Club Oblivion

Liam Cagney | Tolka, Issue Two, December 2022

As Indrani and I sweep up the charred-black staircase past a precipitously tottering woman, and as we hand our coats and bags to the tattooed Garderobe worker, and as we slip into a dank graffitied toilet cubicle, then, buzzing to at last be here, sweep back downstairs into the bar, slipping through the chest-to-chest throng, all leather and beards and babble, I have no inkling of the paranoia into which, like a slobbering dog falling into canal slime, my night will plunge, because for now, as I glimpse Indrani’s complexion lit up George Grosz red, we are completely intoxicated by Griessmuehle’s carnival, the club girls in glitter-ball face masks, the sweating bears, the spilt drinks and music, a pandemonium that, after the quiet unreality I’ve endured recently alone in my high-rise flat, feels like a happy dose of unbridled realness.

*

It’s January 2020. And when, after weeks of prevarication, I finally decide that, yes, I will go to Griessmuehle’s closing party, to the weekend-long closing party of one of Berlin’s most beloved nightclubs, the first thing I wonder is what I should wear. Should I daub my lips purple again and rock up in my black and white stripes? Or, since I’ll be going with my new girlfriend Indrani, should I instead wear the headdress she bought me, orange and green, with a string vest and silk floral shirt? An outlier is my fetish gear – mesh, dog collar – but although it’s a queer party, fetish isn’t Cocktail d’Amore’s vibe, and although you want to be unique as you dance in the abandoned industrial units, you also want to fit in.

Like the butterfly effect, where a red admiral’s wing-flap in the Caribbean invariably causes a devastating hurricane in the Outer Hebrides, one incorrect item of clothing at Griessmuehle’s Cocktail d’Amore closing party might destroy my whole weekend. And Griessmuehle’s closing party isn’t just any party; it’s a historical event, so you want to be dressed right. In our images of history, fashion’s the unsung hero; without fashion, Napoleon at the Brandenburg Gate would have ruined his Prussian conquest by wearing fluffy pink galoshes; and had JFK, rather than a tailored suit, worn an Aran jumper and sandals with socks, his famous Ich bin ein Berliner speech would be long forgotten, remembered if at all as an embarrassing low point for our species. Such are my wild thoughts as, having confirmed, after depressed months laid up ill, that I will indeed have one last dance at Griessmuehle, I think about what to wear.

Perhaps Oscar Wilde’s quip – it is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances; the true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible – is for you just that, a pretentious quip. But in the endless midnight of a party like Cocktail d’Amore, the deepest can truly become the skin.

*

A gay-nightlife staple, Cocktail was founded in 2009 by the Italian DJ and production duo Giacomo Garavelloni and Giovanni Turco (AKA Discodromo) with Berghain resident DJ Boris. ‘Our taste was Italo, disco, house and, in general, music that would create some emotional reaction,’ Discodromo told me. ‘No other queer clubs or parties were offering this music. So together with Boris, we decided to start our own night, mainly for us and our friends who felt the same way about the music offerings from the club dance scene.’

Cocktail started off in a basement on Ritterstraße in Kreuzberg, before subsequent peregrinations around Berlin took in, writes Daniel Wang, ‘a former brewery in Rollbergstraße . . . Chez Jacki on the Spree riverbank . . . a trashy, non-descript storefront hidden between sixties Plattenbau apartments and the Kino International, and an odd farmhouse-like structure behind the Hamburger Bahnhof ’. Having arrived at Griessmuehle, a former factory in which Garavelloni and Turco installed a high-end sound system, the monthly party seemed able to end its wandering, finding a lasting home.

Cocktail’s musical aesthetic is hybrid, open, playful, filthy, intense, self-subversive: in a word, queer. In the Wintergarten, you might hear Alex from Spain blasting out ‘Relight My Fire’; in the main room, Discodromo spinning some indefinable psychedelic melange; in the smoky cosmic hole, Trent playing slow, narcotic crunk; then, in the garden, as dawn’s rays glimmer through the branches, Daniel Wang spinning as an aubade Tomita’s kitsch electronic synthesizer arrangement of Ravel’s Boléro. ‘We still book unknown talents we get excited about and try to create a unique yet very varied sound that some by now call the “Cocktail sound”, unable to put it into a specific genre or defined box,’ Garavelloni and Turco said.

Psychedelic-cum-pornographic graphics courtesy of Pindar Andriopoulos have been there since Cocktail’s first flyer – a bouquet of roses made of cocks. Cocktail d’Amore’s record label hosts productions by the likes of Discodromo and Sfire ( Jeffrey Sfire and SOPHIE). For me, the track that distils Cocktail’s vibe is ‘Sfire 1’, a sweet and driving party track with vocals by Marcela, electroclash meets Italo, light-headed and wistful and childlike, and now, since SOPHIE’s death, almost unbearably bittersweet.

*

When Saturday night enfolds us in its mysterious embrace, it’s wet and dark and grim as only East Berlin in deep winter can be. On the tram to Indrani’s Moabit flat, as I pass the hulking Plattenbauten apartment blocks at the Platz der Vereinten Nationen, I pass the time reading about Griessmuehle online. Located in the district of Neukölln, Griessmuehle is housed in a former grain mill (hence the name). Industrial units, railways lines and a canal insulate it from the outer world. Grain silos stand erect in rows or lie prone with revellers having climbed inside them. Wooden decking stretches away through sparse trees, which men climb up for shenanigans. Campfires are started; heart-to-hearts happen. The canal flanks the site like a moat, a ballast against reality – until now.

There isn’t much you need to know about Griessmuehle’s eviction. Briefly: the club is on a lease; the property-developer owner decides it’s time to kick the shabby clubbers out to give way to the predictable generic hotel/office spaces/exciting retail opportunities – reality. Berlin’s Club Commission and politicians step in as mediators, and after 45,000 people sign a petition and Neukölln’s mayor speaks out, a compromise is reached: the site will be bulldozed, but the mooted exciting retail opportunities will become instead an exciting cultural opportunity (corporate sleight of hand); meanwhile, Berlin’s politicians will help to find Griessmuehle a new home, supposedly (says the rumour mill) a site in the austere eastern district of Lichtenberg. I live in Lichtenberg, in a modest apartment on the twentieth floor of a GDR tower block with decades-old lino floors, a knackered sofa and a dizzying view of other Soviet high-rises stretching away to the horizon.

*

Janelle Monáe sings from the speakers and anticipation clasps my stomach as, in the bedroom of her flatshare, Indrani tells me about the performance-art piece she’s writing. It’s a spoken essay about her Indian grandfather, she says, the stern paterfamilias who during partition moved the family from India to New Jersey. Indrani’s performance piece is about how in his patriarchal shadow the ties between his three daughters came undone; it’s about how patriarchy sets women against each other.

Indrani was raised by her white father’s family in North Carolina. She sometimes got to visit her mom in the Detroit projects.

‘Two-thousand words. Now I have to memorize it. But I have my B2 German exam the same week, and I’m worried I’m putting too much pressure on myself.’

I watch her apply blue lipstick at the mirror. We met months ago at a club night in Wedding and grew attached, two immigrant artists with de rigueur precarious jobs. That night was Indrani’s birthday and on the dance floor she was impossible to miss, laughing in an elegant white gown and gold earrings. We danced and hooked up and spent a weekend together during which we listened to Princess Nokia and she told me about her Fifty Dates of Grey pamphlet and Cindy Sherman and the Berlin Diaspora Society she was trying to get going, a support network for Brown artists. Tonight she’s opted for a silver space-age dress with blue lipstick; on her forehead is a jewelled bindi. Meanwhile, I’m on the floor rooting around in my suitcase like a dog.

Indrani pops the cap on her lipstick and purses her lips. ‘What do you think?’

I look at this retrofuturistic space diva in Indian jewellery.

‘Gorgeous. But lose the fake septum ring, babe, you don’t need it.’

My answer makes us both self-conscious; I feel my cheeks glowing and I go back to looking through my clothes. ‘At least I got us on the guest list tonight,’ I say, changing the topic.

If at their least imaginative clubs are four walls and a ceiling for people to get fucked in, at their best clubs are stages in which new personas aren’t simply possible but demanded. So, while I’m drawn to the music and only sporadically take in what’s around me, Indrani spends her time looking at the hats and belts and shawls and wigs, absorbing the inventive looks in what is effectively an art space just as much as is some sterile Mitte commercial gallery.

Baudelaire described fashion as ‘a symptom of the taste for the ideal which floats on the surface of all the crude, terrestrial and loathsome bric-a-brac that the natural life accumulates in the human brain.’ Fashion, he said, was ‘a sublime deformation of Nature, or rather a permanent and repeated attempt at her reformation.’ I can get with this idea of dressing up as an insouciant act of freedom in a degraded world that always falls short of our ideals. A person dressed stylishly shows esprit, truth through artifice, as I’d learnt from my Galway girl friends years ago. And through style you can express your gender however you want.

Now, I lift from my suitcase the porcelain harlequin face I found in a bargain bin in Humana. I attach the enigmatic smiling face to a lanyard and hang it around my neck. Yes, this’ll do; Complicious, I’ll call her, this harlequin who looks like Kraftwerk’s niece cross-bred with Ornacia from Drag Race season six. As if creating a collage, I stumble upon my outfit by accident: after Complicious, I dress myself harlequinesque.

I enjoy the lipstick’s taste as my lips turn red and black. I enjoy my red and black chequerboard blouse with the lumpen shoulder pads. I enjoy my knee-high socks in red and black stripes, my black shorts, my leather bumbag, my face that, below my red head-dress, I powder matte white. As if virginal, free of vulgar identity, untainted, my face emerges anew: daubed white blotches, dragged black lines, a surrealistic white under a thick black X. But in inventing my face I erase myself, erase my face while retaining it spectrally. In clubbing at Griessmuehle, in making myself art, isn’t that ultimately the freedom I desire – death?

I’ve always felt alien to myself. Yet that ridiculous existential scenario – always driven to seek and fail finally to become identical with yourself – can be flipped into a liberation. Your self becomes the open portal through which you step to find the unknown, clasping for it in the darkness of your insides, the darkness of the club space, this sealed-closed world. Yes, it’s hard to disagree with Baudelaire when he writes that, deep within such night-time spaces, the clubber is ‘quite within her rights, indeed she is even accomplishing a kind of duty, when she devotes herself to appearing magical and supernatural’.

I come back to myself. Indrani’s yuppie downstairs neighbours are banging the floor with a broom. ‘Ignore it,’ she says, picking up her keys.

By now it’s well past midnight, but before leaving her apartment we take a couple of photos. The last time we went to Cocktail was Hallowe’en, and we took photos of Indrani in an elaborate Marie Antoinette garb with a thick bouffant, pink gown and guillotine-marked neck, and me in a furry waistcoat and bandana. This time, scanning my photo, Indrani looks uncomfortable. I look over her shoulder.

Yes, I look ludicrously camp.

*

Not being over-blessed with queer friends in Berlin, the first time I went to Cocktail, having heard about it by word of mouth, I went alone. And I gabbed to randomers and had fun. I still remember the feeling, down the line, at Cocktail’s tenth birthday party, when in a dark and teeming main room, Boris dropped Patrick Cowley’s ‘I Feel Love’ remix. Sweat-scented and balmy with body heat, the room lifted off. As Cowley’s synthesizer solo grew ever more ludicrous, hands threw silhouettes on the rainbow lights; two men made love; a hand-standing Italian woman tried not to topple over; the state of play was friendly, gay, delirious, and I felt like I’d been transported back in time to NYC’s Paradise Garage circa 1980.

‘It’s a disco that absolutely blew my mind,’ the artist Keith Haring said of the Paradise Garage, adding that it was ‘nothing like other gay discos. . . . It’s the closest thing to being at a Grateful Dead concert, except that it wasn’t this hippie thing, but taking place in a totally urban, contemporary setting. The whole experience was very communal, very spiritual.’ That sense of quasi-spiritual freedom – in style, behaviour, gender, music – gets at Cocktail’s appeal. An Englishman spending a year in Berlin told me that Sundays at Cocktail had become his ‘church’. You could be whoever you wanted without giving a shit about what anyone might think. Turco has said that, looking back, ‘my life in Italy seems like a previous life. We both share this feeling, actually. When we moved to Berlin, it felt like being reborn. Completely. Sometimes I look back and I feel like I never had a life before Berlin. I was asleep, kind of.’ Except now Griessmuehle is being demolished, and it’s winter, and my bones are degenerating, and everything feels uncertain again.

*

Shimmering Alexanderplatz appears outside the window as Indrani and I sit on the train heading west. As per my standard transit routine, honed over years of gruelling bus journeys to Donegal, I have ambient music on my headphones, All Lanes of Lilac Evening by Siavash Amini & Saåad. Now, reading online again about Griessmuehle’s closure, the music inadvertently imbues everything with a mournful, almost melodramatically tragic air, all tape hiss and synth pads and arpeggiated minor chords – a growing sense of ennui, regret and carsickness. For light relief I switch to the Facebook event page and scroll the comments. There’s a post from co-organiser Giacomo: Fun game: post a sneak peek of your ultimate outfit(s) for the weekend! (we know many of you have been working on it since the announcement of the last cocktail emerge eheh). As in the Bayeux Tapestry the figures unfurl: a bearded man in a tiger costume; a bespectacled nerd sporting a full body condom à la The Naked Gun; a Barbie doll, naked, tied to a pole by her heel-length blonde hair; a paunchy bearded man modelling a pink bikini. But a palpable sense of dread has seeped into the fun: like this bereaved woman in black drapes and a thick veil (‘I’ll be the grieving widow all in black lace whispering “amore . . . ” between sobs’). I take off my headphones – the train is edging into Sonnenallee, our stop – and I show Indrani how the most reactions are for a humorous stock photo of an East Asian man wearing a medical facemask. ‘Thank God you got us on the guest list,’ she says, as we step out into the rain.

*

‘The guest list’s been frozen,’ announces the party’s gatekeeper, a swarthy man in white robes; he delivers his harsh judgement with a bizarrely quavering voice. ‘There’s absolutely no space left in the club,’ he tells us and the other disappointed guest-list hopefuls gathered in the rain before him, ‘so you’ll have to wait for people to leave.’

‘How long?’ I ask. Behind his handsome face and shrill Aussie accent, I remark the light-headed look of someone coming up on a pill. ‘Minimum three hours. Join the guest-list queue back there,’ he concludes, pointing a hundred lamentable yards back down the long alley.

How proud we were, and now how crestfallen now we feel, trudging back along the queue’s multitudes of gay men in colourful outfits and women with piercings, every further footstep a humiliating slap in the face, taking us away from this party of parties! Eventually we end up behind an Irish group sharing a bottle of rum, among whom I pretend not to notice the redhead Limerick woman who once Airbnb’d a room in my Alt-Treptow flatshare, and who brought all manner of druggy chancers back to our apartment from Griessmuehle, having noisy sex while I lay cooped up and miserable in the neighbouring box room.

‘What’ll we do?’ I ask Indrani.

Her narrow eyes are dimming. ‘I dunno, babe, not feeling so good. Think I’m getting a cold.’

‘Will we go to that other place for a while, where Ashanti ran the karaoke night?’

‘The one at Richardplatz? That closes at two-thirty,’ she says, looking at her phone. ‘In ten minutes. Sorry, babe. I know you wanted to go dancing for your birthday. We tried. What about another club? Is there one nearby?’

The mere thought of going to some lesser club when the last Cocktail is on is rancid, like going to the cinema to see a new print of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and, finding it sold out, having to settle instead for The Fast and the Furious VII.

I get down on my hunkers and check that the two pills in my sock are still intact. Should we pop them here to pass the time? The alleyway is wet and dirty and voices babble from both lines, the long guest-list queue and the infinite one for normal punters. A woman emerges from the club, staggering boldly. ‘Does anybody have a lighter?’ she asks the queue. ‘Do you have a lighter?’ I shake my head. A man leans over the steel barrier with a lighter and she pushes back his hand: ‘Just because you are good-looking, doesn’t mean I must talk to you.’

Everything becomes messy.

I drift.

In my mind a dream image flashes up: bodies in plumed Venetian masks, queuing in an alleyway; queueing not for a club but for soup. It’s the video for David Bowie’s song ‘Fashion’. In a New York City dance studio, an African-American woman in a leotard directs people to imitate Bowie’s gormless gestures, before snippets interrupt from fake TV ads for amphetamines. The video’s a collage of nonsense, lacks any semblance of narrative, and it snatches victory from the maw of defeat. Reduced to attitude and pose, Bowie generates a sense from his material that couldn’t pre-exist that material. This is exactly what I love in fashion – the unforeseen made necessary – the liberating trust in surfing the wave of one’s imagination; life not as a set pattern but as an open experiment.

My reverie breaks. ‘Time for evasive action. Stay here, I’m going to blag it.’ I stride purposefully to the top of the queue, where the burly Turkish-German bouncer is letting in people who already have a wrist stamp. I gesture to the Asian-Australian gatekeeper in his white robes. Brandishing my phone, I explain that I’m a writer and, look here, I wrote this piece about Cocktail d’Amore for the Guardian and, you know, I might write about tonight’s party, but I’m not able to stay on the whole night, just a few hours and—

‘Oh, why didn’t you say so . . . You’re not guest list, you’re press list.’

With relief, I dash back and grab Indrani. ‘Busy night,’ I say cheerily to the robed man when we return, who looks like he’s trying to stay on top his jackhammer heartbeat. He smiles weakly and nods – ‘One last time’ – then, giddy with excitement, we’re inside under red lights.

*

At this point you might have to bear with me, reader, because it’s later in the night, and everything’s blotchily cartoonish.

I can’t take my eyes off this lanky, haughty woman. She’s dancing on a platform near the DJ box and she’s yellow-skinned and femme. She’s wearing an airy Twiggy dress and Holly Golightly sunglasses and she sets one platformed shoe before the other, one platformed shoe before the other, four-square, rhythmic limbs, right-angled elbows, while dancing beside her, his toady squatness ridiculously complimenting her lank pout, there’s a headless monster. He has a shrivelled green face set in his tummy and he jives and jives, a carefree Blemmyes, waving a pair of white rave gloves – quite touching!

Below the disco femme and the monster there’s a gay couple in the early stages of an encounter. A smiling boy in a string vest and blue shorts reaches one arm towards the older bearded man’s crotch. Then, out of nowhere, the boy’s arm merges with the bearded man’s penis. Their joint penis-arm extends, a writhing trunk, a rippling waveform, an autonomous third entity, in time to the music.

And here, hand in hand, stumble space-age Indrani and harlequin me, half mad, as my little smiling amulet Complicious dangles from my neck. Cocktail’s main room is a throbbing shadow, a flickering scrum pounding with Hi-NRG music. The dark is interspersed with halogen strip lights. A huge pile of empty bottles lies in the corner. And it’s buoyant. Most of the men are topless, a virtual-reality gay club painted by Breughel, wet paint oozing in the heat. Cocktail’s main room is like a laboratory for masculinities. Men experiment with masculinity, push at its contours, rearrange their gender in perceptual shards. Military epaulettes and leather jockstraps, drag and butch, animal and vegetal – through fashion’s doorway, all wind in dance.

The dance music fascinates. My over-analytic mind characteristically flies into action trying to figure out what genre it is. Techno? Too many motifs. House? Too lacking in melody and harmony. Psychedelic, anyway – hybrid, the sonic correlative of the paint on my cheeks, of the necklace’s geometrical relationship with Indrani’s left shoe, multiplied by the hour of the o’clock it is, divided by the inverse square root of my heartbeat’s bpm . . . But wait, that screaming – is it? – yes, Suicide, Alan Vega mixed over these beats – so surprising and unsettling!

I tug at Indrani’s warm hand and we slip through the ranks down to the back of the room. From the ceiling, angry orange lichen droops and blue bananas grow. Two men embrace in high-vis vests. Viscid like glue, a membrane of an enormous eyelid unfurls across the ceiling for several metres, a biomorphic banner, ebbing towards that teeming pile of empty glass beer bottles underneath the speakers, glinting in the flashing disco lights like an insect’s compound eye.

Now before me there’s a punk with blue skin and a green Mohawk. His single head has multiplied into three heads, and each head is stacked upon the other. The blue punk leaps into the air, three mouths agape, and in his topmost head’s mouth, I now see, this blue freak catches wonderfully a dazzling pink laser beam that’s shooting from a huge bust in the corner, a statue of a greenskinned bearded bear.

‘It’s like a sauna,’ Indrani says, disrobing her silver dress. Dizzy and sweating, I hang its flying saucer sheen over some exposed piping on the back wall, as drops of cold water drip on me from a ceiling crack. ‘Much better,’ she smiles.

At the top of the room, flashing red and blue lights trace broken geometries. Past them flies a huge pair of hairy balls. The balls are autonomous from any phallus and body. The airborne balls shoot out billowing dry ice on the dancers below, a cordial emission.

Happy birthday, baby, Indrani’s smirking blue lips mouth as, her hand clasping my gloved fingers, my eyes flick open. Two green femme cone-head aliens are beside her, conjoined twins in yellow lace knickers. Pulling me through the darkness towards her bra and jewelled bindi, Indrani presses my waist against hers, and I feel her warmth, and in my skimpy shorts, shorts through which she so crudely groped me earlier, I feel myself getting hard. Happily my white face and lipstick aren’t a turn-off. Happily she’s forgotten—

Languorously kissing Indrani’s warm blue lips under the bellowing speaker, I disappear out of my body through her mouth, at the back of this teeming squirming dancefloor, sluiced altogether from existence, vanishing in stars and nebulae, disappearing in comets through our bodily congruence, which I’ve so much missed this mentally ill winter, disappearing from my white face, my red- and black-painted lips and red headpiece until, brought back to myself again through a hard object under my shoe, I realise Indrani’s not here. I’m standing on a man’s foot and in dumb apology I gesture to his scowling boyfriend, like a pantomime.

*

The stronger the cut that a club effects with the outside world, the better the club is. Industrial ruins and non-functional architecture are best: they seclude, shelter, create exclusivity; and, when there are no windows, no sign of the sun rising or falling, they can allow clubbers to forget absolutely the outside world, the oppressive ferule of ever-ticking clock hands; to submit to play and glamour.

‘Either the well was very deep,’ Lewis Carroll writes, ‘or [Alice] fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next. . . . Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end?’ It can feel like this entering Griessmuehle. Having passed under a railway bridge and turned left onto a long alley, you walk for an age towards Griessmuehle’s entrance along a kilometre-long stretch of concrete, Alice’s well rotated ninety degrees and becoming a dirty inner-city catwalk. As you transition, you’re granted at least a preparatory sideshow. Dishevelled club kids walk in the opposite direction, tender from their sleepless adventures, distraught or smiling crookedly.

So as Indrani and I, at 2 a.m. on the rainy night of Griessmuehle’s closing party, walked down the long alleyway towards the club, a shadowy woman and man appeared enigmatically in the distance. They were like emissaries of a foreign land. The woman in particular, a drag queen in a crumpled cocktail dress, with blonde curls and a tiara, projected a regal air, all the more effectively seductive because of the exposed catwalk of her approach. Her wrangled regal head seemed a pre-taste of Cocktail: you are entering an altogether different place. Indrani and I approached the drag queen and her courtier companion, and I thought of how Proust’s narrator describes, from the Paris opera stalls, gazing up in wonder at the spectacle of the Duchesse and Princess de Guermantes making their entrance: ‘I had no doubt that their manner of dressing was peculiar to themselves, not merely in the sense that livery with red collar or blue lapels had once been peculiar to the houses of Guermantes and Condé, but rather as for a bird, where its plumage is not some added adornment of its beauty but an extension of its body. The way the two women dressed seemed to me like the snow-white or the many-coloured materialiation of their inner worlds’ – inner worlds that exploded with wild gentleness in this Griessmuehle queen’s dilated pupil, exploding to envelop us.

*

A plump bird woman with yellow plumage has fashioned a mask from a glitter ball, and she pushes past us as we lean on Griessmuehle’s main bar, as the distant music pulses over babbling voices. I’m still waiting at the bar to get served. How long has it been?

Bodies bustle in the red light. Across the bar there’s the bald lesbian anarchist from Berghain chatting to the bulbous man with a goatee who always wears a rubber suit. A huge bouquet of fragrant white lilies dominates the bar, lending to the impression of a canteen on an alien planet.

The barman with a black hood over his face and hardware chains around his neck has ignored me for twenty minutes, doling out shots and long drinks to every other fucked face. What’s the problem? He’s currently light-heartedly chit-chatting to two men to my right. Indrani wraps her arms round me.

‘I feel like the music was better last time,’ she says.

‘I felt like we were in a film in there,’ I reply.

‘You already said that, babe.’

The man with a handlebar moustache, whom I spotted outside in the queue wearing a dinosaur hat (an elaborate homemade hat fashioned from a child’s 3D dinosaur jigsaw) pushes past us. In my left hand I clutch Complicious’ porcelain. Finally, through his hood, the barman stares me in the eye and, after I greet him in German and ask for two Vodka Mates, with faultless Schnauz (a distinctively Berliner show of contempt), he takes my money and throws the too-generous tip in the jar, deliberately without comment.

‘Heterophobe,’ I mutter grumpily as I hand Indrani her drink. ‘He just sees you as one thing.’

‘Well, the . . . he doesn’t know your . . . your persuasion,’ Indrani stutters hesitantly.

There’s awkward silence. Indrani avoids eye contact. Yes, of course we will have to discuss this. But why the fuck now?

The bar’s redness, Grosz red – my mind’s redness.

‘Look’, Indrani says, switching topic, pointing at nearby graffiti. ‘1UP. Remember their mural by your Treptower Park flat?’ Around the white trail of the 1UP crew’s tag, too impatient to await the club’s imminent destruction, grubby patches of moss have already begun sprouting, encircled by red admiral butterflies, which seem to be visibly multiplying.

‘Butterfly effect.’

‘I have to go pee upstairs,’ Indrani says, turning and walking.

As I follow her, a lingerie-clad man almost falls down the stairs on top of me, embarrassed as I catch his arm. Briefly we chat. When I look up, Indrani is gone.

*

Walter Benjamin spent years writing his endless Paris Arcades project. The discotheque concept also arose in Paris – in the 1950s, spreading to the USA in the early 1960s, an immersive social space with artificial lights and a disc jockey. To the extent that the discotheque is French in origin, and that its spread demonstrates capitalism’s standardisation of urban space, it’s a kind of twentieth-century cousin of the nineteenth-century arcades. Benjamin quotes a contemporary Illustrated Paris Guide on that urban novelty of the 1830s and 1840s: ‘a new contrivance of industrial luxury . . . glass-covered, marble-floored passages’, lit by gas lamps, linking shops on either side, ‘so that such an arcade is a city, indeed a world, in miniature’. Which is not dissimilar to club spaces at their most ambitious; especially when, as in Berlin, they’re literally housed in the ruins of commerce and industry.

The Parisian arcades for Benjamin showed how capitalist reality acts: instituting an artifice as if it were natural. ‘With construction in iron, architecture began to outgrow art,’ Benjamin wrote. Architecture here isn’t innocuous and neutral, simply a passage you walk through. Architecture in fact articulates you as a subject; it insidiously tells you who you are, a capitalist consumer and little else. Here is the birth of our modern world. These miniature environments, so aesthetically dazzling, induce narcotic forgetfulness and, in doing so, they erase other possible worlds, till you altogether forget who you might otherwise have been. Eventually, there no longer is any outside. Alongside the nineteenth-century standardisation of public space came a concomitant, no less contrived domestic interior: ‘The private citizen who in the counting-house took reality into account, required of the interior that it should maintain him in his illusions,’ Benjamin notes.

As time went on, from radio to TV to 5G, information technology took up and exploded what we might call the immersive arcades principle. The local Parisian prototype was projected wholesale onto our global sensory environment. Actual (IRL) and virtual (online) alike, our mass-media world, as Marshall McLuhan said, exists recursively, ceaselessly iterating, propagating itself as a spectacle, a de facto work of art. (Nietzsche, in his notebooks: ‘the world as a work of art that gives birth to itself ’.) Phantasmagoria (Phantasmagorie) is the word Benjamin used to describe this homogenous society and how we experience its alienating pseudo-reality. The resonance with Freudian phantasy isn’t accidental: to call the everyday a de facto artwork is basically to say we’re in a waking dream.

Phantasmagoria: doesn’t that suggest the surreal environment of a night-club space?

*

I think of the club as a play-within-a-play, a phantasmagoria-within-a-phantasmagoria. A Berlin club can be like a deconstructed arcade.

Embroiled in the everyday weave, the stream of dead concepts and dead images, of faded ideas and bland repetitions, all of which stage-manage us unbeknown to ourselves, we might come to realise one night that, although there is no outside, we have the power within us to work the weave. With an artistic eye, at special times we can embody fashion, say, in a way that gently tears apart the dream-fabric smothering us. In such cases, as with the butch queen in lingerie I just bumped into on the stairs, dressing up positively expresses a more-real selfhood.

That club culture should owe so much to queer movements is no coincidence. Judith Butler talks about critical gender consciousness as ‘how to work the trap that one is inevitably in’. Butler shows how, at a deep structural level, gender and sex norms generate and organise us as conscious subjects. Gender identity is pre-conscious: it’s wed to architecture and fashion as the texture of our collective dream. ‘Fashion,’ Benjamin wrote, ‘like architecture, inheres in the darkness of the lived moment, belongs to the dream consciousness of the collective.’ Queer club people reformulate and refashion the world. Their club world simulacrum shows that the outer world was always already a simulacrum. No wonder at Cocktail I instinctively started wearing peculiar outfits: those outfits, I realised, put me in touch with a more real self.

For now, as I pass along Griessmuehle’s charred-black corridors amid bedlam, dressed in my harlequin gear, it’s as if I’m in a Brechtean version of the capitalist phantasmagoria: the stage set is broken; the lights, flickering; the general apparatus, exposed and about to collapse.

*

I wait for Indrani in the narrow upstairs corridor. Bodies and heads move in every direction. Duos and trios go about their night, eyes bulging; I hold Ornacia. This morning – could it be true? – I felt suicidal; hard to believe, I think, clutching Ornacia tighter. After all my drama about what to wear, most of the other men here are semi-naked, wearing leather harnesses, pearl necklaces. And after my weeks laid up depressed, how mad it is to be in this carnival atmosphere. I think about the drugs in my sock, pressed against my ankle, probably melted in mush. Beside me, passing out on his feet, a fucked man props himself up against the wall while his boyfriend asks him what he took (he can’t remember). From over the archway leading back downstairs, someone tears away the green fire-escape sign, which is less concerning when you remember that the whole building is going to be destroyed in a few days anyway. The proximity to erasure gives everything a preternatural clarity.

I dash inside the dank urinals room, which, as in all Berlin clubs, is plastered in fly posters, and I pee beside two men who have joined forces to enable the semi-conscious one to piss. A gymnastic woman, pants around her ankles, backs up and tries to piss in the urinal, spreading her legs in an arch, bending down to the ground and doing a half-splits. At Berlin club nights women suffer from the fact that the cubicles are always clogged with groups doing drugs.

I leave the urinals and go into the bigger toilets to seek my silver-dressed girlfriend. But I don’t see her queuing there, and she doesn’t answer when I call.

‘I need a new life,’ says a woman beside me in the queue in denim jeans, à propos of nothing.

I’ve taken off my headpiece and feel all floppy-fringed frazzled Manila Luzon as I take in the woman’s freckles and bulbous pupils. ‘What’s wrong with your life, dear?’

Shaking her head, she deflates me with a literal German reply. ‘I am just joking.’

The dank toilets resound with white-noise babble. Where’s Indrani? A woman behind me in the toilet queue says she was standing outside Griessmuehle for four hours, so I let her go ahead of me. And soon I’m at least thirty minutes here waiting for Indrani, or waiting for one of the drug clusters to vacate a cubicle, and chatting is the only thing passing the time.

From her jeans pocket the freckled coquette produces a pink tube. ‘This stick is my only treat. Wanna see?’

‘My lips already have lipstick, babe. But sure.’

I turn the lip balm over in my fingers, not entirely sure of what I’m meant to be seeing.

‘That’, she says, ‘is my only make-up.’ (She’s wearing eyeshadow.) ‘It costs forty euros for this one stick. It does not colour your lips in an artificial way but . . . helps the colour that your lips are already.’

I look at her moist round pink lips. I nod. ‘An enhancer.’

She grabs it back and turns to a stoned-looking Hispanic guy to her left. ‘He is no good. You wanna try?’ He smiles lazily and she begins dragging the stick across his lips.

An oblique connection strikes me. Of course! All those pink faces I was seeing on the dancefloor, and now this pink embellishment . . . Weird . . . Does it mean something? . . . That I should – put some on?

Two muscular American men dressed in black are leaning against the closed cubicle doors. ‘Deine Tätowierungen sind wirklich cool,’ the coquette says to one of them.

‘Thank you,’ he drawls, then looks at his toned bare chest. ‘Yeah, let’s see: Boston . . . London . . . Tokyo . . . and this one here I got in Berlin.’

‘That one is best,’ she confirms, touching his right bicep, on which is tattooed a tacky pseudo-South Asian frieze, a horribly crude pseudo-Kama Sutra scene showing Ganesh fondling a woman’s bare breasts. ‘But stay it like this,’ she adds, ‘do not overdo them. The blank spaces are just as important, so stay it like this.’

Am I just being mad or is something clandestine being communicated here?

‘Isn’t that sorta cultural appropriation?’

The coquette looks at me, then sneers at her new pal. ‘Virtue signalling!’

Instinctively, for comfort I reach for the plaster mask round my neck.

Ah! It’s gone.

‘Fuck!’

‘What’s wrong?’

I clutch at my hair and look in vain at the filthy ground. ‘I’ve lost something.’ This is great. Now not only have I lost Indrani, I’ve lost Complicious. That mask isn’t just a straightforward accessory: the white harlequin face, the red and black lips smiling, is my miniature, my homunculus, my ideal. With Indrani nowhere to be found, this second loss really makes me anxious . . . I feel exposed, like Dolly Parton losing her wig.

Everything’s out of kilter, like a doctor’s waiting room. A door swings open and a man in Dayglow yellow underwear strides past holding his phone, talking exuberantly on Facetime – he must have gotten a good report . . .

On the floor I see the coquette’s chapstick in a puddle. As soon as I notice the pink stick, the puddle starts turning pink. A rippling mouth coalesces – two yellow eyes.

The freckled woman turns towards me her slim green irises. Her warm arm touches mine. ‘Come, you need a shot?’

*

No small part of my Drag Race infatuation is the joy in seeing people invent themselves – naming themselves, pouring themselves out, the joyous paradox of dancing queen Alyssa Edwards exaggerating and exaggerating that hair and eyeshadow artifice to reveal her authentic truth. Benjamin thought that, through dialectical analysis of modern Paris at its dreamworld’s inception, he could show the roots of our modern alienation. But doesn’t camp do the same thing – and with brio? For queer people, parodying gendered fashion norms – whether a cop’s uniform or a prom dress and moustache – works the trap, tears the map.

Really, Clarice Lispector speaks for me when, in rhapsodic mode in Água Viva, she writes: ‘I, anonymous work of an anonymous reality only justifiable as long as my life lasts. . . . I’m still not ready to talk about “he” or “she”. I demonstrate “that” . . . I am pure it that was pulsing rhythmically.’ Yes, Lispector’s androgyny is the ideal. I mean, she’s so femme, and so butch; she’s butch inasmuch as she’s femme. How couldn’t you want that freedom? Likewise, in the club’s dark box, somehow I realise my masculinity to its maximum extent – that which I am – through becoming-woman. And that’s no paradox.

Nothing is so ephemeral as a theatrical performance – it even differs from night to night – and, in an age when songs, concerts, films, books, the explosion of the Challenger, the inauguration of a president, can be reproduced over and over again, hoarded and stored, what Ludlam did on his little stage is remembered solely by people who happened to see him.

That’s Andrew Holleran in his essay on Charles Ludlam’s early 1970s Theatre of the Ridiculous. For me it just as well describes a night out at Cocktail d’Amore or Buttons.

Camp and wild, the Theatre of the Ridiculous arose in New York City in the same post-Stonewall moment as gave birth to our dance-music culture, which, prior to disco’s mainstreaming, initially kicked off at places like the Loft and Gallery, and later at the Paradise Garage, with Black and Latino gay men at its core. At these parties, the line between gay and straight could blur. ‘As David Rodriguez would say, “Straight to the next man!” or “He’s bisexual: he likes men and boys!”’ said Michael Gomes (as Tim Lawrence reports in his history of the NYC scene, Love Saves the Day). ‘There were so many people who were just sexual. A lot of black men would have sex with other men but didn’t consider it gay sex,’ said Nicky Siano. ‘It wasn’t about gay or straight. It was about, “Hey, let’s party!”.’ Sexually we’re actualised on a spectrum which, though it has gravitational poles of greater or lesser probability, is nonetheless as inexhaustible as timbre or colour. How liberating, then, to throw your shabby inherited hang-ups out the window – and how nerve-wracking, too.

On the dancefloor I gravitated towards queer people. They were more attractive and more interesting. In contrast to the straights – on autopilot in our breeding-based society – queer people, I thought, had had to work to become who they were, and I supposed that that was why on dancefloors they usually felt more open and respectful. Yes, in Berlin’s clubs it was the homos who were hetero (i.e. multifarious) and the heteros who were homo (i.e. homogenous). That’s why, as well as the intense music, and although truthfully I didn’t know many people there, I felt at home at Cocktail: in blue fishnets or ludicrous epaulettes or whatever, I felt free; in this ludicrous mise en scène – this industrial ruin that worked the trap – I felt free. And at some point the strange thought dawned on me: this is a fabrication to which you go to get a dose of reality.

In the aforementioned essay on Charles Ludlam’s Theatre of the Ridiculous, a heartfelt homage to drag and camp, Holleran writes:

Ludlam was comprehensive – pure theater. Which we were starved for – driven to his little group by the staleness of Broadway, the fatuities of a mass-produced, television-dominated, film-and-book-soaked century that gave equal time to the fall of Beirut and the fire in Michael Jackson’s hair started by a commercial for Pepsi Cola. Drowning in what Godard said the West had simply too much of – Culture; on the lam from history, novels, films, the New York Review of Books – and none of them any FUN!

All of which captures the ridiculous theatre of clubbing, Saturday night’s essential oblivion – the oblivion of this club Griessmuehle, the homely oblivion that undercuts us all.

*

The dancefloor below is a far-off fug of darkness, a dingy aquatic pool. From a rickety platform above, we watch the bodies moving, only faintly visible through their dancing motion, a shoal of fish intermingling below the water’s dank surface, the etiolated strings of a Giacometti canvas.

The music is slowed-down electronic crunk. Its largo effect is as if, after an ambitious bump of ketamine, reality had lost track of itself – had, in clumsy slow-motion, split from itself and were trying in vain to grasp and catch itself, as the costumed bodies below us enact a languorous pleasurable pantomime.

This is the Cosmic Hole. It’s the second of Cocktail’s three dancefloors, hidden away at the back of the factory building. Its vibe is spacier than the main room. Overhead, a solitary red lightbulb is set in the high wall, a distant red dot emitting terminal cosmic pulses, rendering everything red, rhythmic, as the industrial space stretches away into night-time black.

‘It’s like we’re in a movie,’ Indrani says.

She looks at me pensively. I finally found her here five minutes ago, leaning alone on the unsteady proscenium rail.

I don’t know what to say. I remain silent.

Through the mist I’m watching the two men behind the decks, the tall, bearded Trent smoking a joint and the fresh-faced Dama spinning a record. The track’s a slowed-down early eighties electro jam where, on every off-beat, the snare strikes in cavernous reverberation, slam . . . slam . . . slam . . . buildings exploding . . . towers tumbling. (Later I’ll learn that Trent and Dama DJed back to back in the Cosmic Hole for twenty-four hours continuously, a legendary set.)

A straight couple in matching rhinestone policeman’s hats, pink and blue, elbow past us, descending the stairs down into the Hole. I feel woozy, the combination of music and heat and lighting perfectly expressing, like a living canvas, that tension, impossible to quell, of being here, embodied within the interior of an old building that, so familiar from these parties, the Sunday mornings of my recent life, will imminently never again exist, its corridors and rooms and darknesses poised only for the ravenous void, a veritable world that will soon be nothing, less than nothing, giving all our actions here – this eye contact, that thought, that lapel – a sense of . . . not profundity, but rather the opposite . . . that vertiginous sense, as in Valéry’s cimitière marin, of being more identical with themselves than ever before:

I no longer have any importance. Now I’m the present itself. My personality is completely wedded to my presence, in perfect harmony with whatever may occur. Nothing more. No further depths. The infinite has been defined.

I remove my cheap white gloves. Against the darkness my hands, fingers extended, become flowers blossoming, petals unfurling.

‘Let’s go down,’ I say. I take Indrani’s hand and we descend the staircase.

On the basement dancefloor I glance back. Indrani smiles.

No need to explain yourself. She knows.

*

A tall man in leather and amulets, a Bronze Age warrior, is fanning Indrani’s face, while at the edge of the dancefloor there’s a man and woman making love. The heat down here is brutal. Being in a milieu, a hazy middle, through dance eventually leaves you unsure of where exactly you are: the distinction between outside and inside is collapsing in this soon-to-be-destroyed building.

‘I feel like we are in a film in here,’ I shout.

‘You already said that, babe.’

Kraftwerk’s ‘The Model’ comes on, slowed way down, and one or two people cheer (I hear myself among them), and Indrani moves her head to and fro. And Indrani’s bindi resonates with the rhinestone police hats. And we entwine hands, then she lets go, and the electro emits spirals, and my ears become spirals, and the distant red bulb’s dot stretches out into a line, and my eyes, following that line, become stretched in red lines, and my mouth becomes stretched into a red caricature of my mouth, and here in the middle of the dancefloor, the world stretches and is wildly exaggerated, more truly itself than it’s ever been before. And on the ground before my harlequin striped socks, there’s a furry hobby horse, mute and inexplicable. Intensely, the hobby horse regards me. And now, as in a painting, a burnished late Rembrandt, wherein the force of condensation and focus brings us back to the reality of, say, that pair of thick black shoes, paradoxically through making those black shoes vividly strange, or as in a poem, wherein the condensation of image and vortex of language, away from all utility, brings us back to the polymorphousness of language itself, so too now on this dancefloor the absurd parade of fashion and play and pantomime, set to synthetic electronic sounds, brings us back, through collective estrangement, to whatever it is that underlies our everyday reality and which is usually occluded. And as soon as I think this grandiose thought, I go to type it in my phone, to take a note, but my phone screen’s a humid blur and after a few squint-eyed seconds I give up, and it doesn’t take long for the night, too, to become a humid blur, a lurid smearing of pink into red, of blue into yellow, each colour intermixing to beget some new mulch, red and white making pink, and yellow and blue making green, and pink and green making blue, and so on, wonderfully dirty and wonderfully fecund, and wonderfully destructive, too, smearing Saturday night into Sunday morning till somehow Indrani and I, in the harsh drizzling daylight, are sitting on a bench beside the pink furry rocking horse, and of course Indrani, who enjoys herself till her body fails and we’ve collapsed together on this S-Bahn platform, collapsing a few metres from a bearded uniformed cop, who may or may not actually be a bearded uniformed cop, ultimately doesn’t really care that much, since she and I are drawn to each other for who we are rather than who we’re not.

‘Club Oblivion’ was first published in Issue Two of Tolka (November 2021). Issue Two is available to purchase here. You can subscribe to Tolka for a year for €22.