#philberg

Walking out of Radion’s heavy black vinyl flap doors, leaving the party, music was somehow hardly audible from outside. Each cold exhale dispensed and sent up, somewhere. The canal water was flat, and the reflection of each star pooled and swung like tiny short-leashed tetherballs on the slight ripples. My legs felt long. My body felt complete, a mechanical performance. I was smiling to myself, swelling from tear-glazed eyes to jaw-dropped sensations and ideas and noticings, each one stopping me in my tracks then making me smile and chuckle to myself. So quiet and alone, I was startled to be witnessed by a man and two women closing up a darkened Thai restaurant, huddling together and penguining off, parka-d, to the train station. It was night in Amsterdam, around 1. I was an adult; I had reached it with no time stamp. Life was additive. I was alone. I was myself, the humor of my own name bouncing in my head. I was in a full time marvel.

I’d walked over from my large hotel to the club around 7, a place I’d chosen for its cheapness, apparent safety, and proximity to both Radion and the airport, where I was going early the next morning. I had wandered Amsterdam all day after taking the train in from Utrecht.

I ate three little mushroom squares at 7, a decent microdose, then another three at eight. I’ve never gone to a party so early, but it had been going since Friday, so “early” had lost its perspective. I was reminded upon entry of the strength of unfamiliarity, of foreignness and aloneness, even with all my mental faculties. Trying to enter, I walked right past the entrance and had to double back, sheepish. I couldn’t find an available locker, perplexed, until I realized there were roomfulls more. I didn’t realize you had to pay for the locker with Radion coins, an arcade-like exchange. I wandered into the music, feeling out the steps down in the dark, trying to let my eyes adjust to the shape of the room. Everyone’s phone cameras were covered front and back upon entry. I wondered if there was another stage. So early in the night, the main bars were closed for a rest, only the large cafe open. I did two circuits of the whole club before I asked a Radion coin cashier how to find the cafe, whose main purpose seemed to be sitting down. It was obvious. The landscape started to melt into familiarity, and I settled in to listening to the music, my low-dose trip beginning.

The night moved at a spread alligator crawl; twenty minute sections each felt like the most exciting sensory hour, watching each person around me as they danced and their eyes wandered and they socialized and willed others toward them. I was thinking about the floor and my feet and the thumping noises layered with sounds like a frog squelching or a rhythmic repeating stair climb which always gave me a chill of excitement, feeling my body moving in its normal shapes and patterns and occasionally urging in a new motion or direction.

A man turned around and handed me a little blue pressed pill, which was slightly dampened from his palm. I accepted it, then asked what it was. “A mint,” he said, pulling out the tin and giving it a shake. I put it in my mouth. The flavor was incredible, spread out and lasting in every part of my mouth. “We don’t have mints like this at home,” I thought to myself, then laughed. I moved back and forth between the upper level (for air and space) down into the throng of crowd packed up toward the caged djs where I could fully immerse myself, the kind of scene pearl clutchers probably imagine when conjuring satan’s modern temptation techniques. While most people were mellow, with eyes that seemed to see, it was carnal: people hanging onto the cage bars like animals, frenzied and drugged and moving and not speaking, the concrete angled ceiling beautifully brutalist, but also not unlike a prison in some futurist indoor, stuck world. A beautiful old man in a pleated skirt and taped top faced away from the music, gathering a circle around him like a pied piper before heaving, hands on his knees, for what felt like forever, and only rising again a more demure self. I asked a kind, British looking boy smoking a blunt for a lighter to smoke a cigarette. He misunderstood, handed me the blunt, and I dropped it as it sparked on my fingers. He then gave me a lighter, but someone knocked the cigarette out of my hand in passing after the first drag.

The djs put in sounds that complemented and incited crowd-screaming, and the crowd screamed. As the night mounted, fresher patrons entered, mixing with the haggard weekenders who may have been there all day or longer. The bars re-opened. The slightly disgruntled employees trying to keep the space usable seemed to switch shifts or lighten up as the night actually began; it always seems like a club is affronted by daylight, daytime, recognizable working hours. A woman at the sink in the bathroom said something in Dutch. I said sorry, I didn’t understand, and she took a short beat before saying while looking in the mirror “I need some lipstick, something to look alive.” I didn’t have any; I felt awkward and smiled. I looking into the mirror and saw a funny face, cherubic and young and somehow innately preppily earnest; even the right clothes and eyeliner don’t make my face any less soft. I do not have “the look.” When I walked in, the bouncer asked how old I was. “26,” I said. “Good.”

A very young girl, lithe and beautiful, stood on a step and reveled in those watching her. I thought about how my own body had changed, changes, and will. I’d seen her loading her things into a locker an hour before, with another young companion, everything thoughtful and folded. I wondered what it could possibly be like to know this place and command it at 18, fan snapping in hand and makeup perfect, hair coiffed and slicked. To dance propelled with the energy of adolescence.

The sexy upstairs bartender flexed her torso like Iris Law in a red lingerie set and avoided serving drinks. Warm, handsome, enormously tall Dutch men urged me forward to get served first, and after a wait watching the bartender gyrate and wander about I got a beer, which cost 1 Radion coin and which I would drink and then refill with water from the delicious bathroom tap, so cold the faucet was in a perpetual sweat. I felt like I moved between unofficial crowd segments of gay men and straight people. Down in the cafe, I didn’t know where to sit, every place taken and people chattering, linguistically stranded. A cuddling couple smiled and beckoned, but I went back to the dance floor. A short German man with dark sunglasses and a belly and a patterned shirt was dancing hard and happily; we were next to each other for a while near the front and he turned to me and said “it’s a good angle,” gesturing at my form. Every time we ran into each other after that we’d bump shoulders and smile. The music mounted; the djs had held us in repetitive industrial restrained heavy rhythms for so long that the slightest hint of a tone felt indescribably good and sent the dancers into a frenzy.

At the fullest portion of my trip, from 9-11 or so, each little chunk of time would pass like this. Wildly full, enrapturing, dancing hard and hearing and seeing so much. As I started to come down, the music only seemed to get better. I texted Alec a clip and he said “spooky industrial sewer pipe.”

Only when I left, around 12:30, did my own self start to take its full shape again. I spent the next hour strolling and thinking and feeling. The drugs had a light enough touch I could feel them entirely, emotions and ideas and feelings and inner calm leaping up into the space left by the absence of sensory overload. Every song was worthy of tears. I listened to John Cale’s All My Friends three times in a row, which even once likely would have annoyed me sober.

I made it back, hands finally totally numb, and realized I was starving. I got Bugles from the hotel store, and ate them silently with a Coke Zero at the desk in my room. I remembered as a child putting one on each finger like raspberries and eating it off, but I didn’t do that. I was texting Alec and Max and Phil and felt great. I took a long hot shower, swaddled myself in towels, and slept.