Lesson learned. If you get drinks with a guy who looks like
Amenidiel from Lucifer
So I went to do a sensory deprivation tank in Liverpool in
the afternoon. It was a very Miranda Hart style experience. I rock up and get
shown a small waiting room with an incredibly comfortable chair, soft blue
lighting, and zen meditation music before being lead downstairs. The incredibly
hushed-tone scouse man running it walks me into room 3 and introduces me to the
system of incredibly fancy showers, as well as the apple-product-white egg in
the centre of the room. The inside of the smooth dome was dark until a button
lit it with a neon blue that added to the sci-fi vibes. He also recommended I
do it naked, meaning the trunks I’d taken with me from Chester were deemed dead
weight from the beginning. So after he leaves I strip off and get in, sealing
myself away and hitting the light switch.
I lied there. It was certainly floaty. Dark. Okay. lets see
what happens. Did I just get tricked into a £40 bath? Salt! Salt in the eyes!
Salt in the other places! I scramble for the eye spritzer before showering
instead. Round 2. This time I get the foam halo for “added head support” and
lie there. Better. I wonder when the enlightenment magic moment hits. My brain
continued to reach for thoughts it couldn’t quite get to, making puns, counting
breaths, searching for fixes to my life outside the giant egg. Until finally
the mediation music eased in and I could leave. I towel off and head to the
surface in my scruffy jeans. At least its off the bucket list.
I take my bag and en-route to the train station head to the
shopping centre, marvelling at how shops in cities stay open so late.
Everything in Chester closes at 6. The idea of shopping at 8pm feels like
turning water to wine. So I do what all single students do in new towns. I open
the dating apps. At this point I’m already considering staying a tad later.
Just to see Liverpool *properly* in the evening. So I get some local knowledge
and flirt for a bit, until a profile catches my eye. “Northstar”, a broad,
bald, black guy with some way-too-professional profile pics and a quip about
“not being a pizza to be ordered by the inch.” I say hi, I ask him all the
usual questions about pubs and new towns until he mentions Jupiter.
I find it on google maps, my curiosity piqued to the highest
degree, ending up at a very chill bar with aliens on the window. There, by the
door, stood in a dramatic smoking pose in a slightly grungy ankle length
cardigan-hoodie-thing that was almost definitely a wizard cape, was bootleg
ammenidiel. “sorry? did you message me a few seconds ago?” he asks unsure, in a
much better accent than I was expecting. “yeah, I was curious” I justified
heading in for a nose. “well you can join us if you like” he smiled.
The pub was dark, 80s music playing off the TV and a lesbian
woman in a football shirt and a ponytail manning the DJ booth. Speckles of
groups, mainly soft-butch women but with a few dudes thrown in, just chilling
out. Too few people for a singleton to go amiss. The grunge-wizard, whose name
I now know is “our Kenny” – a very scouse title if I do say – introduced me to
his side kick, a skinnier lad who’d have been cute if some of his anecdotes
didn’t remind me of the kinds of shenanigans my gramps had told me about. We
chatted for a bit and I remember having a warm moment of “oh, so *this* is human
connection. I now get it!”
Then the weird got turned up a bit. Kenny pulled a face.
“are you okay?” I ask him as he strikes the universe with a glance like he’s
realised his ex had walked into the room and the oven was still on at his
apartment at the same time. “yeah, I’m … sensitive to energy. Some bad energy
went into the room” he justified, asking the bartender for her input. She was
an older woman, striking eye make up and a constellation of charms around her
wrists and neck, I have decided because the bar was called Jupiter’s after
hades, and the woman was a pagan (hence Kenny asking about energies etc) that
she is the Persephone. “oh don’t worry, he does this. he’s recently got some …
newer beliefs” his friend explained non-challantly as Kenny stroked the air
like he was in a Florence and the machine video.
“so the last train is at about half 11, the one after that
is 6ish” I explained “do I go hard or do I go home?” This later lead to me
deciding FUCK IT! I’LL STAY TIL 6. But, to be fair to the lads who I was
drinking with, they did keep an eye on the clock and one of them offered to
make sure I got to the station okay. “one last pub before the train, its only
around the corner. Posthouse” he propositioned, dropping some trivia about the
posthouse being the only gay bar in Liverpool with a signed photo from Adolf Hilter.
I nodded pretending to listen and Kenny gave me a weird look. “you did not just
say ‘oh nice’ about Adolf Hilter?” it was then that I realised what was going
on. “Wait … you said Hitler???”
So we went, and its there that we met Dan, our 3rd
companion for the night. He was Scottish with an accent that sounded like
smooth whisky against drunk ears. We talked about accents, until I discovered
he was part of a Scottish gay rugby team. “how many have you shagged the way
through?” I joked. He actually stopped and counted. Apparently getting a load
of testosterone filled young homosexual men into a confined space for a week
gets things to turn a tad … Olympic village-y. I added it to the bucket list.
I explained my situation. Go hard or go home. half 11 or
6ish? Before agreeing to carry on until 6. If nothing else it’s a story. In the
next bar I asked the scot about his open relationship, which was fun, until I
discovered that one of the more drunk of our party thought mahogany was the
opposite of monogamy. I had to tipsily explain that one was only dating one
person, the other is a type of wood.
By bar four I met Mohammed. At this point the scot and the scouser
were very intensely, drunkenly kissing, and Kenny had vanished. So I chatted to
the Arabian guy at the bar. He was cute, well dressed with a Marylin Monroe
beauty spot, immaculate hair, and teeth like UV lights. except he went from 0
to wanting a relationship in the mere hours I’d known him. it started off with his relief about me not
being weirded out by his name and his arabian background, and evolved into
incredibly heavy kissing on his side, until I essentially had to give him a
quiet reality check that I was off home in under 6 hours.
After hours dancing, dodging trouble, waiting for the trains
to start back up again, and enduring my friends very heavily making out with
one another I managed to fight my way back to bed. Just goes to show there are
wacky and interesting people in all sorts of places, even if you have to get
stranded in Liverpool to meet them.
