In my late teens and early 20s I started hanging around with a “Bad Crowd”(c)6000BC that had these kinds of parties. Full of people and booze and drugs. I was always a DD so I didn’t take part in the drinking/drugs (I was a major dork too) but on occasion, even totally sober, these parties were trippy beyond all reckoning.
I wouldn’t trade any of my memories of those parties for anything, even all the drama and heartache that came from them. I doubt many of the people there would. We all experienced life, and I got to see what I missed when I spent my teen years reading comics and going to “dances”. Sure I had glimpsed “real partying” in my teen years, but this was on a level I never experienced.
I look in on those people from time to time. A great number of them have tried to get as far from their pasts as possible. Some are still there, living in their flop-house lives.
It was gutter-born magic for a while.