Barclay Bram started going to clubs alone when he moved to Chengdu, China. For a while the wall behind the DJ was covered in tin foil and duct tape that made for nice twinkled refractions of the tracer-arc of disco ball squares and neon. Now that has been replaced by a deep red velvet curtain.
Tonight, the DJ is playing a well-mixed funk-house set that sometimes flirts with disco-italo. The crowd is a melange of cool Chengdu scene-kids, most of them a decade younger than me.
The bar sells NoX balloons and the kids huff them around me. Then, as they near the end, they let go and stumble and giggle as the black plastic flies off into the air. Sometimes an old Chinese ayi walks past with a straw broom and sweeps them up. It started when I moved to Chengdu and has now metastasised. A girl on my Instagram posts daily updates from an ashram in Rishikesh. Another friend just posted a picture of her speaking to the UN security council. Now, as I enter the twilight of my twenties it seems that the liminal period in which there would always be someone going to some night somewhere is closing itself off.
Those halcyon days of nights that bled into days are now spin classes that bleed into brunch. I am writing an ethnography about mental health; I spend a lot of time talking to therapists and their clients about trauma. My friends in town are also older. Especially mid-week, which is when the DJs I like most are playing. Clubbing alone started when I saw Bradley Zero had been randomly booked to a play a club in town.
I slipped into the club and danced for four hours without realising it. After a while I noticed I was tired and went home. There was no waiting for my mates, corralling them to the smoking area to ask where we were going or who was taking what night bus or waiting for the one who works in finance to call an Uber. I just walked out onto the street, scanned the digital bar-code on a shared bike with my phone and cycled home.
