Tearing the city at the seams no. 16 - Fear and Loathing in Soho

The time had upsurged dramatically to the point of 10.35pm and with it the onrush of intoxication, catching us in its forward momentum like some kind of alcoholic riptide. It was the end of a grim and dreadful December day, and as we goose-stepped ourway along Shaftesbury Avenue towards Soho I remember that strange feeling in my gut that it was time to let the night slip away and stop trying to force entry to the citadel of good times.

And yet we went on, my brain feeling as though a gigantic hypodermic needle had embedded itself beneath the cortical integument and compressed the plunger on a full syringe of pure drunkenness. I was at the point at which the bright lights, the people, the traffic become congealed together into a sensory sludge held in vivid and febrile uniformity by sheer nervous energy and a willingness to keep going, but in danger at any minute of splintering into chaotic disabandon. The night had passed the point of safe return; it was destined to end either spectacularly or terribly, there would be no chance for any mediocrity in between.

My companion and I were heading through from Chinatown where we had sampled sake in a dim sum bar chased down by Isahi beer, served up with some noodle soup by a harried Chinese waiter with an accelerated demeanour and a frozen scowl. My friend was terse and on edge for reasons that will be explained later on. For now though, let it suffice to say that after recklessly consuming a near-full bottle of port by the time we had even made it to Chinatown, he was at risk of becoming quite frenzied with paranoid delusions.

As for myself, I had my own personal traumas to contend with. Only a couple of weeks earlier the surging tide of romance had finally broken back, leaving me as a solitary beachcomber to sift through the moraine of regrets and recrimination left behind.

I had taken to undergoing quite extensive night walks in an effort at escaping the flat where arms of bitter ennui sprouted from every wall like something from a Polanski film. Dickens himself, as a cure for insomnia, would often take similar night walks through London, observing 'one drunken object staggering against the shutters of a shop, another drunken object would stagger up...to fraternise or fight with it.' If it was good enough for him, then it would surely suffice for me.

Out on the streets, the Christmas shoppers were just about on the wane, their squadron of bags clustered about them as they in turn clustered around bus stops awaiting the convoy to spirit them away from this battleground of commercial imperatives and sales incentives. It was at that time in mid-December when people have begun to yield to the intolerable pressures of the festive season, a few scant days remaining before the clear pocket of air in which people can take a few deep breaths before being landed back in the turbulence of their lives once again.

Almost exactly 24 hours earlier Nelson Mandela had died, and the atmospheric pressure of the night was scored through with that very particular kind of unacknowledged yet telekinetic sine wave that follows in the direct aftermath of a major news event.

My own sense of anxious self-worth is intensified the more I think of Mandela in this skewed state of mind; one man's titanic legacy rendering any problems I may have or potential achievements I may fulfill wholly inconsequential by comparison. But then only a fool would make such a comparison.

I'm of the firm belief that the innate fear of dying is in large part bound up in having not achieved anything in life of any real worth, of not being remembered, of having mispent your few alloted years. This goes hand in hand with the eternal quest for immortality, for cheating death. Indeed, I thought, for all the hardship and struggle Mandela endured in his life, he surely died the greatest death possible; for how many can lie on their death bed knowing, not only that they will be almost universally mourned, but in a sense that they have assumed, through being promoted to 'icon' status, as close to immortality as is humanly possible?

But anyway, enough of this morbid fascination. We were entering Soho and there was boozing to be done. A round of halves at the French House on Dean Street, a place spilling over the brim with people, clutching to conversations on the pavement outside huddling round their cigarettes for warmth. We veered round onto Old Compton Street, a fabulous thoroughfare of camp exhibitionism. Walking along it you can almost astrally project yourself back a few decades when it would have been as risque, seedy and exhilerating as anywhere else in the city - Travis Bickle's nightmare ('all the animals come out at night').

Into Cafe Boheme for a couple of rum and cokes, propped at the bar like a pair of folded umbrellas, observing this poseur's palisade.

It was at this point in the proceedings that my companion became increasingly jittery as the freeflow of booze irrigated his mind of its faculties of logical reasoning. Desperate to leave his job at an insurance firm, but lacking the wherewithal to quit, he had taken to frantically scouring online job listings, a predator shuffling through reams of possibilities before zeroing-in on the one that appeared submissive enough to try and groom.

Taking off another in a whole repertoire of sick days - this time pleading gastro-enteritis - he had spent the morning spreading his oratory peacock wings of achievements and capabilities, and the afternoon recoiled in on himself in the corner of a Brixton pub as a spent force, supping his way through an entire bottle of port.

(The reason for this particular beverage being a fondness for the elegantly wasted Sydney Carton from 'A Tale of Two Cities', as well as an inquisitive fascination with William Pitt the Younger who managed to serve as Prime Minister despite drinking 3 bottles of port per day before yielding to a peptic ulceration of the stomach. If only this were David Cameron's prescribed daily intoxicant he might actually become relatively interesting.)

Coaxing him out of this somnolent stupor had been hard work. For one thing, he knew that there was an insurance team night-out in Soho planned for that very evening; indeed by bullshitting some feverish lie he had been mandated to surrender his invite. He made it explicit that he would hold me responsible should we cross paths with his collegiate ensemble, and so the night had assumed an almost guerrilla mission air of gravitas. I had batted away the entirely reasonable compromise of going somewhere else, thereby avoiding any chance of such a potentially cataclysmic meeting coming to pass, for the dubious reason that I had acquired an annual member's card for a dive bar on Greek Street that was due to expire at the year's end.

The fact that my friend was prepared to swallow such self-indulgent guff confirmed to me that perversely he was almost willing such a meeting to transpire, seeing as how it would bring to an ugly head the tedium of his present working life. The fact that I could sense in him the desire to bring about his own downfall, could sense it in the way he constantly surveilled the bar and its patrons, all the while unable to elucidate rationally as the nervous energy short-circuited every thought process, was fascinating to observe.

We were manoeuvring across a trapeze, he knew it and I knew it, and there was only one thing to do and that was to keep on going, stay close to the ground, drink our drinks, fortify ourselves against potential enemy fire and move on fast. It was true that there were any number of drinking establishments in the Soho province, but it was also true that we were engaged in a game of Russian Roulette, in which the moment we stepped through the doors of the wrong place at the wrong time it would all blow up in our faces.

We made our way in the direction of Soho Square, all the while my companion weaved around the more sedentary pedestrian traffic, his eyes roving in all directions, determined to preempt any danger before it was too late. By contrast, I sought to remark on the number of cafes and franchised eateries that had infiltrated Soho's midst, diluting it of any autonomy into a weak broth of generic familiarity,

Passing by Bateman Street, I spotted the sorry sight of the now-closed Lorelei pizzeria, its lozenge-like neon sign permanently extinguished on a legendary Soho institution, a nook of a place where pizzas cost around 600p (as the menu would stipulate) and sacks of flour would be perched around the entrance as though they were sandbags guarding against some unknown flood.

Making it, without incident, to the northern border of Soho, we ducked down into the basement bar of the Toucan, a dingy Irish bar which remains charming despite, or perhaps because of, all the Guinness tat all over the walls,not to mention the 'pint of Guinness' bar stools. We hoisted ourselves onto these spongy plinths and ordered the obligatory pint of the black stuff and double whiskies. It wasn't long before I began to imagine my friend slowly sinking arse-first into his pint-stool, unaware until completely submerged, like Augustus Gloop in Willy Wonka's chocolate river, leaving only a crime-scene outline of his seated posture as a new kind of clover in the foam.

Truly, I thought, there can scarcely be a more iconic beverage than a pint of Guinness? Having drunk numerous pints of the stuff in Dublin, I concluded that the myth of Guinness only being at its best in its hometown was well founded; in fact it is a myth that its a myth. I remember making the mistake of ordering a pint in a Los Angeles bar and being presented with something that tasted like Marmite-infused dishwater.

Back out on the street, clusters of lairy lads clung from each other's shoulders like bleary-eyed apes, barfing out snatches of incomprehensible Oasis lyrics and shouting garbled propositions to harassed-looking women passing by. What would nights out be like were these staple gender roles reversed? How would I react, I wondered, to a throng of pissed-up girls stumbling in a graceless chorus line yelling vague yet slightly threatening offers of sexual congress towards me? I suppose one can never know...

By now my companion had let caution go the wind, narrowly avoiding being hit by a speeding taxi, and I worried that he had crossed the void into willing his own physical as opposed to just professional demise. Taking control of the situation I deduced that what we needed was more drinks and helpfully steered my friend in the direction of the dive bar on Dean Street to which we had been aiming from the off.

Downstairs the bar was about half full and we tried to ingratiate ourselves with the clientele as successfully as we could given the circumstances. The decor of the place was at once troubling but hilarious; framed photographs of Mussolini and Mafioso bosses. Perched at the bar I ordered two more whiskies and tried to corral my friend into some kind of decadent orderliness, insisting to him that the main danger of the evening was over, this hole was the last place a tightly-clenched fistful of insurers would be seen in.

Without acknowledging me he took his drink and stumbled off to a corner table, slumping down between two amused women. Soon enough some wholly out-of-place house music began pumping out and everyone became whipped into a bout of sweaty convulsive dancing. Leading the hedonistic charge, was a middle-aged man who was, it is only fair to say, unbelievably gay. Gay men would be ashamed to call themselves such in the face of this man and his quite staggering level of campness. In fact I wondered whether bizarrely he hadn't crossed the rubycon into a whole new plateau of gayness that for most people of the same persuasion remained a hazy and distant fugue.

Suddenly, my attention became drawn to a sultry and mysterious woman poised at the end of the bar surveying the unfolding dancefloor melee with wry amusement. Alcohol's demolition squad had blasted down all the sober walls of refinement and self-preservation and I began to engage this woman in conversation. We discussed the horrors of Christmas shopping crowds, the dubiously fascist overtones of the bar's decor, as well as the intriguing sexual politics that daily afflict the relationships between men and women.

Before very much longer I became aware that the whole room had somehow descended into a maelstrom of frenzied and unabashed sexual activity, clothes had been shed and everyone was urging one another towards a hysterical level of climactic fervour, an animalistic orgy utterly liberated from the staid conventions of everyday life.

This idealised version of reality dissipated around the cumulus of ice cubes encased in the amber of whiskey. The woman at the bar had been dragged away onto the dancefloor by a tall man wearing lederhosen. I wondered whether the choice of outfit was out of irony (the same way as Christmas jumpers that are always uniformly naff), certainly none of his friends had chosen to similarly dress up.

Fuck sexual politics, I thought, I would have to get hold of a lederhosen outfit sooner rather than later if I were to successfully try and navigate the waters of single life once again.

As for my friend, he had disappeared from sight and my heart jumped as I assumed he must inexplicably have struck gold with his two elder mistresses. Alas, a vibrating in my pocket alerted me to the fact that he had sought refuge in a toilet cubicle for two highly drastic reasons.

Firstly, to regurgitate the purple reservoir of port sluicing his gullet; and secondly, because lo and behold, the platoon of insurers had just descended onto the dancefloor, lead by the boss, in his words - 'the tit in the lederhosen'.