The marimba loop of “Girls” by the Beastie Boys will always remind me of vomit, foaming up inside a plastic cup‪.‬
I begged her to let me take her to the bathroom. I said I would pay for her cab ride home. I said I’d check in on her in the morning, I’d get her water, I’d take her out for fresh air. She refused, clinging to her boyfriend with one hand and clutching her vomit in a plastic cup in the other. There were five or six cups just like it on the table, all full. While we were dancing and drinking with our other friends, she was sitting in a booth at a crowded, hot bar decorated like a children’s day camp playroom, vomiting in 8-ounce plastic cups‪.‬
It was the last time she agreed to come to Dance Cave with the rest of us‪.‬
This isn’t even the worst of the stories my friends and I have accumulated from Dance Cave. There was the time someone grabbed me by the neck and told me he “appreciated” my “nose-to-forehead ratio.” The time our friend’s glasses fell off his face and were smashed into pieces by dancing feet. The time we met a guy outside of the bar with blood splattered across his shirt‪.‬
Much of Toronto’s student nightlife has groan-worthy reputations‪:‬ Brunswick House is a mecca of 20‪-‬year‪-‬old bros in polos and caps who are legitimately concerned about how the Jays will do this season‪.‬ Bar 244 will deny you entrance without a bandage dress on‪.‬ Mick E Fynn’s is overrun with jail bait‪.‬ Dance Cave‪ is just known as being the worst.‬
The Cave was‪,‬ and is‪,‬ an unofficial student bar‪,‬ thanks to no cover with a student ID‪,‬ drinks on the cheap before midnight‪,‬ and cute drunk girls in floral onesies‪,‬ side‪-‬satchels‪,‬ and wooden bangles. They play the same songs, serve the same kind of drinkers and dancers, while providing the same experience every Friday and Saturday nights.
Dance Cave is never a destination: it’s a thing you decide to do in The Annex at 11:15 on a Friday when a group of boozy girls say, “Let’s go ooooout, I want to daaaaaance.” (Vowels are big with the female set.) It was a nightmare and my friends and I hated it, even though we went enough throughout our respective undergrad degrees to know the playlist by heart: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Vampire Weekend, MGMT, repeat.
The cave has one of the worst reputations of all the bars in the city. Nearly everyone is in their first few years of their undergrad degree, the bartenders are unfriendly and can’t mix a drink to save their lives, and every Friday, the same guy shows up wearing pyjamas, drinking Labatt 50s next to the foosball table. Suggest going there when you’re older than 21 and there’s a certain level of shame that comes with it, like you can do better. You probably can–there’s a point in everyone’s life when ironing a shirt to go out becomes an understood prerequisite.
Most people hate Dance Cave because it’s the place they have to go. It’s cheap, convenient, and represents a very specific time in your life when you’re 20, broke, and okay with it. Still, what the 18-to-21 set really owes Dance Cave, is a big thank you. As one of Toronto’s most unpretentious, casual, comfortable nightclubs, it never said it was anything than what it was: the easiest place to go on a Friday night with a student card. Granted, you typically needed to drink before and during to have fun through the night, but when you did, it was big fun. Unfussy, young fun. The kind you only get when you’re broke. It was girl-watching for many of the boys, a familiar dance scene for the girls, and an excuse to get fall-down drunk for nearly everyone.
Where else will they play “A-Punk” four times in an hour?
It‪’‬s the end of a lot of post‪-‬secondary degrees this spring‪,‬ including mine, and Dance Cave is going to get new clientele come September‪.‬ Fresh-faced girls in cut-off shorts and concert tees, and boys in the deepest v-necks they could find. It’s easy to miss and long for, since we always knew where everyone would be at the end of the week, and we knew the layout and we knew what would happen.
This grungy bar represented the nucleus we had in university with our friends, one that’s done now, and one that we’re getting too old to maintain anyway. It sounds sad, but what’s even bleaker is that all my memories of my friends are tied up with Dance Cave’s music selection. Still, when you feel too old for a place when you hit 22, it’s time to let go. We’ll find new bars, where crop tops aren’t appropriate, and where you don’t shove your jacket under a bench for “safe-keeping.” Still, nothing will feel like the racket and fun of Dance Cave, poorly sewn together, and only really lasting for about two hours a night before we needed to lie down.
After our other friend decided that her nauseous show at Dance Cave would be her last, her friend decided to go with us the following weekend. By 1:30, she was standing outside with a cheek-full of a pulled pork burrito while a drunk tourist and fellow Cave patron was squeezing her wrists, shaking her and asking what was so great about Toronto. We thought about helping her, but decided against it. This, we figured, was a much-needed initiation into the Dance Cave fold. This was the cost of coming here underage, and having a $3 beer. She’d get used to it eventually.
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Scaachi Koul is a Toronto-based writer. You can follow her on Twitter: @Scaachi
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