The Juliette Society(35)

At the bottom we’re confronted by an unmarked black door, like the door to the underworld. Anna knocks twice then pauses and knocks again three times. And it opens. And when it opens there’s not a whole lot more light inside than out. Just a half-light so dim that your eyes need time to adjust to it. A shadowy, hulking figure, the kind of man mountain you always find working the door at a club, ushers us inside without saying a word.

I follow Anna down a long thin corridor, with walls so close that we can only walk in single file, like a passage in a catacomb, then down two more flights of stairs. We’re under the city now. And it feels like we’re so far down that we’ve burrowed through the earth into a section of hell.

We’re in front of a large steel door painted dirty green. Anna knocks again and it swings open, held by another man mountain.

The first thing that hits me is the smell. And instead of the faint smell of alcohol and mold, this place smells like sex – the smell of hot bodies colliding and combining.

The second thing that hits me is the heat. Wet and humid. The kind of heat that makes you break into a sweat the second you step into it.

The third thing is the sound. Techno. Because what’s a club without techno and, specifically, German techno. German gabber techno at ear-destroying volumes. The perfect sense-disorientating, high-velocity fuck music.

We walk into a large rectangular room with brick walls, a bar all along one side and a ceiling so low it seems as if I could reach out and touch it. It’s packed with every kind of freak you could imagine; those who are freakish in appearance and others who are just freakish by nature, in behavior, all congregating and in some form of congress, whatever that may be. It feels as if all the social misfits of the world have been drawn here. They don’t know why. They just know that this is their place. Where they won’t be judged or condemned or looked at strangely. Where they can indulge in whatever their particular peccadillo is.

Two large cages sit on either side of the bar, the kind you’d keep a hamster in but larger, much larger. One contains a naked girl, the other a guy. There’s a tray for food and a feeding bottle attached to the bars; both empty. A midget, wearing a top hat and nothing else, is standing on the bar throwing peanuts through the bars of the cage at the girl.

Opposite the bar there are several arched passageways that lead off into other areas of the club.

‘That’s where all the real action goes on,’ Anna tells me. ‘But once you leave this room it’s like a labyrinth. You can easily get lost and it feels like you’ll never find your way out.’

I look around and I tell myself that this is like every club scene you’ve ever seen in a movie. There’s loud, pounding music, it’s dark and populated by freaky-looking people who don’t look like regular people, who barely even look human. And the protagonist is frantically searching for something or somebody vital to their quest but clearly doesn’t belong there. Clearly doesn’t even want to be there.

And, at the same time, this is a club scene like you’ve never seen in a movie, like you will never see in any movie. Because club scenes in movies are made by people who have likely never set foot in a real club. They’ve just recreated one for their stupid movie so the hero can wander through it looking totally weirded-out by the strange freaks with no fashion sense whatsoever, who are dancing like loons to some of the worst club music you’ve ever heard in your life.

The people who make club scenes in movies have likely never set foot in this club, or any club like it. The Fuck Factory is a place where people are defined only by their kinks, their fetishes and their desires. Nothing else matters. Nobody cares whether you’re young or old, who you are or what you do in the real world, whether you’re a janitor or a CEO.



Anna says, ‘I want you to meet Kubrick,’ and she pulls me towards an older man leaning against the bar. Kubrick is the manager-proprietor of the Fuck Factory. Not Stanley, Larry – but everyone just calls him Kubrick. He is short, fat, Jewish, camp and bald. Because if life’s going to deal you one bum card, it’s probably going to deal you the whole deck. But Kubrick doesn’t seem to mind. He’s happy as Larry.

Kubrick has a friendly smile and a tactile manner, but he looks pretty harmless. He has a long snow-white beard, a curtain of downy white hair all over his body, down his arms and over his chest, covering his belly, which is the size and shape of a beach ball, and not flabby but hard and taut like muscle. He looks like Santa Claus. If Santa Claus had ditched the big red fur-trimmed coat for a black leather jerkin and had the word SADIST carved into his bare chest.