On the Rocks is a club in Shoreditch. It looks as though a junior property developer on a budget bought, for the price of a doner kebab, a stretch of decommissioned city street that had once provided access to an oil refinery just off Kingland Road, and built a small structure on top of it made entirely of recycled, Luftwaffe-loosened brick that he or she found heaped behind Chariots Roman Spa. It is a squalid, sticky dump with filthy, uneven floors. Standing in the middle of a hog path is gentler on the Eccos.
Even so, it is a hot item in the not-quite-Hackney fashion world, and the beers gush from the kegs, even at £4 a pop. Last Friday night, the place started filling up with victims by 11:30 faster than the Ivy fills with trumped up egos post-theatre. The fun kicked in about an hour later, and I don't mean the drugs. Those had already clearly been flowing in every direction.
Speaking of drugs, I'm not going to. But On the Rocks knows its market, and the two stalls in the men's toilets seem to have been intentionally designed for indulging in the romance of powders in privacy and relative peace. They are, of course, large enough to accommodate two at a time, a trait that would facilitate rather unfortunate acts as the evening progressed, if that's the right word. But first the crowd.
I was the oldest living being in the place that night, and, frankly, I've never had my age so apparently sprayed in my face. On the Rocks causes in people of my generation - and I am of a generation different from the one that generally surrounded me - apoplexy. Let's just say that, had my public manners and sense of space not been quite so liberally greased, someone would have had an eye out, or several. Kids do not behave well when they get together in crowded rooms, or, perhaps more at it, they've grown up in a more crowded world than I did and realise the only way to get anywhere is to Panzer a path directly to wherever it is you need or wish to be.
Girls are the worst. Girls will just assume kill you as get to the bar or the dancefloor or nowhere to rally round each other and their mates in anything over the strictly allotted time, a quantity for which only they and god seem to understand the calculations. To be sure, the time frame lies somewhere uncomfortably between 'immediately' and '10 seconds ago.'
Girls will ram into the backside of you forcefully enough to spill your drink and theirs on your shirt simultaneously. Your shirt, not theirs. I spent the evening with wet sleeves and so much splashed lager dotted about my pullover that, had I been a building, I wouldn't have passed rising damp inspection.
Yes, my dears, you're terrible, and please listen as a gay man breaks the news. In gay bars, young ladies, please, PLEASE be aware, you drive us and our homo-sensibilities absolutely, certifiably round the bend with your unearned and unfair sense of entitlement to our space. Stop it before we outlaw fag-haggery, and stop spilling lager on my shirt.
Fashion is very, very important, and I'm now old enough to see it recycle itself. I've not seen, since the early 90s in New York, so many faces stocked out in Gok Wan spectacle frames with no lenses. At one point, I had to resist the urge to go round poking my finger through the backs of people's 'eyeglasses' just to confirm.
I also spent a hell of a lot of time ducking and dodging mobile phone photography and video recording sessions. My theory was that younger people must experience a lot more 'Madonna syndrome' than people my age do, even though we've had to put up with far more of her than they. I'm not talking about fake English accents: I'm talking about Warren Beatty's assertion in Truth or Dare that, unless she was performing or there was a camera pointed at her, Madonna's reality didn't exist, never mind that it wasn't real. But then, it isn't a stretch that her pop-cultural legacy is the foundation for most of youth culture now. So hey ho.
But the toilets. Oh, the toilets. The standing queue length ran to twenty feet, up the stairs, out the bathroom door and onto the former roadway/dancefloor. One time I reached the stalls and realised that one of them hadn't opened for quite some time. I pointed out to the man in queue in front of me that nothing appeared to be happening in there, although I could see an anthropomorphic shadow on the floor. Just then, the poster on the stall door began to shake, steadily and deliberately. Groans emanated from within. I knocked on the door insistently. A minute later, two men came out, and I went in. Mid-business, I noticed spunk on the wall. Maybe I'm just lucky enough to have never found that sort of thing personally appealing; or perhaps I'm just very, very happy that I've got my own place and can have sex there anytime I wish.
The best chat I had was in the outdoor smoking area (where, ironically, one had to go to get some fresh air) with a 33 year-old Frenchman who has lived in London for 10 years and used to be a DJ at the club. I don't remember most of what we discussed, but, when I pronounced his age correctly enough in French, he seemed pleased. He then told me that French doctors ask you to say 'trente trois' when they examine your chest with a stethoscope. He was a nice garcon.
But was he gay? And did it matter? And how old were those kids squatting in the smoking area? Were the rumours true that 14 year old posh gay boys were inside and trying it on with their elders, i.e., anyone apart from the bacteria on the men's room wall? And is this civilisation's last gasp?
No. I've just been around a lot longer and suffer from context. Even so, 43 years old or not, I had a cracking time, mostly because scale-model anarchy is always more fun - for a short time, in a controlled environment - than higher civilisation. Rock on, kids.
