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by Jim Holman.
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It Swallows You Slowly

St. Paul, St. Thomas, and the Culture of Rave

BY JAMES MCCOY

By day, it's a school of dance on Eddy Street in Northridge, but one night before Christmas, it housed a rave. "Now the works of the flesh are manifest," says St. Paul, "fornication ... immodesty... drunkenness, revelings, and the like." At least two of these were obvious at the party. But the fruits of the Holy Spirit are more subtle: "charity...peace ... benignity... modesty." Were they there too? Can it be true what some ravers say: that some people first learn to savor peace and love -- that these fruits are ripened -- at a rave?

"We are all just prisoners here," blared a disembodied voice, "of our own device!" It was a line from the Eagles song, "Hotel California." Not only were the words disembodied, the whole song had been disemboweled. It had been gutted here for its lyrics (which were amplified, distorted and dislocated) and its beat. "Electronica" music is one of the pillars of a rave. In creating it, DJs find most tunes too rich for their taste. Even disco music is stripped of everything except its beat. One can listen to electronica for 20 minutes at a stretch without hearing any melody.

Other than myself, the DJ seems to be the only other middle-aged man present. The ravers look as if they're mostly under 21, the majority under 18, maybe. On the wall behind me is a bar with which a ballet dancer might practice. I hold onto it for support while the techno music stamps me like an ingot in a factory.

A Christmas tree stands in a corner, a real tree, but without any trimmings, save for the lights, which are blood-red. Further illumination is provided by a '60s-type kaleidoscopic light and, of course, a strobe light. Glow-sticks are waved around by three kids while they dance. About 25 people dance, but the kinetic motion drops by degrees until it reaches absolute zero on the sidelines. There several ravers simply sit or stand alone like the young man on my left. On my right is Christopher Carpenter, 22, of Lomita.

"I probably been raving now a good eight years," he shouts into my ear. He has mixed emotions about the rave scene. What's bad about it, I ask? "Ecstasy, heroin, crack, speed," he replies. "There's f----g everything here. It's a buyer's market."

Ecstasy is a "designer drug," a term that has come to be "applied to practically all synthetic drugs of clandestine origin," according to the Designer Drugs Directory written by Karel Valter and Philippe Arrizabalaga of the Institute of Ecotoxilogy in Geneva, Switzerland. One type of designer drug "is taken during 'Rave parties'... particularly 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA)...." On the street today, MDMA is known as Ecstasy or "E." A hit of Ecstasy, called a "roll," costs about $20. Other drugs might make you feel happy, but Ecstasy makes you ooze with empathy -- that's why it's widely considered a pillar of the rave community.

(A girl walks up to the guy on my left and leans up against his belly.)

"E is more like a venus fly-trap," Carpenter is saying.

(The girl begins kissing the guy on the lips.)

"Once you got it," Carpenter went on, "you take a little bit of it, and it ends up swallowing you slowly. The fly doesn't know it's caught yet."

At a rave there are usually a variety of spaces, and I press my way through the milling ravers to the room where they come to chill. A black light colors one corner of the room purple. It's possible to overhear other people's conversations. The beat in the background has become like the sound a baby hears above it in its mother's womb. Most of the kids are sitting or recumbent, like one guy and girl who lays her head on his chest. After a few minutes she assumes a fetal position. Suddenly he gets up and moves away, leaving her flat.

A young woman in a Santa outfit bursts in. "It's all quiet in here! It's nice and quiet in here. C'mon, let's dance!"

A tall young man, having noticed my note-taking, comes over to get to know me. When I ask him his name, he says Obi-wan Kenobi. "This is a good one," he says. Why is it a good rave, I ask? "It's a new location, clean, no smoke." I had noticed that: all the cigarette smoking was being done in the parking lot outside. That seemed unusual. "Very unusual," Obi-wan says. "And the producers," he went on, "small-time producers. They're a bunch of kids." (He means young at heart.) "Rave for ravers," says Obi-wan, who happens to be one of the promoters of this rave.

"I'm a regular," said Obi-wan, who lives in Hollywood. The scene can be found in area clubs as well as parties almost every day of the week. Obi-wan raves "six days a week ... as long as I'm in L.A. I'm 28, and all my life I've tried to go where I feel the love, go where I feel the new things happening. For newness is very important in life." He considers the rave scene a "culture where people can participate with each other without necessarily doing drugs."

An empathetic young woman comes up to Obi-wan and hugs him. "You are?" she asks.

"Obi-wan Kenobi," he says.

"Hi, I'm Lauren." Lauren's tongue has an obvious stud.

"I really want to do an article," Obi-wan continues, "on all the people who go to raves without doing drugs." He tells me about a recent rave at the Masterdome in San Bernardino. Slogans like "Roll Hard!" were run on the scoreboard all night. "And then," Obi-wan snorted, "it said 'PLUR!' That's ironic."

Why is this ironic? Laura LaGassa, 34, is married and living in San Francisco. A computer programmer, LaGassa has been part of the rave scene on and off since 1992. A few years back she wrote a webpage on PLUR. "The 'four pillars' of the house or 'rave' community," she wrote, "are PEACE, LOVE, UNITY, and RESPECT.... It doesn't just magically appear because you've arrived at a rave or taken some acid or ecstasy. You have to find it and generate it for yourself, and then GIVE IT AWAY to anyone and everyone to sort of 'jump start' them into generating it. The 'giving away' of it is what makes up, in my mind, the 'vibe.'"

Next, LaGassa takes each part of PLUR in turn. Peace is "sort of like serenity and being calm.... The peace gives you the chill factor so that you get to the unconditional love.... Once you have peace and love, unity follows in that you can appreciate other people and other things, and this appreciation allows you to work together with them, or spend time together with them." Respect "is the key that is often missing on our scene.... You can't have peace, love and unity without respect." In another posting on the internet, LaGassa revised her thinking somewhat: peace, love, unity and respect are not so much the pillars as the fruits of the rave scene.

In a recent phone interview, LaGassa told me "ravers didn't invent PLUR." I pounced on that, telling her that St. Paul lists twelve fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5:23, beginning with "love, joy, peace, patience...." Peace and love, I hardly needed to point out, are terms held in common. "It makes sense to me," LaGassa replied. "The fact that it kind of came up in St. Paul's writing verifies my idea that these things have been around and there's just different expressions of it."

LaGassa said that Ecstasy was not a pillar of the rave scene. Is that because it wears off after a while? (Users find they can only take Ecstasy about once a week, and even then its effect dwindles after a few months.) "It's not so much that it wears off," LaGassa replied. "It's if you've done it a couple times you know the mental state. The door of the mental space opens for you. Once you've done it a couple of times, it's like it's taught you." Through this door LaGassa found "a way to meet and form a network of support. Our society kind of alienates people from each other." She also found her husband through the rave scene. In San Francisco, LaGassa said, that scene includes more people her age. Some of her friends are married with children.

Reciting a few items off St. Paul's works of the flesh list, I asked LaGassa whether they -- much more than PLUR -- aren't the quick and dirty solutions which people find to their life's problems. "It does very much depend on the individual and the environment they're experiencing," she said. "If people are doing it out of love of music and the scene and being in this group of people, these tend towards going to the PLUR side.

"I was brought up Catholic," she went on. "I was well disciplined as a child, I got a good job... So for me, my experience was always in control and fulfilling. But I can see if somebody is 14, it would be all about being as messed up as they can be."

So you're a lapsed Catholic, I ask?

LaGassa laughs benignly. "Isn't everybody?"

"Oh, I know what you mean," Lauren, 18, was saying in reply to Obi-wan's ironic observation. She had been at the Masterdome, too. At that rave she had been with a friend, a girl, who was wearing wings, a favorite fashion of ravers. Her underwear was also showing.... (Um-hum: there's St. Paul's immodesty, which St. Thomas Aquinas explains, in his Galatians commentary, consists of outward acts ordered to fornication, such as "touches, looks, kisses and the like.")

At the Masterdome rave, Lauren remembered, some guys began making remarks to her friend, like, "do you know your undies are showing?" At first Lauren's friend ignored them, but that only increased their enmity (another work of the flesh) "from which," St. Thomas says, "arise verbal disputes" -- that's why St. Paul puts "contentions" after "enmities." Next, as Lauren recalls it, the "bad-vibe kids" tore off her friend's wings and burned them. ("When anger of spirit leads to blows," St. Thomas says, you end up with what St. Paul calls "quarrels.") Lauren tells me that this rave, however, has a good vibe. "When you get into a place you can feel the vibe.... This is a kick-it spot, a chill point."

By now Obi-wan has left us and Lauren has brushed against me more than once, like a cat saying hello. So the two of us sit down facing each other for some empathetic talk. "My parents divorced when I was eight," she says, "and my mom left when I was 12. My mom sells" -- Lauren presses her index finger to the side of her nose -- "tweak" (that is, cocaine). "And that's why they divorced."

Do you do drugs?

"Oh, I love weed" (marijuana).

Have you ever done Ecstasy?

"Ecstasy is like love in a pill. When people get all tweaked out and stuff, they get mean and violent. It took Ecstasy for me to realize what the rave is all about." Lauren, who first took it when she was 17, added that "it just gets old."

Suddenly a man enters and bellows, "How's everybody liking the party?" After the echoing cheers have subsided, another young man asks just as loudly, "Who's selling Ecstasy?"

"The works of the flesh.... But the fruit of the Spirit..." St. Thomas says there's a reason why St. Paul calls the one "works" and other "fruits." Fruits are the final product of a plant, and they are sweet. "On the other hand, that which is produced ... not according to nature ... is, as it were, an alien growth. Now the works of the flesh and sins are alien to the nature of those things which God has planted in our nature. For God planted in human nature certain seeds, namely, a natural desire of good and knowledge...." Just add the water of grace, and watch the fruits of the Holy Spirit grow.

Everyone has a yearning to love; St. Thomas says it's the most basic of our inclinations, and so the first seed to grow, the first fruit of the Spirit, is charity. "God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us" (Romans 5:5). Man's ultimate goal is joy, says St. Thomas, a joy which perfects him inwardly. Joy surges when we possess our beloved. But charity already has him whom it loves, for "he who abides in charity abides in God and God in him" (1 John 4:16). The enjoyment of charity is joy, St. Thomas says. The perfection of charity is peace, a peace such that "no matter what comes," the lover of God is "not able to be impeded from his enjoyment." Peace, like charity and joy, perfects man inwardly. That inner peace is protected from outer threats by "patience, which makes one tolerate adversities...." The eight other fruits are likewise other-directed, showing charity for one's neighbor.

Assuming you could find Catholics with enough patience (and benignity, goodness, longanimity, mildness, faith, modesty, continence and chastity) to dialogue with their PLURy friends, would it be fruitful spiritually?

"I think as far as getting people involved in any kind of spirituality," LaGassa replied, "it all depends on the messenger."

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