I Am A Hardcore Goth

Looks like I didn’t log in properly for my last post (Something Gothic This Way Comes), which was met with muted enthusiasm, but I figure the internet is limitless and a few more hundred words of utter crap can’t hurt anybody much.

Here:

I AM A HARDCORE GOTH

The Tea Party’s ‘Temptation’ blasting out into the cold air, I went in, had my hand stamped by a gender unspecified entity, moved through the undulating throng towards the bar, thinking only “drink”. All they have are Ruskies so I take one of them, regret wearing the trenchcoat, the heat from hundreds of bodies making my eyes sting…the mascara is running already. Someone stand on the tip of my shoe but it doesn’t matter, they’re steel-capped, and she apologises profusely, her dark crimson hair and spider web blouse probably not as totally original as she had hoped, and ankh around her neck meaning nothing in the end. I smile as genuinely as I can and motion with my drink that if she perhaps went away, perhaps over into one of the corners, I wouldn’t resent her existence so much. Drugged to the eyeballs she just nods and takes the Ruskie out of my hand and drinks from it, and I sigh pointedly as The Tea Party segues into My Dying Bride, fumble for a cigarette and give up when I realise I don’t smoke, and the guy standing next to me with the Eye of Horus makeup and the lip-piercing stresses me out slightly so I take the drink back off this girl who is about 16 and really should not be in here, and she pouts and notices some complete lecher of a guy with a fat ass, tight PVC pants, and a riding strop, and she slinks away and for a while it’s cool until London After Midnight begins to blare, and I’m thinking “blood” and semi-wondering why there isn’t more of it, and this guy who calls himself Morpheus walks up with this schizophrenic chick who calls herself Angel, and he is in period costume and her in a vinyl mini-skirt and black feather boa, and Angel looks at me strangely so I take the razor blade out from between my teeth and put it back in my pocket.

“Hey,” Angel says, now completely ignoring Morpheus because she probably just realised that I would be a much better fuck.

“Hey,” I say back.
“Can we talk?” she asks me.

I intone something in Latin and she gives me a bemused expression, so I shrug and take a swig from the bottle.

“About what?” I finally ask because it’s, like, totally apparent that she isn’t going away.
“What?” she asks, lip-synching to some Marilyn Manson song that, I notice, nobody is dancing to.
“What do you want to talk about?” I moan.
“Oh, you know, nothing really.”

The guy with the strop is smacking the 16 year old lightly on the ass with it so I move over to the cigarette machine and get a pack of Winfield Blues, and, I stress, I don’t smoke, and the self-titled Morpheus, resigned to his fate, begins to cry and some transvestite with green hair and stilettos comforts him and he throws a hissy fit and runs off to the bathroom to, no doubt, end his life with the blunt dagger that he always carries around, and Angel is tagging along behind me and although any other circumstances I would fuck her but now Nine Inch Nails is playing so, er, no.

“The fuck do you want?” I ask her.
“Steve,” she whines, “We need to talk.”
“Steve?” I blink, opening the pack of cigarettes, “My name isn’t Steve.”
“What?”
“My…name…is…not…Steve,” I growl in a convincingly menacing fashion.

It’s her turn to blink and she draws in a breath and says “You’re not Steve?”, suggesting that I’m lying to her, and out of the corner of my eye I notice this gorgeous chick with purple hair extensions, holding hands with her gay boyfriend, and with them is some other guy in a black trenchcoat who looks like he would rather be at home sticking needles in his eyes, and I think the chick’s name is Mel but before my train of thought can reach a satisfactory conclusion Angel is groping at my crotch and I’m thinking “Okay, here we go,” and a bunch of baby goths in Manson shirts giggle their way past us, and I look around for a bouncer to forcibly eject them but realise too late that this is Vortex and that anyone can get in, and Angel is getting me aroused against my better judgement so I inhale on the cigarette, cough, contemplate stubbing it out on her neck but, instead, throw it to the ground where it hisses out in a puddle of…something.

“Could you not do that?” I ask Angel so she stops, singing along with whatever the hell the fucking song is, perhaps The Church, and I’m thinking “Is there any song this bitch does not know?” and the chick who I think is Mel and the gay boyfriend in the skirt and the, well, the maudlin guy in the trenchcoat go past me and up the stairs to what is, apparently, ‘The Goth Level’, and some dude who bears a remarkable resemblance to Elvis except he’s thinner and with braces comes up to me, and for a long time I concentrate on his hair, on the stiffness of his hair, on the erectness of his hair, and he’s saying something to me and I’m just like yeah, whatever, and he and Angel exchange harsh wordss and he goes away and Angel starts fondling my crotch again and I scream at her “Jesus, I am not Steve!” so she runs off to, I guess, kill herself too, and this music is bugging me and this stunningly beautiful chick in a red PVC miniskirt and tank-top affair is sitting with some ugly guy with a bad personality, but she loves him to death, so it’s okay, right? So I stand there for a little longer, thinking, “Why did I even come here tonight?”

Bored beyond my sensibilities I decide to do a reconnaissance of the place so I move through the dancefloor, through the crush of bodies, past two lesbians frenching one another, both of them very ugly, past the DJ who is wearing a shirt that reads “Industrial is my forte” and who is asking a short fat chick in a black dress with a shaved head and a nose ring what day it is, and I move towards the bathroom and I enter and, sure enough, Morpheus has killed himself, cut both his wrists, or at least tried to, and I wonder idly as I piss if the vest he is wearing would fit me and, um, no, wait, that didn’t work. Rewind…

…and I move towards the bathroom and I enter and, sure enough, Morpheus is in there, crying to some guy, “I want to kill myself I want to kill myself”, and I wonder idly as I piss that if he did kill himself, would the vest he is wearing fit me? I wash my hands and take some antihistamines that I find in my pocket, touch up my lipstick, a shade called ‘Putrid Grape’, and as I exit I bump into, oh, joy, Angel, but she’s someone else this time so she doesn’t recognise me, not that she did before, even though my name is Steve, and then a stunning Greek girl goes past, long straight black hair, and this distracts me enough that I don’t notice my pocket being picked, but all the fool is going to come away with is a blood-stained handkerchief and perhaps a few satchels of sugar, and for some reason the word “mescaline” escapes my lips, and I follow this Greek girl around a little, careful not to tread on the hem of her excessively long violet dress, but I do anyway and she falters, regains balance, and turns around and fixes me with the look of death but then realises that I’m her dealer, so she sucks on my tongue for a while and I take two grams from my shirt pocket and give them to her and she gives me a bundle of notes, sucks my tongue again, and goes away as Rammstein comes on and people shriek and wail and surge towards the dancefloor so I steal a seat, cross my legs, and I sit there, thinking, “Yes”.