Holy Communion in Clubland

Picture the scene. 11:45 pm on a typical Saturday night in Dublin, 1995. My boyfriend and I have just dropped ‘E’ in the Pod nightclub and we’re standing around sipping Bacardi & Coke waiting for the high to kick in. We’ve already had a couple of drinks in the Chocolate Bar next door, a bit anxious about whether we’d actually be able to score ‘yokes’ but sure enough, we saw a familiar face and a little while later Keith seals the deal in the loo. It’s a bit darker in the club rather than the Chocolate Bar, so once we went inside he surreptitiously hands me a pill and we have one more drink knowing that once the E kicks in it will be water for the rest of the night.

Waiting to ‘come up’ was always a bit fraught for me. There’s nervous anticipation and the hopes that it’ll be good. Will it be a clean high? I first took E in The Fridge night club in Brixton, London. Keith and I had gone to visit a friend for the weekend and he took us there on Saturday for the gay extravaganza, Love Muscle (you can deduce the meaning for yourself).

Swigging from a bottle of Bacardi & Coke in the cab on the way got us loosened up and by the time we joined the queue outside we were well up for it. Keith and I had co-ordinated our black and white outfits and were looking pretty sharp, so much so that the guy who Keith scored yokes from had spotted us queuing and invited us for a threesome, which Keith politely declined. I had never done E before so had no idea what to expect. The come on was particularly intense and I was standing around on the dancefloor kind of immobilised, feeling really weird and not knowing what the hell happened. Keith put his arms around me and explained that in a few minutes I would be ‘up’ and would feel amazing.

Nothing could have prepared me for that first time coming up. Boom! Every fibre of my being turned on and lit up. I was I became the music, the music became me. My heart was exploding and everyone around me was my new friend. This, this, THIS. This is what it’s about. I love you. I love you.

I LOVE YOU.

Before long I was up on the stage largeing it with the flamboyant Drag Queens and loved up clubbers giving everything to the Weather Girls singing ‘It’s Raining Men.’ I had been inducted in the world of altered biochemical bliss and things would never be the same again. What a night.

Back in Dublin, we started going regularly to the Pod, Shaft, and other clubs. If I say so myself, I took to the scene like a duck to water, within a couple of years I knew practically every doorman in Dublin and could score yokes in several clubs. Going to basement club Shaft (a Friday night fave) I was the designated scorer. Many nights I’d sidle over to the dark area beside the toilets, £100 scrunched up in my hand. There’d be bloke hanging around there who you just knew was selling. You’d stand there bopping to the music and lean over ‘got any yokes’ as you kept moving to the beat, then move back into your own space. Couple of seconds later ‘how many d’ye want?’ bop bop bop. And so it went until you slipped him the cash, he went into the jacks for a minute and then he’d come out and you’d dance towards each other for a sec while he passed them to you. Dom Perignon was the beverage of choice for swilling down the goods at Shaft.

God, I loved those nights. The music, getting dressed up, the anticipation, the thrill of coming up. The feeling of being liquid gold when you were up. The love. Dancing in a club packed with people, everyone smiling, making eye contact, the knowing nod. Sure, the E could be a bit scaggy sometimes and there might be some rough moments during the night as the drug caused cycles of euphoria followed by feeling cold and weird in your body when the peak rescinded. But here it comes again and fuck yeah, it’s brilliant. This pulsation, this feeling of being connected to everyone on the dancefloor, this is what I’m living for.

Because the truth is; this was our church. Dancing was our prayer. I always felt there was something deeper happening.

Yes, there was a group of people high on Ecstasy dancing to a DJ who played the crowd like a symphony, take it up, up, up, then suspend the track, keep em waiting, the beats pumping, the tension almost unbearable. It felt like an overstretched balloon about to explode, stretching, stretching, stretching, arms reaching towards the sky, bodies straining towards the stage and then BOOM – resolution. The track kicks in and the place erupts. Holy communion. I am with my tribe, I don’t know most of them but they’re still my tribe. We are in on the secret.

We know that we are feeling something incredible, we have transcended the mundane. Our boring jobs, our feeling of not belonging, our fractured families and damaged self-esteem. Not now. None of that matters. We here and we are alive, vibrant. We are connected to something bigger than any one of us, the music, the feeling, the collective. We belong here. The ecstatic obliterating the everyday. Sing hallelujah. The DJ is our preacher and we are feeling the spirit.

The thing is, we’re all looking for something more. A way to feel part of something bigger than our individual selves, to have share moments of ecstatic transcendence. Mass wasn’t exactly on our radar as twenty-somethings in mid-1990’s Dublin. But clubbing took us outside the mundane, towards altered states of rapture and connection, an opportunity to merge with the great mystery. I give it to you that many of us loved-up clubbers, hugging and dancing with people we’d never usually even talk to, were having our own spiritual experiences on those sweaty dance floors. Experiences of love and connection and being part of the cosmic pulsation, the throb that beats all our hearts.

I’m not recommending that everyone do illegal drugs. Not exactly. I mean, I think they should be legalised. And actually here in the US, MDMA (Ecstasy) is being used by the military to treat veterans with PTSD with remarkable results. Vets report feeling a massive reduction in overall anxiety and depression after even one experience with E. I recently read an article in the New York Times that stated that these days more and more people consider MDMA and other psychotropic drugs to actually be beneficial to our health.

I rarely take Ecstasy these days, maybe once a year. But when I do, I still love it and it connects me to something beautiful and important, a feeling of transpersonal love and general euphoria. I always feel a little brighter afterwards, a little more sparkly. But man, I miss those days of clubbing.

Dearbhla Kelly, November 2020.