If you’ve ever chanted in yoga class, sung your team’s fight song at full volume in a stadium, shouted “USA,” or wept to Lee Greenwood, you’ve likely felt the same high. Maybe it’s lower grade, but it works the same. Corporations caught on to the effect, and now the employees of your local big-box store chant every morning. Your cable guys do it during the monthly employee meeting. Doesn’t work quite as well. But a half-assed attempt at inspiring group loyalty is cheaper than paying people.

I can’t tell you why I didn’t feel it. Not with any certainty. Might be that I was rejected from the group because of who I was, even then. They knew I was different. I knew, long before I put a name to it. Might be as simple as that the traits the cult saw as faults—my stubbornness, my rebelliousness, my questions and doubts—made me a shitty cult member. Maybe that’s why they tried so hard to torture those traits, that I secretly believed to be virtues, out of me.

   Don’t get me wrong. There were times when I broke, when I desperately tried to feel what they said was true. I wanted to feel it. I wanted to belong, even for just a moment, to feel a part of something. But I couldn’t feel it. Sometimes, often, I believed just enough to know there was something very wrong with me. But I couldn’t change it. In the end, lying on my futon in a row of futons, my brother grinding his teeth beside me, I’d always come to the same thought: it wasn’t real.

When I saw it again in the Air Force, that rush of euphoria, the absolute certainty of belonging, I thought, maybe it is real. Maybe I’m just broken, defective, the one the group has to reject—the lame, the blind, the other.

Maybe it’s not surprising, then, that the only time I did feel part of a group was working in the service industry. Anthony Bourdain could wax poetic about the criminals and outcasts, the pirates who gladly sacrifice their bodies in a sweltering kitchen. I’d done my time in kitchens as a kid. I signed up for another group: the nightclub staff at Badlands. The pay was criminal. But the benefits weren’t all bad—free drinks, free entrance to any other club in D.C., and occasionally, often, free drugs.

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The entirety of my drug experience at twenty-three, when I started working at Badlands, was that I’d smoked pot a few times. I liked it. I would’ve done more. I would’ve tried just about anything. But in high school, I didn’t even know who to ask. The Air Force was too risky; they’ll fucking lock you up for thinking about marijuana. By the time I started experimenting for real, I was dealing with adults who were generally pretty responsible about their drug use, who knew about dosages and what not to mix, who made sure everyone stayed hydrated.

   There was always someone who could take one look at any pill and say, with absolute authority, “Yeah. That’s gonna be a clonazepam, one milligram. Generic Klonopin.”

When nights at Badlands finally came to a close, Lil’ Joey would grab one of the buckets we used to collect glasses and scuttle around the bars, the bathrooms, the couches upstairs and collect the drugs people had dropped. But the bigger haul was the dance floor. You want to do drugs in a club without getting caught, the dance floor, with a dancing mob for cover, seems as good a place as any. It’s a terrible idea. You don’t realize how much you’re being bumped around until you try to stand still. Once your vial or baggie hits the floor, it’s gone forever, or until the bouncers sweep after the lights go on. Every night, while the tills were counted, we’d sit around at the entrance, smoking, mostly too tired to talk, but not too tired to hold a swap meet of soggy pills and powders and glass vials of clear liquid.

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There was a time, before they razed the Navy Yard in 2007 to build the baseball stadium, when the only place to be on Saturday nights was Nation, a massive warehouse painted matte black, converted into a club that brought in DJs like Paul Oakenfold, Ti?sto, Chemical Brothers, Paul van Dyk, Junior Vasquez. We couldn’t compete.

Eventually, Badlands started a lesbian party to fill the club. But late ’01 and most of ’02, any given Saturday night, we’d be left with a few out-of-towners wondering why there were no homosexuals left in Dupont. So we’d often close the bar early, cram into cars and taxis, and head across town to Nation.

   The Navy Yard was a neighborhood just south of the Capitol, a part of D.C. tourists never saw unless they were extraordinarily unlucky or hopelessly lost, and shitting themselves about it. The bouncers at Nation were direct from central casting. Two guys with beefy arms and neck tattoos let us pass with a nod and a hug from one of our bouncers. No ID checks and no fifty-dollar cover charge. The first time it happened, I thought this was what it must feel like to be cool.

I could feel the music before I heard it, but then we passed through the double doors into the main room and I couldn’t hear anything else.

The guys I came in with crowded around the bar to get their customary courtesy drinks. (Those bar years drinking for free did a number on my head. Twenty years later, I’m still surprised at the price of a cocktail, and that I have to pay it.) I was on a mission, though. I’d seen this on TV, back in Amarillo—Jerry Springer or Dateline maybe. These massive warehouse clubs with the light shows and club kids. Drugs. Drugs that kill you. Drugs that turn you into a zombie. Drugs that cause promiscuous sex. Drugs that cause platform shoes and angel wings and black eyeliner and body piercings. Drugs that cause satanism and dead bodies in bathtubs. They were all full of shit, and I knew it the same way anyone does. They said all the same shit about weed, and all that caused was dry mouth and enjoyment of Tommy Boy. On 90210, they had to trade an egg for directions to the rave. A guy in a basketball jersey with the number 4 on it sold Emily Valentine “U4EA,” and she drugged Brandon. I headed off to find his real-life counterpart.