Thrashes of light sporadically washed over the pulsing milieu, unrelenting high-hat flourishes tapping their teeth while the vibrations of the kick drum bounced their heads fore and aft. Their bodies were a vessel containing a dearth of gleeful sensory overload. Dozens of the turned-on were turned out to imbibe in the full gale-force trauma of a mere night where the stars were glued to the sky above their heads.
The night's scintillated cavalcade rocked together in a shared effort to wave away the rising of tomorrow's sunrise. They reviled the notion of that sun's jarring glare hitting them full on in their faces as they exited the safe lair of their exuberant brethren. Easier, it was, to bask in the blinding flash of the xenon strobes bouncing across their sweaty bodies absorbing the nectar of one love in their laser-lit and smoky cocoon. They writhed and slithered amongst each other as vipers do when in the midst of courtship, eager for the same outcome to await them after the mating dance and the elaborate courtship, however extended or fleeting it may last.
It was a Saturday midnight in Birmingham. Saturday nights in the rave clubs were not right for fighting at all...aggression, ego, rage and pettiness nil when utopia was so easily compressed into a pill.
Doses of exaltation dissolved on the tongue, each more divine than a sacramental wafer whose ingestion merely suggested heaven was in their future. Those wafers provided the hope of floating in the clouds. The ones swirled around in a swig of hot saliva and cold Poland Springs provided actual floating in the clouds with lithe and consummating angels...or their money back. And there was no need for scripture to be read, Reznor and Moby had the verses and curses all covered, no need to think...only be. The idea of inglorious rapture and the outright straight-arming of every care or problem they had in their mortal worlds drew in God's children at the cost of only fifteen single notes, Presidential.
Beyond the black-lit doorman with his UV-greened teeth and glowing stamp of approval were carnal needs and expectations of those earthly needs to be met. Within the four walls and earshot of the finest electronica available on wax or media player, they danced without a set of pre-learned moves. There were no rules to their motions.
In the blasting of strobe and varied lights, they embraced with their eyes both their same sex and their opposites. At times, the spark of smoldering eyes found tinder in their groins, was blown upon, and caught up with that flicker of sweaty flame. If the party gods were appeased sufficiently, they eloped into wondrous pairings of exploratory caresses of tongue and fingertips. In between, they drank copious amounts of freshly chilled water from faraway lands...like Atlanta, or Zephyr Hills.
Designer drugs were changing the face of clubs in 1994. Of course, the old tried and true mixer bars with purple hooter shots, the night's ESPN showcase, and fried jalapeno poppers would never fizzle out completely. There was enough comfort in the brew and the burger to keep the doors to the traditional bars open. If HIV did not keep drunks from trying to fuck strangers at clubs in the 80's, nothing would. A whole new generation of youth enamored with free love and floating above the humdrum now dabbled in ecstasy...the name said it all. They eschewed for the most part the coke and glam metal speed scene of their older siblings. They tried the old standby, heroin. Many mixed LSD and ecstasy and splashed around in manic bliss, flowing with the go.
Far from needing the legally mandated kitchen and wait staff bringing pitchers and pre-bussing, a decent rave club need only bring in a guy who was into the music and having his own DJ setup and a dream to club for even more people in the future. Whereas a typical old-fashioned mixer bar needed beer vendors, liquor licenses, a concept and kitchen menu, location, location, location and heaps of insurance, a rave club stock up a few number ten washtubs with Sam's Club waters, buy a decent sound and light show setup, rent some old warehouse and get the power turned on. Then get some heads to paint the inside with fluorescent paint and hand out flyers at the colleges.
Drugs of course brought out the riff-raff as beer brought the macho and the sloppy. The wink and the nudge handled most problems easily enough. If someone were ripping people off, a dropped note to one of the numerous undercover cops everyone knew was around would pinch the offender. If someone got too overt with the public display of the baggie, he would be asked to make sure the parking lot was his office lest the authorities drop the hammer, slaughtering the cash cow for all involved.
Further party fouls would end permaently with a traffic stop out of nowhere.
What a person had dissolving in their bellies as they paid the big dude at the door a ten for a stamp was their business. Outside in the world of the palmed twenty and the Ziplocked tickets to ride heaven's roller coaster, it was the ultimate personification of caveat emptor. There was always that pesky detail in trying to reach heaven...arrest or premature death.
It was one of the wonders of the rave club that the four walls of disunity brought the cast-aside to its den first. Then, only after some gay friends told their fag-hag co-workers or classmates, did the pretty people abandon a usual night at the theater or the bar and grills for a night of illicitness in a tingly purgatory with pierced dervishes and leering freaks they would shy away from at parties. When it was passed along that the world on ecstasy was indeed beautiful to all regardless of caste, catechism or car, the scene burgeoned further with druggies from other scenes...fratboy keg-drinkers, hippie hashheads, wired-up speed-freaks, the odd older couple wearing freshly purchased black leather seeking a diversion from the suburbs, coke-bumpers, crackies, pill-poppers. All welcome, but all knowing the mood was one of transcendental loftiness, not getting fucked up.
In the world of juicy hard liquor shots and booty music, the focus was on the peacock and his prowess at strutting. Here it was the whole flock of ducklings learning to flap their wings beautifully, often for the first time without the nervousness of am I?... hanging over their gyrations. Now in the unbiased hug of the club, they flowed with the go.
Best of all, what they paid for, really, when they peaked, was every care they ever had back in the sane world could be ground down to the tiny gaps between their clenched teeth and exhaled slowly in deep drawings of air through lips permanently molded into the face of a kiss. Reality thus occluded; there was only the sound and the blurry.
Later as the hour of the end of it all neared, they stared as casually or as fearfully as their persona warranted at their wide, black pupils in the mirrors of the restrooms and wondered...If eyes are touted as the windows to souls, was their soul so black already at the age of twenty-one, was there no hope?
In their foggy midst, a truly depraved soul, who needed no dreamy hallucinatory gaze in some fluorescent white-lit mirror next to partying nymphs with the bent-back sniffles to know her black eyes did match her soul in so many ways, stood off to the side of the throes, her head nodding to the beats. Most of the trip-hoppers danced so much more provocatively in their own minds that they could ever hope to pull off through the swaying of arm or hip. She marveled at their flow, reveled in their nakedly earnest exhibits of carnality. She was getting there herself now, her lofty nirvana needing no pissy shag-head to entertain her pennyroyally. She tasted the tawdriness of her environment, shuddered at the sweetness of the whole damned place. It was just what she needed after a dry spell on the job.
Curio Phelonie was no stranger to the world around her. She was no stranger to the creatures of the night in any environment. Tucked against her niche in the wall next to a black-lit poster of a wild-eyed Bob Marley, she waited patiently for the time to make her way to the dance floor. Always a people-watcher in her youth and possessed of a dutiful set of hawkish eyes and ears now in her current occupation, she surveyed the melee.
A few of the women on the floor were up to her Pepsi challenge. Like flamenco gypsies, they seemed to float about the floor, their arms waving in come-hither arcs around their bodies and often around the bodies of others as their hips served up their sex through their clinging clothes. She especially gawked at the transcendental pixies with their cropped bobs pinned tightly to their head with butterfly pins. With their girlish braids, their tribal tramp stamps and studded piercings, both seen and unseen, they twirled glow sticks on strings and sucked erotically on both candied pacifiers and their neighbors' faces and fingers as they flittered about the floor.
It was a shame the evening was a business meeting for her. A casual menage-a-trois between friends on ecstasy was a delicacy. Eyeballing one particularly cute blonde covered in glitter, she sighed forlornly and licked her teeth.
She noted the tiny pale face up in the booth over her head. A nameless man who was paid to wear eyeglasses sans lenses with tiny flashlights mounted on them as he flipped wax records between turntables and loaded compact disks into awaiting receivers in such a manner as to keep an even flow to the state of the buyer's minds. She noted he tried to look cerebral and almost august, though he was emceeing an event where a sweaty breast could slip out of a halter-top and twirl without its lady even realizing or really caring and genitalia was openly fondled through baggy clothes on the floor beneath his feet.
The air itself hovered in layers, its existence seen in the pall of smoke breathed in heavy doses that smelled oddly like a baby's post-bath talcum rub until it achieved a state of osmosis with the cigarettes and hot water vapor ejected by its users' pores. The club reeked of a primal freedom. It was a turgid aroma, a foggy slurry of body salts and sultry essence laid bare and boiling like some sexual gumbo set to simmer until served at its peak.
In the club known as Lustins, Curio closed her eyes to mere slits and just watched. She had a good view of the water bar and could see who was on fire in the crotch and really feeling fine just by the imbibing of the tiny waters. She stood below and to the right of the DJ booth, just waiting and watching. To the average pair of eyes looking around the club for the faces of those familiar and the oh-so-needing-to-be-familiar-to-me, she was just another nymphet feeling the effectasy and taking a breather to enjoy the euphoric ride so popular among the old warehouse's inhabitants. Now and again, some guy and the occasional girl would try to make eyes at her in the strobe-lit party smoke and rapidly phasing vari-lights.
