Repeating Beats & Thumping Bass

So I went to a rave this weekend. Not by choice. Not by my own will. Not by being dragged in, but yes I can officially say I've been to a rave and it was truly everything I ever imagined it would be.

To sum up my experience quickly:

$20 + sweaty sauna-like air + abandoned office building + techno beats = Tucson rave

Now let me back up.

I was in Tucson visiting my beloved Austin-dwelling Adriana. Her friends were going to a rave that one of their friends was playing at... spinning at...showing at? I don't even know the right terminology.

For anyone who has ever been to Tucson, you know that most parts of the god forsaken city are shitty and rundown, especially south Tucson. But how more appropriate could a location for a rave be?

We park on a street corner, completely devoid of life and await a phone call for directions on how to get to the actual building. They are as follows:

Walk west down the street.
Cross the construction zone.
Take a left at the large tractor trailer.
Walk down the ally until you see the two story building.
Walk up the staircase.
Through the hole in the wall.
Shimmy down the slide.

Okay so those last two steps on the list are false, but you get the picture of how ridiculous this sounded.

And just to give you a visual... I am wearing nice trouser jeans, a stark white long-sleeve v-neck shirt from J Crew and my knee-length black pea coat. A far cry from the light-up shirts, pleated skirts, fishnets, boots and mini backpacks or the occasional just bra and underwear I saw inside.

Room number one... filled with sweaty gyrating preteens with florescently lit pacifiers in their mouths flashing glowsticks around to the beats of an eight-year-old DJ (believe me, I couldn't make this up if I tried... my background is journalism, not creative writing).

"Rave" was painted on the walls in metallic letters (in case the previously described scene didn't give you enough clues) and the room was a stifling 87 degrees with 100 percent humidity, I'm guessing.

Rooms two, three and four are pretty much the same scenario except the others are smaller and one also has a table to sell alcohol. Oh and at the end of the hall a man was selling all the glow-in-the-dark merchandise you could ever want or dream of.

We were asked if we wanted pills by a wandering man in the hallway, some guy made fun of the fact that I had a huge coat draped over my big leather bag and the cops apparently showed up and left (my guess is they couldn't sufficiently substantiate that the binky toting, platform boot wearing, sweaty teens filing out of a bass-thumping abandoned building were coming actually coming from a rave).

I was ready to leave before we got there, but after an hour and a half or so of my lungs and my pores screaming at me for relief, we finally left and all I had to show for myself was the pathetic red "x" marked on my left hand.