Flashback - Not Cat party. Coke party!

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Today I received a Twitter text message from the Atlanta Journal Constitution regarding a police report about a man falling from a Midtown highrise apartment while attending a coke/alcohol party. Since I'm inherently crazy, I cracked myself up for the next hour with jokes about creating formal invitations for a coke party and thinking up what kind of party favors one would give out at a coke party. Ha, ha, I thought. What the hell is a coke party?!?!? Then I remembered that once upon a time, I'd unwittingly attended a coke party. Like to read about it? Here it goes.

While living in Los Angeles during my early 20's, I supported my independently undergrad lifestyle as a sales assistant to a team of financial advisors at...um...let's call the company Cadmium Craig Rugby. Those financial advisors were the epitome of every stock broker, day trader, greedy bastard movie, stereotype and rumor you've ever heard and will ever hear. They were chauvinistic. They threw money around like there was no tomorrow. They were womanizers. They had huge egos. They were rude. They were crass. They had really idiotic, unfunny senses of humor. I had the time of my life working there. I wish I would have started blogging then. Anywho, all of these stereotypes were compounded by the fact that we all resided in the real life ongoing movie set that is metropolitan Los Angeles. Long Beach to be exact. LBC!!! Oh dear, it was so gorgeous there. Everyone was totally and utterly full of themselves. Yep, it was pretty great fodder for a fledgling storyteller.

One of the top brokers...let's call him Bob...announced that he was hosting a summer party at his house. He had this pretty fat crib in the Naples region of Long Beach. His backyard was a beach. He was going to be providing the liquor, food and entertainment. All any of his guests had to bring was his or herself. I was about 22 and ridiculously hot in the ass, so of course I was going. Plus I was playing hostess to these two young, strapping Marines I'd recently met out at Club Lingerie. One of my coworkers, the very angry and very Taiwanese Oliver Chu, wanted us to all roll together, so I volunteered to drive because I didn't really care for alcohol then. Hence, we rolled over to Bob's villa at about 10:00pm that night.

The party started off innocently enough. I dined on some diet-conscious and rather tasteless hors d'oeuvres while lightly sipping on a heavily iced rum and coke or something along those lines. Like I said, I really didn't do alcohol and since many of the guests were my coworkers, I didn't want to embarrass myself in any way. Back then I had a great deal to prove. I didn't want anyone to make any assumptions other than that I was a ridiculously cute young college student who could hold her own in a party full of wealthy people. I sat down with my three dates on the couch and made small talk with a couple of other sales assistants. Other guests both known and unknown trickled in. It was a pretty tame little gathering on a beautiful summer night in southern California. No big deal.

I noticed over the next couple of hours how many of the women had chosen to store their purses under the sink in the guest bathroom but I didn't think of anything of it. I was more comfortable with my purse securely on my shoulder. I wasn't drinking that much so I saw no reason to make constant trips to the bathroom. However, many of the other guests were practically running a train on the toilet. I assumed they just had weak bladders or something. I really had no clue. Then all of a sudden, everyone lost their friggin' minds. Oliver, the Marines and I were sitting on the couch minding our business when it seemed like everyone just started yelling loudly and incoherently for the sake of yelling. I looked up and one of the brokers was tossing around an empty Jack Daniels bottle while a smaller blond female broker was hanging on to his waist as if she was trying to tackle him. The blond, in turn, was being swung around like a human hula hoop. Someone turned on some music and then everyone started smiling insanely and clapping to their own individual rhythms.

I was pretty confused at this point.

A really skinny, fast-talking sales assistant came over and asked me to get up and dance and I was afraid. First of all, she was speaking wayyyy to quickly. Second, I didn't want to be dancing and then suddenly be knocked out by that Jack Daniels bottle. I lied and told her that I couldn't dance. She insisted that since I was African-American, I could definitely dance and she wanted to see. "I can't dance," I yelled at her. "I don't even like watermelon or black eyed peas. I'm an odd Negro!" One of the Marines grabbed my hand and lead me out to the back patio. We turned and looked back inside the sliding doors at the ensuing madness. Except for the other members of our four-person party, everyone looked CRAZY. The energy was indescribable and foreign and again I feared for my personal safety. I'd never seen these people behave in such a manner. Oliver and the other Marine sat on the couch pointing and laughing at everyone else. We signalled to them that it was definitely time to transform and roll out. We didn't even bother to go back in the house. We just went through the fence on the side of the house and met them at the car.

"What the hell?!?" I said. "What just happened?"

"They were doing coke in the bathroom, Dumb Ass" Oliver Chu said. "Like you didn't know that was going to happen." Oh, that Oliver. So Taiwanese. So angry. He cracked me up.

I really didn't know that was going to happen. I had never known anyone who'd done coke. I'd never done coke and never, ever will for that matter. At that point in my life, I knew nothing about cocaine other than it was something to which I was supposed to say "no." I was both shocked and dismayed. Those people handled millions of dollars in retirement funds and such and this is what they did that on the weekends? Were they high at work? Oh my goodness! I was surrounded by high end junkies! Something had to be done! All three of my dates laughed at me. I'm laughing at myself as I write this. Once upon a time, I was that innocent. Following that experience, I think we decided to go eat at Lucy's Drive In. And that, my dear readers, was my first and last coke party experience.