St. Patrick's Day or, Good Thing I'm Not Claustrophobic

My St. Patrick's Day began at 10 pm, roughly twelve hours after all my friends. In the short hour I spent at the bar, we scored potentially offensive "Irish" hats and made mustaches out of Guinness foam at bars, before ending up in a large apartment complex where everyone galloped up the stairs and onto elevators like we were late to our own party. This is clever of me to say because we actually did end up late to our own party. An hour late, actually. Where were we, you might ask? Oh, in the elevator.

I'll never know if the eight-person capacity elevator could have handled our fifteen-person mass because the two last guys to pile in jumped up and down as the elevator doors closed, young and spontaneous as they were feeling.

After about 30-seconds of very little actual elevator movement, we all begin denying reality ("It's not stuck! We're fine!"). When I say we, I am talking about two Frenchies, one Indian, four Americans, one Romanian, five Mexicans, one Bahraini, and one Englishman. Then, the buttons stop responding and the Bahraini and Romanian girls turn into Beliebers who have just seen Justin Bieber himself, but in a bad way. As we are packed like lady fingers in tiramisu, everyone gets hit by their thrashing about. Then, the two girls scream "OPEN THE DOORS" on repeat, pissing off everyone who was lucid, because obviously we're not keeping the doors closed for fun.

Two minutes in and the elevator lights turn off. Hysteria that had momentarily been sequestered to the two girls ensues en masse, and then a few people irritated by the bedlam decide to fight back with their own by yelling ("Oy! Shut the f*** up!"). We all feel each other up at this point as we try to reach our cell phones to create a strobelight-y ambience.

The Romanian girl lets everyone know that she is claustrophobic (duh, she just tried to stampede us) and then lets out blood-curdling screams. In fact, so much blood is curdled that it starts spurting out of her nose ("OH MY GOD MY NOSE IS LITERALLY BLEEDING, YOU GUYS"). Her equally sauced friend, an American, then takes off her own dress ("I AM GETTING NAKED I DON'T EVEN F***NG CARE") so that the Romanian can have a napkin for her bloody nose. From that point on, anytime the Romanian had a breakdown (read: every four seconds) the American would take the girl's face in her hands and say "I AM NAKED FOR YOU OKAY? HONEY LOOK AT ME, I'M F***ING NAKED RIGHT NOW."

The Romanian fainted four times in total. The first time she fainted was the worst, because the American thought that meant she was dead ("SHE'S NOT BREATHING, OPEN THE DOOR RIGHT NOW YOU GUYS") and no one believed her ("SHE JUST FAINTED, WE CAN'T OPEN THE DOORS") and she reacted in the way people do when they think they are saving someone's life by yelling: she yelled more.

The second and third times the Romanian fainted were less traumatic and more the new norm, which we adjusted to pretty smoothly. However, the fourth time she fainted was met with a lot of relief, because it was forty minutes into our Really Great Elevator Ride and she had begun her last rites ("LISTEN TO ME, I HAVE TO SAY THIS. LISTEN, LISTEN. THERE IS A BOY. IN ENGLAND..."), she also gave rites for her family members. So, she is doing these rites, which are kind of making everyone else wonder if they should be doing their last rites, and the English guy, who full context-based loathing, says he is going to knock her out with the beer glass he stole from the bar. He starts positioning himself to take a swipe at her, despite protests from those who have retained clarity, when she knocks herself out with screaming. Close call.

The Bahrani student also had a hard time with the small space in which we were sardined. Similar to the Romanian, she lashed out at those around her but, after time, just needed to hold everyone's hands (we were all kind of holding hands anyway) and then get out of the "corner." In an elevator made for eight, everywhere is a corner, but fine we pretended we got her out of the corner. We were also covered in shards of glass, because someone tried to turn the light back on by punching the bulb.

The only moments of silence were when someone (two Canadians) yelled down the elevator shaft to us. At first, these snippets of communication were helpful ("We've called the fire department. They're coming") but became naive ("Just sit down!") and unintentionally obtuse ("How many of there are you? Fifteen?? That sucks! Guys, they said there are fifteen of them in there!").

About halfway through our Group Bonding Experience, one of the French guys started playing gangster rap from his cell phone to "calm everyone down." Despite rap's reputation for being soothing, it added to the mayhem. There was no moment during the entire fifty-five minutes that anyone was able to have a conversation, because the yelling was constant, though the yellers varied.

While the two girls previously mentioned had the most extreme reactions, the general feel of the group was taught. Someone cleverly declared that we were all running out of air (there was a vent on the ceiling) and then people yelled at each other to stop yelling because it was "using all the air." This theory was buoyed by the rising heat in the elevator: our skin became increasingly sticky, and my hair was stuck to my forehead by the end.

Elevator situations happen on sitcoms, rom-coms, reality tv, and they're always funny and romantic. I am here to deliver the surprising news that tv lies. Excluding a moment that the only couple in the elevator had, we were not feeling frisky or witty. What the elevator did reveal, though, was the role each of us assume in moments of panic. There are, of course, the panic-stricken (the Bahraini and Romanian). There are also those who add to the maelstrom by trying to deplete it (the Frenchies), and those who become care-takers of the stressed (the American friend). There was a leader (the English guy), who became the official communicator between us and our friends yelling through the shaft, and a couple quiet ones, who just waited it out ("We were zen" - my Indian friend said afterward).

I never thought we were going to die, because I once read a fourteen page article on elevators in the New Yorker and had learned that being inside an elevator is the safest place, but also because I knew I couldn't think it. There were already people convinced we were having our last moments of life ("I'M DYING IN A F***ING BOX ON F***ING ST PATRICK'S DAY") and when a certain number of individuals move in that direction, everyone else has to keep it together.

Someone asked me afterwards at what point I thought the experience was funny, and I want to say it was when the Romanian started to give her last rites, but that was mostly just surreal. It didn't become funny until the highly unamused firemen opened the door, we rushed out into the light, and me, one Indian and two Mexican girls ran outside and washed our sweaty faces off in the rain.