parties anymore. Gil hadn’t been too encouraging: “He probably won’t talk to you.
He’s very mysterious.” He told me where Laurent could be found every day: in the
last chai shop on little Vagator beach, playing backgammon.
I was not and never will be cool enough to ride an Enfield bike,^8 so I puttered my
lame moped towards the cliffs north of Anjuna. Clamoring down bluffs packed with
coconut trees and tall, pale teepees, I bumped into a Belgian I had met on New
Year’s Eve. He lived in one of the teepees and loved it. I told him how ironic it was
that the temporary shelters of the nomads mistakenly called “Indians” by Europeans
were now housing European nomads in India. This confused him.
The last chai shop on the beach was a grimy hut filled with folks as weather-
beaten as the long wooden tables they hunched over. Some played backgammon,
others sipped orange juice and chai, and everyone smoked. A sour-faced Indian girl
serving up a bowl of porridge and honey pointed to Laurent: a scrawny guy in a
Japanese print T-shirt, tossing a pair of dice. The man was gaunt and blood-shot,
and his teeth were in bad shape. He looked like a hungry ghost.
Laurent gave a caustic laugh when I asked to interview him. But I took his lack of
an obvious refusal for a go-ahead. He kept slapping the tiles with his partner Lenny,
a balding, washed-out middle-aged Brit. “Art does not pay so I am forced to
gamble,” Laurent explained in a throaty Parisian accent thickened with sarcasm. He
fiddled with my Sony mini-tape recorder, clearly bent on soaking this little episode
for all the humor it was worth.
“The spy in the chai shop,” mused Lenny as he drew heavily on a cigarette.
Laurent cracked up, his laugh degenerating into an asthmatic coughing fit.
“You know, it used to be very bad here for spies,” Laurent said, with mocking
concern.
Despite his sarcasm and creepy laughs, I took a liking to Laurent. He also
proclaimed Goa’s fundamental contribution to rave culture—“This is the source of
the source”—but he was low-key about it all. No mysticism, no nostalgia. “I am a
simple person,” he said. He gave his friend Fred the credit for first mixing electronic
tapes at the parties, but said it was too experimental for the crowds. “Nobody liked
it. Then I played and made it so people liked it. And now people like it all over the
world.” Laurent then let slip that he had some of his early party tapes, and I pressed
to hear them. “Ah, this would be very very expensive,” he mocked. “We must draw
up a contract.”
Laurent told me he played the Residents, Cabaret Voltaire, Front 242—but only
after cutting out the vocals, which irritated him. I kept pressing him about his style.
He paused, and looked me in the eye. “Here you make parties for very heavy
tripping people who have been traveling everywhere. You have to take drugs to
understand the scene here, what people are thinking.”
Laurent’s comment raises a vital point: how we address the spirituality of
psytrance turns significantly on how we assess the spirituality of psychedelic use, not
in some half-imagined Neolithic or shamanic context, but inside Western
subculture.^9 This is not the place to hash out this question, but it is important to note
that the distrust of psychedelic spirituality partly turns on the technological
264 GOLDEN GOA’S TRANCE TRANSMISSION