My friend Steph the Crackhead had her 19th birthday the other week, so she invited all of us to come to a nightclub called Planet Angel. What sort of club is Planet Angel? Well, firstly consider the fact that I referred to Steph as “Steph the Crackhead” and use that as your clue to the basic emphasis of the club. To continue this point of view I would like to hypothesise that the club would more accurately be named ‘Planet Angel DUST’ (angel dust is another word for PCP). Yes, it was one of those fabled ‘drug clubs’ that I read about in the Sunday papers under headlines like ‘look what the young people are up to now’.
Of course, the owners of Planet Angel do quite a good job at disguising the fact that it is basically a neon covered opium den; well, the website describes it best:
“In 1997 Angel and Pete were working in the IT industry, disillusioned, craving the company of other like-minded people and unable to find any gatherings where they felt they could truly relax and be themselves. As an antidote to some quite negative realities of their lives at the time, they both had dreams… Angel’s dream was of a 24-hour location full of creativity, entertainment, good friends and surrealism... Pete’s was of a fun, creative, permanent and sustainable natural lifestyle; one free from the bounds of negative profit-oriented rules…”
When I read this, I was like ‘COOL’; in my mind it would rather be like the Chelsea Hotel in New York; a hothouse of ideas and philosophy, full of intellectuals and poets – the intellectual masters of tomorrow. I had half a mind to bring my vintage typewriter, a battered copy of The Island and a beret along with me, as well as some menthol cigarettes. I didn’t. But I wanted to.
Assumedly, in order to protect the rarefied intellectual atmosphere of the club, it was more convoluted to get into than a 747. Firstly, it was necessary to ‘prebook’ our tickets online beforehand. This involved going onto the internet and finding the Planet Angel website. According to the site, it was a ‘not for profit’ organisation, which made the fact that it cost about £15 a bit ironic. However, I sighed to myself, thought ‘THINK OF THE PHILOSOPHY’ and signed up and got emailed. Then we had to go to the club itself. For some reason I traveled with a load of drunk girls who were all talking about how much sex they had at the Reading Festival. There was one called Cassie (who is my spiritual guru, my own personal Beth Ditto); and one called Fran and one called Leyla. Unfortunately I was unable to tell them apart, even though they looked utterly different. I was also convinced that one of them was called Beth and so when I spoke to them I tended to just call both of them Beth, Frayla, or You There. When we got to the club, we had to talk to a man with a clipboard who would ascertain whether we were on the list, then we had to show them our printout of the emails.
This blew my mind. The night before, at 11.20pm, I had sat in my room and typed my name into my laptop. AND NOW MY NAME WAS WRITTEN ON THIS MAN’S CLIPBOARD. For some reason, this entirely basic example of the information age blew my mind; and I thought to myself – if I am this mind-blown BEFORE I enter the club, imagine what I’ll be like when I’m inside! I was well excited at that point and so I eagerly got frisked by the big black security guard (THERE WAS MEANT TO BE A NO-CHEWING GUM POLICY AT THE CLUB BUT I HAD SOME IN MY BACK POCKET AND THEY DIDN’T EVEN NOTICE IT! FUCK YOU, SYSTEM!!!). Then we showed our tickets to another man and we got our hands stamped and we were thrown into the club itself.
I have to admit that I felt a little let down. Inside was cramped and sweaty and filled with people who were vibrating. Slovens lounged on sofas playing with Lego and probably smoking crack. A midget wearing a day-glo jacket ran past, followed by a fat elderly woman. AND THEY WERE PLAYING MADONNA. We passed through this first room into a ‘dance hall’ which was a flashing UV wonderland replete with gyrating sweaty people and several disk jockeys; here we met Steph who was probably on some drugs. “HI GUYS OMG IT’S SO GOOD TO SEE YOU” she shrieked excitedly, and then started dancing. Steve is a good dancer and she was really getting into the monotonous beat of the hardcore; she had a nice sort of ‘shoulder shuffle head waggle hand wiggle’ thing going on; she was literally waving her hands about in the air like she just didn’t care; and if I was forced to place a temporal description of her actions, I would probably have to say that she was partying like it was at least 1999. Anyway, we all ‘got jiggy with it’ for about half an hour. I have to say I’m a well good dancer. I was cutting some rug up. However, when it comes down to it I think that the ‘dancer of the night’ award goes to the figure who was joking it down in the other dancefloor.
Firstly, she was about 70 which I think in itself is a reason to applaud her. Secondly, she was wearing some white rhinestone-covered jeans and a crop top. Thirdly, she was doing a weird dance in which she was positioned exactly two inches away from the wall (facing it) and squatting up and down while waving her arms around in the air (but not in a manner that said she just didn’t care; indeed there was a level of bemused seriousness to her spasmodic jerkings). After doing this for about three minutes she started waltzing around in circles, rather like a confused zombie, but with a dead serious expression on her face.
At this point I had realized that this club was not going to be the intellectual domain that I had so hoped it would be and I resolved that I was unlikely to take this evening as seriously as some were. And when I say ‘some’ I mean ‘pretty much everyone else on the dancefloor except Cassie who was also laughing at the weird pillhead woman’. I also refer to the woman who showed up wearing a bra and stringy pants and sucking on a pacifier. For some reason, there is nothing so utterly unappealing as a scantily dressed woman in a nightclub. It’s like seeing a Big Mac in a puddle; or watching an episode of Frasier in a bathtub (I had no idea what those analogies mean but they seem oddly appropriate to me). After another hour of having weird sequined boobs rotated around me, I got bored and went and sat outside with Cassie. Outside was filled with people smoking pot and most likely engaging in other illegal activities like sharing needles and downloading pirated music and broadcasting FM radio. I watched two men snorting some self-raising flour from a playing card and pondered. “Cassie” I said, “Why are we not on drugs?”. She looked at me with her sunken piggy eyes and looked confused. I was going to suggest that we cruise for some Triple-sod or Yellow Bentines and get totally mashed off our noggins like a couple of fortnights in a bad balloon, but then a better idea hit me like a bolt of inspiration.
“WAIT A SECOND!” I cried triumphantly.
“What?”
“I just had SUCH A GOOD IDEA.”
“Yes?”
“Basically, if I opened up a shop selling DVDs and do some sort of promotion when I sell them really cheap, I am totally going to call it a DVDEAL!”
She stared at me blankly. I am constantly having amazing ideas like that, but nobody ever takes them seriously. Especially when I am saying them at 2 in the morning with a triple-jacked 19 year old passed out on my foot. That wasn’t even the best innovation I came up with all evening; after talking to Steph about how many drugs she was on: “ONE AND A HALF ECSTASTY, TOM” she replied with a lazy grin that nearly disguised the flecks of blood on her gums, I came up with “EXTRA-SY” which is like ecstasy but just a little bit stronger. We agreed that it was a really good idea and that I was a genius.
Ok, so we were bored at this point. Going to a drug-club and then not taking any drugs is probably missing the point; but it wasn’t like we were even offered any which I frankly think is a bit lax on the behalf of the dealers. I thought that I found a whole sheet of pills on the floor but then it turned out to be a bit of Lego. When I was in the toilets a man popped out of his cubicle said “Excuse me my dear, can I borrow a bank note?” while pointing at his nose. I thought that he wanted to wipe his nose on it and frankly I didn’t have any money left anyway so I was like NO GET AWAY FROM ME and fled the toilets. Thinking about it, he probably wanted it to buy drugs with and I’d been a bit cleverer perhaps I might have gotten in on the deal.
As it was, no narcotics were procured and after the alcohol wore off and we realized that none of us was rich enough to buy any more (the drinks at the not-for-profit club were so expensive that buying a round of beers would have required me to get on the property ladder, slowly move up through careful work and investment until I owned a small 5-room studio flat in London, and then get a mortgage on it). The first train wasn’t for three hours and we were bored, so we sat down on an upper walkway and made snidey comments about the druggers who staggered past.
“Man, I saw her vagina.”
“I like his tshirt.”
“Her boots are fucking stupid.”
“That guy only has one arm”.
Finally, Nat heard us and sat down. Nat is a boy who goes to Kings school. He and I have had a checkered past with regards to this blog (I think I called him a puny little pink virgin flower-boy after he tried to steal my girlfriend, and he called me a pussy, but that is pretty much water under the bridge). “Listen yeah guys” he said to me and Cassie. “Just because you aren’t taking drugs doesn’t mean that you can look down us yeah? Just because you haven’t done it doesn’t mean that you have a RIGHT to look down on people who choose to do so”.
I stared blankly at him. I wanted to point out the moral issues with making moral judgments on people who are making moral judgments on you, but at this point I was still a little bit drunk and it was three thirty in the morning and I just couldn’t persuade my mind to make the correct mental calculations so I said the first thing that came into my mind, which in this case was ‘Yeah, well I have never been Madeleine McCann, but I don’t look down on people who are her,’ and then I sat back and looked pleased with myself. Nat looked at me. Cassie looked at me. I picked up my shovel and started digging. ‘… and anyway…’ I continued “…how do you know we are not on pills? I took two Neurofens and a Vitamin C tablet before coming out’. There was a second of silence.
“Hey, is that eczema on your arm?” asked Nat, pointing at Cassie’s arm, which did indeed have some eczema on it. She stared blankly at him. I stared blankly at her arm. Then I TWISTED THE FUCKING SCREW.
“Hey, just because you have never had it doesn’t mean you have a RIGHT to look down on people who have.” I snapped. I was actually quite annoyed about the whole conversation. To be honest, I have literally no opinion about the business of taking pills for the purpose of moving about really fast and twitching a bit. But I’ll be jiggered if I won’t be allowed to sit in the corner and make sarky comments about anybody who chooses to dress in rave goggles and piss themselves in the corner of a dancefloor. This is my human right as a satirist of the younger generations.
Anyway, we left the club and caught a train home. It was a sad reflection on the world that we’d been out at a nightclub until 5.30 and we were still not hardcore. It’s a bit of a worry that I have managed to miss such a fundamental part of being a teenager as injesting narcotics and rolling about on the floor for eight and a half hours. I also caught a cold on the walk home. That was the worst party ever.
AND I HAD TO WORK THE NEXT DAY. That sucked.
| |
No comments:
Post a Comment