The Four-Night Weekend, Part 3: Epic Night

Woo. This was an epic night. Here’s what my social calendar looked like for today:

• 17h: meet Bob & Donna for drinks
• 20h: go to a friend’s place to play poker with some of the UofC doctoral students
• 23h: go to On Cherche Encore… [LINK] to pay a visit to DJ Aclank, who had a minimal techno event going on (he was at Le Pin Up the night before and invited me to come out).
• Sometime between this thing and the next: meet up with the guy I met last Thursday for some drinks somewhere
• 1h: head to Le Java for the 1-year anniversary of the Mona night (the guy who runs it is the new boyfriend of a good friend of mine, so he invited me and put me on the list)
• 2h: catch Roman Flugel spinning at Social Club (previously, Le Triptyque)
• 4h: go to Le Glam to catch my buddies HD Project and Timid Boy at a sorta-after-hours event that runs from 4h – 10h.

The schedule was pretty much impossible to keep, but I think I did pretty well for myself. After spending the afternoon sleeping in and then working on blogging and the reading assignment for my English students, I headed out at around 17h00 to begin my long night. Here’s how my 17-hour marathon went down:

18h: drinks with Bob & Donna

Met Bob and Donna and two of their friends for drinks at Café des Anges near Bastille. Conversation was nice and it was cool to finally hang out with them outside of the usual Berlin-nightclub contexts. It was great to get their perspective on the clubbing establishments that I know here in Paris. However, I had forgotten my cell phone at home, which meant that I had to leave early to get the phone and make it over to my friend’s house. Boo!

20h: poker night at friend’s place.

I got to her place a bit late, after biking frantically home and then back over there. I bought two bottles of wine, thinking everyone would share, but everyone brought their own drinks, so I ended up finishing two bottles on my own. Oh, and I had forgotten to eat dinner. So by the time I left here, I could barely form complete sentences. However, I did win the poker game, and left 20€ richer. So there.

0h30: On Cherche Encore… to visit DJs Aclank and PanPan

I can barely remember how I got to On Cherche Encore…, but I know that I was pretty trashed and doing my best to hold myself together. I deliberately took the long route to get to the bar from the subway station, letting the cold air calm me down a bit. I managed to appear sober enough to make it into the bar and say hi to the DJs, where I stupidly ordered a mojito. It was tasty, but it was too close on the heels of all that wine and I began to feel not just drunk but a bit ill.

2h30: Date with hot guy (postponed, replaced with food)

I had exchanged a few messages with the hot guy I had met last Thursday and he was going to come meet me from a house party where he was, so I was hanging back and waiting for him to appear. Since I knew he would call me from the subway station, I took advantage of the moment to head out and get a bit of food in me. I needed a bit of something to absorb all of this liquor, and a kebab seemed like the right idea. I headed down to a kebab joint at the bottom of Faubourg du Temple, where I still managed to order in Turkish, despite my state. Eventually, my date called and put off our meeting until Sunday, which was fine with me; I was feeling a bit too out of it to manage courtship and flirting.

3h00: Mona one-year anniversary party @ La Java

After the kebab, I headed back to say goodbye to the DJs at On Cherche Encore, and then over to Le Java for the Mona night. Getting in on the list was a bit of a hassle and the coat check was a disaster, but the crowd inside was great fun. The music was mostly straight-up house and the crowd was largely middle-aged gay men of the skinny-and-bearded variety. It was pretty hot and sweaty, which gave the basement club a certain rave-party feel. I ran into my friend and his boyfriend, who was running the party that night. We hung out for a bit and shared some champagne, but then the love-struck couple wandered off to make out on the dancefloor. I wasn’t feeling particularly at home in the crowd (this is generally true of gay clubs for me; Berghain is the big exception) and I wanted to check out Le Java before I ran out of energy, so I headed out around 4h30. Considering that I had probably already missed Roman Flugel’s set, I cancelled the trip to Social Club and went straight to Le Glam.

5h00: Le Glam after-hours-ish night w/ HD Project and Timid Boy

I was feeling a bit more clear-headed as I left Le Java, so I decided to take a bike ride over to Le Glam, which was on the other side of the Seine. The ride over really helped, and I arrived at the club feeling pretty much sober. That soberness was slightly dented by the super-stiff vodka-tonic that the bartender served me once inside, but I was nonetheless in pretty good shape for the rest of the evening. The bar was another basement bar, with a nice layout for an after-hours place, with lots of banquette seating around several rooms that were joined by a central bar. I managed to finally catch up with HD Project, who I hadn’t seen in almost 2 years, and Timid Boy, who I hadn’t seen in at least a month. As the night/morning wore on, more people that I knew showed up from other soirées and things got pretty fun. By about 8h00 or so, the bouncers started getting antsy with the drug use going on (it’s an after-hours, after all) and began to hassle people in the toilets and toss people out. I was eventually part of the collateral damage, as a paranoid bouncer decided that I had been going to the washroom too much. Despite my protestations that that was the logical result of drinking alcohol, he wasn’t convinced and told me to get my things and leave. It was already close to the end of the evening anyway, so I asked the bouncer to give me a minute to make my goodbyes, did my rounds, and then headed off. At first I was a bit miffed that all of my friends and acquaintances reacted to the news with, “Oh that’s too bad. Bye!” I kinda expected them to at least make a token effort to help me stay at the club, especially those who were connected to the event, but I had only been one of several people being hassled tonight, so I don’t know how useful that would’ve been, anyway.