold, my shoes were soaked, face and fingers numb, body sore and muscles collapsing like I’d gotten my ass beat by evil snowmen. Blurry costumes were peeled off and discarded. We bargained for shower rights. Someone said “Tyra goes last” and we laughed. Tyra didn’t get it.

Thus ended Wet Wonderland. It was a rare and incomparable experience, a testament to the resilience of friendships and the human body, from which we ultimately learned nothing, nor changed our behavior in any way, other than to remember that when you sip the cup that says “drink me,” be prepared to shrink or grow to untenable sizes.

10/10.