August 18, 2013
Source: Shutterstock
Two snapshots I remember from the early days. One: we were dancing in the Brain club on Wardour Street, an incubator for “hardcore jungle,” the interior painted fluorescent in the form of an actual brain. There was so much energy in there, the roof could have blown off. I was dancing on a table and I kicked a drink, a glass full of vodka tonic, across the room. I looked up from the amazing footwork I”d been performing and into the eyes of a tall black dude with dreadlocks down to his waist.
“I”m sorry,” I shouted.
“I love you, man!” he shouted back. “Fuck the drink!” he added.
“Fuck the drink!” I chorused. And we huddled, arm in arm, into a two-man junglist dance frenzy. The man was Lenny Kravitz.
Two: Inside the same club, one raver was rushing so hard, he told the crowd around the bar he just wanted to eat the Vick’s paste he was covering his shirtless torso with, the fumes sending him higher and higher. Soon enough, with a little encouragement from bystanders, he fingered the stuff into his mouth in large wallops. He emptied the tub, turned green, and zoomed into a dance ritual the likes of which we had never seen, bending and twisting as if a bubble was forcing its way up from the floor to his head and he had to squirm to let it pass through his entrails. Then he began to foam at the mouth.
Ten to fifteen minutes later the ambulance took him home via the hospital. Next Thursday night he was back in the club.
You know me: I”m never one to be nostalgic. The next great time is a plane ticket to Mexico DF.
But those were the days.
We liked to stay high all the time because”why come down? As a man in a space suit at a San Francisco 405 party once told me: “Better living through chemistry.” Seen?
This is not what I advocate universally; not for an adult life. It’s more in the vein of Hunter Thompson’s dictum: “I hate to [recommend] drugs…but they always worked for me.”
à bientôt. Seen?
“Bombay
