FREDDY: PARTY OF ONE
Do people go out to make new friends anymore? Or are club nights just for people who already have friends?
It ended up being more of a chill ‘Saturday club night’ which made Freddy happy. He didn’t go overboard. No blue or pink pills with ironic carvings on them (“is that a green lantern symbol?”) had been imbibed. No partying till the crack of dawn. Just a few sniffs in the bathroom mixed with shots of tequila and the odd beer here and there to keep up with Daan and his friends Sander and Bas.
New friends. Is that what you call them? Freddy still hadn’t quite figured it out. In the right setting, meeting new people was a bit of a hurdle, but Freddy often managed. He remembered what his English teacher told him in High School about meeting strangers. “People are starved for attention and, in general, love to talk about themselves. So always ask them questions and they’ll do the rest.”
He enjoyed finding the right question that would unravel what looked like a one-sided conversation. But Freddy had always been an active listener. Since he was small, he’d been curious about people. At times he thought he might be an alien from another planet, draped in human skin. Asking people questions became a way to understand how people saw the world and rendered visible the social rules he hadn’t quite grasped. It’s easy to ask strangers questions about themselves when you genuinely want to understand how they go around living on this giant ball of chaos.
No, it wasn’t initial introductions that were a challenge for Freddy. After all, he’d met Daan simply by noticing him at a café and asking if he could borrow the sugar that was on his table. (When they both shared that they liked going to raves it seemed like a potential connection.) It was keeping friends that Freddy found hard. He could attest to the fact that while the Dutch were extremely social and great at small talk, most already had close friend groups established when they were young. That’s a hard circle to crack into, and most are not looking for new members. But Freddy also wondered if society’s hustle culture was partly to blame. Nothing says ‘successful’ than being too busy to make friends. Spending the bulk of your time making money and spending it on the group of friends you already have seems a wiser investment than adding new ones to the mix.
He thought he was meeting Daan to go to a techno club but at the meeting point he checked his Whatsapp to see that Daan had shared his live location along with a text saying “line too long. We’re going here instead.” Inside the new club, Freddy recalibrated his expectations to fit the new the vibe. Decades of partying made it easy for him to process the auditory and visual cues. This was a predominantly heteronormative space for early to mid-twenty-somethings who wanted to party to accessible club tracks and possible hook up. The DJs were slick and professional: recognizable RNB and Hip-Hop vocals were given uptempo remixes and sliced up hits from the aughts bumped up against Dutch bangers with afrobeats. Freddy hung near the bar and watched contentedly as the floor filled up with effortlessly attractive Dutch boys and girls. To Freddy, it was giving Montreal Crescent vibes (for those who know, know) which, in some ways, made him feel strangely at home. Seeing the crowd unanimously mouth all the words to Danzo Kuduro made him embarrassed that he didn’t know Spanish. And when Daan and him hit the floor because shawty went low, he almost panicked at the thought that he might not be able to get up, sensing his knees buckle and his back seize up.
It wasn’t too late of a night which made Freddy happy. He’d be home before 4am which meant he’d still get a good night’s rest and a full day to enjoy the next day. Before hopping on his bike, he made sure to text the hubby, imagining him asleep in their bed, or maybe reading. Riding a bike in Amsterdam at night, with a crisp breeze and a slight buzz was one of Freddy’s favourite things to do in the city. Amsterdam was at its witching hour where cars were almost non-existent that some of the traffic lights had switched to blinking yellow, allowing for an organic flow of movement.
Biking home, Daan’s words rattled in his head. They were on the dancefloor dancing to Tyla when Daan leaned over and asked, “So you just go out on your own?”
Freddy shrugged as he scoped out the room. In that moment, a broad-shouldered guy with blonde hair almost knocked him over. When he spun around, he smiled at Freddy as if to say sorry and gave him a fist bump. Freddy looked back at Daan. “I’ve just always liked going out.”
“Wow, I could never go out on my own.”
It might have been meant as a compliment but now on his bike, it kind of stung a little. Freddy could remember a time not so long ago where going out on your own didn’t seem quite so strange. In other cities he’d lived in, clubs always held a space for people to go out alone. Often people moved to cities to leave their suburban prisons and find themselves or escape persecution from family. Going out at night to the club was a way to find like-minded people, to dance with strangers, make out, get in trouble. Certainly, clubs had always been a place for friends to congregate and enjoy their own little bubble in a public setting. But Freddy felt like the space for individuals to join the party as a party of one was maybe not so acceptable anymore. People say you should try to make new friends by doing hobbies that you like or joining a sports club. But what do you do when your passion is going out clubbing, where people tend to rave with the friends they already have? Was Freddy supposed to stop going out just because he had no one to go with?
Daan’s words rung in Freddy’s ears, in time to the throbbing pulse in his head that foreshadowed a wicked hangover. “I could never go out on my own.”
Funny, Freddy didn’t think he was.