I had been at the world’s longest running party for four hours and was beginning to feel sluggish. The bubbly acid yiddish funk thumped in the speakers as an M.C. ironically scratched the records and made a podcast. The party had been continuing since the first of January in the year two thousand. Fourteen years of non-stop nonsense. The host, Gary Faberge, sits on a smashed in couch trying to separate cigarette papers from each other.
“How can you afford this?” I ask. Gary gently peels a paper away and straightens it with his thumb and forefinger.
“I’m sponsored by Red Bull. Can’t you see the signage?” he says, nodding around at the huge company logos stuck on each wall. There were also thousands of empty red bull cans dotted throughout the building like spent ammunition, along with empty nitrogen canisters and bottle lids. The walls are patterned with graffiti, chemical frescoes. The guests stagger around like somnambulists, mumbling to each other about green energy and the illuminati. At least three people had to be awake and music playing at all times for it to be classed as a party, although that was simple enough that the party had been going on for a while.
“How did it start?”
“Well, in 1999 I had a big New Year’s Eve party, it were mad. I had fifty people in my flat, this were before we knocked through, so it were packed. People kept coming and going at all hours and that’s been pretty much it ever since.”
“What’s it been like to have been living in a perpetual party?” I ask, watching a cockroach make its few last steps before dying of old age. Gary roots around amongst the empty cans until finding a pouch of tobacco and sprinkling it along the fold of the paper before rolling it up.
“None stop parties forever!” shouts a girl, her makeup mostly snot and cocaine.
“Sometimes it has been hell. Sometimes it has been good. But it’s always been a party.”
“Doesn’t every party have to end sometime?”
“I don’t see this ending any time soon. I’m having an extension built on the roof, it’s going to be a big magnet that will turn the entire house into a speaker.” Says Gary, lighting up the cigarette wearily. “What is most remarkable is that I have survived my own life. I had my first cigarette when I was nine, took pills before I left high school and had a crack addiction for the last twenty years. And I can’t leave this party.”
“Why?”
“I…I don’t know how.” He says, looking into the distance. We are interrupted again by a spokesman from Red Bull wearing a silver suit, honking an air horn all around us.
“Do you guys like to party?! Can I get a hell yeah!” he shouts. I take out a can of expanding foam and spray it into his mouth before turning back to Gary.
“I can get you out of here. We can escape.” I whisper. Gary looks at me with the eyes of an abused dog. Too scared to act. An untenable position. I don’t need to hear his reply, he was always at the party and will never leave. The party and the man have become inseparable, the lines between the two have become blurred. To stop one would mean to stop the other, just as sometimes when an elderly person dies their partner does soon after. The redbull spokesman has managed to pull most of the expanding foam from out of his maw and so I refill it for him before making my way downstairs, past fire damaged walls and across urine soaked carpets. The amount of cigarette burns everywhere are reminiscent of the surface of the dark side of the moon, black on black on black. I descend into the depths of the party, copulating couples and people caught in an overdose. True debauchery, akin to that of any civilization tipping over the edge, just as different species of animal would begin to fuck and eat each other just before an earthquake struck. Unrestricted pleasure often resembled pain, just as every opposite is more alike than the state in between.
