My first new party friend, Low River.
So now into the fourth week of December it was just Bones and I sitting upon mountains of pure, clean speed and living above the Starry Plough. We hadn’t made any other friends yet but we’re spending a few hours in the bar each night checking out the bands and starting to know the regulars. Bones had a quick fling with a woman up the street, a hippy mom ten years older than him with three children. She used the word ‘magical’ in every other sentence she spoke. She invited us over to dinner several times. One rainy afternoon she gave us each a hit of acid and asked if we could look at her broken car parked down the street. We were just starting to feel the strong effects, none too happy for standing in the cold drizzle. We opened the hood and in a minute both of us simultaneously spotted a small, disconnected wire behind the engine. We plugged it back in and sure enough the car started right up. We looked at each other, laughed and felt like an invincible team. Bones’ affair with her lasted a week, too many iterations of the word ‘magical’.
Our lives and our lifestyle changed radically in a single night. It was a few days before Christmas, a Friday night around eleven p.m. I had just reached the bar after my coffee shop. I found Bones standing at the bar, beer in hand and all wound up, struck with the beauty of the blond lead singer of the band onstage. The music was loud and the place was packed.
Soon after, the band took a set break. She walked right over to where we stood and ordered a beer. Bones couldn’t resist this chance and told her that we lived upstairs and were having a party after the last set and that she and her friends were invited. He said this of course just to get her upstairs and possibly into bed. But let me pause here once again to point out the complexity and ambiguity of our language, and how a single word, this time ‘friends’, misconstrued, can lead to radically unintended consequences. He talked with her a little more, told her he was a musician too and would like to jam. She was in a happy mood and agreed to come. “Fait accompli” we thought, as she walked back to the stage. But as soon as she got up she grabbed the microphone and announced to the packed bar, “hey everybody, there’s a big party upstairs after we’re done and everyone is invited”. A deafening cheer sweeps through the room. I suppose when you’re really happy, as she was, ‘everybody’ is your ‘friend’.
Bones and I glanced at each other in some confusion at this turn of events. We went upstairs, looked around and put our few valuables away to prepare for the hordes. But we had little booze to speak of, no food, how were we going to host a party? One item came to mind.
For some inexplicable reason, when we rented this flat a few weeks earlier, besides the dilapidated furniture, the mattresses and sheets and dishes, between the fridge and the stove was tucked away a full-sized window in its wooden frame. Now all our windows were intact and in place so we guessed this must be some spare with nowhere to go, and we left the mystery alone. But now it suddenly had relevance and purpose, was laid flat on the kitchen table and on that glass I poured out about thirty lines and shaped them with a razor blade. There being about ten lines to a quarter gram this amount took down a vile by less than a half, hardly a dent. It was an impressive buffet, the only one we had.
Our front door, as I mentioned before, led in from the hallway right next to this kitchen and kitchen table and as our guests soon began to stream in I stood there, straws in hand, inviting each to partake of a line, which almost everyone gladly accepted.
This quickly got our party off to an excellent, boisterous start. The quality of our speed was so smooth and strong that many thought it was cocaine because it gave an immediate rush and had no stinging effects at all, (which come from the impurities in your typical street ‘crank’). Many had come upstairs with their half-finished beers in hand, which were soon finished. We had little in our fridge, but again impromptu resourcefulness. Some of the bartenders from downstairs were already upstairs and ‘up’. They had the keys to the basement and cases of beer were brought up and a quick collection made. Soon after the first guests arrived the band from downstairs came in, unpacked their instruments in the large front room and a jam session began to flow, people milling about, me busy doing more window dressings and everyone happy. The party roared on till five a.m., over forty people talking, drinking, or playing music, all delighted to be there.
So Bones and I were now ‘déterré’, that is, revealed to the world that swirled around the Starry Plough.
We woke up to a flat with beer bottles and cigarette butts everywhere, half empty pint glasses on every ledge, left behind jackets, glasses, bags. Our apartment looked like some war-torn landscape. We woke up happy.
Word got out and as we returned the many glasses to the bar that afternoon, we were accosted by strangers or dimly remembered faces, warmly greeted and repeatedly asked: ‘When’s the next one?’
We talked and decided (since it was Christmas), that we’d have another in two days. This one was better prepared with beer, and ashtrays laid out. The window on the kitchen table was the same, though now I had friends to help me do the honors of chalking up lines so I could mingle more, which I did, so much so that I woke up on the other side of town beside a woman some ten years older than me named Low River.
