Jay Fox - THE WALLS

As the vocalist tells the audience about the most famous mooch on record in a smoky croon, people begin to depart from the kitchen and the upstairs rooms to sing along. The chorus then comes, the Mustache Man conducting one of the most call and response choruses in musical history. Anyone familiar with old, Warner Bros. cartoons proves capable of following along.

“Doesn't this freak you out, man?” Tomas asks as an Elvis impersonator — complete with fat suit (it's obvious that it's a fat suit because he lacks a turkey-neck that is either real or prosthetic) and white, rhinestone-studded abomination — walks past. “I mean, I am all for partying, especially at a madhouse like this, but, seriously, you know, there's a limit. This is just too fucking bizarre, dig.” He pauses. “Whatever,” he shrugs. “You want to grab a beer?”

“Yeah. Looks like they're over there.”

As we stroll into the kitchen, a shoe whizzes over my shoulder and hits an unassuming bystander eating a bowl of Lucky Charms in the face. He drops the bowl, which shatters on the floor and sends a rainbow of milk, marshmallows, peculiar-shaped oats, and ceramic puzzle pieces flying into the air. While some begin to duck for cover, the bowl's previous owner continues to stand with a look of unadulterated mystification as the admixture soaks into his jeans and shoes. Blood begins to gush out of his nose with the force of a hydrant, which causes the viscous, amethyst pool on the floor to turn the color of eggplant. A few attend to the injured. Others address the assailant with tones that range from admonishment to persiflage. The assailant's name, apparently, is Mongo. As he comes in to explain himself, Mongo snags his unshod — and sockless, too — foot on a crescent-shaped shard, which leads to yelps and screams and a sudden flinging of blood and marshmallow milk throughout the entire kitchen. It doesn't seem to matter much to these culinary jesters, as they are all bowling over with those peals of laughter that ripple through rooms like thunder upon the igneous summer skies of the Midwest. Even the one with the potentially broken nose can't help but join in the revelry. Mongo, meanwhile, quietly makes his exit.

This, of course, is not the end of it; within a few seconds Mongo comes running back into the room with an ironing board above his head. He tosses it down in front of him, jumps on, screams “Cowabunga!” and skids through the pool of Technicolor sludge until the board hits the island, which sends him flying through the air towards the byramid towering above the awestruck spectators in a pose so immaculate that it makes everyone in the room believe him to be a veteran aerialist, if only for the moment. There are no barrel rolls or flips; still, his form is exquisite. As the inertial powers that be propel him along in a horizontal swan dive closer and closer to the aluminum monolith, people begin to seek cover under whatever they can find: empty cases of beer, onionskins of newspaper, slices of bread, ashtrays, hands, arms, feet, various props from the set of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg .

The collision sounds like a strike, but the tumultuous symphony of crashing aluminum and flesh summons the image of a bowling alley only in the schematic sense. These metallic pins don't so much fall as explode; Mongo, meanwhile, continues upon his trajectory, spans the entirety of the island flawlessly, and falls to the floor amidst successive avalanches of cans and swill and the tremendous boom of laughter and tinny cacophony. The music in the other room stops. Shortly after this yet another orange slams into the wall. It's a bullseye, something which may have been overlooked had it not been for the roar from the balcony of “Bullseye!” which cascades down upon the party, summoning a celebration of Tunguskan magnitude. When the applause dies down, the Mustache Man asks if everything is okay. Upon hearing an affirmative response from the kitchen, he gives a three-count, which leads the band right back into the chorus.

“What the fuck is wrong with these people?” Tomas yells, though no one pays much attention to him. Most in the kitchen are busy trying to help Mongo to his feet. This proves to be far more difficult than initially assumed, as the dregs of beer from the two hundred or so cans is by now mixing with the previous mélange of Lucky Charms and nasal and pedal blood to form a concoction with the constitution of mineral oil, which bleeds over the tile floor like a spilled vile of ink upon a page. As the kitchen inhabitants begin to find their feet traveling on radial patterns of 90 or 270 degrees from the vertical axis, which finds right angles at the floor, but not so much the ceiling, cans of beer and tumblers of far more troubling concoctions start to launch skyward in parabolic peril, thereby leading to even further chaos. As the guitarist beings his solo, Mongo emerges from the morass, a primordial beast arising without the ornery disposition that one typically associates with the Godzillas and Mothras of fame, though he is somehow just as menacing. He smiles to the two of us — perhaps because he recognizes something green in us, perhaps because he just happens to be looking in our direction. Before he says anything, however, he slips, goes horizontal, and finds himself on his back yet again. The sound of the crash coincides with yet another bullseye from the citrus artillery, another effervescent celebration, and the portion of the solo where the guitarist teases a Tony Rice head.

“What's going on in here?” a female voice asks with feigned contempt. Tomas and I both turn around to see Boots and the resurgent Patrick each with grins on their faces. “Did Mongo take out the byramid again?”

“You guys can't tempt me like that,” responds an asylum-friendly voice from below. Mongo has crawled his way to us through the swamp of whatever demons have accumulated on the floor. A green clover is stuck to his forehead. “I'll take that shit down every time,” he says as he pounds the floor with his fist, splashing no small amount of fluid into the air.

“You probably shouldn't be crawling around in broken glass, Mongo,” Patrick says stoically. “You're liable to end up in the hospital…again.”

“I think it only got my foot,” he responds. He examines himself. “Nope, got me in the arm here, too,” he says as he presents a patch of blood near his elbow. “This one's not so bad.” He looks to his other arm. “And here, too.”

Patrick and Boots nod. “Well, Maecenas,” Patrick begins to me, “You probably want to meet Daphne.”

“Obviously,” I respond quickly. “The set's soon to be over?”

“This should be the last song,” Boots confirms with a sideways glance to Tomas.

“What?” he smiles for the first time in a while.

“I'm just curious as to how you're taking all of this in,” she says on the sly.

For once Tomas' response is silence; he merely shrugs his shoulders and begins to edge back into the main room, careful not to slip on the sludge slowly sprawling over the pale, tile floor.

“No, I don’t need to go to the hospital, Pat. I’m fucking fine,” is heard as we walk away. There’s an odd sense of sarcasm in his voice that I can make little sense of.

“What's the name of this act?” I ask Patrick.

“Poot Moint.”

Patrick and Boots begin talking to a little person or dwarf or whatever as we join the crowd. Daphne calls him Harry; Patrick calls him Einhard. I remain next to Tomas. The two of us scan over the party in an attempt to get a better idea of what the inhabitants look like. There is no one style that defines them besides the abundance of sunglasses. There are three people wearing zoot suits, one in mint green, one in baby or Carolina blue, and one in a darker blue of the cobalt variety. The first two each wear hats that match their respective suits; Cobalt's hat has found its way onto a transvestite necromancing with some of the darker elements of the crowd. The majority of this latter group is adorned in Rocky Horror garb or the more prurient fashions that the Goth world has to offer. Their pale, translucent skin gleans as the music and the energy of the crowd continues to crescendo towards heights ethereal, to a realm where self is surrendered to a transcendent and unreflective experience of sight and sound. Some of the men in this group seem to be oblivious to a rather large woman walking among them in nothing more than a girdle. She holds a ruler in one hand and, occasionally, someone's cock in the other.