| The Great Perversion Party Road Trip of '03 |
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| the Official Truth: |
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It was in Ashburton that it happened. We'd been on the road since about 10:30, though in fact the outing was already ninety minutes old before the ten of us had piled into the van and headed north. I figure that when you get five people aged 34 to 22 together in a living room engaged in an avid discussion over the relative merits of various Danger Mouse episodes while the four-year-old loses interest and goes off to get dressed and do something useful with her morning, you're witnessing either a KAOS function or a NORML meeting. Since nobody had lit up or eaten any cookies while I was watching, I had to conclude that the Dunedin KAOS road trip up to the Christchurch KAOS perversion party started then.
The van was a wriggly, rented affair large enough to accomodate The Dictator, the Minister Of Propaganda, seven untitled members and someone who had been introduced to me as a member of Jarrod's fan club in some semblance of comfort. It had been organised and magnanimously financed by our sainted Multi- Purpose Adjustable Wench, who consequently got dibs on calling shotgun over bagising the front seat. In retrospect, however, I suspect she regretted this as she kept having to twist in her seat to join in conversations. And - as always - these conversations were interesting. They started, naturally enough, with a discussion of the first appearance of a strap-on dildo on BBC TV and kind of went from there, encompassing nun jokes, condom jokes, cybernetic contraceptive implant jokes, discussion over whether we were going to pick up hitchikers (yes), how we would decide which ones to pick up (rate them out of ten) and what rating they would be required to achieve before we picked them up (DD). I mentioned that Orlando "Legolas in the movie version" Bloom was going to be in a pirate movie, to which the Wench responded by saying he could buckle her swash any day of the week, a line I plan to steal and use for my own purposes as soon as the opportunity presents itself. Someone got bonked on the head with an empty drink bottle, which prompted the Dictator to institute a rule against bonking in the van. Then, for a bit of light relief after all this heady and serious discourse, various people traded anecdotes about mates of their's who'd killed themselves.
But as I said, it didn't happen until we were in Ashburton. It didn't even happen when we stopped for lunch in Timaru, where Daniel, Thomas and I got separated from the others. Quickly, we reached the only reasonable conclusion - the others had all been abducted by a Satanic cult and sacrificed in some foul and blashemous ceremony. Since they actually turned out to have gone to the Lagonda Tea Rooms while we were using the public conveniance, this turned out to be an only slightly eroneous hypothesis. The three of us went to the Peter Pan bakery next door, and if I may say so, the pies there are good. While we were eating Daniel pointed out a poster in the window which read "Be a responsible owner - have your pet NEUTERED". The three of us made a pact never to mention this poster to the Dictator's Floozy1.
It still hadn't happened by the time everyone had been reunited and those who still needed it had been toileted. But all the way between Timaru and Ashburton, I waited patiently, thinking to myself that sooner or later it had to happen. There was, surely, no way we could go the whole weekend without it happening. And as we entered Ashburton, my patience was finally rewarded.
"There's an ice-cream shop we should find if we're going to stop here", she said. Yes, it had finally happened. Yvette had spoken without being spoken to.
We got to Christchurch without further incident and spent an inordinate amount of time fluffing around. First we went to the flat where the party was to be held and made ourselves known. Then we went to the White Palace, where we dropped off our stuff. Then we went to a supermarket and spent money on food for the barbeque. Then we went back to the flat where the party was being held and ate said food. Some libations were poured. Then we went back to the White Palace and got our costumes sorted out.
The Dunedin contingent quickly decided which was the little girl's room and which was the little boy's room. The girls went off to their room and started getting changed and the boys jockeyed for elbow room around the keyhole. I'm joking, of course. We'd already rigged up hidden cameras and were watching everything on the close-curcuit TV system in the other room.
"[CENSORED]!", yelled Jo at one point, "can you come and help me with these suspenders?!". The Wench gave a little whoop and went off to oblige. She'd already changed into her wenching outfit and had LICK ME painted into her cleavage in chocolate, though she decided against this and washed it off, considerately leaving a little brown smudge on the hem of her blouse for those so inclined to spend the evening taking peeks at. Daniel put on his make-up, then helped Thomas put on his. Laura, who'd been getting into her costume continuously since 4pm and still wasn't finished, calmly continued getting ready, oblivious to everything else. Jarrod, we decided, was a big girl's blouse for refusing to wear the dress the Wench had bought along for him. I tried it on briefly and, with the exception of my lack of certain constituent parts, it didn't look all that bad.
I'd already got changed, actually, as my costume only required me to shed my trousers. In a white shirt, blue campaign rosette and black tights, I gave what I thought was a credible impression of a British Conservative MP. Even so, I wasn't entiely comfortable. There wasn't much room in the costume to hide a notebook or dictaphone, let alone an erection. I also thought I looked a little silly. In the end, however, I needn't have worried. With all four limbs more or less covered, nothing on that I could see my face in and less than three inches of cleavage showing, I was one of the most casually-dressed people there.
We were among the first to arrive. The flat was still only half-converted into a seedy den of vice when we turned up. Tables and armchairs were being manhandled out of the way and disco balls hung in lounges. Maybe twenty people milled around, some of them more self-conscious about their costumes than others. As eight o'clock dribbled away towards nine, however, the crowd began to thicken. Those in charge of organising the party had apparently invited everyone who had ever stood downwind of a KAOS badge, and every one of those people had come and bought along their significant other, flatmate, flatmate's cousin and their dog. By ten there must have been a hundred people there, shivering slightly on the lawn or pressed costume-to-costume on the makeshift dance floor or crashed out in the shed where these guys kept their astonishingly comprehensive collection of roleplaying gear. People just materialised. Apart from the arrival of the Christchurch Alfs (sturdy chaps), I only once saw a group actually walk in - to whit, The Village People, who favoured us with a brief but enthusiastic performance. But strictly between the two of us, I don't think they were the real Village People. I mean, they were getting far too much attention from the women. One of them curled up on the couch with one young lady and held a single snog for the duration of two entire Nine Inch Nails songs. Then I saw Great Cthulhu eating someone's sporran. At least I hope he was eating his sporran. The thought of what else Great Cthulhu might be doing at that level is too horrible to contemplate, especially after all the effort the women at the party went to finding out what was under Al's kilt.
Later on a youthful individual of indeterminate gender stopped in the middle of a particularly enthusiastic slam-dance and gazed at me.
"You have really great hair", (s)he said. I glanced down and noticed that, yes, because of my costume my leg hair was indeed visible and, in its own way, quite impressive. I was going to return the complement, but my complementor had gone back to dancing. I went and sat on the porch for a while. While I was there a young maenid was apparently flung through the doorway and landed in a not entirely dignified pose on the ground in front of me. She looked up at me.
"I'm drunk", she sulked. "It's not my fault I'm drunk". I gave the matter some consideration and concluded that, yes, entheos had well and truly taken place. Unfortunately there is nothing more I can say about this without getting executed, so please insert your own Naomi-got-tanked joke in the space provided:
It wasn't long after that, when I was sitting on the couch wishing I hadn't stayed up so late the previous night (something that made the Wench get briefly clucky over me; I assure you I was fine), that a young fellow came and bobbed down beside me.
"This your first KAOS bash?", he asked. I replied in the negative. "It's my first", he continued. I asked him what he thought of it. "It's great", he replied. "You get to see a lot of hot chicks in a lot of hot stuff".
And he was, in a general sense, right. There were a number of fairly impressive costumes around. For example, several women were wearing corsets. There are a number of interesting questions about corsets, such as - ouch - why anybody would get into one voluntarily. Also - yikes - how you get out again afterwards. And - jeepers - where the rest of you goes in the interim.
"It all gets squished", explained one woman. In addition to those ladies attempting to treat their midsections like play-dough, there was also several schoolgirls, a smattering of French maids, a woman wearing hipsters and a lot of Gladwrap, a woman in jodphurs, a riding helmet and progressively less else over the course of the evening, a woman who dumped her schoolgirl costume halfway through the evening in favour of a dress that showed a bit more front ("if you've got it, flaunt it", she said - so she did), the bondage nun, a woman dressed as (apparently) the world's largest liquorice allsort, a member of the British aristocracy ("we don't need perversions - we are a perversion!"), Medusa and a woman who'd rigged up a flashing light down her cleavage, which I confess to have initially mistaken for a fluttering insect that had flown in and gotten stuck down there. There was also a woman in a pixie skirt constructed from handkerchiefs printed with diagrams from the best-selling 1970s how-to manual The Joy Of Sex, and whose party piece was spinning around on the spot and letting someone pick one off; by midnight only the really silly positions where you'd drop her on her head were left. This was dubbed "[CENSORED]'s Wheel O' Sexual Depravity".
Of course, it wasn't just the ladies who were dressed to impress. Several men were wearing rather more women's clothes than I was. One fellow was wearing rather less women's clothing than I was, though I'd wager he didn't look much sillier. One member of KAOS Otago confesses to have initially mistaken the legs of one of the cross-dressers for those of an actual woman, but he spoiled my fun by asking me not to use his name. There was me, of course, in my knickers, a bloke who'd dismembered an enormous number of soft toys and sewn and weilded them together into something that can really only be called a teddy and someone who maintained that a Wiggles tee-shirt counted as a perversion costume because he knew all the words to all their songs. Another fellow tried to pass off a Hanson tee-shirt as a perversion costume, though I'd take issue with this on the basis that unlike The Village People, Hanson wrote their own songs, played their own instruments, didn't dance and functioned, however briefly, as a genuine and not entirely awful band. But I didn't think it would be polite to point this out at the time.
I also got a chance to meet Raoul Duke. This was something of a thrill for me, as it would be for any writer who bumps into the originator of his entire literary genre at a party. Raoul and I talked for a while. We got on like a Vegas casino on fire and shot a bunch of bats and manta rays together. He even shared his stash with me. But as the conversation wore on I realised it might not have been the real Raoul Duke. Where was his convertable? Where was his Samoan attorney2? Where, most importantly of all, was the trail of narcotics detectives, bomb-sniffer dogs, traumatised hitchikers, brutalised bell-boys, debauched croupiers, irritated Democratic presidents and demolished suburbs of metropolitan Las Vegas that Mr Duke inevitably leaves in his wake? I walked away from the conversation wholly disillusioned. I think I'll give up gonzo journalism and go and write picareque novels instead. Only joking.
And here, of course, I must pause to give the Tailgunner Joe award for Best Costume. This has to go to the fellow done up as the 5th form geography teacher. He looked the very picture of my loathesome School Cert Geography teacher, Mr [CENSORED], though I suspect the fellow at the party was better off because it was common knowledge that Mr [CENSORED] spent so much energy combing his hair in the morning that there wasn't any lead in his pencil.
There's one question people will no doubt want answered before we leave the happy topic of perversion costumes - were they perverse? And my answer to that question is simple - what on earth are you asking me for? I have no experience in this field of human endeavour. I've never been tied up, tied down, had a threesome, consumed any food or worn anything of hers during the act, been walked in on, effected coitus with more than one part of my anatomy upright or engaged in any form of sexual roleplaying more explicit than briefly running a Toreador character in a game of Vampire: The Masquerade. My sex life to date has been devoid of fellatio, cunnilingus or or anything we had to clean up afterwards. I once wore a codpiece, but not for the purposes of titillation. I still regularly score in the 90s on internet purity tests, for christsakes. I'm the last person who should be commenting on matters like this. At best, this was a pretty good costume party. At worst, it was a harmlessly silly jaunt. Either way, I was put in mind of what might happen if Larry Flint, Neil Gaiman, Hieronymous Bosch and Dr Seuss had ever gotten together and collaborated on a book. And if that isn't a complement, I don't know what is.
There's also the fact that I left early. A lot of interesting stuff apparently happened while I was asleep at the White Palace. The Dictator's Lackey did something (she won't tell me what) with someone (she won't tell me who) that must have been fun because she spent the next week bouncing off the walls about it. Someone did something that got them forever nicknamed Lawnboy3. Laura slow-danced with an Alf again and got it on with none/one/two/three/five/two at once/ every single one of the men at the party (delete where not amusing). Someone apparently managed to find a dustpan and brush, scoop the wreckage of Naomi's brain back into her head and carry the poor girl home. Knickers were apparently thrown around and some kind of conga line took place. It's absolutely typical for these people to save all the really silly stuff until after I left.
As one of the first in bed, I was the first who was up and about on Sunday. Not that I felt all that good; between the floor, the inflatable pillow and the fact that Thomas snores like a cartoon character I'd slept only fitfully. Still, I decided to make good-morning cups of tea for everybody, but on searching the kitchen I found no tea. I did, however, find a jar of gherkins, so I went around offering people a good-morning gherkin.
"No thanks", said Laura.
"Piss off", said the Wench.
"Nggguhhh", said Naomi.
I also tried to eavesdrop at the door to Daniel and Jo's room, but they wouldn't speak loudly enough, even when I knocked on the door and asked nicely.
It will come as no surprise and probably result in no blame if I relate that it took an awfully long time to get everybody up, dressed and toiletted. Then we went to the supermarket to find breakfast. This was terrible because it required us to proceed through suburban Christchurch on foot. Those of us born in Dunedin find this a problem because we have nothing to navigate with. Usually, you see, we have The Hill looming over us and providing a fixed point of reference; stand with The Hill to your left and you're facing north. But in Christchurch there's no such guide. The streets wander aimlessly, telescoping out behind labyrinthine blind corners and never seeming to really go anywhere, and you very quickly lose all sense of direction. I suspect the city fathers of Christchurch did this deliberately just to piss us off. In any case, the only reason Jo, Daniel and I got out alive was because we followed a will'o-the-wisp, a sentient shade of the colour purple, that floated ethereally in the air a hundred or so metres in front of us and eventually guided us to the party venue, where a bunch of us sat on the porch and watched Jo help them clean up. Naomi committed a terrible atrocity by pouring several hundred millilitres of perfectly good ginger beer out on the lawn. I asked for a quote from one of the flat's inhabitants.
"Boy", he said, scratching the back of his neck in that way you can only do if you've just got up after a rough night, "Did we throw a party or what?"
Then we slogged our way back to the White Palace and got our shit together for the one-hour killing round at the university. For me, this meant making a press pass. For eveybody else it meant trying to find a functioning water pistol in the great trunk of weaponry Simeon dumped in our hallway. It took a while, but eventually they managed. We all piled back into the van and hurried off to campus. As we were getting out I noticed one of our lot was packing a weapon of mass destruction. Well, okay, not a real WMD, but something that might very well have had the same effect if she'd used it, at least in cosmetic terms. I wasn't looking for this, you understand, but there are some things that just leap out at you and sear themselves forever into your impression of events. And surely, one of those things must be MOAP - the Mother Of All Pantylines.
I became an embedded journalist, tagging along with one of the groups in the round. Unfortunately this gig proved to be a bit of a fizzer, as the group was ambushed after about three seconds and destroyed. A young lady who'd been noticeably popular the previous evening was the first to go down.
"How does it feel to be the first man down?", I asked her.
"The misery! The agony! The humiliation!" she gasped with her last breaths.
When the formation into which I had been embedded had been wiped out to the last man - despite their deplorable attempts to use the press as human shields - I went and found another one. Unfortunately, I chose Simeon's. Over the next ten minutes I got to see more of the Canterbury campus than I did in in the month I spent here during summer school, albeit while tripping over and gasping and wheezing and tripping over again and suffering minor coronaries and wishing the guy would stop running for a moment.
Eventually he confronted some dastardly individual in a cloister on the far side of campus. The two of them advanced on each other very slowly. Somewhere in the distance the theme to The Good The Bad And The Ugly was playing. I made sure my press pass was clearly visible and walked ahead of Simeon, towards the other fellow, hoping to get some pithy and revealling quote such as "LUKE, I AM YOUR FATHER" or something.
"I don't trust the press", he said. Then he raised his gun and walked autofire across my press pass, the wanker4. I staggered around dramatically for a while and then lay on the ground. In the confusion the guy escaped and Simeon was off again. I lost him for a while and, while I was looking for him, came across some guys hearding a crowd of recalcitrant zombies back towards the library. One of the zombies stepped out of line and asked if I would interview her.
"Okay", I said. "How does it feel to be a zombie?"
"It's a highly skilled position", she replied. I asked her to elaborate and she rolled her eyes dramatically. "What", she continued, "you think it's easy keeping your wrists this limp for years on end?" I was going to ask what sort of effects zombification had on one's sex life, but one of her overseers yanked her back into the mob as they continued their anguished shamble back to eternal servitude in the library. I watched them go and, as I was doing so, saw a figure standing imperiously on a hillock across the way. Yes! I could rejoin my unit again. Of course, all this actually meant was that I got the opportunity to suffer several more heart attacks trying to keep up with Simeon as he spent an enormous amount of time stalking people around the University Book Shop.
Finally, an end to the carnage was called and, after a gentlemanly duel, the glorius Dunedin representative, Agent JK, was declared the winner. Then the groups scattered to their various modes of transportation and decamped. Most of them regrouped in the food court of one of the malls that form the exoskeleton to the soft, shapeless interior of the lobster that is Christchurch. They lunched loudly and at length, commandeering a huge table and spilling over onto several others and alarming the other patrons with their appalling table manners, glowering demeanour and indescribable body odour. And that was just me. You should have seen the actual combatants.
Then it came time for the Dunedinites to make a move. There were many tearful goodbyes, not least that of the Dictator to Al, possibly because she'd received the last ear job she was going to get for a while. But the farewells were mollified by one great and marvellous breakthrough - for the first time that weekend, Thomas got everybody's name right.
The One Hour Round
Some people may be interested to know what Agent JK got as a prize for winning the killing round. Well, he got to drive the rest of us home.
It was a altogether less boisterous crowd in the van on the way south, which is understandable. Some of them had only had a couple of hours sleep the previous night, while others had tried to keep up with Simeon in the killing round. Laura spent most of the trip curled up on the floor, asleep. We didn't stop in Ashburton. We didn't stop in Oamaru. We did stop in Timaru, but only to powder our noses and release the caterpillar I had apparently snared in my hair during the killing round back into the wild. It was only thereafter that anybody except me really started talking.
Not far from Blueskin Bay we took a detour to the KAOS mansion we have hidden in the woods out there and performed various initiation rituals upon Thomas, such as the Chocolate Mousse Atrocity Ritual, the Raid The Dictator's Floozy's Pet's Toybox Ritual and the Dip Him In Honey And Throw Him To The Grizzlies Ritual. If anybody saw him walking in a strange and unusual fashion the following week, that was why. He passed them all, sturdy chap.
They dropped me off first, at my parent's house, a repulsive and gargantuan edifice that looks like a public convenience outside and an office creche inside but which does have the not inconsiderable virtue of containing a SKY decoder. I thought it was about time someone had a chance to get a word in edgeways. And it hadn't been such a bad trip, all things considered. I hadn't disgraced myself at the party. I'd acquitted myself fairly well at the killing round. Nobody said anything horrible about my costume that I couldn't talk myself into believing was a joke. I didn't get spanked or executed, insofar as these differ. I'd seen everything I'd come to see and only a few things I didn't. The only way it could've gotten any better would have been if anybody had offered to lower my purity rating a bit further. But of course these people had far too much self- respect for that to have happened.
1. It might not have gone well for the Dictator's Floozy's Pet, a chap by the name of Colin.
2. The Samoan attorney was there, Joe must have missed him.
3. Actually, that was at KAOS Canterburys' First Party '03.
4. Jeremy-James also ran faster, lived longer and collected more trophies than Simeon.