Part 7

So, I left the South Bank Centre and walked back to Waterloo, where I bought and then devoured an oversized pretzel from one of the food stalls. I wasn’t sated but it filled a hole, so to speak. Without further ado, I took the Northern Line to Elephant and Castle, from where I made my way to the Ministry of Sound, a nightclub I had frequented with my so-called friends back when I was a student, friends who I had mostly lost touch with, in some cases, having fallen out with them, I had deliberately severed ties, in other cases I had simply lost touch with them, having never had a deep bond, it had been all too easy to not stay in contact, in yet other cases, a very small minority of cases, I clung to the vestiges of friendship, but in reality I cared not one iota about the lives of these so-called vestigial friends and they cared not one iota about mine, nonetheless, we nominally kept in touch, meaning a cursory phone call every once in a while, or more likely a rudimentary text message exchange, along the lines of: hi mate, how’s things? good mate, and you? good. Ludwig alone had been the only friend I’d ever really counted as a true friend, whose friendship I had always valued and who in turn had always valued mine; or as far as I could tell he had valued my friendship, although he did, it was true, make a lot of people feel as if he valued their friendship, even if he didn’t in actual fact value their friendship in the slightest. People often feel, he once said to me, that I value their friendship, when the truth is I don’t at all, I merely let them believe that I do: in reality I couldn’t give a fig about their friendship, which is always offered with strings dangling off it, hence why it is impossible for me to value such a friendship. Whether Ludwig felt my offer of friendship had had strings dangling off it, I am unsure, although he never gave me an inkling that he did, hence why I think Ludwig did unreservedly value my friendship, as he should have, since I am not and have never been the sort to attach strings to the offer of a friendship, being of the very fixed opinion that friendship must be offered, if it is offered at all, without any expectation of something in return. Ludwig never went to nightclubs, being staunchly against raving and rave music, meaning I had gone clubbing with these other friends I’d had when I was a student, all of whom turned out to be fair-weather friends, good for a night out, for taking drugs with, but not a lot more, although in a few cases I’d wanted there to be more, in the end it became obvious that they didn’t want there to be any more. It was a hard lesson to learn. Life was chock full of hard lessons, I reflected. Life was an unending stream, a raging torrent, a veritable tsunami of hard lessons. Easy lessons, on the other hand, there was a distinct dearth of, I reflected as I stood in the queue waiting to be let into the Ministry of Sound. I was not unaware that I was 25 years older than the next oldest person in the queue, probably 35 years older than most people in the queue, which explained, I felt, why I felt so uncomfortable standing there. They must think you are off your head to be standing in the queue, I thought, not only are you too old to be in this queue, they must be thinking, but you are quite obviously on your own, whereas we are all of the right age to be standing in this queue and we are not on our own, we are waiting with our friends, who we have arranged to have a night out with, just as they have arranged to have a night out with us. We are normal in other words and you are abnormal, they must all be thinking, I thought. They were right. What was I doing here? I didn’t belong. It was pure nostalgic fantasy on my part to be stood here waiting to get into the Ministry of Sound. My raving days were well and truly behind me, I thought. It was preposterous to believe that I could go raving now, at my age, completely friendless. What had I been thinking? I thought. I was about to leave the queue and find a more suitable entertainment for myself, when I realised that it didn’t matter in the slightest how old I was or whether or not I had any friends, if I wanted to go raving I absolutely had an unfettered right to do so. When I got to the front of the queue, the bouncer squinted at me, rubbed his chin, looked perplexed. I’m meeting some friends inside, I said. The bouncer didn’t look convinced. What skin is it off your nose? I wanted to say to him, but I didn’t, instead I just smiled as best I could, reiterated that I was meeting people inside. Fine, the bouncer said, whatever. He ushered me through the entrance and I immediately joined a new queue, this time to buy a ticket. I could feel the bassline thudding from inside and knew immediately that I had made the right decision. You need this, I told myself, you deserve this. But did I? Did I really? I couldn’t be sure. After buying my ticket, I walked through the Ministry of Sound, going from one room to another. It seemed bigger than I remember it being, the décor brasher, the music louder, the lights brighter, the people glitzier, everything, I reflected, had the suffix er attached barnacle-like to it. After doing three or four circuits, I decided the hard room was best, so I went back to the hard room and bought myself an obscenely expensive cocktail from a bow-tied waitress at the u-shaped bar, I could have bought a moderately priced drink, but something in me decided that an overpriced cocktail was the way to go, not that there was a me for there to be something inside of, not that there was an inside either, but we make do, I thought, with these totems of reality when in actual fact we have no clue what reality is or could possibly ever be or whether it even makes sense to use the word reality, the signification of which is hopelessly obscured by thickets of ignorance, I reflected, even though many people would consider my taking issue with the semblance of reality nothing but the cavilling of a so-called effete thinker, nonetheless I ardently believed that it was pure folly to think reality, in inverted commas, was anything other than a misnomer, false premise, illusion etc. I took a sip of my cocktail and then I had a puff on my vape pen, device or whatever, then I took another sip of my cocktail, then a puff on my vape device, then a sip, then a puff, sip, puff, sip, puff, sip, puff, I was about to take another sip when I realised I was trapped in an obsessive compulsive loop of sipping and puffing and that what I needed to do (exigently) was to break that obsessive compulsive loop, which I did by quaffing what was left of my cocktail in one ungainly gulp and by having just one more lingeringly long puff. Then I tossed my cocktail glass over my shoulder and put the vape device away and I walked around the perimeter of the hard room in search of a drug dealer, I didn’t want to take drugs necessarily, but nonetheless I felt compelled to do so, all my life, I reflected, I hadn’t wanted to do things necessarily and yet I had proceeded to do those very things, even and perhaps especially if those things invited opprobrium and caused the members of so-called respectable society to tut and glare reprovingly. I skirted the perimeter of the hard room hunting for a drug dealer, but I couldn’t see any obvious candidates, so I made a beeline for the toilets and as I micturated at (into?) a urinal, I furtively glanced in various directions to see if I could spot a drug dealer, but all I saw was a few cocks hanging out and the gormless physiognomies of the guys those cocks belonged to, physiognomies I knew could only have been caused by drug taking, hence why I asked one of these guys, the most gormless one, if he knew where I could, er, you know, score some, you know etc. The guy nodded inanely, smiled brainlessly. Yeah, man, he said, like what is it you’re after? Whatever you’re on will do just fine, I said with what I hoped sounded like bonhomie but could have been sardonic froideur. Okay, cool, cool, the guy said, follow me my man. So, I followed the gormless guy, who put his cock back in his trousers only once we’d left the toilet, which I felt was weird, but who was I to call into question the tardiness with which he had put his cock away, it being totally fine if he wanted to leave his cock hanging out for all I cared, not that he had in fact left his cock hanging out, but if he had it would have been just fine and dandy with me, since I was categorically not the sort of person, when all was said and done, to give one scintilla of a shit if a cock was left hanging out. I followed the guy to the chill-out zone, where he made eye contact with a bug-eyed bloke slouched against a wall, who it turned out was a drug dealer, a fully paranoid one looking in all directions as he handed me the drugs and as I handed him the money for the drugs, money I kept for just such an occasion in a special compartment in my underpants. I thanked the gormless guy by giving him one of the pills I’d procured and then I took one of the pills myself, washing it down with another cocktail, this time a moderately priced one, since I was not, as they say, made of money, although I certainly wasn’t poor having saved a good deal of my earnings over the years by not buying the things that most people, I was all too aware, generally perceived as being conducive to the so-called good life, a state of being that I had long since decided was impossible to attain and therefore I had long since given up trying to attain it, not that being an avid consumer of goods and services was the way to go about attaining it if it were attainable, I thought, the good life being, in fact, if it weren’t a mirage, which it was, entirely antithetical to the avid consumption of goods and services. I loathed avid consumers, I thought, as I danced on a podium waiting to come up on whatever drug I had swallowed, I was implacably, staunchly, irrevocably opposed to their superficial avid consumerism and had always been opposed to it, even when I had exhibited all the signs of being an avid consumer for my parents’ benefit, I nonetheless abhorred avid consumerism, which I believed, sincerely believed, was the root of all that was wrong with society, the country, the world. As I railed against avid consumerism, I danced and as I danced I railed against avid consumerism, until at some point the drug I had swallowed entered my bloodstream and effected certain physiological outcomes, those outcomes being phenomenologically characterised as feeling ecstatic, transcendent, one with all that is and so on. For my own safety, I immediately got off the podium. I made my way through the terpsichorean throng to the DJ, who was busy doing his thing in his pulpit, namely emitting ethereal energy to the assembled ravers, who it suddenly seemed to me were all part of the same organism, the limbs of which were jerking like crazy, in unison somehow, yet also completely spasmodically discretely, if that made any kind of sense, I thought. I knew it didn’t, of course, that nothing I could think of then, and indeed ever, made sense. The DJ in his pulpit was smiling down upon me, us, with a beneficent smile that seemed to me to radiate loving kindness. This, I remarked to myself, is the real fucking deal. This, I said to myself, is the raison d’etre, the thing-in-itself, the noumenon, God, the monist substance, the One, the absolute, the ineffable it etc. This, I said to the raver next to me as I raved alongside him, is quite simply the meaning of existence, the ontological root so to speak. This (I gesticulated with a whirling index finger that I meant the ravers, the DJ, the music, the strobing lights etc). The raver smiled encouragingly at me without ceasing to rave, his little bubble of a body bobbling in the way that only a bubble can bobble. Yes! I shouted. Fuck, yes! I hollered. It had been a long time since I’d felt this way, I realised, perhaps the last time was the last time I’d gone raving, I thought, but then I immediately thought that this felt a little bit like regret, like I was telling myself that I regretted how long it had been since I’d felt like this, and that thought didn’t belong in, could only sully, this moment, so I flung it out of my mind with all the force I could muster, but it was one of those boomerang thoughts, hence why it returned a little while later, and this time, realising the futility of wishing it away, I decided to take a different tack with this thought, hence why I told myself it was fine, in actual fact, to feel regretful about not having raved in such a long time, it’s just a way of saying: don’t forget this experience, don’t sink back to where you ordinarily dwell, i.e., the subterranean hell of so-called daily reality, this is what matters, remember this, do not ever forget that this exists, is possible, accessible etc, and as soon as I allowed myself to think that thought about the boomerang thought, the feeling of regret, of privation that the boomerang thought had precipitated, disappeared in a flash, without a trace etc because, I reflected, it had had its say, served its purpose, imparted its wisdom and therefore no longer had any reason to exist. After that, I raved with complete and utter abandon until, I realised, I needed a break, hence why I left the hard room and made my way to the so-called chill-out zone, where I sat myself down on a beanbag and immediately set about vaping as I watched the amorous couple on the adjacent beanbag to mine clutch and paw at each other, though I told myself I shouldn’t watch, that it was inappropriate to do so, all the same I was completely transfixed by the amorous couple and their lustful manoeuvres; at some point, I necked another pill, I wasn’t flagging exactly, but there was just a hint of something missing or rather receding, so I thought it best to take another pill immediately; after necking the pill I carried on vaping to my heart’s content as I watched the amorous couple with studied interest, as if, I thought to myself, I were an anthropologist observing two primates engaged in an elaborate mating ritual for the purpose of collating information for a monograph that I intended one day to write on the subject of primate mating rituals, not, I hasten to add, from a biological perspective, but from a hermeneutical perspective, a perspective that I had long considered to be superior to a biological perspective for the simple reason that it was less epistemologically presumptuous. At some point, I realised something had changed apropos the amorous couple, something fundamental that called into question the whole premise of the amorousness of the couple, namely that the woman seemed to be pushing the man off of her, whilst for his part the man seemed to be forcing himself on her. The woman was crying and seemed to be succumbing to a rape, I thought, though she was trying (feebly) to push the man off of her, a broad-shouldered brute of a man, I suddenly realised, she was in no way succeeding in extricating herself from his dastardly clutches. Having watched the amorous couple or what I had taken to be an amorous couple, I had somehow failed to notice that the burly beast was perhaps three times the size of the poor woman he was clambering all over, pinning down, taking advantage of. This is almost certainly a rape I am witnessing, I thought, I had never witnessed a rape before and therefore had no rape touchstone to compare it to, but nonetheless this is certainly how I would have imagined one occurring if I’d set my mind to the unpleasant task of imagining a rape, which I never had because one simply doesn’t imagine rapes, I thought, not unless one is a wannabe rapist, a rapist in the making, then almost certainly the imagining of rape comes quite naturally, whereas I was not and had never been a proto-rapist, hence why I had never imagined a rape. I was about to get off my bean bag and intervene, do something to stop the man molesting this poor defenceless woman, when it suddenly struck me that I was mistaken, that far from being the victim of a rape, the woman was in fact in a heightened state of sexual arousal, that what had seemed just moments before as the behavioural signs of a damsel in distress, were in fact the signs of a woman in a highly eroticised state, that the man’s clambering all over her, his neanderthal thrusting were merely the actions of a man in the throes of sexual ecstasy, actions that were all too easily misconstrued by the casual bystander as those of a demented rapist, but which were in fact the entirely benign actions of a man engaged in lovemaking. This is no rape I am witnessing, I told myself, this is simply two adults engaged in highly impassioned coitus. My concern for the woman’s welfare having thus dissipated, I allowed myself to sink back a little deeper into the beanbag and naturally I took a fulsome drag on the vape device. I closed my eyes and allowed myself to float in the remnants of the wave of narcosis. But then I heard a scream, a piercing scream which was loud enough to be heard over the music in the chill-out zone (contrary to what one might perhaps expect for a chill-out zone, the music was very loud). My eyes flicked open immediately and I saw that the woman was in obvious distress, the man had his hands around her throat and the woman appeared to be choking, her face was bright red, her eyes were bulging out of their sockets, clearly, I thought, this is a rape, perhaps even a murder in the making; I stood up immediately and prodded the man between his shoulder blades with the index finger of my right hand. Nothing. I prodded again, a bit harder this time and now the man seemed to register my prodding and turned around, squinted up at me. Yeah? he said. I ignored him. Are you okay? I said to the woman. Do you need me to get security? The woman blinked at me, seemed baffled, stupefied. Meanwhile the man was scowling intensely. He made as if to stand up and I could see very clearly that violence was in the offing, that, moreover, this was no rape I had put a stop to, but merely a highly charged fully consensual sexual act, it had seemed like a rape, had had the hallmarks of a rape, but now it was abundantly clear to me it was no such thing. I showed the man my palms. I don’t want any trouble, I said, I thought –. You thought what prick? interjected the man. Nothing, I said, I thought nothing. I immediately left the chill-out zone and then I raved for a while in a cave-like room in which everyone seemed to be emaciated and close to death, though they probably weren’t close to death it seemed to me as if they were, on account of their emaciated bodies, gaunt spectral faces. After however long I felt as if it was pointless raving with the skeletons, that no good could come of it anyway, and so I left that room and went back to the good old hard room, where I purchased a bottle of beer at the u-shaped bar from a ponytailed barman, not for the beer per se, but in order to have something to wash down my third and final pill with. One more for luck, I told myself, as I gulped the pill down with a swig of the beer that I had purchased purely to wash the pill down with; I drank the rest of the beer because I wasn’t the type to waste a beer, even if it had technically served the purpose I had purchased it to serve, nonetheless I felt I had to finish the beer, it being anathema to me to waste something I had paid for. After imbibing the beer, I raved for a while, but in a slowed-down muted fashion, I wanted to rave faster but I just couldn’t. In the end, I had to accept that it wasn’t going to happen for me, that as much as I wanted to rave faster, I wasn’t going to be able to do so. This is what happens, I thought, to middle-aged ravers, they embarrass themselves trying to keep up with the young ravers, they go raving with the best of intentions and for a while everything appears to be going according to plan, in other words they rave every bit as hard as the young ravers, perhaps, because they haven’t been raving in a long time and are unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future or ever again, they even rave harder than the young ravers, but inevitably, as well as tragically, they wilt under the pressure of their own raving, until their raving becomes shambolic, listless, enervated, nevertheless they stoically (stubbornly) persist with their raving, take some more drugs, hope for the best, but it’s a forlorn kind of hope, the sordid truth is they will never be able to regain their raving momentum, the night is over and they know it is, but they eke out a little more raving anyway, just a little bit more raving they say to themselves, for posterity’s sake, even as their raving descends into a sloth-like parody of raving, meaning it barely qualifies as raving. Pitiful, I thought, middle-aged ravers are a disgrace to raving and therefore I am a disgrace to raving, whereas the young people who are still raving all around me, still going strong, as they say, are a credit to raving, do nothing but good for the reputation of raving, a reputation that middle-aged ravers such as myself besmirch with their pathetic, ludicrous attempts at raving.