There are nights when waiyou delivery and cheap dvds are enough, more than enough. When french fries eaten hungrily on an orange beach towel is comfort beyond reckoning and no words need to be said. Nights in the dark, talking, just talking.
But there are the nights when you need something else. Sometimes you need to be in a place that’s so crammed with people that you can’t tell where your limbs leave off and theirs begin. When sweaty bodies threaten to crush you and the music that is hardly music at all but just a beat that echoes through your heart and booms its way from your feet up. To dance until your contact lenses are seared into your eyeballs and you’ve sweat clean through your shirt and your skinny jeans feel as if they’ve been plastered on and you wonder how you will ever be able to take them off again. When your heels are killing your feet and you can’t see in the dark except for a hand holding yours, leading you through the ever moving bodies, lust and desperation and music making the air palpably hot.
And then to stumble out into the night air, half-dead from exhaustion. Waiting in line for twenty kuai hotdogs with all the laowai milling around while the blonde guy behind you teases his chinese companion (“c’mon drunky, let’s get you home”). You wonder why there’s always something slightly seedy about a beijing nightclub, no matter how expensive it’s cover charge.
But then you soon forget because the cab is here and your teeth are sinking into the hotdog and it is good.
Ahh…many nights of those.
lol too many nights of those