Party Time_Raving Arizona

by Shaun Attwood

  Their focus on me intensifies. Paralysed by a sense that my answer is going to determine my fate, I slur my words: ‘Yeah. If I get pulled over and they ask to search my car without probable cause, I have the right to refuse. I don’t need to tell them anything, but you said it’s OK to say that I came here looking for G Dog. If they do arrest me, I tell them that I want a lawyer. The lawyer you recommend is Alan Simpson.’

  Raul nods as if satisfied with my explanation but maintains an interrogative expression. ‘What did you say to them when they pulled you over coming from here?’ he asks, brow furrowed, hazel eyes ablaze, head cocked back. His associates remain quiet and fixated on my body language.

  The sense of the danger I’m in rises. They kill people who speak to the cops. Why do they think I’ve spoken to the cops? How can I convince them I’ve not? My pulse quickens, making my entire body feel as if it’s throbbing and expanding. ‘I’ve never been pulled over coming from here,’ I say with an edge of protest.

  ‘That’s not what we was told.’

  ‘Whoever told you that is full of shit,’ I say forcefully, hoping to convince them.

  ‘Someone gave a police report.’

  ‘Who said it was me? Does the police report have my name on it?’ I ask, clenching my brow.

  ‘Shut up and stand still!’ In a white wife-beater vest and shin-length denim shorts, a man as broad as an ox steps forward with an iron bar, his eyes so big and crazy it’s impossible to hold his gaze.

  Assuming I’ll be knocked out and buried in the desert, I leap out of his way. Two of them grab me. In a panic, I squirm.

  ‘We’re not gonna hurt you, homey,’ Raul says. ‘We just wanna know the truth.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘I’m telling the truth. I’ll do anything you want to prove it.’

  I’m pinned to a wall. The biggest approaches. He holds up the bar. I notice it’s not an iron bar. It’s an electronic device. He wands it over me. It beeps near my belt buckle.

  ‘You’re gonna have to strip down,’ Raul says.

  ‘Okay,’ I say, guessing that they’re trying to detect a police wire.

  Embarrassed but more concerned about my safety, I disrobe. Naked, I reveal a trembling body streaked with sweat. One of them searches my clothes. The wand runs over my clothes, but it only beeps at my belt buckle.

  ‘Put your shit back on,’ Raul says. ‘We were told you got pulled over and gave a police report,’ he continues, his voice less harsh now.

  I scan the other associates. None of their expressions have softened.

  ‘That never happened. I’d have told you or G Dog right away,’ I say, dropping his brother’s name to remind him of our relationship.

  ‘We’re gonna grill the other person and find out what’s going on. It’s all good, homey.’

  Shaking, I leave afraid to drive in case the police are around, yet keen to get as far away as possible. At home, I take Valium to calm down.

  Later on, I find out from G Dog that the person who gave my name had been pulled over by the police. That person disappears.

  Chapter 30

  ‘It feels like your hands are melting into my back,’ I say to Aiden – an Irishman I met at the George & Dragon – on his massage table at my home.

  ‘I specialise in shiatsu.’

  ‘It feels really bloody good on E,’ I say, my eyeballs rolling up.

  ‘Who’re you getting your E off these days?’ Aiden asks.

  ‘I’ve been going through LA,’ I say, groaning, relaxed, almost falling asleep.

  ‘That’s funny. I’ve got a mate from Manchester in LA and he sells E. I thought you might want to meet him.’

  Suddenly alert, I ask, ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Mike Hotwheelz. An artist and DJ. He’s in his 40s. Dead intelligent. He was working for Tony Wilson when raving began in Manchester and was part of LA’s early rave scene. You’ll get along great with him.’

  Hotwheelz sounds ideal. ‘This is bloody good timing, Aiden. I’ve got two connects in LA, but one keeps trying to jack the price up and keeps me waiting for hours every time I go out there, and the other’s a bit hit and miss. Sometimes he doesn’t have the pills ready and he has to call around.’

  ‘There’ll be no bullshit if you’re dealing directly with another Englishman.’

  Desirae and I drive to LA. Pulsing trance guides us to a narrow house.

  ‘Nice tunes,’ I say, ringing the bell.

  ‘You and your fluffy-ass trance!’ Desirae says.

  A man answers the door wearing tartan bondage trousers and a tight black T-shirt with 3-D blinking eyes on it.

  ‘Are you Mike Hotwheelz or Johnny Rotten?’ I ask.

  He smiles. ‘Hotwheelz. Come in, mate.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, mate,’ I say, shaking his hand. ‘This is my girlfriend, Desirae.’

  ‘Hi, Mike.’ Desirae enters first. ‘Holy shit! This is incredible!’

  ‘Wow! Your house is a Toyland!’ I say.

  There’s no furniture in the living room – just toys. The centrepiece is a landscaped slot-car track looping through a multicoloured plastic city: town-hall buildings, a church, highways, bridges, palm trees, bushes, balloons, flags, people, trains, cars, a zeppelin scudding over on a yellow string. On the wall beyond the track: a golden swan, a bust of an African woman, the head of a boy puppet, a framed painting of sperm swimming away from an eyeball.

  ‘Check this out.’ Hotwheelz raises the roof of a model building with a sign reading ‘THE HOTWHEELZ HOTEL’ and a spring-loaded couple make love.

  Laughing hard, I stoop under an arch of draperies – golden, heavy-velvet, tasselled with bell-shaped pom-poms – that belong in a Parisian brothel from another era. The wall art intensifies in the next room: a horned skull with plastic angel wings at ear level, a cow’s-head mask, Christ on the cross, a teddy bear, a Cowardly Lion mask, a skeleton’s hand dangling from a mirror. A couple sat on a leopard-skin sofa are snorting lines of white powder – refined crystal meth called glass – off a plate.

  ‘This is Frankie Bones and his girlfriend,’ Hotwheelz says.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ I say. ‘I’ve listened to your tunes since raving began.’

  ‘You’re the Frankie Bones,’ Desirae says. ‘Wow!’

  ‘Not another Englishman,’ Frankie Bones says, shaking my hand.

  Desirae and I sit down. ‘’Fraid so, and from quite close to where Mike’s from.’ My instincts tell me to trust Hotwheelz, but having only just met him, and being in the drug business, I must be careful. ‘Where in Manchester are you from, Mike?’

  ‘Chorlton, South Manchester. Not very ghetto,’ Mike says, leaning over turntables.

  ‘I’m from Widnes.’

  ‘So you’re not a Scouser, you’re a Woollyback.’

  I laugh. ‘I went to Liverpool Uni, and clubs like The State and Quadrant Park in Liverpool, but I did most of my raving in Manchester. The Thunderdome was my favourite.’

  ‘Fucking hell! That sketchy joint on Oldham Road! I remember all those dodgy-looking fuckers from Salford.’

  ‘That’s where I took my first E,’ I say. ‘When The Dome shut down, I was a regular at Konspiracy. I only went to The Haçienda a few times. I heard you were involved with Tony Wilson.’

  ‘Yeah, I worked at Granada with him on a couple of shows, and we hung out a lot at The Haçienda.’

  ‘How come The Haçienda got shut down?’

  ‘Gang warfare broke out and they were losing too much money. Under the licensing laws everything was supposed to shut at 2 a.m. Of course, we’re all E’d off our tits around that time, courtesy of the Happy Mondays. Anyway, there were few places you could go after the club shut. One was a snooker hall around the corner that wasn’t very E-conducive and the other was in the opposite direction, a little West Indian club, which was cool, but the Rastas in there were like, “What the fuck are these kids on?” They saw the money to be made from Ecstasy and shortly thereafter Rastas, and I mean Jamaican rude
boys with big hats and canes with big fuck-off silver tops on, started strolling in The Haçienda like they owned the place, thinking, Fuck me, we’ve gotta get into this rave shit for the money. Shortly after that, the whole thing started kicking off with the white boys from Salford, the Cheetham Hill Gang and the Moss Side Crew, the West Indians in the south. It went downhill fast. A doorman got shot.’

  Proper old school. Frankie Bones in his house. All this knowledge. He’s for real. ‘It must have been fun in the early days.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, we’d go to little warehouse parties, and the cops would show up and some big Rasta would shout, “Babylon!” and we’d get out as fast as possible. This was back in ’87, ’88. Then in ’89 I moved to London. I missed all the Manchester scene after that. I did a few Orbital raves, and a great one in King’s Cross run by Zodiac Mindwarp, who did all the visuals. The entrance was in the shunting yards through a hole in the fence. Some geezer with a Rottweiler was holding open a plank of wood so you could clamber in. The best thing was they had five or six different areas where music was playing. One was a shed and everyone in there had painted their faces with luminescent zinc paint. So under the black lights their faces were all trippy, tribal, like a scene outta Tron. Another area was a big warehouse with huge great fires and crazy-ass metal sculptures. My favourite was the cheapest and lowest tech of the lot. The techno stage had one strobe light on all night, with a hundred people dancing all tranced out and a bunch probably twitching away on the floor having epileptic fits. The strobe never changed sequence or anything. It was fucking brilliant!’

  ‘So how did you end up in LA?’

  ‘I was a graphic designer in London, earning good money, but I broke up with my wife and moved to America.’

  I tell him my story, and about the problems with my Ecstasy suppliers. ‘Can you get E on a regular basis?’

  ‘Usually, and as many as you want.’

  ‘Thousands or tens of thousands?’

  ‘For ten thou, I’d need plenty of notice, and I’d have to put a special order in,’ he says confidently.

  ‘I’m constantly running out of E, and looking to increase the size of my purchases.’

  ‘Well, here’s your thousand Mitsubishis. See how these go and let me know if you need more.’

  Trusting him, I don’t ask to taste a pill. I pay and leave thinking, It’ll be much safer doing business with an Englishman.

  After Mike’s, we go shopping for clothes at Red Balls on Melrose Avenue.

  ‘I wanna get my clit pierced in there,’ Desirae says, pointing at a dingy store selling clothes and drug paraphernalia. Inside, we are greeted by three tattooed men who look stoned. ‘I’d like my clit pierced,’ Desirae says.

  ‘Pick a barbell out, and I’ll do it upstairs,’ says a man with tribal tattoos on his shaved head, who takes us to a room full of boxes, assorted junk and a woman with a pink Mohawk, asleep on a mattress. ‘Get ready and sit here,’ he says, shoving a mongrel off a couch coated in dog hairs. Desirae undresses and sits on the couch.

  The punk wakes up, rubs her eyes and squints at Desirae. ‘Oh, I don’t wanna be here for this.’ She hurries out.

  ‘That won’t do,’ the tattooist says. ‘You have to shave before I can pierce you.’ He hands Desirae a trimmer.

  ‘There goes the great Italian bush,’ Desirae says, buzzing her pubic hair. I laugh.

  ‘Much better,’ he says. ‘Now slide your butt forward. I’m gonna clamp it, stick the needle through, and then the barbell goes in directly after the needle. You’re gonna need to take care of it with antiseptic. Clean it two or three times a day.’

  ‘Will you hold my hand?’ Desirae asks.

  ‘Of course, love,’ I say.

  She offers her left hand, and with her right opens her outer labia.

  ‘OK. Keep still,’ he says.

  Desirae squeals, jumps and squeezes my hand. ‘That fucking hurt!’

  ‘You shouldn’t have moved,’ he says, examining the piercing. ‘It went in crooked.’

  ‘Aw fuck!’ Desirae says. ‘It’s so crooked, I could put a piercing on the other side, and it would make an X.’

  We leave disappointed with the piercing, and book into a hotel. Another Ecstasy dealer I’ve arranged to meet brings pills. ‘These E stamps are good pills, but these Hieroglyphics are just fuck-you-up pills. I’ll give you these for cheap if you can get rid of them.’

  I examine the large blue-purple-green pills that seem to change colour as I turn them. ‘I’ll take some of these for my friends who like to get really fucked up. I won’t say they’re X. I’ll call them Egyptian Splits. What’s in them?’

  ‘I don’t even know.’

  ‘I’d better test-drive them then. I don’t want people getting sick on them like those Batmans you sold us.’ Chewing a pill unleashes a harsh chemical taste with no trace of MDMA. ‘I’ll definitely take 2,000 E stamps.’

  The dealer leaves before the pill takes effect. We are heading out to a rave when I stumble and have to sit down.

  ‘What’s wrong, love?’ Desirae says.

  ‘Oh … love, I can’t move. It feels great … but I can’t move. I don’t think I can … can go to the rave. Bloody hell!’

  ‘But I want to see Simply Jeff!’

  ‘And I want to see … Ron D Core, but I can’t do it. You’ve got to help me get back to the room, love. This feels different from anything I’ve ever felt. I’m kind of tripping and rolling at the same time.’

  ‘If it’s fucked you up that much, I wanna do some. We’ve got food and water. We’ll be safe in the room. If these are that fucking rocking, give me two.’

  ‘Are you sure you want two?’ I say, trying to raise myself, only to fall down. As we head back to the room, the lights in the world keep brightening and dimming as if fog is moving in and out.

  Chapter 31

  ‘Why don’t we throw our own raves?’ Skinner asks at one of the weekend board meetings I hold in the Blue Room.

  ‘Acid Joey tried that and look what happened,’ I say, generating a few laughs. I still want to bring the English rave scene to Phoenix, but Acid Joey’s loss raised my guard. Who can I trust with my money to get the job done?

  ‘To be able to throw a party and make money you have to be business-minded,’ says Lucas, a skinny Spanish philosophy undergraduate dressed in bright colours.

  ‘What? Like you?’ I say, testing him.

  ‘I can do it,’ Lucas says.

  ‘So can I.’ Skinner sounds more confident. ‘Have I steered you wrong so far, big brother?’

  ‘With me by his side, Skinner won’t lose your money,’ Mari says.

  I don’t doubt it. Mari’s proving to be Skinner’s backbone. ‘What are you proposing?’

  ‘The most successful parties are the ones catering to the breakbeat crowd,’ Skinner says.

  ‘I hate breaks,’ I say.

  ‘You suck,’ Desirae says. ‘It’s all about Simply Jeff!’

  ‘If I throw a party, I want to bring DJs from Europe, so the ravers can hear the DJs I grew up on: Sasha, Carl Cox—’

  ‘But look how much they cost to fly out!’ Lucas says.

  ‘If you want a breakbeat headliner, I want some house and trance,’ I say.

  ‘We can get local DJs to spin that for free,’ Skinner says. ‘Breakbeat’s the crowd-puller right now.’

  ‘How much will I need to put up?’ I ask.

  ‘A party costs between twenty and thirty thou,’ Lucas says. ‘But you only need half of that up front.’

  ‘If that,’ Skinner says. ‘With five grand, I can get flyers printed up and put deposits down. Ticket sales will raise more cash right away, and we can use the door money to pay the balance of a lot of stuff on the night. We can also use our own security.’

  ‘Our own security?’ I ask.

  ‘We’ll just buy security T-shirts,’ Skinner says, ‘and throw them on Acid Joey and some other big dudes.’

  ‘I don’t think so!’ says Cody, a
friend of Desirae, whose clean-cut looks, cropped blonde hair and preppy clothing make him seem out of place in the Blue Room. ‘Security has to be licensed and bonded, otherwise the cops will shut the party down.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ I ask.

  ‘I work as a security guard.’ Cody dips his hand in his pocket. ‘Here’s my licence.’

  ‘So when the cops or fire department do a walk-through,’ Skinner says, ‘Cody can flash them his licence.’

  ‘Cody, you just became the head of my security team,’ I say.

  ‘Why, thanks. And I thought you didn’t even like me.’

  ‘Cody, I like you, but you’re quirky. You’re the only one of us who stays sober, so I can’t think of a better man for the job. There’s also something I’d like to talk to you about after this.’

  ‘Having our own security opens up all kinds of possibilities,’ Skinner says.

  ‘Like what?’ I ask.

  ‘If our security bust anyone selling X, then that X goes to the house and the house resells it,’ Skinner says.

  ‘I like the sound of that. If you can keep the cost of the party down to twenty thou, I’ll put the money up. The way I see it, 2,000 ravers will show up, and at twenty a head that’s forty thou.’

  ‘But a quarter of them won’t pay to get in,’ Lucas says. ‘They’ll be friends of the DJs and everyone involved in throwing the party, on the VIP list and all that. I know this because I help Swell throw parties.’ Swell, the first rave store in Arizona, organises most of the local events.

  ‘All right, if 1,500 pay to get in, that’s thirty thou. That gives me a good ten-grand margin of safety,’ I say.

  ‘Plus, we’ll sell them water all night,’ Skinner says.

  ‘OK, here’s the deal: I’m putting Skinner and Mari in charge of the money. Anyone who wants to work security can see Cody. Lucas, can you help with the booking contacts you’ve made through Swell? Can everyone else help promote the event? OK, Cody, let’s go talk.’

  Cody follows me into another bedroom. ‘What’s up, Shaun?’

  ‘I’ve got too much going on to be driving back and forth to LA picking Ecstasy up. You’ve got a car. You don’t look like a druggie. Are you interested?’