In Defense of the Darty

There comes a point in every reasonably committed nightlife career when four in the morning stops feeling romantic and starts feeling like an administrative failure. This usually happens gradually. You are still perfectly capable of staying out until sunrise. This is important. Nobody has defeated you. You have simply begun to notice the consequences. Saturday disappears into Sunday. Sunday becomes a dimly-remembered sequence of electrolytes, delivery food, and horizontal negotiations with God. By Monday you are technically alive again, although perhaps not in any meaningful spiritual sense. Then Thursday arrives and someone sends you a flyer.

For years, I understood this as the price of admission. If you wanted the good part, the strange part, the moment around 2:17 a.m. when the room finally stopped behaving like a collection of individuals and became one sweating animal, you had to accept the collateral damage. Sleep was for civilians. Daylight was something you encountered accidentally on the walk home. There was something almost honorable about surrendering an entire weekend to one good night, or at least it felt honorable while you were still awake. The nobility became harder to locate around three the following afternoon, when getting out of bed to retrieve a glass of water required the kind of internal negotiations usually reserved for hostage situations.

I have no interest in becoming one of those people who announces that they are “done with nightlife” and immediately begins talking about mornings as though they personally discovered them. I like clubs. I like staying out until late becomes early. I like the peculiar intimacy that develops between people after the sensible portion of the population has gone to bed. I like cigarettes on sidewalks and conversations in bathrooms and hearing a record so good that leaving suddenly seems philosophically incorrect. I even like the walk home at sunrise, when the city temporarily belongs to delivery trucks, dog walkers, and people whose nights have gone either extremely well or extremely badly. I also would simply like my Sunday back.

Which is how the darty begins to look less like a compromise and more like an ingenious loophole.

The word itself is unfortunate. “Darty” sounds like something invented by a fraternity social chair to make drinking vodka from a plastic container at eleven in the morning sound like an organized activity. But perhaps an undignified word is appropriate for an activity that involves being visibly drunk in the middle of the afternoon. Calling it a daytime fête would not improve what is happening. There is a DJ. There is a cooler full of drinks. Someone has already lost their sunglasses. It is 3:30 p.m.

The basic proposition is almost suspiciously good. You arrive sometime in the afternoon and discover all the machinery of a night out operating several hours ahead of schedule. There is music loud enough to dance to rather than the polite background music of brunch. People have dressed with intention. Cigarettes are being borrowed. Someone you haven't seen in three weeks grabs you by both shoulders as though you have returned from war. Within an hour or two, the distinction between a daytime party and a regular party begins to feel mostly astronomical.

Except then you look at your phone and it is 7:46 p.m. Somewhere, people are eating dinner. You could leave. You could actually go home. Not “go home” in the nightclub sense, meaning forty-five minutes on public transportation followed by removing your shoes as quietly as possible because it is nearly five in the morning. You could be home by nine. You could eat something containing a vegetable, take a shower, drink an amount of water generally associated with desert survival, watch a movie and go to sleep while the evening is still relatively young. The next morning, you might wake up and discover that Sunday has hours before three in the afternoon. Apparently people have been using them this whole time.

This is the darty as a substitute, and it is particularly attractive when you have reached that specific kind of burnout that comes not from disliking nightlife but from liking it too frequently. There is a difference. I don't want less dancing or fewer parties or to suddenly develop a mature relationship with bedtime. I just occasionally want to participate without offering the next twenty-four hours as collateral. The daytime party gives you five or six hours of the thing itself and, if you possess a degree of self-control I admire mostly from a distance, releases you back into society at a humane hour.

Of course, this assumes you actually go home.

The other function of the darty is as perhaps the most dangerous pregame ever devised. A traditional pregame understands its modest place in the evening. You drink something in an apartment, complain that nobody has called the car yet, and eventually proceed toward the actual event. A darty has no such humility. By the time it ends, you have already danced for six hours. You are already dressed. Your friends are already assembled. Whatever social hesitation existed earlier in the day has been thoroughly eliminated, and now the entire city is beginning its Saturday night just as you are theoretically supposed to behave responsibly.

At some point around sunset, somebody mentions another party. They always do. Perhaps a friend is playing somewhere later. Perhaps somebody has guest list. Perhaps the information is much less specific; merely the assertion that “there's something in Ridgewood” has probably been responsible for more lost Sundays than any sentence in the English language. Suddenly, going home feels strangely premature. You have spent all afternoon constructing exactly the conditions under which you would ordinarily begin a night out, except now you have a six-hour head start. Sometimes the darty saves your Sunday. Sometimes it simply makes Saturday fourteen hours long. Both have their pleasures.

There is, however, a cost to all this convenience, and it is considerable: you have to do it in daylight.

Night has always been a willing accomplice to bad behavior. Darkness doesn't simply hide what we are doing; it makes the whole thing possible. A nightclub gives you smoke, shadows, strobes, red bulbs and occasional flashes of enough illumination to locate the person you were talking to. Everyone becomes more attractive partly because everyone becomes less specific. You see someone's mouth, a shoulder, a piece of jewelry, the outline of their body moving. The remaining information is graciously withheld, allowing imagination and whatever you have been drinking to handle the rest.

More importantly, the arrangement is reciprocal. They don't have all the information about you either. There is enormous freedom in this. The darkness provides a final layer between anonymity and actual humanity. You can stop being someone who has unanswered emails and a landlord and a dentist appointment you have been meaning to schedule. For several hours you become whatever survives when those details disappear: a body, a voice, a cigarette ember appearing periodically in the dark. You can dance badly without fully witnessing yourself doing it. You can flirt with someone while maintaining the possibility that you look much better than you actually do. The nightclub does not ask questions it does not want answered.

The sun is considerably less discreet.

There is something genuinely horrifying about realizing you are drunk at four in the afternoon. Not because being drunk at four in the afternoon is inherently worse than being drunk at four in the morning, but because at 4:00 p.m. you can see yourself being drunk. So can everyone else. The sun is perhaps the least sympathetic lighting designer in history. It has no interest in preserving your mystique. It illuminates the sweat above your lip, the eyeliner that has begun migrating toward your cheek, the stain you hadn't noticed on your shirt, and the fact that your sunglasses have long since ceased to be primarily about UV protection. Every decision you made while getting dressed that morning is now being evaluated beneath the same lighting conditions used to grow tomatoes.

Being fucked up in broad daylight has a particular psychological quality because the rest of the world has not agreed to participate. At night, especially late enough, the city begins to feel populated largely by people engaged in some version of your own bad decisions. At a daytime party, ordinary civilization remains inconveniently close. On the other side of the fence, someone is buying groceries. A child is learning to ride a bicycle. A man is carrying his dry cleaning home. Somewhere nearby, a person has spent their Saturday doing errands and is now walking their golden retriever while wearing the peaceful expression of someone whose bloodstream contains nothing stronger than iced coffee.

Occasionally you have to encounter these people. You leave the party to buy cigarettes or find an ATM and suddenly find yourself standing at a crosswalk beside someone who has had a completely different day. You are sweaty, slightly drunk, and dressed for a nightclub that does not yet exist. They are carrying tomatoes. For several seconds, two entirely separate civilizations are forced to acknowledge one another before the light changes and everyone is allowed to return to their respective lives.

The strange thing is that after the initial horror of daylight wears off, its cruelty begins to feel almost generous. Once everyone has accepted that there will be no flattering darkness coming to save us for several hours, people seem to stop worrying quite so much about being seen. The visibility that initially feels exposing becomes part of the party’s intimacy. You can actually see people's faces when they laugh. You can see who is tired and who has just arrived, who is flirting and who is trying to escape a conversation, who has been dancing for three hours and who is sitting on the edge of something drinking water and waiting for their body to forgive them.

You can also see the party itself in a way that nighttime often makes impossible. At night, particularly in clubs, the dance floor has a tendency to consume its surroundings. The architecture disappears and the room reduces itself to bodies, speakers, and light. You can spend eight hours somewhere without developing any meaningful understanding of what the place looks like. Daylight refuses that abstraction. The party remains attached to the physical world around it.

There are trees above the dance floor and fire escapes behind it, tarps stretched between buildings, speakers beside plants, and cables running along the ground. People smoke on staircases or disappear into corners to talk. Someone has climbed somewhere they probably weren't supposed to climb. Bubbles occasionally drift through the crowd with the inexplicable regularity of bubbles at outdoor parties, where apparently someone always arrives carrying the equipment necessary to produce them. The machinery of the party remains visible alongside the party itself. A backyard, rooftop, beach, park, warehouse courtyard, or otherwise unremarkable patch of concrete has been temporarily declared important, and for the next several hours everyone agrees to behave accordingly.

People look different in this environment. Not necessarily better or worse, just more complete. You notice clothes and sweat and gestures, but also all the small social ecosystems that darkness tends to obscure: someone sitting down while their friends keep dancing, two people talking intensely beside a speaker, somebody wandering through the crowd looking for whoever they arrived with, the smokers slowly establishing their own satellite party twenty feet away. There are people kissing and drinking water and making introductions and taking breaks. Without darkness compressing everyone into one anonymous mass, the crowd starts looking less like a crowd and more like a temporary neighborhood.

There is something nice about that. A nightclub can make partying feel as though it occurs outside ordinary life, in rooms deliberately constructed to erase any evidence of the hour, the weather, or the world beyond the door. The darty has no such luxury. Life keeps happening around it. Leaves move overhead. Airplanes pass. The sun changes position. Somewhere on the other side of a wall, somebody is trying to have a completely normal Saturday. The party doesn't escape the world so much as temporarily reorganize a small piece of it.

Maybe that is why the darty has begun to feel like something more than nightlife with better scheduling. Nightlife traditionally depends on separation. There is the daytime world of work and errands and obligations, and then there is the other world you enter after dark. We dress differently for it. We travel to particular neighborhoods and buildings. We stand in lines and descend staircases. We surrender our coats. The physical architecture of nightlife often feels designed to make the ordinary world disappear.

A daytime party cannot quite accomplish that because the ordinary world remains stubbornly visible around it. Instead of disappearing from normal life for a night, the party inserts itself directly into that normalcy. There is something pleasantly indecent about dancing at five in the afternoon while knowing that elsewhere people are doing laundry.

It changes the crowd, too. At night, there is usually a sense that everyone is progressing toward something together. Midnight becomes one, one becomes two, and eventually there is that peculiar stretch of early morning when everyone still in the room has made a conscious decision to remain. A daytime party is looser. Someone comes for two hours before dinner. Someone arrives halfway through carrying a tote bag from whatever responsible activity occupied their morning. Someone intended to stay for one drink and is still dancing five hours later. People leave and return. The edges of the party are porous in a way the sealed room of a nightclub rarely is.

Perhaps because of that, the darty can feel surprisingly communal. Nightlife often gets described in terms of escape, and understandably so. Escape from work, boredom, loneliness, responsibility, yourself. The darty doesn't allow for complete disappearance. You remain visible, and so does everyone around you. Instead of becoming anonymous together, you become conspicuous together. After a few hours, the thing that initially seemed terrifying – being seen clearly while dancing and sweating and behaving with considerably less dignity than you possessed at breakfast – begins to feel like part of the point.

Then, if the party lasts long enough, daylight begins to leave.

The transition happens gradually enough that nobody really announces it. The sun drops behind the buildings. Shadows stretch across the dance floor. Sunglasses migrate onto tops of heads. Someone turns on a string of lights that had looked completely unnecessary three hours earlier. The temperature drops just enough that people start retrieving jackets from wherever they abandoned them. Faces become less distinct. The same party that seemed almost comically exposed at four in the afternoon begins acquiring mystery.

I love this part because you get to watch the night return to people. Usually darkness is already waiting when we arrive at a party. Here, it happens around us. You have already seen everybody beneath the merciless clarity of afternoon. You know what they actually look like. You have seen the sweat and smudged makeup, the strange faces people make while dancing when they aren't thinking about their face at all, the small gestures between friends that disappear in a packed dark room. Then the sun goes down and everybody slowly becomes fictional again.

This is also when the darty presents its final and most consequential question: what exactly are you doing after this?

There is still time to make the responsible choice. You can say goodbye, walk out into an evening that feels bizarrely late despite being nine-thirty, get food, and go home. There is an almost illicit pleasure in climbing into bed after a proper party and discovering that it isn't even midnight. You feel as though you have exploited some administrative error in the calendar. You went out. You danced. You drank. You saw everyone. You did not have to encounter a sunrise against your will.

Or someone can lean over and tell you where everyone is going next.

I have done both, and I don't think one is necessarily more correct. The beauty of the darty is partly that it gives you the choice. It can be the substitute when the thought of another weekend ending at five in the morning makes you want to fake your own death. It can be a complete night out compressed into the afternoon. On the other hand, it can be the most elaborate pregame imaginable, a cheerful decision to begin making mistakes several hours earlier than usual. The exit remains available. Whether you take it is between you and whatever version of yourself exists around 9:30.

Night will always have something daylight cannot reproduce. Darkness makes strangers beautiful. It makes ordinary rooms mysterious and allows us to become temporarily unknowable, even to ourselves. There are things about being in a club at two in the morning, surrounded by several hundred people who have collectively agreed that tomorrow is not yet relevant, that I would never want to trade for an early bedtime.

Another kind of freedom exists in dancing in the afternoon. Daylight removes some of the fantasy and discovers that the party survives without it. Everyone can see everyone else. You can see the sweat, the pupils, the bad dancing, the outfit that looked slightly better in the mirror, the person you've been flirting with in complete and occasionally alarming detail. There are no strobes to rescue you and no darkness to turn you into a silhouette. You are forced to remain an actual human being while doing all the ridiculous things nightlife usually allows us to do under cover of darkness.

After a while, that becomes the beautiful part. Everyone has been seen and nobody has left. The music is still playing. Someone is opening another drink. Your friends are somewhere in the crowd. The sun has spent the entire afternoon refusing you anonymity, and eventually you stop asking for it.

Then it begins to set, and for a little while you get to have both.

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