Even David Bowie preferred Ibiza. Back when. Back when it was cool, when it was blissed out hippies in calico kissing flowers, licking toads and chasing dragons. Then the DJs came, and the hard-core hedonists, the club 18-30ers, the stags & hens, the Ryanair ravers and the toilet happened.
The toilet looms large and long, as do the chemicals: ephedrine, corn starch, amphetamine, quinine, methamphetamine, sugar, cocaine, lysergic acid diethylamide or, if really lucky, your actual 3,4- Methylenedioxy-methamphetamine or, because life is short, pills.
Scoring on the island’s a doddle: the local pharmacists do a roaring legal trade in downers, and creative options there are aplenty, sellotaped under tits, instead of inflated local prices, for gobbled up disco biscuits, cut with what Wikipedia can only hint at, that shoot you up and down on a bungee rocket, and Bet You Look Monged on the Dance Floor! 2,000 light years from the penthouse, sweet, but well handy for the gutter, internal grammar mashed, and not in a good way neither…
Outside the toilet waiting… waiting for the emotional current to catch up, to go the way of the narrative flow for an easy life. Sometimes it’s best not to swim upstream against the turds and the piss. Get it written, don’t get it right. Wrong.
This is the story of perceived slights. Fatal injury inflicted by superego and detail. Detail is the devil of a bastard to unpick. It rots guts. It casts doubts upon the badly re-imagined memories that comfort. Forget it. Leave it alone. Let it slide into the compost… If only.
Later, the salad days of domestic commentary need no longer be heeded, and the hours you’ve spent watching him/her over and over again, a compulsive toddler on a decade-long film binge, can only ever be retrieved as nostalgia and narrative therapy. Then you will gladly piss all over their outside compost toilet and [s]he’ll be grateful for it. No lid to leave up or down. No personal memoranda listing unacceptable chemicals, and where and why specifically the yellow toilet cleaning gloves are to be kept behind the dip in the U-bend, and more importantly, used. The blue ones, marked: Piss into the patriarchal wind, and see if I care, are largely symbolic.
On Ibiza, at the beginning of the brand known as the millennium, chemicals remain the subtext; the real head fuck as always, out in the open, Al fresco San Antonio. Yep, that San Antonio. Club 18-37. So way past our sell-by we can't even be bothered to pretend otherwise. The holiday’s cheap. Cheap is good. But that’s not where it begins.
The psycho-geography is critical. YOU ARE HERE. ↕
The little arrow that indicates exactly where to begin confuses: the start line, outside the toilet. Is this where events take place, waiting for him/her to come out? Should you wait here or down there?
You continue to stand outside the servicios, where the door displays the prerequisite skirted black figurine that you recognise, and a word you take to be gender specific. But the unisex singular that you are waiting for must have surely exited already, or are you expected downstairs? Would that be more logical?
Now you’re not so certain you don’t go downstairs and do most of your waiting there. Those pesky details are sketched on a bed of toxicity that infects recall. Having clapped eyes on one another, you intuit the change in climate. You watch as the bloated beast descends the European beef mountain splashing noxious Beaujolais and rancid butter everywhere.
This is not drugs talk. This is about toilet etiquette. That this matters not one iota of a jot is not the point. The point is everything. It is always about what it is about. The fact remains: you are in the wrong. Outside of the ladies is no place to wait for a lady, boy. Still, that’s not it. It is never only about the gender performance. Theirs is a hers, but stoic, capable, and ambidextrous; yours, readable, its scaffolding looks firm, yet lacks internal hard core.
Fuck it! Fuck it! Fuck it! Fuck it! It feels good breaking the rule of three. Where the fuck is she?
That’s it. No going back now. The masks of respect and empathy have slipped, now there exists only authenticity, and it is sincerely pissed off. There is a price to pay for excess, emotional baggage notwithstanding.
Where the fuck is she?
The red bikini. The low slinky walk, later done under hubris, lulls you into a false sense of insecurity. You have actually fallen in love with a magazine cover, but December’s shoot turns out to be someone who likes to provide effective opposition, to snooker alpha males and drink them under the table. Other interests include sumo, Mensa mind games and winning. Being right in an argument, against anybody, but preferably against a close intimate, is the gold standard that rocks her world.
Where the fuck is she?
Gangster trippin’ as per, runs in the less aspirational wing of the family, south-east London villainy, Catford and Penge. She sticks magnetically to people she likes, before polarity is reversed and disappointment ensues.
This time he dies. Surprisingly, he is shot dead before the inevitable can happen.
A professional bouncer/ medium-level drug dealer, he might easily pass for the missing link between Rugby League Social Club Doorman and the King of Tonga. His female accessory provides a soda stream of inane froth. Coked and neurotic, time weighs like a medicine ball. Climbing down the chemical staircase, waiting… waiting for our other halves to come together, in that small hotel room boxed in by bling, and a statement ceiling that screams cottage cheese, popcorn and stucco, stuck in the Wendy house with a disco dolly more used to mincing around Gucci clutch bags and sparkling the sparkle of glittery baubles around smartly-dressed and independently wealthy working-class faces, occupying bar space where the holy trinity holds sway: guns, fear and flight.
Your cheap flight tickets certainly are: end-of-season and nasty. A pair of predatory PR touts speaks MTV English to entice you, plural, into a club by exposing alternate left and right breasts, something which is completely out of kilter with your hard fought for feminism. The effect is akin to arms dealing at a Quaker assembly hall. The cold indifference is batted off, and the promiscuity bobs along to the next couple of unprepped candidates.
So here it is, merry Ibiza 2000, everybody’s ultimate cheeky half, the late late 30-something show, the fag-end of the flagella, a final pump of the sperm tail, as pre-partum animals jiggle mechanistically and write cod shit on postcards that won’t even get posted. Welcome to the dinosaur theme park resurrected (again!), what can possibly go wrong? This one last chance to party, one more time to unleash the demons that always want more, and more, before, inexorably, irretrievably, it all goes a bit Pete.
I’m a rainbow too, I’m a rainbow too, I’m a rainbow too, I’m a rainbow too, the Firehouse club remixes the trapped loop of thought that plagues you, the collective ear worm that becomes unbearable. So you have to go poolside to convince the cleaner the volume button can be lowered and she won’t lose her job and yes, you can speak Spanish, and yes, the guiris do all get insanely twatted in Inglaterra too, often. She misses the blissed out hippies.
You miss your other half. You are in Ibiza with all the curious detachment of someone who knows that the story never ends on an island you only ever visit to escape.
And the Angel did descend from her class-A heaven, and lo, and behold, a celestial vision and the glory of our Lord & Father the DJ shone and she was forever more… paranoid!
Too late! She’s out. She’s downstairs. She has been there for an eternity. Where the hell have you been? Why on earth would you wait there? You are pathetic. You are a miserable apology for your own gender. What is more, you have just declared World War II and a Half.
As for emotional nourishment, these days your preoccupations are less germane, more esoteric. In your new role, as Professor of Teddy Bear Technology and Humbuggery at the University of Aston Villa, not a lot fazes you – apart from the four missing meerkats. And there is an aardvark unaccounted for.
As any hacked interactive toy bear knows: God is a DJ. Rhythm is a bouncer. Ibiza is a toilet.
Exterminate! Exterminate!
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