Scenes from the undergro.., p.1
Scenes from the Underground, page 1
* * *
* * *
Scenes from the Underground
Gabriel Cholette
With Illustrations by Jacob Pyne
Translated by Elina Taillon
* * *
* * *
Copyright © Triptyque, 2021
English translation copyright © 2022 by Elina Taillon
First published as Les carnets de l’underground in 2021 by Triptyque
First published in English in 2022 by House of Anansi Press Inc.
www.houseofanansi.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
House of Anansi Press is a Global Certified Accessible™ (GCA by Benetech) publisher. The ebook version of this book meets stringent accessibility standards and is available to students and readers with print disabilities.
26 25 24 23 22 1 2 3 4 5
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Scenes from the underground / Gabriel Cholette ; with illustrations by Jacob Pyne ; translated by Elina Taillon.
Other titles: Carnets de l’underground. English
Names: Cholette, Gabriel, author. | Pyne, Jacob, illustrator. | Taillon, Elina, translator.
Description: Translation of: Les carnets de l’underground.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220224064 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220224218 | ISBN 9781487010751 (softcover) | ISBN 9781487010768 (EPUB)
Subjects: LCSH: Cholette, Gabriel. | LCSH: Gay men—Social life and customs—Biography. | LCSH: Dance parties. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.
Classification: LCC HQ75.8.C56 A3 2022 | DDC 306.76/62092—dc23
Cover illustration by Jacob Pyne
House of Anansi Press respectfully acknowledges that the land on which we operate is
the Traditional Territory of many Nations, including the Anishinabeg, the Wendat,
and the Haudenosaunee. It is also the Treaty Lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Action Plan for Official Languages — 2018–2023: Investing in Our Future, for our translation activities.
Don’t send this to my mother.
Legend
Berlin, Germany
Bert puts me up on the edge of the stall to take test photos because the lighting is good. I have just heard for the first time the expression “to make soup”: it means to mix the bottom-of-the-pocket drugs of everyone huddled in the club toilet stall, opened MD, ketamine, old dry speed, crushed e pills, to make big lines that will let us forget the past forty-eight hours that have been so difficult.
Two days before the soup, I’m bored at Emma’s place; I tell myself I’m not experiencing Berlin fully enough. I message someone on Grindr who looks straight and seems to be propositioning a guy for the first time in his life. Next. I message a dude with lips a little too full for my taste. We exchange photos. Next. Even more bored than before.
The first guy replies to let me know he’s sitting next to the second. I realize that he’s not straight and clearly not undercover in his new homosexual life when he explains that he’s at an orgy party and that there are twelve people sucking each other off in the next room.
That’s not my sort of thing, but even so I agree to play the game; the dirty talk succeeds just as much at turning me on as it does at making me realize that if I go over there, I’ll be, quite frankly, the service hole. I end up telling the boys that I accept their invitation on the condition that no one joins our threesome and that they show me a little respect.
Of course, that doesn’t work. A fourth one (not ugly) joins us, the others push on my head to get me on my knees, but, before doing anything, I tell them that this isn’t what was agreed on, that I’m not comfortable, and that I want to leave. The three understand right away, we begin a quick little conversation (what do you do for a living? they enumerate: law fashion cinema) and suddenly they win some points: I find myself a bit seduced.
I think that if we’d talked a little longer, I might have stayed, but it’s fine because Florian messaged me when I left and we spent the rest of the day snuggling on a lakeshore.
The next day, I find myself at Buttons with Sophy and Emma, and, going up to the cloakroom, I spot in the distance the “straight” guy trying to avoid my gaze. I manage to dodge his as well, except in the toilets I run right into him, and he explains to me that he felt like crap all day because I’d seemed very uncomfortable the night before. I tell him that it wasn’t traumatizing, that I was just sticking to my boundaries. He introduces himself in passing, Bert. I hear Bart, like Bart Simpson, and I call him Bart for at least an hour before he finally corrects me.
From that moment on, we were never apart, to the point where the girls spent three hours looking for me, doing the rounds from the dance floor to the toilets by way of the dark rooms, where they thought they saw a guy having a full-on heart attack on the ground but who was just jerking off. All this while Bert had me dancing “robot-style,” stuck on the ends of his feet while he controlled my legs and my arms and we fell, thanks to the magic of Berlin, madly in love.
(There really was something magical: Bert was leaving in twelve hours and we didn’t want to lose a single second of the time we could spend together.)
I accompanied him to his Neukölln apartment to help him pack while we both cried our hearts out. We Skyped four days later and, trying to look cute, I overturned the wooden table on which I’d set myself up, in the process knocking over the four plants that were there. He didn’t seem to find this cute, and he told me, already reluctantly, that I could swing by New York to see him during Fashion Week if I wanted.
The guy lived in Manhattan — the dream — and since I was in love, I decided to take off again as soon as I got back to Montreal, already imagining myself moving to the mythical city that gave rise to Sex and the City. My Amigo Express lift was four hours late, but at last I fell into Bert’s arms in a Lower East Side park next to which we went to eat fried chicken with one of his model friends, who only ordered coleslaw.
It’s rather tragic that I arrived late because that was our only good day together in New York. I spent all the others waiting for him in his apartment with not much to do before he would come home and turn grumpy, and we would bicker without me understanding why.
Even more frustrating: he makes me buy a ticket for an after-party ($50 US because everything is ultraexpensive in New York) but avoids me the whole evening, until I decide to leave without telling him. Struck by misgiving, I come back and tell him that his attitude, it’s kind of shit, and he stammers something, introduces me to a tall handsome guy, like really handsome, and we spend all of three seconds together and they find a pretext for abandoning me.
On the verge of tears, I go back to Bert’s place, telling myself that he’s got to return eventually, but he texts me to announce that he’s not coming home: he had an argument with the tall handsome guy, like really too tall, and he lets me know that the guy in question is his boyfriend and they were already dating when we met in Berlin.
Can anyone explain to me what I’m doing in New York waiting in the apartment of a guy who has a boyfriend from whom he’s hiding my presence?
A few days later, I come back to Montreal with two of his Nike tank tops that I stole. Now, when I think back on it, I regret not having taken some young in-vogue designer’s piece.
When Bert took my photo in the stall at Buttons after the soup, he was telling me that he was responsible for the casting at Vogue and that, who knows? if the photos came out well, there would maybe be a future for me in the business. I learned the hard way: no, the photos didn’t turn out well, oh, and Bert, he’s an asshole.
Homemade Porno
Berlin, Germany
It’s the first second of a solo porn video that I filmed in the Berlin apartment I rented with Emma (sorry, babe, this is how I’m telling you). In the following moments, I perform a precise choreography, a choreography that I repeat at least eight times before collapsing from fatigue: I move back, I take off my shirt, I do three or four things that I don’t want to describe here, and I aim for two minutes maximum to execute my routine.
All this because the day before, at Cocktail d’Amore, Sophy met a guy in the line she’d spent eight hours in before gaining entrance, whereas I — if I remember correctly — cut ahead of everyone with a group of French people. (The French were told no at the door, but not me, who entered in front of them as proud as anything.) The guy Sophy met is named Jacob, and, for a moment, I don’t know why, I thought that he was the ugliest of the party. So I didn’t pay attention to him.
That was Mistake #1. He was very handsome.
Cocktail — which no longer exists — was a huge, badly lit party where eighty thousand trained and sculpted biceps plowed into each other. Seriously, there wasn’t a single person who wasn’t shirtless and, after the first twenty-four hours, not a single person who wasn’t in a jockstrap or a dog mask or something like that. Just saying, Sophy had discovered a secret mezzanine on the second floor and had become the dominatrix o
f the place. That was Cocktail for you.
Mistake #2: Telling Mika, Anton’s friend, both of them dealers I met at Tresor a few days before, that we would go together to consult manuscripts at the Staatsbibliothek.
Basically, Mika turned out to be an expert on the Middle Ages; he tripped out on gold-painted initials, and he knew that Berlin houses a particularly famous manuscript that I’d seen the day before, for my studies. So Mika, whom I like a lot, kept me with him the whole evening in the hopes that I would accompany him to the library in the near future, which I already knew I wasn’t going to do.
Anyway, it wasn’t that big of a mistake, because I was entitled to two wingmen by my side, two masc-for-masc King Kong types who spend their days at the gym and who introduced me to their gang. Never again will I say something bad about douchebags, because to my great shock, everyone was real nice: they talked about the same things as us and I recall with delight everyone whom Anton introduced to me, Herculeses in leather Speedos who could have carried me, the beanpole, on their shoulders all evening without effort.
While we were wading through Cocktail, I ran face to face into Jacob, who seemed to be in a k-hole; right away, he took me by the hand and brought me under Sophy’s mezzanine, in the immense slightly trashy dark room that scared me. We sat next to the line of guys waiting to go fuck a designated victim (a chosen one?), between a couple of folks in their forties who were finding each other at last after years of confusion, and some people searching for something on the ground, probably a dropped baggie of powder.
Incapable of speaking but extremely motivated to show me something, Jacob stuck out his tongue and his phone and began searching hastily through his photos, among more or less a thousand dick pics of himself and other guys, videos, and rather questionable selfies. Holding a photo of a normal penis, a little bigger than average, he pointed at himself, his tongue still out.
There ensued a weird sequence of events: Jacob, who wanted me to suck his dick, pointed from his mouth to his belt with his cell phone and placed the screen at an angle to indicate that it’s his penis, all the while shaking a little. Miming understanding, I took his phone from his hands and gave him a kiss on the .jpeg. He jumped, saying no no no and started to unzip his pants to show me his flaccid penis.
At that moment, he regained the faculty of speech. He told me (in English, and I’m paraphrasing) I would love if you kissed it, I’m too high on ketamine but my penis looks like what I showed you in the photo. I let myself drop to the dirty floor of the dark room. I know that it would have been more dignified to say no, but nonetheless I chose to give him a cute little peck on the head of his penis — nothing that would wake the beast.
Mistake #3, the most fatal: Listening to him talk and letting myself be lulled by his wildest fantasies.
Jacob then measured two ml of GHB while explaining to me that he has a particular fetish: collecting face-dick pics. This type of photo is a powerful weapon that can put an end to anyone’s political aspirations, because it’s the only infallible way of associating the equipment with its owner and using their little intimacy against them. When he finished measuring the two ml of g, he warned me: I’m going to go back to the state I was in fifteen minutes ago, so maybe we’d be better off separating.
But don’t forget me.
Which I didn’t. I stayed a good twelve hours longer at Cocktail, and before leaving I headed back to Jacob with the goal of taking him with me. Except there were still another twelve hours before the party stopped, and he wanted to socialize as much as possible. Running with a particular idea, I went back to Neukölln, positioned myself in the room in front of the gorgeous luminous rays of the rising sun and I imagined my first solo porno.
Four hours later — I had technical issues filming the finale — I sent him the video. He must’ve still been at the party at that moment, but he replied immediately to tell me that the file was corrupted, that it wasn’t working. I spent a half-hour reformatting the video so it would be compatible with his iPhone. I sent him the new file. Seen at 9:36 a.m. To this day, I still haven’t had a response. If I’d known that, I would have put little golden initials all over my body — that might have worked better.
Cucumber
Mile End, Montreal
For a long time I looked for this exact photo because it’s quite a funny souvenir: we’re all at Glitterbomb, even Emma and Rouz, who don’t usually like that kind of event. I’m completely blacked out, and as soon as everyone is ready to go back to the house, I climb into a taxi occupied by four random girls who scream at me to get out.
Except I refuse to get out, and I demand that everyone calm themselves because it’s not worth getting worked up like that, i’m just blacked out and don’t know where i am anymore. Luckily for me, there’s a girl in the back who tells the others to stop screaming, look how pathetic he is. But pathetic or not, what happens is that in the front, real cozy next to the taxi driver, I’m taking up the place of the fourth friend who from the outside is hitting me with her high heel through the open window.
I’m kicked out on the curb next to Emma and Rouz, whose jaws are on the floor seeing me expelled like this. By mutual agreement, we decide to go to Cyberia — Jacob accepts without really realizing it, I think. The after-party is much more crowded than usual, but, seized by a stroke of genius, I figure I’m going to show my stamp from Glitterbomb to skip the line and avoid paying the cover. I was the only one who managed it: Emma, Rouz, and Jacob (actually quite pissed off) go back to the house and leave me alone at Cyberia.
Which means I’m alone, blacked out, probably OUT OF MONEY, and everything that happens there is unpublished; no one knows the series of events that is deeply embedded in an inaccessible part of my brain.
I imagine that there was Valentin, Oli, the usual gang who dropped in — I can’t really say. I only know that I regain consciousness right in the middle of the street, at seven in the morning, like an old cucumber, accompanied by Aubrey, Sean, and Bobby, who reassure the Instagram community by announcing that they’ve finally found me.
A little messed up, we sit / spread out on the sidewalk at the corner of Parc and Van Horne while the sun rises. It’s one of the last hot days of the fading summer, and I have my head on Sean whose head is on Aubrey whose head is on Bobby who is saying that after-parties, they don’t really have any use, other than spending moments between friends lying against one another.
Wednesday
Neukölln, Berlin
Middle of the week I’m among the plants it’s sunny in our little one zimmer in Neukölln I’m crying telling Emma that I’m going back to sleep all afternoon to replenish my serotonin which has evaporated.
The Queen of the Toilets
Berghain / Panorama Bar
On LoremIpsum’s Instagram, with a little searching, one can readily find the marine Aquarius Zelda swamp fairy symbolism that Sophy and I recognized at Berghain the first time we spent an evening there together. In this club, which is like an amusement park for adults, there are three floors where different groups cohabit. In the second artery of the third floor, to the left, the cool kids of Generation Instagram assemble. Not much there, just two toilets and a bench, but it’s big enough for a handful of youth — whom Sophy and I know virtually — to gather.
(If everyone meets up at the toilets, it’s because that’s the ideal place to do keta. Nothing mysterious or coincidental: it’s drugs that organize the space at Berghain.)
We found the spot — which we will thereafter call “the oasis” because it will serve to revitalize us — by shuffling like zombies after beautiful people with familiar haircuts: bowl cut like me, bangs and mullet cut like Sophy, bleached hair, middle part vagina cut, chrome dome, etc. We were following the tufts like a token of possible friendship by placing ourselves strategically behind them in the line for the toilets, striking up a conversation at the opportune moment. Seeing as we had hair compatible with theirs, the tufts started to talk to us. Bingo.
