Back then in Montreal, the club kids would freeze in feathers and glitter and lilting boas and knots of hair on their heads. Gideon dabbled with their underground DJs and pretty girls sprinkled pixie dust on him. Those kids draped in pneumonia and stardust and fake blood, Icon nail polish and platform shoes teeter-tottering, blotting out the morning in the deep dark of the K-hole, “ware the k-hole!” they said, a corner of the club that’s the stickiest, darkest, drabbest, dreariest meeting of the walls, a bog where basslines come to frazzle out and die. That corner’s uninhabitable! They smoked and blew it into the strobe and glow-fan of laser lights, blew it into coloured clouds of dragon castle, and they kissed and fucked, as much kissing and fucking each other’s costumes as each other’s flesh. Morning threw down a ladder and none of them took it. By noon they’d wander homeward, homeless, to a futon or a hammock or a balled-up housecoat on the bathroom floor, right beside the kitty box and the splatter of manic panic hair dye, fuschia, and sleep a sleezy, fuzzy, dreamless sleep til mid-afternoon.