One night on Ibiza?

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Sitting under the palm trees on Ibiza surrounded by Gods and Goddesses I could not help but thrill to the synchronicity of it all, even though I don’t really subscribe to any ‘pattern’. In a background window, my hilarity may even have cheered up the jetlagged Goddesses for some short time but after a few hours of core dumping the table folds back into two cars, Richard W. and girls, plus Dennis Mckenna, in the one car, Joey and I in the other. Joey looks at me and we both start laughing. I guess we both know that, although it’s after 2.00 AM, we’re on Ibiza and the night is still young. Though we attempt to follow Richard, Dennis and the girls back to Richard’s place to persuade Dennis into coming out with us, we get split up in heavy single lane traffic.

Lights stream by on all sides, we’re loose on Ibiza! Locking navigation over everything else, I manage to relocate us to a nearby harbor that’s jam-packed with young, brightly colored, scantily clad humanity. Parking is easy because I’m a mojolocutus parking bot with zoned circuitry processes in direct communication with a cosmic internet inhabited by Gods and Goddesses so chill out because time is always in the present. Aaoom!

The wave eventually passes through me. Back on Earth, Joey is muttering something so negative about local fashion that I convince him into buying tickets to a nightclub called Privilege, or was it Amnesia? Anyway, the only thing I know is that I don’t want to drive anywhere anymore, so even though the club is another town we head towards where the free bus is supposed to be. It doesn’t take more than a few hundred paces for Joey to become anxious about the location of the bus so I try flagging down a cab. Instead a wrecked Fiat of some kind pulls over to a shuddering stop next to us. Inside this contraption is an emaciated guy wearing black cutoff leather gloves and clutching at the steering wheel with both hands like we’d take it away from him if we could. I try and smile benignly, briefly wondering if this is still possible. The moon looks on while we barter for a ride to the club. He tells us it’s in another town but that he’ll take us there for 20 euro. We eventually agree on 10 and climb in. He’s smoking a hash joint, so we strap ourselves in before taking an obligatory hit. Our driver is from Rumania and he says we can have anything we like except acid, mescaline or grass. We look at each other and start laughing.

The Rumanian doesn’t drive very smoothly so it takes him another ten minutes for him to get us to the club and there are enough turns to convince me that we wouldn’t have been able to find this place on our own. The Rumanian tells us that he’ll do us the return trip for the same price so we take his number and say ciao.

It’s more than 30 degrees and no one is overdressed as we ponder the true weirdness of our situation under a full moon in a parking lot outside a giant rave club on Ibiza. Succumbing to a moments panic, I compulsively check to see if I’ve lost any kit but most of it is there so I separate what looks like money from the crumpled tickets and head towards the door. Inside, it’s like 180 BPM with raised platforms on which weirdly painted, scantily clad dancers gyrate underneath a guy in a lycra swimsuit while he does acrobatic stuff hanging from a pink rope that looks dangerous.

In the midst of all this mayhem my feet are firmly stuck to the dance floor because I’ve been up for longer than I want to think about and I'm thirsty enough to let them charge us 20 euro for a coke and a single scotch, which we share. Like the Rumanian had said, the place wasn’t exactly charging our batteries so I talk Joey into walking over to ‘Underground’, which, according to the Rumanian was only ‘500 meters away’ up the hill.

We let ourselves out but the immediate vicinity of the club is populated by moving waves of ravers and we immediately get offered a joint by a German girl who can’t get her lighter going before following a thin stream of people walking up the hill in the general direction of the Underground club into moonlight and kamikaze oncoming traffic because there is no other pathway so we have no choice other than to dodge oncoming cars. Joey stresses; "we could get ourselves killed", but there are worse problems because we have no idea where we are, or where we’ve dumped the car. In fact, we don’t even know the name of the town we’ve in. “Good stuff. Better than the real thing”, mutters Joey, so it doesn’t matter if we’re lost because two girls come running down the hill towards us like they’ve just ingested vast quantities of slimming tablets. They talk to us in stuttered gibberish which Joey pretends to understand, so I tell him what to say. “No”, he tells me, they're not going in the direction of our car because we don’t know where are car is, right? Nodding, we pack up laughing. The girls take this as a bad sign and start running across the road. Joey calls after them, but though one drops her bag and nearly gets run over trying to retrieve it, fortunately they’re soon downstream. We slog on up the hill for another 20 minutes while more people go by in the dark. Everyone is friendly in passing but by this time we’re wondering wtf is going on because we’ve been walking up a hill for what seems like forever and the lights in the distance don’t seem to be getting much closer.

I’m busy regretting my earlier enthusiasm for walking when the Underground club appears behind some big trees right next to us and before we’re able to understand where all the traffic is coming from we’re back to dodging SUVs in the parking lot before making it to the dance floor of Underground where blonde bimbos rule peeled bananas in the early hours of Friday morning. Babble aside, it’s all a cut from the next Sodom and Gomorra movie so to avoid culture shock I keep a grin stitched to my face as I pull the now-protesting Joey through crowds of smoke, drug and liquor sodden, off-their-face people until he begs me to take him home, which would have been a good idea once, but instead it’s the moment I’ve been dreading because we don't know where we are, and we've lost our car, and it’s after 5.00 AM.

There’s only one logical short cut to get us back to where we'd left the car and that is if we can re-connect with the Rumanian taxi driver so he could drop us off where he’d picked us up. This is assuming the Rumanian is alive, driving and conscious enough to remember where he’d picked us up. None of it bears thinking about. A little voice in my head is commanding me to take it home so I’m sure I sound more confident than I really am when I assure Joey that the Rumanian is waiting for our call because he needs another 10 euro to keep going and driving with him is not frightening because we’re more desperate to get home than he is to get high, right?

Joey giggles, fortunately too tired to compute how much a local call made on a South African cell phone chip is going to cost him so I guess the little voice in 'his' head is also making itself heard because he just makes the call without arguing the point. I’ve just had the last logical thought I'm going to have until I get back to our car so it takes me a moment to notice that, next to me, Joey is waving at someone in a car parked a few paces from where we’re standing.

Amazingly, or maybe not so amazingly, it's the Rumanian, and he’s pleased to see us, pleased we went to Underground, pleased about everything. He’s so pleased that he lights one up in the car park before heading back down the hill. We can't help laughing at the absurdity of it all but our maniacal cackling from the back seat of the open cab doesn’t turn the Rumanian's head so we give him 15 euro instead of 10. Though he is happy about everything, he is also very pleased with this and salutes us by executing a spectacular U-turn, waving at us as he spins around, probably headed back to Underground, or some other like place.

By now, Joey and I are worn out. It’s been a long day, what with Tanit then dinner with Dennis Mckenna, Richard, the Dream Dancers, our night out and everything else I’ve forgotten. We head back up a familiar harbor wall in the direction we think we’ve illegally parked the car, hoping it hasn’t been towed away and it doesn’t take us more than 15 minutes walk to find the unclamped car where we’d left it.

It’s now closer to 6.00 AM and returning to Richard’s place wont be easy because we still can’t remember exactly where we're staying, nor do we have Richard’s phone number or street address. For a time, things look hopeless, so we cruise around aimlessly, maybe looking at all the other people who cant find their way home looking at us but we’re cooler because we’ve got the top down and the CD is saying “Drums please…”, so I make like I know where we’re going. Summertime - anyone?

A day later:

I’ve slept well enough and it’s now almost time to return from forever - or is it return to forever? Whatever. We have tickets booked for the return ferry and we’re packed and ready with no mistakes well before the 2.30 PM deadline. Lining up to say our goodbyes, we hug Richard and the Goddesses goodbye, wishing we could’ve stayed on a few nights longer. But it isn’t like that because Joey has a plane to catch at 9.00 AM Sunday morning and Dennis has to return to Minnesota three days later.

Yes, the 'Boys from Brazil' were on a tight schedule but mounting the ramp of the ferry wasn't without a sense of loss because Ibiza is a place you can lose your car, your wife, your life; a nice fantasy, if it wasn’t tinged with child sacrifice, character dissolution and maybe sudden death. The island of Tanit remains an enigmatic place, somewhere I’ll try to return to, if life works out that way.

An excerpt from 'Cognition Theory', by Schwann, edited especially for Travelblog.org. No folks, you will not find this anywhere else on the net right now.
Copyright all Media: September 23rd 2004

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