NUIT BLANCHE: A REVIEW OF THE NIGHT
(this is a work of fiction)
It’s approaching 11pm and I’m in a cab watching the little numbers slowly creeping upwards on the fare calculator. I try to recall the evening as I feel a hangover starting. The whole story started the evening before when Pascal, his sister and I saw Fever Ray at the Kool Haus. The concert had ended and I still hadn’t come back to earth. The mixture of incense and massive amounts of fog had created the atmosphere of an ancient time in another world.
"Wanna go to a party tomorrow?” Pascal asks me.
I accept. I wasn’t planning on going anywhere anyway. I heard it was going to rain for Nuit Blanche. I stayed at Pascal’s house that night. We smoked weed out of a homemade light bulb vaporizer and he gave his sister two benzos for a pill of E. Nothing interesting happened that night, so I wont go into any more detail.
The next morning we had a big breakfast of pancakes and various other things around the house. Pascal had an omelet if I remember correctly. We watched Caillou in French. Pascal was still receiving calls and text messages from Dani, his girlfriend. The party was moved from Tavi’s house to Jostein’s. I was happy about this. I had been to Jostein’s house before, and his father wasn’t a threat to me.
We left for Jostein’s house around four or five pm. When we got there Jostein, his little brother and Dani were in his room playing with some rats. The music was constantly switching from psychedelic ambiance to Finnish folk metal. Jostein was counting his tabs of acid, while Dani was contemplating how many she should take. Pascal had already informed the group that he had a sufficient amount of chronic and one pill of ecstasy just in case.
“So I’m thinking I should do two,” Said Dani, talking about the acid.
“On your first time?” Asked Pascal, in a doubtful tone.
“Yeah,”
“On your first time?” Repeated Pascal.
“Wait, if I have a low tolerance for other stuff, does it mean I’ll have a low tolerance for acid?” Asked Dani.
“Well, yeah,” Pascal said. He didn't want her to do two. He realized that there were only 6 tabs. Jostein was doing three, the last three had to be split between Dani, Pascal and Damien, who hadn’t arrived yet. I was told they saved a tab for me, but I had to leave at 11pm, and I hadn’t planned on doing any acid. If Dani had two, Pascal wouldn’t get any.
Damien arrived. I had never met him before. He was nicer than he looked. The acid was divvied up and Pascal gave me a shampoo bottle full of some clear liquid he said was vodka, because he “felt bad” that I didn’t get any acid. Shortly after Damien arrived Pascal had convinced Dani to give him the last tab. After a few swigs from the mystery bottle it became apparent that what I was drinking was far from vodka, if in fact it had been vodka at one point.
“What else is clear?” I asked, “Well, gin is, but this isn’t gin.”
“A lot of things are clear,” answered Pascal, being the mystic that he always pretended to be.
“Wait, this is Dragon’s moonshine, isn’t it?” I asked. This night brought up more questions than answers.
Pascal just laughed: “maybe.”
At least I knew what I was drinking now. I chugged about half of it, and by the next thing I knew the room more than doubled in population. There was a dubious amount of people who I didn’t even know. It looked as if they all came in at once. We moved the party from Jostein’s room to the basement, where the children could roll their joints in peace. Once I got a good view of the crowd I immediately picked out the kids that I could tell I would hate in order to stay away from them during the evening. Luckily, I could only find one. His name was Bobby (or at least, that’s what I remember his name being) and he was very tall and had a nose that didn’t look like it had any business being on his face. So I ignored him.
Dani was out earlier that day buying some paints and paintbrushes, so we decided to paint. She grabbed some paper and lay it down on the floor. Jostein started freaking out about how we were going to make a mess, but Dani convinced him that the paint was water-soluble and it didn’t matter. I could tell that the acid was starting to kick in.
Damien came and sat down next to me, proclaiming that he wanted to paint as well. We decided that we were going to make our own mini Nuit Blanche. So we painted. We used mostly yellows, blues and whites. Dani’s brilliant idea was to make green. She mixed the hues with an air of pseudo-elegance while I sat there writing the word “cunt” over and over again in paint. It was then that the person who I knew that I would hate for the rest of my life came.
Her name was Allison, though when she first started talking to me I was almost positive she said her name was Haiti. She wore a leather jacket, tights, and a pink skirt-like thing. She had some sort of “artsy” shit on her face that was supposed to be some sort of eyeliner pattern. I could tell from the get go that she would be nothing but a bitch to me and I called her out on that, and apologized for it shortly after. I then may or may not have told her that I wanted to her to die.
Damien and I had a very in depth conversation while we were painting. I forget what it was about. Every time I looked at him he’d be smiling at me. It was probably the acid. Jostein’s dad then called us up for dinner, which I had none of. I wasn’t blind yet.
I was trying to stay inconspicuous, standing in a semi-familiar kitchen, staring at a bunch of kids I’ve never met before eat a bunch of food. It wasn’t working. I was standing next to Damien who was holding hands with that Haiti bitch. He later informed me that they had never met and she was piss-drunk. Fucking parasite. Damien kept forgetting I was standing next to him, and asked me where I came from. Jostein’s dad came up to us and asked us if we wanted some food or “a punch in the face.” I took his joke a bit to seriously and went to stand behind Dani who was, at this point tripping balls. I managed to swipe some bustle sprouts off her after Pascal said that “those green things were meant to be for everybody.” She had a meatball on her for and informed me that she “fucking hated this fucking meatball and she never wanted to fucking see it ever again.” So I kept on taking it and putting it back on her plate, no matter where she tried to hide it. Pascal and I talked about how we wanted to burn the house down and kill everyone.
Did I mention the French kids? There were some French exchange students who looked completely oblivious to all of the drug use that was going on around them. I went to hang out and smoke with them on the front porch, but their novelty disappeared as soon as I realized that they knew none of the cool French bands that I knew, like “Le Le” and “Kap Bambino.” Though they did inform me that Champagne was a real place in France, and not something that I had just made up. Also I was informed that that Bobby kid I decided that I hated drank some of the Dragonshine too. Though, unlike me, he had only taken a few swigs off it and was already acting like a complete douche.
Tavi decided that she wanted to go see Nuit Blanche and I started talking to this really nice girl named Katie (not to be confused with that Haiti bitch). Out of all the people at this party, she probably wished the least harm to befall upon me. I blessed her and said “may death come swiftly to your enemies.”
We were then on the streetcar. Tickets were supplied via Pascal and everyone was having a jolly good time. Except for Pascal, who was babysitting Dani because, even though she thought that one tab wouldn’t be enough, she was on another planet. Haiti was sitting next to Damien (still holding hands) while Damien was smiling at me whenever I looked over.
We got off the streetcar somewhere close to the Much Music place and started walking. The plan was to wander around until art found us. The first thing we saw was some scary ghosts and that crazy hallucination machine. After careful inspection we concluded that the line was too long and we didn’t really need to visit the hallucination machine in the state we were in. By this time Haiti was gone and Dani and I stopped talking about different ways in which we were going to kill her.
We ditched the Frenchies along with some other girls and Bobby to hang out on some bleachers next to an intersection. We watched a movie that consisted of, from what I could tell, seeing as I wasn’t wearing my contacts: a man getting out of a pool which then turned into the Washington monument, which then turned into a burning table that burned backwards to show a table with tea and a book on it. It then showed a busy highway and a different screen that we assumed was in Japan. It might have also shown a clock or a metronome. I forget. I had been begging Damien for a smoke, and he finally re-lit his half used cigarette so I could take a much-wanted drag.
While sitting on the platform thing I started calling some friends. None of them were at Nuit Blanche and I proceeded to tell them they were losers because of that. I then told them I loved them over and over until they hung up. Some imposters showed up and I called them out on it.
We started walking because Jostein was going to pick up some MDMA or something from some kid somewhere. It was nearing eleven, so I started bugging Pascal to get me a taxi. We were waiting outside a hotdog stand when Dani said:
“Damien, you know, you’re like the perfect person,”
This caused us to laugh, seeing as Damien has blond hair and blue eyes.
“No, I mean, he’s completely pure,” she went on “Not like you,” She pointed at me, “Your hair is brown, and that’s because you’ve bred with a nigger.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked her.
“You know what I’m talking about.” She replied. “But you’re beautiful. Like an angel. You’re made out of porcelain. We can’t keep you in the cold too long, because you’ll crack and fall apart and then the tea that is inside of you will spill out everywhere.”
“Well, that’s true,” I said.
We gravitated towards some smoke in the distance, following a closed down road littered with Pillsbury Doughboy corpses. The smoke reminded me of the fog at the Fever Ray concert.
“I really want some incest,” I said. Fully aware that was confusing incest with incense. Damien and Jostein burst out laughing.
“You know, like, some good lemon incest,” I said “the pure stuff,”
We sang along to the music that was playing and started walking to what we thought was another art exhibit, but what turned out to be an ad for 5 Gum. We gave it the finger. It was almost eleven now, so Pascal called me a cab and I got in.
“Hey, I’d like to go to Kingston and St. Clair” I said to the cabby.
“We should take the highway, trust me,” He told me, “there is way to much traffic. Why do they even have this? Every weekend they shut down the city to have some sort of festival.”
“It’s good for tourism, I guess,” I suggested, not completely paying attention to him. Trying to make my creeping hangover go away.
“Bleh, there’s can’t really be that many tourists,” He said, “They all just want to come to look at the lights.”
Which is true. None of my friends nor me got any significant benefit from it. We didn’t even understand what the art was supposed to represent. I’m not sure that anyone did, unless they really tried to pay attention and learn about that. But most people don’t do that. They just want to get drunk. They don’t have time for abstract concepts. They just want to come see the lights.
