Just follow the beams, man! (pt1)
Howaya?

I did an Erasmus year in Limoges, France.
A half hour or so’s drive out of town was a mega-club with seven dance floors or more catering to every imaginable type of music nightclubs generally cater to.

Goths mingled with wiggers.
Ravers shared cocktail jugs with Cure-heads.
Punks proferred Gauloises Blondes to Ben Sherman-clad admirers of Madness.

Lolo Ferrari was the special guest one evening and we clamoured in unison to brush against her beach balls.

I lived in student halls.

Therein resided quite the melting pot of Francophones and Francophiles, most of whom at one time or another found a means of travelling to the mega-club half an hour away the name of which escapes me.

I had no means of getting there but had heard tell of its’ glory and was suitably envious.

Enter Bernie: a giant hulking mass of a man with dyed blonde hair. He always wore cheap red plastic-framed sunglasses, smiled like a loon, wore golf trousers, lurid polyester shirts and flamboyant shoes.

He lived on the outskirts of Limoges having dropped out of University in the UK with a pile of debt so enormous, his egress to her majesties’ domain was not assured without a police escort.

Bernies’ love of sunglasses, his intoxicating grin, his sense of style and it transpired later, his familiarity with the British constabulary, had rather a lot to do with that most wonderful of pill-shaped evening enhancers, MDMA.

Now, I am not unfamiliar with the warm-bath-like frisson of a pill or five or seven and nor was I then.

Nor am I likely to run a mile from the odder, more abrasive elements of society.
Nutters are fascinating and great company.
I mean, just look at you lot.

Bernie rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way.
Bernie was not a student but a dropout living off Mammys’ buck and didn’t mind letting anyone know it.
Bernie had a car and a petrol allowance.
Bernie had access to considerable quantities and varieties of stimulants.
Bernie craved attention and something to do.

All Bernie needed was a partner in crime.
Enter baz,

“Good evening”.

“I am not a tall man.
At the time, I was slender and half-starved with the deep set eyes, shaggy coiffure and comedy facial hair of a man deep in thrall with the mighty weed – kind of like a malnourished mini-Vipros.

Bernie and I made quite the pair.

Clad in black to counterpoint Bernies’ spectral flamboyance, we set out one night in his car, a metallic blue mid-range Renault for the mega-club a half hour or so away the name of which escapes me.

We had, perhaps, one hour earlier or so, dropped a couple of tabs of acid.
I was concerned for our, oh, say, lives but the overgrown harlequin assured me all would be well and as we made our way further along the motorway, I became increasingly complicit in this belief.

We were uncertain as to the way after a certain point.
There was meant to be a turn off the motorway down a country road to a field in which lay our destination club-topia.

The acid served to nurture both our doubt and belief in the inevitability of success.

Above the mega-club, there was a giant strobe light casting fishing lines out into the sky to hook us eager swimmers and in a flash of drug-induced inspiration, we decided that our success lay in simply following the beams.

Bernie was racked by doubt.
Despite his outward display of self-assuredness, he was hugely indecisive.
Sometimes mere seconds passed in between his repeatedly declaring,

“Are you sure we’re going the right way?”,

to which I repeatedly responded,

“Just follow the beams, man!”

We followed the beams.

The distant rifle-blast thumping of the rave part of the mega-club grew closer.

We knew we were on to something.

Our grins grew wider.

Bernie became more assured.

With rapturous outbursts of joy, we gazed upon the gaudy neon we craved and having parked, we leapt for joy at our ill-advised, map-less, drug-fuelled success.

We were, in that moment, heroes of hedonism”

INTERMISSION

rafter
baz
(bazmorningstar efil4nat3b, Wed 15 Apr 2009, 14:39, 4 replies)

Beautifully told
.
( Monty Boyce, My cheese game is strong, Wed 15 Apr 2009, 14:53, closed)

Don't stop now!
I was on the vinegar strokes.
(LickOutTheJamsMotherfuckers!, Wed 15 Apr 2009, 15:50, closed)

ahem
"deep set eyes, shaggy coiffure and comedy facial hair of a man deep in thrall with the mighty weed – kind of like a malnourished mini-Vipros"

do I need to take offence at this?
( Vipros. clever got me this far, then tricky got me in, Wed 15 Apr 2009, 16:04, closed)

I say...
"Nutters are fascinating and great company.
I mean, just look at you lot."

I fucking object!

I'm shit company.
( Undercovercarrot got done for gross misconduct on..., Wed 15 Apr 2009, 16:50, closed)