An Earthquake Hit the Discotheque

Time raced past on a zip-line in the schizophrenic fragments of strobe and dry ice. In the labyrinthine depths of the superclub partiers oscillated with the bass beats throughout the four separate floors. The glowing bar was anchored with the weight of burly men bearing down upon it, each one surveying the landscape of the bar either side of him as though about to take a chance across a busy carriageway. The queue was reaching its zenith, around 5 bodies deep, everyone swaying in agitation and texting for the whereabouts of friends from whom they were now hopelessly stranded.

On the dancefloor the hive of ravers waved hands and gyrated as one, in salutation to the DJ in his booth, acting over the congregation like a bishop in his pulpit. In a psychic frenzy he would conduct the atmosphere of the mass collective before him and suspend them in his grasp, accelerating rhythms and beats and dropping refrains from the summer’s biggest tunes all congealed together as one fluid torrent of pulsating sound that frequently ran the risk of imploding in on itself, swallowing all and everyone within a black hole of static and white noise.

Pinned into one of the booths running the length of the dancefloor, Robbie was appealing loudly and gesticulating even louder to the group that surrounded him on the leather cushions, eager for them to move upstairs to the relatively quieter zone of the club. “Cumon guys, let’s get upstairs, keep the bant going!” he shouts at the top of his lungs only to have his words dissolve away in the bass reverberation.

Trapped into the cubicle he looks like a hyperactive child in a public baths locker-room, desperate to preserve the banter that has been so strictly enforced and maintained throughout the evening, and not allow it an easy escape down the ever-widening rabbit warren of drunken detachment. The girls in his enclave play down his protests and distribute glasses of an exotic blue lagoon cocktail from a pitcher that contains a few inches of alcoholic liquid swimming around a miniature Antarctica that’s been divided up and dispensed in convenient cubes. They text away on phones and survey the rippling communion before them, eyes drifting on past the many men that dance in peacock strides before them.

Over on the dancefloor Roger has his usual circle of youthful admirers around him, faces lit up at the sight of him swivelling his 75-year-old hips – twice replaced – and shaking his bald old head in time to the fractious electro streaming through the sweat-starched particles of the air. Roger is a regular on the club circuit, so much so that his commitment to ‘staying young’ has earned him a free membership card that he stows away in his wallet behind his bus pass, and a legion of ‘fans’ despite the minute parameters of irony in the affection being stretched to their elastic limit.

However, he is essentially harmless, a figure of fun, a court jester, a raving Hugh Hefner, living proof that age knows no boundaries, as he delights his audience with break-dancing that could double for awkward spinning in his fast-approaching grave, and poses with possible great-granddaughters who fawn over him with the patronising affection they might have for an invalid.

Over on another dancefloor – this one dug down into the floor like an underground bunker – Toby grinds away with Nicole. Toby is by no means ugly or unappealing; he wears the right clothes and is clearly doing the best with what he’s got at his disposal. Truth be told, Toby has always been a bit shy around members of the opposite sex, a trait symptomatic of growing up with a domineering mother and four brothers. Odds are strong that one will grow up to be gay but he’ll be damned if it’s going to be him.

Having said that he’s not had a decent shag in almost a year and so is more than a little ecstatic at this beautiful stranger lavishing him with sexual attention. Out of all these other guys in the club as well! Toby, he thinks to himself, you really are a sly one sometimes. As he shuffles himself slightly to conceal his stiffening cock from Nicole’s rotating arse, he runs a hand through her ebony locks and notices her group of friends acknowledging their improvised union.

Nicole swivels round and writhes stomach-to-stomach with Toby who allows himself a quick glance around the steps leading up and away from the dance pit, lined with sand dunes of onlookers, all grazing and on the prowl whilst the lucky ones below them embark on their hastily-concocted pre-mating rituals.

Nicole also notices her friends’ disapproving faces and reads their judging behind mascara squints and lipstick pouts. Fuck ‘em she thinks, it’s been over a week since Darren ended it with her, leaving her pride - if she’s entirely honest with herself - smarting blacker bruises than her heart. She wanted to go out and cut loose tonight, which she has, and if she wants to go ahead and fuck some stranger on a rare one-night stand then she will. The initially alarming realisation that Darren was on the same dancefloor with his dirty hands grasping over some common slag did, it has to be said, spur on her own efforts somewhat.

As she tries to size up this guy’s erection with her arse, she takes a good look at who Darren’s managed to ensnare – the kind of blonde scrubber who probably carries around her venereal disease of choice in a clutch bag and will more than likely spend mornings swigging Special Brew outside school gates before the age of 30.

Besides, Nicole reasons with herself, this guy is sort of cute in an awkward way. She knows she could do a lot better if she strutted around one of the other floors a bit longer, but she decides she can’t be fucked. He’ll do. The sight of her svelte curves unfurling around the nervous, stiffening limbs of this new guy will only serve to incense Darren even more when he notices.

Down on the first floor, a mass of students partying their way through Freshers Week, squirm and slide through an avalanche of foam that has just been spewed from a ceiling-mounted phallus of hydraulics and plumbing vents. The music swirls to decibels of indiscernible heights, ricocheting off the bodies and walls in a sonic pummelation of the senses that could pause heartbeats if they weren’t so wired on vodka and Red Bull.

When the first tremors start to bubble through the superstructure of the building like an approaching tube train, no alarm is raised or fears sparked amongst the clubbers. The accelerating drum n’ bass coagulates and forms a soundtrack as the seismic pressures radiate through the floors, gaining in confidence and strength, until the force of the quake is threatening the needle to the upper climes of the Richter scale.

At the peak of the undulations people are thrown over and under one another, as though all suddenly taking part in some spontaneous act of drunken shamanistic ballet. The dry ice pours out as thick as a dust-drenched blanket and the lasers shimmer like spotlights roving through mist for floundering survivors of a shipwreck. People are dismounted from podiums like a bucking bull, a section of the roof above the bar caves in, spilling concealed vents and drainage installations out into the open like intestines from a massive stomach wound.

The screams only start once the peak of the sensations has passed and the aftershock ripples have dissolved, and even then they are muffled by the deafening sounds of the speaker system going through white noise convulsions. After a few minutes of drunken panic and trying to assess the extent of the damage to themselves and their immediate surroundings, the clubbers begin to rise to their feet feeling bruised and confused. It doesn’t take the more sober of those among them to realise that all escape routes from the floor to one of the lower levels have been cut off by the building’s hasty rearrangement of its structural apparel.

Over by the set of double doors leading out from this dancefloor a steel girder has detached itself from the skeleton of the building like a fallen tree branch, bringing down with it a significant portion of the suspended ceiling panels and crushing the hulking bouncer who had manned the door. His bald head like a fleshy bowling ball is visible beneath the chaotic rubble with an ear-piece still embedded, still perhaps crackling with information and futile instructions on how to control the crowd in light of this unforeseen disaster.

Over in the sunken dance pit, ravers are picking themselves up, offering hands of assistance although now there is a stale air of drunken every-man-for-himself prejudice between them all. Nicole scrambles over to Darren and they embrace amongst the crowd, clearly recognising the fact that they must stick together in order to get out in one piece, all previous bitterness and envy dissipated into obscurity by the quake.

Meanwhile Toby, who was thrown clear of Nicole during the more violent of the tremors, is frantic that this geological interruption not quash the sexual liaison that he and Nicole were about to pursue and moves to challenge Darren. Since, however, Darren is a good few inches taller than Toby and with slightly more hours invested down the gym, Toby’s flaring temper is quickly suffused by a few gentle blows to the abdomen and head region. Nicole slithers back into her man’s firm embrace, relieved at their rekindling passion wrought back from the fires of defeat, confirming in her own mind that they were meant to be together all along.

All the while her group of girlfriends are desperately searching through the smog and debris for a suitable man to act as their impromptu knight-in-shining-armour, for them to cling to in the hope that together they have a better chance of survival from this discotheque tomb.

People scramble past Roger who is now slumped against a haemorrhaging wall, one of his replacement hips cracked once again. No one cares or notices him now that his dance act has been stifled; he is merely an old man whose novelty factor has been permanently fractured in the eyes of this fickle community. The scales have been shaken from their vision to reveal him as a phony, an imposter on their youthful playground whose motive now strikes as being just too desperate or sinister rather than amusing or admirable.

On the floor below, Robbie picks himself up from a momentary lapse of consciousness and takes a squinting glance around him, trying to determine details in the gloom that has fallen from the lights having failed. He cannot see but the girlfriends that held him back from ascending to the level of his choice have been dealt a fatal blow by a large mirrorball falling from the sky like a comet colliding with Earth. He crawls along the floor, his palms embedded with the loose grit of shattered glass and his eyes stinging from the first vestiges of smoke from fresh flames that have sprouted amongst the wreckage.

In his booth the DJ looks upon his splintered assembly with a frantic temerity. Quickly as he can he wrestles with his laptop connections and EQ settings, trying to salvage the situation as best he can in getting the party back on track. His carefully prepared playlists now abandoned he throws caution to the wind and drops ‘Born Slippy’ by Underworld into the fray.

The instantly recognisable synth notes sound out as a call to arms to those survivors who edge out from the collapsed tables and fallen wall panels, clinging to newly-found lovers as a shield against the hurt, a reassurance that in this new subterranean bunker that they alone inhabit, cut off from the rest of the world through a freak act of nature, they will not succumb to solitude. They forge a relationship, however fleeting or vacuous, merely to ensure that they should not have to prolong their existence down here alone.

As they amble out, dazed and with reeling heads, some hand in hand, others gathered together in loose cliques of solidarity, they slowly dance with a fervent determination that the show must go on, the night must not be indelibly tarnished by this crushing setback. As the beats kick in (shouting lager-lager-lager-shouting-mega-mega-white-thing) the clubbers reengage with their party spirit, reenergised with the lifeblood of the music and raise up bruised arms in jubilation and confirmation that they would indeed continue to go higher and higher for nothing must bring them down tonight.

Lights Extinguishing Slowly

Here before you stands as proud testament, the last words of me, Dylan Stewart.

As fetid undertaker of disbelief I stood before you in my prime as a majestic spectacle, a tight-rope walker across a circus of gaping mouths.

A wonder of the very world upon which I skipped and jumped, left my indistinct markings and then was gone without a trace.

Well now my blood runs down the walls of resentment, my mind regurgitating my daily penance for things said and done.

For all these things and countless more, I am sorry.

I am sorry for the things done and not done, achieved and fallen so far short of.

Every smog-stained commute, the city’s dust decorating the lungs with phlegm wallpaper paste.

Coming up for air and smoking cigarettes, lining the stolid veins and arteries with chemical depositories and trans-fats, stagnating blood cells with one more drink, just one more drink.

Another chance polluted, another love lost in the ether of lust, desire burnt away through years of lying rotting in one’s vanity and feculence, watching your own mind and body go to ruin like an ancient metropolis.

I look down upon the world and vomit from a great height.

Whilst I bathe in Coca-Cola the poetry of youth is stencilled in neon billboards that rape the stars of the night sky.

Maybe one day you’ll be able to download foetuses from some vast internet database, create human life from binary code, 0-1-0-1-0-1, clone yourself so that every hour of every day you can see just how beautiful you are.

Maybe one day you’ll be able to build up empires in a lazy afternoon and cast devastation upon them in a fleeting afterthought.

What if the electricity ran dry, lights burnt out, cars collided in mechanised bliss, airplanes paused before descent like a ball thrown and not caught.

I’ve seen it all and now when I stab my eyes out with kitchen utensils stained with the rust of yesterday’s food I will see nothing more.

From Belfast to Brighton, the Isle of Skye to St. Ives, Piccadilly Circus to the cobbled backstreets of fuck knows where.

It’s all a mirror-image, a tapestry sown with false promises and scarcely concealed lies.

We are the vermin!

The vermined ones who in our finest hours pose for posterity and hang photos in frames on walls, a snapshot of a second that sets into concrete a memory now long since lost.

Yes if it were down to me, I’d rain down a million Hiroshimas upon you and your vainglorious shopping selves.

Level Manhattan like a billion-dollar Hollywood movie, retire the Eiffel Tower to bed, set graffiti artists to task on the Taj Mahal, pack all the Pyramids and Roman ruins into storage, dismantle the life’s work of mankind’s greatest thinkers and philosophers, poets and priests, artists and entertainers.

The finest achievements in science and medicine, economics, space travel and academia all cast to the raging bonfire of my ennui.

I’d tear great chunks out of religious manuscripts and knaw them to a pulp between my foaming teeth, ejaculate upon Mona Lisa’s smile and lay landmines beneath the paving stones of Las Ramblas, Oxford Street, Times Square and Sunset Strip.

In the words of Mr. Carl Panzram – I wish mankind had one neck and I had my hands round it.

Suffocation in the junk dens, feral dogs, oil cartels, mass media conglomerates, used-car salesmen, disaffected travel agents and frustrated shelf-stackers in just another Walmart graveyard, perverted teachers of primary children, hysterical bus drivers who keep on pulling themselves back from veering across into oncoming traffic.

Here stands your Messiah!
Born again!!
Born again to spread famine, drought and whichever venereal disease you might choose, stamp flowers into dirt where only weeds may sprout.

But this is all for nothing these tidings I bring.

These prophesies I offer up to the world, my dictatorial rule as God and the Second Coming are routinely ignored to fall on deaf ears.

Fair enough then I say to thee.

You can just wash your acne faces in sinks of hydrochloric acid, feast on banquets laced with strychnine and hang yourselves from ceilings using your favourite neck tie.

I take it all back. I take it all back......

We might as well retire gracefully from living, extricate our being and try our hand at something new.

At the end of the day we’ve given it our best shot but things just aren’t working out.

Life is past its sell-by-date, it’s gone rotten and we don’t know what to fucking do with it.

So ends this parable from me, Dylan Stewart; could be a suicide note, could be a love letter.

Or it could be the tired old ramblings of a withered drunk, slumped on a bar, chewing on his false teeth, trying to remember the way home as the landlord tolls the bell to signal time gentlemen please.

Phew, For a Minute There I Lost Myself

So sighs the Baptist as he surrenders down the virgin’s veil in haste. He preaches serenity of silence to the doe-child and exits stage-left to the waiting stomach of the church .....

So gasps the father as he presses forehead cold to medicine cabinet mirror. Footfalls slow and serendipitous on soft carpet (cream – her choice not his) ascending the stairs with a head-full of bourbon and a heart-full of hurt. He ambles along midnight hallways and enters to tuck the little ones in for a long peaceful sleep before smearing the marital bed with graceful rose-petal strokes .....

So blushes the beauty queen as the boyfriend pauses their convertible at red beneath which rots a wretched drunk, randomly brought to rest like a paper bag from a pillow of wind. Their eyes collide for a molecule of time but that’s all she can afford since the lights have blinked green and she wants to be fucked in the Jacuzzi at least twice before the afternoon is done ....

So acquiesces the shepherd who with the power vested in him surveys his flock from up on high and, feeling shame and regret, casts casual ruin with one firm and sturdy palm to erase all and everything from view.

Phew, for a minute there I lost myself.