We Never Went to Devine’s

After ‘The Summer That Never Was’ by Tim Kreider.

Last night was a movie, said no genteel, self-respecting youth (with any interest in getting laid) ever. But there have been scenes, gorgeous and fleeting at three in the morning, that seem to me befitting of an A24 film, or at the very least some promising sketches on a storyboard, where smiles flash by like passing cars and white teeth glint, silver, in the moonlight. I don’t mean the ones you’d imagine. Not the ones spent reeling through the streets in a blue haze, chest tight, vision blurry, the keen bite of stomach acid in the back of your throat. I mean the other kind, the sort epitomised by that one night we never went to Devine’s, a favourite haunt of fellow college students on Thursday nights out. But I’ll get to that. In the meantime, please: indulge me in a little roundabout detour¹—the defining characteristic of any decent night out. 

Going out is a curious activity, one so commonplace it’s been co-opted as an adjective (e.g. ‘going-out tops’). Let’s examine the act forensically. It may be conducted in parties, bars, clubs, or any form of traditionally alcohol-fuelled environment, whereby one may exchange names, bodily fluids, meaningless anecdotes, a rich variety of respiratory diseases, etc. It is usually preceded by the oft-underrated pre-game, which ensures that one is equipped with the tipsiness (or outright drunkenness) necessary to face the many thrills and terrors of the evening ahead. There is a liminality to pre-games that lend it a special quality, a certain rarefied ease: everyone in their finest party raiments, hair coiffed in place, a foot out the door on the brink of a new adventure. Comfort coupled with the jitters of stifled jubilation.

One Thursday night, a group of friends and I decided we would ”hit up” Devine’s. It would be, I was earnestly promised, “lit”. We got ready, dressed accordingly, and met up in the basement common room of a freshman residential hall. Two girls we did not know happened to be celebrating their eighteenth birthdays; spirits were high. Cue the fanfare and digicam photos. “We’ll go to Devine’s after this,” I said. We sang along to the most off-key rendition of Happy Birthday I have ever had the displeasure of participating in, warbled some vague noises in lieu of the girls’ names, and cheered when they blew out the candles. The night was young. We headed up to someone else’s dorm, one lit by ambient blue lights, for a pre-game. Conversation flowed as vodka was haphazardly trickled into red Solo cups and necked. As time went on, the noise reached an untenable, RA-worthy level.

“The ‘pre’ is always better [than the going out itself],” a girl once lamented to me. But to remain at said ‘pre’—to effectively acquiesce to spending the night at a dorm party—would be, in another classmate’s words, “lame”. At college, more than ever, I feel as though we have regressed to our middle-school selves, in that transient sliver of time when Rainbow Loom ceased to be cool and fidget spinners were suddenly all the rage; the unspoken desperation to get with it, to know and possess what is in vogue, more real and obtrusive than ever. A male friend regaled me with the excuses he has heard other guys concoct in order to avoid going out without sounding uncool: “nah, bro, I’m locking in [for midterms]”, “I’m hitting the gym later tonight”, “I heard this one’s gonna be hella lame”.²

Allow me to be clear. I have no intention of taking on some puritanical stance on going out: that young people tend to be irresponsible and out of control, that the presence of alcohol and drugs is invariably corrupting, that parties and bars and clubs promote a hookup culture indicative of our civilisation’s rapid decline. This isn’t a ‘lame’ argument, per se, but it is boring (and terribly reductive). What I am interested in is the performance of going out, the weird alchemy of pleasure and obligation it engenders. I know for a fact that some of my peers and I have no real interest in going out on a handful of the nights that we do. Why do we this to ourselves? Why go out if the ‘pre’ is—on occasion—more enjoyable than the ordeal of the following ‘game’?

But let us cut back, briefly, to the night that was akin to a movie. “Devine’s, Devine’s,” a friend insisted, to murmurs of assent—yes, that was the goal, we were heading to Devine’s. We figured that we had loitered in the pre-game for too long. We managed to escape to the grassy quad outside the basement common room, only to be sidetracked: a full moon! how pretty! Someone withdrew their digital camera and snapped an image, which inspired a full-blown photoshoot on the quad, parts of which loosely adhered to a Singin’ in the Rain theme (due to a nearby lamp post). It was eleven o’clock. Another friend, whom we shall call Chad, had overdone it with the vodka and was now incoherent, though he’d developed a newfound determination to go to Devine’s, “like, now”: he staggered a couple of steps in the direction of the footpath before lurching back, unsteady.

The primary reason people go out, of course, is that it can be fun—very fun. Spending time with friends is fun, meeting new people is fun, and doing both with the added lack of inhibition induced by liquor and strobe lights: all the more fun. It’s the novelty, the titillation, plus a sense of belonging as well as the intoxicating notion that here, if only for a few hours, you could be whoever you wanted to be, do whatever you want to do.³ A large part of the fun also lies in the thrill of encountering attractive girls, guys, people, what have you: to desire and be desired, to watch eyes flock to your body like moths to a flame. Alcohol aside, it’s sheer sex appeal that spikes the seltzers of the late evenings.⁴ The tantalising allure of other people’s company, the promise and possibility of the night’s revelries taking on a different form. 

But this part—meeting people with the unspoken subtext of wanting them, one way or another—is inherently awkward, a game that often yields hysterical results. I have been informed, a number of times, that my English is impressively fluent (18 years of practice, it appears, pays off); lectured at length on the virtues of Rilke’s work as it relates to the canon of German romanticism; subjected to a former White House intern’s exhaustive descriptions of what it was like working at the White House, in D.C., a fact that seemed to have metastasised into a personality. (Did I mention that he interned at the White House?) Some go about the whole affair less circuitously: in Amsterdam, a man hollered “beautiful Chinese girls” at my group of friends. Or, as another had it, more concisely: “CHINA!” The latter sent my best friend and I into fits of uncontrollable laughter.⁵

It’s possible that I was laughing a little too hard; the alternative would have been less fun to bear. While indulging in this facet of going out can be flattering, pleasant even, it sometimes leaves me bone-tired, drained. An upperclassman offered this unsolicited piece of advice on going out at college: “The trick,” he said, “is to pretend you’re having a good time, even if you’re not.” (We proceeded to pose for a photo.) There are only so many times I can muster up a modicum of good humour over suggestive references to a former Asian girlfriend, or stand on the fringes of a party beside two people violently making out to another odious song by The Weeknd, before things begin to seem more absurd than hilarious, the ritual of going out juvenile and Sisyphean. The two a.m. texts, the regrets, the hangovers: why do we do this to ourselves?

Later that night, having collectively agreed that Chad was not making it to Devine’s, we half-dragged, half-carried him back to his dorm. At some point he had mysteriously obtained a fistful of spongy birthday cake, which he proffered to me; I duly complied. (It was very good.) He then fell on me, which was less good. Hoping for a dragonfruit-flavoured vitamin water to share, we poked at a dysfunctional vending machine that burped out two caffeinated orange-flavoured vitamin waters. Defeated, we brought Chad back to his dorm, poured bottled water down his throat, and waited until his incipient snores sounded through the pillow. Troy, Alea, and I lay on the hardwood floor grinning at the ceiling as he fell asleep. Then—”Devine’s,” we agreed. The walk out towards Devine’s was blustery and cold. Observing the racial diversity of our group, a man sitting by a storefront exclaimed that we were from “all around the world, ladies!” We smoothed our winces over with laughter.

I once interrogated a friend who goes out frequently about her motivations in doing so: bluntly put, was it the sexual attention she enjoyed? And if so, how much of that factored into her decision to go out? She estimated that it was the attention which compelled her to go out “ninety-five percent of the time”. Yet, despite the abundance of interesting people and fructifying flesh around, there is no guarantee that something in the ascending order of baseball metaphors will transpire. Not everyone is truly invested in the consummation of that attention, either: just the experience of it, the fresh awareness of it being a possibility.

Again, we return to the matter of the performance of going out, of putting on a skimpy top for the unique experience of being seen in a sensual capacity. Chalk it up to personal expression and sexual liberation, sure, but I would argue that the pervasive influence of the male gaze remains present despite it all. As John Berger put it in Ways of Seeing: “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.”⁶ I tend to think of this as a morally neutral fact, neither good nor bad; either way, the male gaze and the performance of sexuality play a crucial role in shaping the culture of and motivations for going out. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be wanted—this is an intrinsic part of being human. At extremes, however, that can manifest unhealthily, can cross the indistinct line between sexual liberation and objectification, plain and simple. (I still don’t know where the line is; it makes my head hurt, and I try not to think about it.)

Somewhere around midnight, as we inched closer and closer to Devine’s, we spotted a Mexican food truck. Now this we could not pass up. An orgiastic assortment of tacos, quesadillas, and nachos were ordered and heartily consumed. We sat on rickety benches in the dark, reliant primarily on the harsh illumination of the adjacent gas station for light, and talked about everything and nothing at all: of our tragicomic love lives, grandiose future plans, other worldly matters of which we feigned understanding, in tacit agreement not to poke holes in one another’s wafer-thin comprehension and unsubtle reasoning.

Past one, we walked back to our dorms soberly amused, Devine’s forgotten. I watched our shadows warp as we passed each streetlight, our footfalls feather-light against the pavement. I wished, quietly, that I could cast this moment in amber and exist in it forever; that somewhere out there a God I did not believe in had recorded the night’s events and preserved it for safekeeping, to be relived if we ever got to a heaven that felt anything like this. I am referring, here, to intimations of the divine.

Like I said: we never went to Devine’s. But that night, that one moonlit night of strawberry shortcake and nachos slathered in guacamole and effortless conversation—oh, God, what a movie it was.

1. colloquially known as a “side quest”

2. The funny is not in the statements themselves so much as the false passion with which they are reiterated: the nerves that underlie the fear of somehow being found out, of someone else discovering that maybe he doesn’t want to go out for the third night in a row, not even if it’s ‘for the plot’. (Also, the unironic employment of “hella” is [or should be] tantamount to a criminal offence.)

3. Literally: at one such party I introduced myself to at least twenty strangers as a polisci major from the Bay Area, shortly before escaping through a window and urinating in a bush.(A bush that provided excellent cover, mind you; I am, after all, a lady.)

4. I’ll not belabour this point with a weak quip about ‘hard’ liquor.

5. I would like to know if hearing your country of origin shouted at you has ever worked as a pick-up line; surely not?

6. Or take Margaret Atwood in The Robber Bride: “Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”

I struggle with this thought frequently: when I wear a nice dress, or apply makeup in the morning, who is it for? Myself, or the prying little man who resides in my head? There’s no way of evicting him, or at least I lack the will to evict him; the male gaze permeates too much of the world. One constructive way of dealing with his presence (I have tried, and failed, to trace this idea back to its source; it is not mine) I have heard depends on your ability to be endlessly cognisant of the male gaze: to cling to the idea that, yes, you may be looking at me—but I, I am looking right back at you.