| The Heaven and Hell Party - Fear and Ducklings on Main Highway 1 |
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| the Official Truth: |
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We were out on the Canterbury Plains somewhere on the edge of Ashburton when the ducklings hit. We were innocently driving along, minding our own business and doing our best to get a box over the knob of one guy in the back seat, when the van in front of us came to a squealing halt and the driver leapt out, gesticulating for us to stop. Then he did the same for the car coming in the opposite direction. We were still wondering what on earth was going on when, out from in front of his van, there came a duck. And then there came - yes, one...two...three...four...five little ducklings, toddling along behind their mother with the tweeness and fluffiness canonical to the species. The guy in the van kept State Highway 1 firmly closed for the minute or so it took this proud mother to get her nauseatingly cute brood across the road, and kept us held up while the smallest duckling took the two or three attempts it needed to jump up over the kerb and follow his family into the neighbouring industrial estate. The least we could do thereafter was give him a round of applause. That is, we gave it to the guy in the van. I suppose the duckling deserved one as well.
It might be cogent to pause here for a moment and emphasise that this really happened.
Anyway, once the ecological balance - and syrup quotient - of northern Ashburton had been safely preserved, we were able to continue on our way.
"As your Dictator", the Dictator had said, "I'd advise you to put together a half-arsed costume for the Heaven And Hell Party and come up with us for Stacey's birthday and the spring picnic next weekend." I'm quoting from memory, of course, but that's the gist of it and anyway, since these people keep calling me a gonzo journalist for some reason, I thought I'd better start living up to the title. We had our costumes, one or two spares, two six-packs of Coke, a four-pack of V, three bags of those little chocolate things Cadbury's is marketing these days, a bag of brazil nuts, a bag of fruit-flavoured bullshit lollies, whatever Cameron had put in the gas dispenser he'd borrowed from Angus the previous Thursday, a bottle of mead, two bottles of water, the box Streak's vibrator came in, The Best Of Penthouse Forums Volume XII, assorted sleeping bags, spare undies, toothbrushes, hairbrushes and road trip what-have-you, and a laptop.
What we did not have, however, was a billet for me. Everybody else had managed to sort something out, but by the time we'd had to leave that morning the Dictator still hadn't heard back from any of the people she'd asked on my behalf. So in the end what we had to do was bowl up to the YMCA and throw ourselves on their mercy.
"Hi", said Cameron, "got a place where we can keep a stray for tonight?"
Simeon took one look at us, then pointed directly at me and said "What, him?" It was a tricky point. He and I had a duel outstanding from the Otago 48. As it happened, however, the YMCA crew were only too happy to take me in overnight. I spent a good hour or so chatting with John about the relative merits of different David Bowie albums.
Getting to Stacey's birthday was going to be more difficult. Christchurch is a strange city. It's too big for you to walk anywhere that's worth walking to and even if you could, you can't because the streets all look the same and meander aimlessly between each other, like the figures on a Snakes And Ladders board, so directions are essentially useless. People live in odd, precariously residential places and, apart from a couple of main trunk lines, there's no structure. There is, admittedly, a good bus service, but even the best bus service wasn't going to be that much help getting between two different, distant suburbs at 8pm on a Saturday evening. The only thing for it, I eventually decided, was to call a cab. Someone arrived in a car so large I figured he was compensating for something and pootled me over to the barbeque, a trip that took about fifteen minutes. At one stage we passed a sign saying "Riccarton Welcomes You!" This is a city where you have to be kept informed of what suburb you're in.
After a few mildly panicked minutes spent wondering exactly where number 28 was, I found my way down the drive and into the back door. I was cheerily greeted by a bunch of people and informed that, while the barbeque was more or less over, I'd got there in plenty of time for what I gathered was going to be the kind of desert that causes everyone to avoid bumping their stomachs against anything for the rest of the evening, lest they explode and make a mess on the carpet. While Stacey, who'd been cooking all day, busied herself with last-minute preparations in the kitchen, I re-united myself with the visiting Dunedin contingent. The Dictator was as she always is when among old mates, Streak was enjoying herself, and Daniel hadn't arrived yet. The most amused was Cameron, who'd found himself a companion for the evening. He was regaling her with a rendition of the Mr Creasote sketch from Monty Python And The Meaning Of Life.
"So what he does", said Cameron, "is eats, just eats like a fucking pig for ages and ages, and finally, eventually, he finishes everything, and the waiter comes up and says `and finally, monsieur, a waafer thin mint.'"
"Wafer thin?", she asked.
"No", said Cameron, "he's French, so he has to do that accent - waafer thin."
"Wafer thin?", she asked again.
"No", said Cameron, "it's his really particular French accent - waafer thin."
"WA-fer thin?"
"No, not like that, like - waafer thin."
"Ofer thin?"
"No, waafer thin - bend it, waafer."
"O-wafer?"
And so on. She eventually got it and, for the rest of the evening, whenever either of them had the slightest excuse to do it, there would come this great cry, a kind of reflexive, verbal orgasm - "WAAFER THIN!" She thought it was great. I suppose it was. Certainly, it was an appropriate response to the dessert, as Stacey loaded the table with a great big torte, a huge plate of chocolate eclairs and an enormous cheesecake so rich it's a wonder it didn't announce its intention to run for governor of California, mount an America's Cup challenge, marry for the cameras, or undertake one of the other hobbies of the unwisely wealthy. I got through my piece, but I assure you that any attempt to feed me a waafer thin mint thereafter would have probably have produced exactly the same results in me as they do in Mr Creasote. This would have harmed my relationship with my mother who, when I watched it with her a couple of years ago, covered her face during the sketch and wailed "It was gross thirty years ago and it's still gross now!" She never was good with flying entrails.
Not that the unfortunate Mr Creasote was the only source of amusement at the party. At one point I stepped backwards and caused the birthday girl to look up from her conversation and say;
"Are you drunk, or do you always stagger like that?"
I suppose someone had to ask the question eventually. And the best answer would have been "A little from column A, a little from column B", but I'm not that witty. I just told her the truth, which prevents inconvenient explanations later on but is nowhere near as funny as...well, as the question itself. Everyone from Dunedin just about wet themselves.
Then Daniel and I went and got our costumes sorted out for the party. Everyone at the party figured I'd come as an Old Testament prophet - robe, hair, stick and all that. Actually, I'd come as Aqualung, the title character in a song by Jethro Tull, a disgusting, lecherous old vagrant whose plight is used as an excuse to muse obliquely on the nature of humanity's relationship with God. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. Certainly, if you'll indulge me by pretending you already heard that explanation, it gives me an excellent lead paragraph for this next section of the write-up.
I hadn't actually planned on writing anything about this trip, thinking of it more as a blow-out before exams than a press junket. But as I sat and ruminated on the opening lines of the song...
"Sitting on a park bench
Eyeing little girls with bad intent"
...Heather walked in, and I thought "They don't get a lot littler than that", so I hauled out my notebook and started doing my job.
It wasn't, it must be said, much of a success as a costume party. A lot of people made only cursory attempts at dressing up and a lot of others were wearing only slight variations on what they normally wore to KAOS gigs. Heaven was, consequently, conspicuously under-represented among the costumes. Not that this was particularly surprising. It's often said that the devil has the best tunes, but this isn't actually true. Lennon and McCartney have the best tunes, closely followed by David Bowie, Ian Anderson, Kurt Cobain and Richard Thompson. However, as we showed that evening, the devil does have the most impressive tights. In addition to my homeless paedophile, there were a couple of angels, several demons, one or two lawyers, a horny little devil, Daniel - unaligned but certainly eschatological - a fellow whose makeup only became apparent when he stepped, eerily, out of the red light at the end of the evening and the usual assortment of rubber pants, fishnets, fuck-me boots and women yanking their blouses off on the dance-floor.
As always, the dance-floor was a fertile source of material. It was there, for example, that I heard Hamish telling a story about a fellow he knew who'd put together an `incesticide' mix tape.
"Insecticide?", I asked.
"No", replied Hamish, "incesticide."
"What does that mean?", someone else asked. I was about to offer my thoughts on the Nirvana compilation Incesticide when Hamish gave a big grin and answered;
"No fucking Sisters!"
This wasn't the only time that evening when people offered comment on the KAOS play-list. I was sitting on the couch beside the dance-floor when Nine Inch Nails' "Closer" came on.
"Urrrgh", said the woman beside me, "I've always hated this song."
"Really?", I asked.
"Yeah", she said, "it's so graphic and dodgy."
A fair point, actually, though I still think it's amusing. Consider the opening verse:
"You let me violate you
You let me desecrate you
You let me penetrate you
You let me complicate you"
I think that last line is hilarious, not to say perceptive. Frankly, I think it indicates that the inestimable Mr Reznor has a greater appreciation of the additional trickiness a relationship gains when sex comes into the picture than he's been given credit for. Whether or not he really articulates how a relationship changes when one partner announces to the other that "I want to fuck you like an animal" is not, unfortunately, something I'm qualified to comment on.
And I might, in fact, have missed an opportunity to find out. As I was knocking around the kitchen, one of the people I arrived with came up and announced she and her significant other were clearing off.
"Gosh", I said, "that was quick." We'd only been here for about an hour.
"I'm easy", she explained with a shrug. We saw neither of these people for the next sixteen hours.
I went out to the front lawn where a small group of people were having - or so my notes tell me - a Kick A Hippie competition. This was, I thought, a wonderful idea, and I would cheerfully have joined in, though it must be said that the event was somewhat spoiled by the noticeable lack of any hippies to kick. This was, I suppose, because this was a KAOS party, and while KAOS people are given to dressing and acting in a silly ways, they show a commendable reticence to think in such a manner as well. Even so, people who don't know me very well have occasionally mistaken me for a hippie (the hair, I suppose), and I beat a hasty retreat back inside. As I clipped a corner of the kitchen I heard a jubilant shout from the couch down the other end - "WAAFER THIN!"
In what I think was the laundry and had the first conversation of more than two sentences I'd actually managed with Tony. Then I headed out into the hall, where I was about to strike up some witty repartee with the crowd in there when there came a frightful crash, then a series of loud, escalating thumps. Then something barrelled past us, did an impressively quick circuit of the vestibule, shot past us again and crashed its way back into the lounge, narrowly avoiding smacking its head on the top of the doorframe.
"Yikes", I said, "What was that?"
"I think", said someone whose name I wish I'd caught because this quote really deserves attribution, "I think Rebecca should go and take out some Simeon insurance." Natch.
The hall was clearly not a safe place to be, not with rampaging party animals on the loose. So I ducked into one of the bedrooms, which I ascertained within a second or two belonged to a girl (nine pairs of shoes), a fastidious girl (bed impeccably made), and a fastidious girl who paradoxically didn't mind opening her room to the party (full of warty old-school KAOS types). I flopped down on one of the chairs and joined - or hijacked, it's always difficult to tell with me - the conversation. At parties, as I've said in previous write-ups, one should only discuss three things - icky-sounding sex acts, religion and particle physics. This is simple good manners. Talking about icky sex acts is allowed at parties because everyone's done one, heard about one they find amusing, or come up with one they want to try out on one of the other party-goers, and besides, everyone enjoys making other people wrinkle their noses. Religion is okay because pretty generally someone will tell a story about a guy they used to know who scared away Jehovah's Witnesses by saying he was a Satanist; everybody used to know (or, scarcely less frequently, be) that guy, so everyone immediately has something to talk about. And particle physics is allowed because I once talked to an inebriated physics third-year who managed to make it interesting. Other conversation, if indeed there must be any, must be kept as light as possible, restricted to topics of an airy and insubstantial nature, subjects no reasonable thinking person can possibly be offended by, take seriously, have any real opinions on, or regard with anything more than vague, detached amusement. Which is why we ended up chatting about student politics.
And so most of the rest of the evening passed. I had to duck out of the room to do my "Bohemian Rhapsody" thing on the dance-floor, but other than that we just sat around cheerfully badmouthing the prefects of or respective tertiary institutions, stopping briefly at about 2am to turn our watches forward and cheer on daylight saving. Then people began drifting away, and by four I think Rebecca and her flatmates were starting the subtle, polite piss-off routine that the hosts of parties justifiably begin at about that hour. A bunch of us piled into a cab and headed back to the YMCA. With us was a young lady I think I'd caught a glimpse of at the party, and given the guy she was sticking close to I thought for a moment that Jeremy-James had finally managed to chat someone up, but then we took a detour on the trip to drop her back at her flat. Some things are too far-fetched even for journalism.
Before we leave the evening's festivities and I have to think up a way of introducing the picnic, I would like to point out that the last item in the notes I took at the party reads "Schmoo abducted by aliens". This note was presumably taken at some ungodly hour of the morning, and I have no memory whatsoever of what it means, but if someone could TXT Schmoo and make sure he's still in the solar system I'd be very much obliged.
I spent most of the morning sitting in my sleeping bag flicking through the various Vampire: The Masquerade editions on the lounge table. I find Vampire amusing, partly because it so perfectly captures the kind of lithe-demeanoured, pretentious attitude the undead would presumably have in real life, but primarily because of the designers' hilarious conceit that the game doesn't include character classes. It's been in print in one form or another since I was 14 and I'm still waiting for a decent explanation of the difference between Vampire Gangrel and AD&D rangers. Perhaps it's just me. Or perhaps the difference is waafer thin.
I eventually hauled myself out of my fart-sack and stuffed as much of my gear as I could into my various bags. Then I skedaddled down to the bus stop, arriving at about the same time as the bus to Hagley Park - the second-largest municipal park in the world after the Japanese Imperial Gardens, or so I learned.
"People think it must be Central Park in New York", said Simeon with largely justified pride, "but they're wrong."
The two of us got to the picnic venue on time, though a lot of other people didn't. For about fifteen minutes we were the only ones there. Two or three of the YMCA crew never made it at all, and there were a couple of other noticeable absentees. We thought this to be an unsporting and needless display of apathy and whimpiness on their parts until it occurred to us that, because of daylight savings, a lot of them had been shaking their booties in a concerted manner only six hours previously. After that our opinion of the quitters rose considerably.
The slow start actually ended up being something of an advantage, as for a long and worrying while it looked like the weather might give out on us. When Cameron and Theuns finally put in their delightfully spiffy appearance, however, things were beginning to brighten up. The next person to arrive was someone I'd known from a couple of years ago in Dunedin, Chim-Chim. Those present at the picnic will remember him by his beady little eyes, fur, pronounced muzzle and long, prehensile tail. He is in fact an alumnus of Otago University, having almost completed a degree in applied bananas (with minors in Ebola-incubating and animal-rights-activist-mauling) before chucking it in for a career as a male model, though he's recently given that up as well. When not doing his job stocktaking and minding the till in a martial arts supply shop in town, Chim-Chim enjoys giving hand-jobs to fellow lower primates and rubbing himself against the legs of female humans. He is interested in Burkina-Fasoan foreign policy and collects internet porn. Chim-Chim is tangentially associated with KAOS Christchurch and it was nice to see him again after several months of doing nothing more than exchanging e-mails making fun of The Matrix. Since we'd all left the house in a hurry that morning, he and I and Simeon went off to find something to eat.
This meant a trip into the Christchurch Arts Centre, a curious compound I've visited a couple of times before. Somebody, not me, gleefully pointed out the curious plenitude of Japanese schoolgirls in miniskirted uniforms. When we got to the food court, I made a bee-line for the slouvaki wagon, while the Bros. Lodge went off to find something gluten-free. When we got back to the picnic site, there was a sizeable assemblage of swishly-clad people lounging on the banks of the Avon, chatting and snacking and sunning themselves as best they could given the air temperature. One fellow was - honestly - trying to play `The Beautiful People' on an acoustic guitar, which I took as the KAOS equivalent of a campfire singalong. I sat drinking Coke and watching Chim-Chim use monkey sign language to communicate the celebrated awfulness of the clientele at his workplace. It was all most convivial, and made more so about fifteen minutes later when there was a quiet sloshing sound and a punt pulled up on the bank, bearing its passenger manifest of two Alfs, one Alf's moll, the Dictator, and their picnic basket. How classy is that?
But there were ominous rumblings on the horizon. Well, ominous bleepings anyway. Text-messages informed us that the road into Dunedin had been closed by snow the previous night, and while it was open now, catching it so this evening was going to involve some urgency, not to say a bit of luck. Any window of opportunity we had was going to be - sorry about this one - waafer thin. Several contingency plans were mooted, ranging from crashing at Becca's mother's house in Timaru to taking a several-hour detour through central Otago and entering Dunedin from the south. In the end we decided that the best thing to do would be to make a dash for it. While this ended up working, I confess a modest degree of disappointment, as the other ideas would have made a much better story.
Fortunately one of our number had a pretty good story of her own. "The reason I didn't make it to the picnic", she said, "was that [CENSORED] and I were rolling around in bed this morning - as you do - and we stopped so that we could change position. And he said `hey, you're bleeding - hang on, that's me!' Somehow he'd snapped the membrane holding his foreskin on, and there was blood everywhere, and..."
...and the rest of the story probably belongs in the Not So Funny When It Happened file. In any case, it's well on the way to becoming an urban legend - I've already heard it come back through the Otago University talk mill once - and the five of us now have some kick-arse material for the next time we want to discuss icky sex at a party. I made a total ass of myself laughing at it and didn't stop until the Dictator slammed my fingers in the car door after a pee break in Oamaru.
We rolled down through Waitati and Wakouaiti in the kind of tired end-of-the-trip haze where nobody bothers to change the tape after it finishes, leaving you idly wondering whether you've heard `Sympathy For The Devil' once already since Timaru or what. And after successfully dropping Daniel and Cameron home, Streak got herself, the Dictator and I lost somewhere in the town belt, taking us on a curious and unscheduled little tiki tour of some of its more southerly environs. Actually, I rather enjoyed this, as I'd done a big walking tour of the belt a couple of years ago, and revisiting it again at night was about as perfect a way of finishing the weekend as I could imagine.
But the story ends on a somewhat unpromising note. When I finally got back to my flat, I flipped on the TV and discovered that New Zealand television viewers rated The Prodigy's `Smack My Bitch Up' as the eighteenth greatest film clip of all time, so perhaps it wasn't an entirely perfect weekend after all.