Free Don't Get Too Comfortable by David Rakoff Page B

Midnight Madness HQ on behalf of all of us. “Look at your feet,” we are told, and there, suspended from a sidewalk grating by colored tabs, are envelopes hanging down into the sewer. We fish them out and find locker keys and a clue that leads us to our next location: the South Ferry terminal.
    It is now well after 2:00 a.m. as we scramble for cabs to take us to the bottom of the island.
This taxi is going the wrong way,
I think, as block by block my apartment becomes ever more distant. Looking out the windows to my left and right, I see that we are a fleet ten vehicles strong, almost the only cars on the road right now. For all my innate incapacity to actually enjoy myself, I am at least able to grasp just how impressive this entire enterprise is. It's beautifully organized and even more beautiful in its execution. Some of the clues are complete works of art. The one waiting for us in the Delancey Street subway station was a perfect replica of one of those official “change in service” notices routinely posted by the transit authority. We walked by it at least ten times. I also have to give it to Mat, the game master who put this together: spending a Saturday night in New York engaged in an actual activity that doesn't involve the usual $30 restaurant expenditure is a very nice change. There's something inherently cool about Midnight Madness, even though this is among the geekiest things I've ever done.
    Mat—whose almost parodic nerdiness is only amplified by the fact that he is as lovely as Montgomery Clift and seems to have no idea—fully agrees: “Geek, when used correctly, is usually a compliment. It means eccentric, skilled, quirky, unique.” Mat is constantly building something. For as long as he can remember, he has taken apart everything he has ever owned and reassembled it into something else. The intricate problems associated with coordinating Midnight Madness make him happy. It's no great revelation that he and I might have different ideas of what constitutes a good time, but the intrinsically
Rash
mon
quality of almost all shared experience never fails to surprise me. When Jaime complains at one point of sore feet and says how there isn't a chance in hell he would ever do this again, I feel a deep and throbbing love for him. But when he gets his second wind not twenty minutes later, the keen knife blade of betrayal slices through me and I hate no one on this earth as much as horrible, turncoat Jaime. People are rarely in sync. I know what my favorite moment of the night is. I ask Mat to tell me his.
    “Battery Park,” he says. “I got to see everyone at that time and walk around. That to me was really nice.”
    He is not entirely wrong. It was an enormous relief to get out of the bus-station-bright fluorescence of the deserted ferry terminal, and a bonus that the park was just a short walk across the street into the velvet darkness of the trees with the lapping of the Hudson River nearby. We all gathered at the World War II memorial. It's a starkly beautiful plaza right by the water with about a dozen huge concrete slabs, easily twenty feet square, engraved with the names of the dead. Players shone their flashlights over the tablets like archaeologists in the Valley of the Kings. The clues—dredged up from the opaque depths of the river, kept dry in ziplock bags, their presence in the black water indicated by those fluorescent Glow Sticks teenagers wave at rock concerts—were complex acrostics with letter and number combinations corresponding to the names and dates on the monuments. This was the final clue of the evening, which would lead us to the secret location of the Midnight Madness wrap party.
    It was probably great fun for Mat to emerge from the command center and see the fruits of his labor after a long night of fielding calls. I might even agree with him had it been during the day. But it was close to four in the morning at that point. Rats were audibly, fearlessly scurrying through the