Dear reader,
Here’s the second and final instalment of our party reports, first debuted at our winter soirée a couple of weeks back.
Political columnist and powerful orator, Guy Rundle, delivered a magnum opus of Melbourne pub history, while the city’s most stylish short-story writer, Paul Dalla Rosa, took us clubbing at the Peel. Paul’s report is reproduced below; Guy, we last saw in the stairwell at the Carlton Club, ranting about the CFMEU. If you see him, ask him about the connection between Eddie Leonski and Ern Malley. What we heard that night shocked us.
xoxo Eds
Paul Dalla Rosa on the Peel
Some nights feel like they’re accelerating, they’re going somewhere, anywhere, then the crash happens—the closure of a club, a call for last drinks, the disbanding of a house party, or you find yourself like me, drunk under downlights, watching carpet cleaners on the home shopping channel—when an inexorable gravity, maybe even fate, leaves you in an Uber hurtling down Wellington Street, hurtling towards the Peel.
Inside, video displays that maybe once showed porn but now don’t show a lot of anything, occasionally have a hunk appear on the screen as well as the words “ALL ROADS LEAD TO THE PEEL.”
It’s true, like a wastewater sample, everything and everyone ends up here in the end. Ticketed events, complex personal arrangements, arguments, corporate conferences, ghosted hookups, ennui in the Greater Metropolitan region: all are tributaries that converge here in the long hours before dawn.
Because of this it’s not really a scene in itself, or there isn’t enough of one to cohere, to reach critical mass, and this is what I like about it. Pretensions tend to have evaporated sometime earlier in the night.
I’m standing in the smokers’ section with a friend who’s just arrived back from Europe. We’re at the Peel before 2am which is perhaps déclassé but during his six weeks away he didn’t once attempt to sublet his room and I think that means something. We speak to a property manager, another property manager, and then a management consultant from Deloitte. Like putting the same prompt into an AI image generator, I keep thinking the next result will be something more interesting.
Standing at the same table, a man once told me he was a singer signed to Universal and had just gotten back from India where he’d undergone surgery to change the colour of his irises. That’s how he said it. His irises. His eyes seemed like normal eyes to me.
We go to the dance floor where a twink isn’t twerking exactly, but kind of wiggling his ass side to side. First his ass waves in front my crotch and then in front of my friend’s crotch. It seems to bob in black space for a while, expressive and anthropomorphic, then moves away, seeking someone else.
I forget which night is for what, Friday compared to Saturday, but one advertises itself as playing “CLUB CLASSICS UNTIL DAWN” and the other plays “CLUB ANTHEMS UNTIL DAWN,” and somehow what this means in practice is that the DJ, at some point every night, plays Muse’s “Knights of Cydonia,” which drives us off the dancefloor.
My friend disappears going to the bathroom or I disappear going to the back bar instead of the front bar. I could walk down the mirrored corridor to the pool table, but I don’t want to see my reflection and I never go to the pool table. No one I know goes to the pool table.
I have a lapse in memory. The only note in my phone for two hours is, “I want the DJ to play Camilla Cabello. Not Havana.”
I can hear music through the aquarium window between the smokers and the dancefloor, but I’m not sure I can really hear it. More and more people are topless inside, in what I feel to be a Rabelaisian way. I think I hear Katy Perry’s “Never Really Over” but the thing with “Never Really Over” is, the song’s three minutes and forty-three seconds long, so pretty soon it’s really over, just like everything else.
It’s five am and the palms above the courtyard are beginning to silhouette against the sky.
A man pokes my chest and says, “Free Britney.” I’m wearing a t-shirt with Lindsay Lohan’s face on it. I say, “Yes.”