Otherworld

The night started slow, my friend and I made it to the Qabbalah Qlub early, early enough to get a parking spot instead of having to try to find dubious parking on the street. We sat around in my car for a little while and I found a trash can to throw away my piss bottles that I had to make on the drive there. 3 beers before we left were fading from my body and I was starting to feel sober. We both wanted to be as lucid as we could for the evening. After a few steps out of the parking lot, we were waiting in front of the door with a few other people. The doors were heavy and red, the same color as the carpet that stretched out from the door. Other gawths and longhairs started to make their ways out of their cars, one was wearing a tophat and another a brown leather jacket.

We were let into the door and after a short excursion of paying for cover, we sat down. The club was mostly empty but we could already hear the music, but it wasn't punishing our ears. At a table flanked by four circular barstoools, I got out my earplugs and started to put them in, then got out my book that I took with me for the occasion. It was my copy of Fanged Noumena by Nick Land. I started to read one of my favorite writings from it, Meltdown, since I thought it was appropriate for the occasion while I waited for the real party to start and bodies to flood in. I didn't get very far into it for the moment, my friend wanted to show me around the venue so I could see where everything was. There was an upstairs area that was dimly lit by chairs the shape of glowing cubes. After that he showed me the balcony, a tight, cramped space full of cigarette smoke and another smaller bar.

When we got back to our table, one of the DJs came up to us with a pen and a napkin and asked if we had any requests for the night. The DJ was a large, androgynous person with lots of makeup, long sticks through their hair, and plenty of silvery makeup. My friend asked for a song by a band with a name that seemed appropriate for the night. Since I was put on the spot I didn't have much time to think and simply asked, "could you play any gabber or hardcore?"
    "Gabber on goth night? I don't know," they said, while giving me a puzzled expression.
    After a little bit more polite conversation about the venue and why they're a DJ that takes requests—something about the club being a communal space—they left.

I went back to my reading. My friend asked me why I brought a book to a club and at the time I didn't know how to explain myself, but I was thinking that it's because clubs are typically loud throughout the whole night and it makes it difficult to talk to people so I wanted something to do while I waited to catch my breath between bouts of dancing. I showed him the page that I was on and he read an excerpt that made him laugh.

Meltdown has a place for you as a schizophrenic HIV+ transsexual chinese-latino stim-addicted LA hooker with implanted mirrorshades and a bad attitude. Blitzed on a polydrug mix of K-nova, synthetic serotonin, and female orgasm analogs, you have just iced three Turing cops with a highly cinematic 9mm automatic.

More people started to make their way into the club and my friend left for the dance floor. I sat and watched people as they walked in, I remember someone wearing a black leather mask with spikes all over it, lots of goth women with shiny, pleated skirts, a guy dressed in suspenders and a black tie, lots of older goths that still knew how to party, plenty of fellow latinos. The music started to get louder. They started the night with some industrial heaters, four-to-the-floor kick drums with thick, pulsating basslines that rumbled like a passing subway train. After waiting around long enough, I started to dance. Since I was sober, my movements were much more controlled, and I did my best to keep my legs and arms moving to the beat even though I was wearing dark red cowboy boots. As I was dancing and looking around at everyone else around me, with a club that was getting more packed with its lifeblood, human bodies, I thought of another line from the book I was reading earlier.

Throughout the derelicted warrens at the heart of darkness feral youth cultures splice neo-rituals with innovated weapons, dangerous drugs, and scavenged infotech. As their skins migrate to machine interfacing they become mottled and reptilian. They kill each other for artificial body-parts, explore the outer reaches of meaningless sex, tinker with their DNA, and listen to LOUD electro-sonic mayhem untouched by human feeling.

Starting to get exhausted, and satisfied that I danced with the intensity I wanted befitting the music, I sat down at a different table and cracked my book open again. The pages looked much different now that the night was in full effect, I was reading Nick Land's machinic schizo-prose through flashes of blue, then green, then red lights, then back again, I could see tiny circles glide across the page from the much smaller lights and lazers scanning the letters like the aim triangulations of a Yautja plasmacaster ready to leave me nothing more than a pile of bloody chunks and bone fragments. With the kick drums vibrating my insides, the effect was intoxicating. To be drunk on words rather than liquor.

I got up to dance again with my friend, did, then sat down on a raised platform to the side of the stage. There was a woman's purse. The owner came up to me, she was an intensely beautiful goth woman with a tattoo of a sword between her cleavage, and she asked me to guard her purse with my life. Since I was planning to sit there in front of the fan while I continued reading, I obliged. After a while she came back up to me with her boyfriend and he seemed really happy that I was willing to do a small favor, when I gave her back her purse he asked me if I wanted a drink and I asked for a vodka cranberry. My only drink for the night. I danced with him and a crowd of other people and he seemed really amused that he wasn't the only one there trying to dance with cowboy boots. He started to take a video of the venue and when he got me on camera I gave a double devil-horns with my hands and stuck my tongue out, shaking it wildly while screaming like Gene Simmons.

Hypersynthetic drugs click into digital voodoo.

Snaking my way through the crowd, I walked upstairs, past the walls painted with all kinds of psychedelic patterns, to the lobby. I wanted to go somewhere a little quieter. I saw plenty of other droogs sitting around and relaxing, having animated conversations, sitting either on benches or the glowing cubes. I picked one to sit down on and sat facing the window so I could watch the club downstairs as if it were some kind of television show. The entire dance floor was filled up by then, there was a crowd of people dancing on what looked to me like a giant speaker, and plenty of people on the short, wide flight of stairs that led up to the stage. There was a row of black clad angels, moving their pale, spidery limbs to the sounds of bold 909 drums and squelching 303 basslines. I knew I was exactly where I wanted to be, before a crowd, bathed in the glow of digital moons, surrounded by fog.

1,337 words.

Special thanks to S for going with me.