A Memoir
by Ryan Knighton
EXCERPT
YOU MIGHT THINK an appetite for something called a nightclub would be a bad idea for someone called night blind. You would be right. Equally wise would be me joining a gun club. Nevertheless, to this day I owe a debt to punk rock. Its culture helped me become as blind as I was, but couldn't admit to being.
My apprenticeship into the club scene had numerous dangers and disadvantages, although most were silly. In my time I have argued with empty bar stools, talked to pillars, knocked down waitresses, bounced off bouncers, pissed between urinals, drunk other people's beers, and hit on shadows. Even though I routinely tumbled down stairs and plummeted off stages, never, not once, did it convince me to perhaps take up a white cane. Bullshit, I thought. I'm not that night blind. I'm just drunk.
When the colored strobes and spotlights did their job, pulsing and spinning with the music, then I was more or less able to see enough. Stepping off the dance floor into the murky bar, that was a bit of a problem. Slow songs, too. They always dropped the lights for slow songs, which left me paralysed wherever I happened to be. For a moment, anyway. Then like a jerky Sex Pistol I'd careen off the dance floor, knocking people over instead of politely scooting around them. I was a poser, not nearly close to hardcore, but blindness lent an authenticity to my recklessness. I ignored every social propriety our eyes manage.
That was the best thing about the scene. The culture camouflaged my inability to cooperate with other bodies. In growing blindness I became, oddly enough, safer and more like the postpunk scenesters around me than I was like my peers at school. Booze helped. Everybody was bent, legless, gassed, rat-arsed, and every other word for blind drunk. Bumping into people was acceptable, even expected, and I was practiced at bashing into folks on a regular basis, whether I was in my cups or just spilling them. Confusion and disorientation ruled the clubs, too, and that pretty much described my sober state. Above all, though, I blended with ease and advantage on the dance floor. I loved to slam. What blind person doesn't?