| The Great Perversion Party Road Trip of '03 |
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| the Official Truth: |
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North East Valley is a strange little place, a steep-sided cleft between the two northernmost hills of Dunedin. Running almost all of its length is North Road, a long, slightly disjointed street lined with houses and schools and other, less obvious constructions like a fur-processing factory and, until recently, Dunedin's only manufacturing blacksmith.
Throughout my childhood, the source of this idiosyncratic suburban thoroughfare occupied more or less the same position as the source of the Nile did among Victorian explorers - something that surely must exist, but that was a long way away and that nobody had ever actually managed to pinpoint. I certainly never found it. My various attempts were thwarted by bad weather, dense undergrowth, quicksand and packs of wolves. But on some of my expeditions, if I got far enough down the valley and listened carefully, I could hear banjos and cavorting hillbillies and squealin' hawgs and other telltale sounds that could only mean one thing - a writer was struggling to make a humorous Deliverance parallel.
Nonetheless, I can just about forgive North Road its many faults - swamp fever, piranhas, anal herpes - in the name of Chingford Park, a lovely clump of grass and trees pretty close to the far end of the valley. This has long been the most pretentious of Dunedin parks. There's a building that used to be a stable in it. It's where the archery club practices and where the orienteering club does whatever they do. Until they petered out a couple of years ago, it's where the Dunedin Medieval Society lived out their Braveheart fantasies. And today some of it was being taken over by KAOS.
I was the first to arrive. By the time I had mopped my brow and gotten my hair back under control - for this afternoon I was fighting a duel and needed to be presentable - several Christchurchians were traipsing up the path towards the stable building. I recognised most of them. Such is the isolation of Chingford and the prosaic nature of the Christchurch brain that it took about an hour for everybody to get there. When we had enough of a crowd, however, the Ringmistress moved us all over to a natural amphitheatre in the shade of an enormous walnut tree and got things under way. For the rest of the afternoon about thirty people milled around on the rise above the amphitheatre, some of them just chatting but most watching the entertainments. I'm pretty sure that, with the exception of the Birthday Girl herself, almost everybody had a go at something.
First up was the three-legged race in which teams had to fill a container with water carried several metres in a teaspoon. Most teams were taped together at ankle level, and then again at mid-thigh. My partner was not showing enough leg, however, and Simeon taped us together at the waist. No good came of this. Laura and Zay won handily.
Then came the toga-wearing competition, in which competitors had one minute to put on a toga and then however long it took to rip the toga off their opponent. Many squeals were heard and much mud was rolled in. Sadly, despite my academic background and the fact that I've actually been taught to put on a toga, I lost my heat to a Carthaginian. I know, it's really pathetic. But consider these lines, spoken by the queen of Carthage in the 1240s BC:
"Happy I would have been, ah, beyond words happy,
If only the Trojan ships had never come to my shore!"
These words, then, burying her face in the bed: "Shall I die unavenged?
At least, let me die. Thus, thus! I go into the dark, go gladly.
May he look long, from out there on the deep, at my flaming pyre,
The heartless! And may my death-fires signal bad luck for his voyage!"
She had spoken, and with these words, her attendants saw her falling
Upon the sword, they could see the blood spouting up over
The blade, and her hands splattered. Their screams rang to the roofs of
The palace, then rumour ran amok through the shocked city.1
All this over a guy she'd slept with three, maybe four times, on the understanding it was a fling. I'd hardly call that mature, would you? And I hardly think beating me in a toga-tying competition makes up for it. I figure we Latin readers can make fun of the Carthaginians for a few more years yet - especially considering that the final ended up as an all-KAOS affair in which Duncan beat the Floozy's Pet.
Towards the end of the toga malarkey, news of a recent marriage came over someone's cellphone. In honour of the happy event, we were all ordered to snog someone inappropriate. And while I appreciate that this is wholly hypocritical coming from me, I think the point is still a valid one - Gareth needed a shave.
Thence was an impromptu competition - the blowing of the butt-horn. Numerous people came forward, all eager to catch cooties off this most famously flatulent of musical instruments. My blast was silent and not particularly violent. Pretty much everybody else outdid me, especially the Alfs. Rochelle's impressive little blast eventually took the title, with Matthew coming a close second.
The next scheduled event was the water balloon toss. This took place I two stages. In the first, we passed balloons around a circle - Naomi cleared this one easily - and in the second we were divided into teams attempting to break each other's balloons in mid-flight while preserving our own. This was tricky, though you'd be surprised how much punishment a water balloon can take at times. Daniel and I had to drop ours about four times before it burst. Okay, I had to drop ours three or four times before it burst. In the end a team led by the Floozy's Pet took line honours.
The William Tell Memorial Competition also went well, especially considering that the bows we used were only just of sufficient pull to cut any apples in half. After all, much fun was had, the cheating that took place was of the we're-all-having-fun-here-so-who-cares variety, and Duncan got wet and jumped around like an ape. And you should have seen all those Austrians pack sads. That'll learn 'em for conquering Switzerland. Oh, and well done to Amy and Chris.
Then we executed a couple of very boring people. Then the Christians got thrown to the lions. Then they threw me to the lions as well because I'd been cruising for a bruising all semester. The lion was very gentlemanly about it and had, for a carnivore, very nice breath. Sadly it did not have a thorn I could pull out of its foot and thus earn its eternal friendship and protection. These things always work better in the movies.
Another of the highlights of the afternoon was the Short Circuit eating competition. For those who weren't there, a Short Circuit is a boiled sweet covered by such a quantity of sour, vinegary muck as to curdle the milk in a cup of tea (no, really, I've tried this), which you have to suck off to get to the sweet within. They were long thought to be out of production - outlawed, or so the rumour had it, after some poor kid ate so many he turned into the Floozy's Pet - until a KAOS member of great intelligence, charm, resourcefulness, connections, good looks and humility laid his hands on a supply. So a large group of people lined up and were doled out their bite-size nuclear warhead. After a proper count-in they stuck it in. They winced. They puckered. They squealed. One balked and spat. Eventually, after much consideration and a bit of largely justified sadism, the Ringmistress granted the palm of victory to Heather. Honourable mentions went to Laura - who'd have thought you could eat one of these suggestively? - and the Dictator's Mascot, who displayed remarkable fortitude, presence of mind and cuteness while everyone told her "you can spit it out if you want" and accused each other of cheating for spitting them out.
That young lady's balls were only among a number of impressive things I saw at the games. There was Stacey's outfit. There was the way the Christians were such good sports about being persecuted, even if it wasn't historically accurate. There was the entirety of KAOS trying to water-balloon one of the Carthaginians and only managing after Simeon chased the bastard down and sat on him. But the most impressive, and I am tempted to say admirable, thing I saw was the way the Ringmistress just about held the attentions of thirty people for close to three hours.
Eventually, of course, things did break down. Naomi and I, who'd been goading each other about this for a while, had our own Short Circuit eating competition. We each got a dozen of Short Circuits and chucked them all in at once and sucked really really hard. When they turned sweet, we packed in reinforcements, and didn't stop until my tongue turned green and started bleeding. I'm not use if this means I won or just that I'm really stupid. Possibly both.
Because my opponent had forfeited the duel, I decided to go looking for another one. After all, I'd hate to have tied my hair back for nothing. Casting around for an opponent, I settled on Laura, who quite sensibly refused to pick up the glove.
"Jeez, Laura", I said, "sometimes you are such a girl."2
"No, really", said a friend of Jo's landlady as the landlady busily dug tar out of her pipe with a safety pin, "you drink your leftover bong water, and there's a whole lot of resin dissolved in that. It works really well." They invited me to join them out on the porch, but I assured her I was fine with my doughnut. Jo had gone off to do girl stuff. And not long after she finished Daniel turned up and did girl stuff as well. When I mentioned I felt a little underdressed they conspired to get me wearing one of Jo's silk shirts. I put a stop to this when I realised that raising my arms above shoulder level in the thing would tear it apart, leaving me looking like The Incredible Hulk's puny, pasty, unaccountably less popular younger brother, The Feasible Weed. This would have made a dramatically-balancing counterpoint to the unfeasable weed being partaken of out on the porch, but I still wasn't happy with it. I planned to get my shirt off later in the evening anyway.
The three of us shared a cab back down to Chingford, arriving at the same time as the Alfs. We were here, of course, to take up the invitation of the Dictator's Floozy and her Pet to take part in the second stage of the weekend's festivities; a five-hour chance, enthusiastically seized, to talk each other hoarse, get a load on, and rustle our bustles.
Thanks to the remarkable organisational nous of the Dictator's Floozy and her Pet, the gig was being held at Chingford Stables, a former horse silo consisting of two large rooms, a hankie-sized kitchen (in which Mixmaster Duncan spent most of the evening lurking) and a side room everyone used as a cloakroom. It was in this room I finally got to actually meet Theuns.
"Hello", he said.
"You're South African", I replied, more or less automatically.
"Oh", he said, "is it obvious from one sentence?"
"Yes", I continued, and before I could stop myself added, "South Africans are odd people."
A hard look. Theuns dug his biscuit deeper into the pottle of fudge he was consuming, an irritated action that made me suspect he was sick of having this conversation with people. "Well", he said, "I assure you we're not all the same." Whoops. A serious miscalculation. The trick with breaking the conversational ice is to make sure you're not standing on it at the time.
The party began to pick up about then, as people began to arrive in quantity, dump their stashes in the kitchen and amble around the flagstoned room lined with seats or into the larger room where the Monkey Of Love had set up his stereo, plugged it into a military-surplus thermonuclear amplifier and taken full advantage of the fact our nearest neighbours were 200 metres away. Music was the traditional KAOS fare, drawn in large part from the nobody-likes-me, everybody-hates-me, I'm-going-down-the-garden-to-eat-worms, buy-my-records school of 80's/90's mope-thrash. In the end there were about thirty people there, including one young lady who told me I was 'eloquent'. I'm not sure why and neither, I suspect, are the people I usually talk to, but I accepted the complement. As time dribbled on towards 8:30, I found the Dictator's Lackey and explained a little plan I had for the slave auction. She and I borrowed one of Jo's props and slipped outside.
"Look", she said, wringing the prop in both hands, "I just feel weird about doing this to somebody who's not in The Scene, you know?" Whoa. I was asking the only person I knew to have experience with this sort of thing to put some whip-marks on my back so that I'd make a convincing-looking slave, and she felt weird? "So perhaps what I could do is scratch your back", she continued. "It'll feel a bit like this, it'll leave good marks, and your girlfriend can kill me later, okay?" I never actually saw the marks, but Thomas tells me they were quite impressive.
I'm informed that other people did stuff outside that was dodgier than this. I didn't see them, however, so I can't write much about it. So many people were rumoured to be doing whatever they were doing, however, that I feel obligated to indulge in some random speculation:
[Yvette/Simeon/Stacey] and [Matthew/Naomi/The Goon] slipped out of the party and went off to [McD's/The Cook/Madame Thrasharse's Red-Raw Spanking Emporium]. Here they bumped into [Prince Charles/Lex/Boba Fett], who was [being de-loused/singing karaoke/looking for a taker for his film script, Nipples The Wonder-Cat]. They also met [Rolf Harris/Hamish/Gollum], and in no time at all the lot of them were engaged in a lively conversation about [sex/sex/sex]. The evening went from there, with everyone enjoying the [gamelan music/Jackson Pollock exhibition/services of Madame Thrasharse herself]. They partook of some [port and cigars/marsupials/whatever the oven-dried nonsense they actually partook of was], and things were most convivial until [the place got raided by the police/Matthew threw his hip out/Nipples The Wonder-Cat took legal action to prevent distribution of the biopic] and they were forced to come back to the party and watch the slave auction.
Our auctioneer never turned up, which was out of character. It's not like Lex to pass up an evening of free sausage rolls and young ladies in miniskirts3. In the end Duncan took on the role with ease, but Jo wasn't happy. She doesn't wear a leash for just anybody, you know. In any case, the auction ended up being a roaring success. Someone I know only as Brasso Boy was sold to the Alfs for the purpose of polishing their buttons - yeah, that's right, their buttons. Gareth and Zay bought Daniel for the purpose of manual labour. Duncan sold himself with considerable aplomb. The Dictator's Floozy's Pet batted a century. Enough money was thrown around to more or less torpedo any NZUSA claims that the student loan scheme is condemning us 20-somethings to a life of poverty. I mean, I didn't think anybody wanted to see my hair deep-conditioned badly enough to spend $50 on the privilege. It's the most money anybody's ever paid to see me do anything other than shut up. Boy, did Duncan see her coming. Or maybe somebody else was just bidding on me to drive up the price. I didn't see on account of being a demeaned slave, broken in body and spirit, fully aware of the horrible, herbal-scented indignities about to be heaped upon me. Also, a certain Auctioneer's Minion who shall remain nameless kicked me in the bum with a pointy boot.
The girls took me into a side room and did things I don't want to discuss, except to say that having three women run their fingers through your hair for an hour isn't as much fun as I'd been led to believe. And they let people come in and observe the process so frequently I don't know why they didn't fucking charge admission or something. By the time they were putting in the wax I guess everyone must have had a look. I could have sworn there were clauses in the Geneva Convention against this sort of thing, right down there between those forbidding Chinese water torture and Jennifer Lopez. It could just be me, I suppose. But in any case, about the only compensation I received for having two inches taken off my height was the fact that I had a cleavage-level view of the entire undertaking.
Later, I was having a forage at the buffet table when there came from one end thereof a great moan. Timidly peering over someone's shoulder, I saw the Dictator getting a spinal massage. Each time the masseuse shifted her hand, the Dictator's eyes squeezed shut a bit tighter and she gave another strangled roar that frankly put me in mind of a constipated Harley Davidson. Indeed, so heartfelt were these exclamations that there were those among the spectators who figured they should be taping this and selling it as an overdub for a porn movie or something. That might be the case, but she was probably faking it. Other people were weathering similar treatment in an altogether more dignified fashion. There was no noise whatsoever coming from the other side of the room, where a young lady was getting the whole nine yards from her slave and one of the Alfs. She seemed very relaxed.
Out on the dancefloor, the World's Sexiest Nincompoop Competition gyrated determinedly on. You'd be leaning against the wall, playing some innocent air guitar, and all of a sudden - YOW, THERE'S THREE OF THEM AND THE ONE IN THE MIDDLE'S FEET AREN'T EVEN TOUCHING THE FLOOR - you'd see the sorts of things they didn't teach you in primary-school folk dancing. Dracula's wives also put in an appearance. They were their usual homoerotic selves, and managed to get through the evening without seducing an estate agent, eating a baby or being decapitated by Peter Cushing, though they did dance their collective arses off. Some actual traditional rock & roll dancing also went on, though this being a KAOS gig there was an engagingly silly twist to it - the couple consisted of a guy in full Victorian formal-wear and a woman wearing a proverbial LBD4 under what appeared to be a chainmail shawl, and they were dancing to Rammstein. Don't ask me how they managed it. I can't even dance, as the Goon will attest. Carl even went so far as to speak to me about it, and with good cause. But it didn't stop me trying. I wore a huge hole in my trousers trying to explain T-Rex to Naomi, but she wouldn't have it. Jo understood straight away.
1am rolled around all too quickly and, as the lease demanded, we vacated the premises. I shared a taxi back into town with a whole bunch of KAOS people, two of whom, I noticed, were spending the night in a hotel that rented by the hour. As we drove through the bucolically suburban netherworld of North East Valley, we passed Naomi, who'd left ten minutes earlier. I later learned that her arrival at another party going on that same evening was so emphatic that it woke the neighbours.
The alarm went off, as usual, at 6:30am. I bashed it. It went off again at 6:40. I bashed it again. It kept going off, squealing shrilly every ten minutes, until finally I hauled myself out of bed at 7:30 and blearily attended to real-world business for a few hours before it was time to once again don flak jacket and press pass and try and make up jokes about people dressing like ninnies and bonking each other on the head with padded weapons that they wouldn't tell about themselves.
I found my way through the streets of Dunedin to my old stamping ground in the Botanical Gardens. This was my turf. I grew up more or less across the street, and a good proportion of my youth was spent mucking around in here. I knew the various tracks and paths in the Upper Gardens like the back of my hand. It used to be that you could blindfold me, take me to the Gardens, tell me which path I was on, and I could lead you down to the gates unaided. So it was with some embarrassment that I had to collar a bystander and ask them the way to the fucking Rhododendron Dell.
People milled around more or less at random. The only reason you could tell this was a martial expedition was Theuns, who, with the aid of his very relaxed-looking assistant, gave a long and impressive demonstration of his mastery of the art of navel warfare. There were also a bunch of people frantically making weapons. And weapons inspection was, as usual, interesting. The Goon was packing a lightsabre that vibrated when you pressed a button on the hilt. That's it. That's the joke. Don't try and tell me you don't get it.
Things began to get underway after the Alfs arrived, this afternoon packing that most important piece of military equipment - a persecuted young woman and her angelic, put-upon child. I broke the first, nay only, rule of war correspondence by not pestering this woman and asking her questions like "So, how does it feel to be ethnically cleansed?" or "You wouldn't happen to have another child who's, you know, blind or something? It would pep my story up no end." I was too busy trying to decide which camp to start the battle in. The various cliques had to their own quarters of the battlefield and begun to eye each other menacingly. And let me tell you, with eyes like the Carthaginians' pointed at you, you can begin to think some pretty scary thoughts. Then again, this is a nation that once tried to cross the Alps with elephants. Any geneticist could have told them what a disaster that was going to be. None of the offspring were viable.
Anyway, it was set to be a great battle. But here's the thing. I spent so much of my time running around trying to get good by-lines of nurses and combatants and innocent by-standers and twitching corpses that I kind of forgot to take notes. Well, notes I can make sense of now, anyway. If there's anybody out there - anyone at all - who can remember what scribblings like "Eighth wonder", "That wasn't be very sporting" or "Women whose breasts you rub" can possibly allude to, please call.
Thankfully there are a few schematic trends and brief micro-moments of action that do stick in my memory. And it is from the application of the latter to illustrate the former that good, perceptive war correspondence is born. We can surmise, for example, that the Alfs at the battle were really Scotsmen in disguise. Such a deduction can be made by taking two factors of their behaviour into account. Firstly, they weren't taking the battle very seriously. They kept breaking off to play games of chicken cricket, chicken volleyball and - and this is a game no true Englishman would play in public - chicken grid-iron. Warfare - whether it's the serious stuff that takes place on football pitches or the occasional light-hearted venting of spleen against Scotland's great ancestral enemy, the Scots - is the Scottish national past-time, and as such they don't take it very seriously either. Secondly, when they were fighting, they fought like Scotsmen - in a series of poetically suicidal charges against enemies who vastly outnumbered them and which invariably ended in those opponents sitting and chatting and smoking next to piles of mouldering corpses. Even when they varied their tactics - dalek charges, conga-line attacks, camouflage - they always ended up as a damp, red speed bump on the grass. It's just as well these guys look cool, because a showing this bad has probably advanced the current direction of the British Empire by decades.
There was, however, one initiative by the Boys In Red that very nearly worked. One young Tommy rigged himself up as a suicide bomber and sped, speedily, towards the KAOS ranks. Against all military common sense, he was foiled by the fact that KAOS wasn't ranked up at the time, having momentarily succumbed to the urge people of a certain age invariably have to stand around in groups and natter endlessly about rubbish. When twenty-somethings are doing this, nothing on Earth, not even a rubber chicken, will break them up or even cause them to acknowledge goings-on outside their clique. So once again an Alf threw his life away needlessly. But given the number of places in the world - Ireland, The Congo, Palestine - where young people talking to each other causes fatalities, it was refreshing to be in a situation were it prevented some.
There was also a moment of high drama when a KAOS member who'd turned out in Carthaginian colours (boo! hiss!) kidnapped the Dictator and held several knives at her throat. She bore this treatment with the kind of tense, stoic charm that heroines sometimes affect in such situations (the other alternative is to wriggle and squeal a lot, and she'd already done that during her massage at the party). The KAOSians gathered in a huddle, mooting various rescue plans ranging from launching a massive charge and hopefully liberating her before her captors could do anything particularly dastardly to calling Batman. Eventually, however, a hero rose to the occasion. Living up to his dashing piratical ancestry, the Goon launched a daring solo rescue mission. Blades flashed, cannon roared, mass collapsed, sadly no bodices were ripped, and through the smoke and flames of battle our beloved leader was borne to safety. Well done that man.
The battle began to come to bits after that. People charged any old how, any old way, with nobody having a clear idea of what was going on and so many fatalities that the courageous nursies couldn't keep up. There was no way I could report on this. I spent most of the later stages of the battle crashed out under a tree with a couple of Carthaginians. They assured me they were guarding the tree against aggression, though they wouldn't say why. Perhaps the tree was of great cultural significance to the Carthaginian people. Perhaps it was an important strategic point they had been ordered to defend at all costs. Or perhaps it was a nice shady tree on a hot day when only the Alfs were getting squirted. Whatever the case, they guarded it with gusto. I left them to it and went to have a look at KAOS closing the battle by charging the audience.
On the way down from the Rhododendron Dell we had a poke around in the aviary, where we introduced the Dictator's Lackey to Keas. She was impressed until we told her what the little buggers can do to sheep. Then she was appalled. She does appalled well.
Had the battle changed anything? Had any problems been solved? Would the world take note of this monumental waste of young lives, including a whole afternoon of mine?
Only one way to answer questions like that, and make it a double, please, bartender. We were all at the Gardies, one of Dunedin's more amusingly plebian dens of intoxication. At the bar Theuns turned to me and raised an eyebrow.
"So", he said, conversationally, "how do you say 'would you like fries with that' in classical Latin?" Sic, he got his own back for my appalling lapse in manners yesterday night. I suppose it wouldn't have been necessary if I'd made it clearer that I find South African accents odd.
We commandeered most of the beer garden and set about carousing. Again, much nonsense was discussed, this time with the aid of lubrication. But never mind. This was a large gathering of people, most of whom have known each other for years and all of whom have something in common. I hadn't seen this since the last time I went to a wargaming convention. Most of these people couldn't have had more fun with Dark Ferret down their trousers.
Eventually the crowd began to disperse. The Christchurchians headed home, and most of the Dunedinites followed suit. In the end it was just me keeping Daniel company until Gar-Gar came back to lead him off into bondage. That suited me because I was stalling before going to my parent's house that evening. After all, they'd want to know how my hair got styled, and I didn't have much of an excuse. I still didn't have one when Gareth finally turned up and hauled Daniel away. Thus, when my sister opened the door and said "Whoa, have you had a hair-cut?", I was forced to answer "No, last night I spent an hour in a bathroom naked to the waist with a British chick in fishnets, a Southlander in a check-these-out top and a preppy American lesbian fondling my scalp". Actually, that's not true. I told her I'd been side-swiped by a truck full of styling wax. Somehow it just seemed more believable.
1. Virgil, Aeneid, book 4, ll. 657-666.
2. Should Laura feel the need to dignify this remark with a witty comeback, may I suggest " Yeah, innit great?" or "Yeah, dont act like you dont enjoy it."
3. By which I mean the sausage rolls were free. The young ladies were charging their usual rates.
4. Little Black Dress