The Night in Question

Story, as lived by Michael BoturPhotographs by Sarah Benikowsky

You scull straight vodka, suckle the OJ nipple and slosh screwdrivers inside your jaw

Ghosts of the week’s insults bother your brain You pass your last piss then push into the ink. A bag heavy with booze cuts into your palms If the crowd is intimidating, unfamiliar, then everything you do tonight will be an act – what you say how you dress how you look what’s your stance what promises you make who you promise to befriend who you seduce how your gut’s sucked in; your lips lie, they’re not yours, they’re engorged with lipstick your eyelashes extruded with mascara your cheeks rouged your guts tucked into a corset your heels extended like stilts you pursue fights you can’t finish you –

If the crowd is friendly, then you can weave into it, unobtrusive

Gates of rain part for the partygoer A party is an army of people avenging the indignities of the working week Cigarette packets extended in handshakes’ stead

Cigarettes warm the breath. They are individual bonfires, private braziers.

Folks compare complaints Corsets, pins, jewellery, restraints, decorations, admonitions Ambitions are bared, upheld or dispelled You wade through cunts to get to your compatible clutch

Shoes speak status In the geometry of bodies, posture determines personality The host is the pillar-post upholding the ceiling People debate miracles in light diluted and dim as their minds

Music is strung between trees like invisible crêpe paper The Host is handed the reins of the neighbourhood Party on another planet The DJ makes hips wobble outside their ordinary orbit Dancers let their torsos talk You drink like the antidote’s at the bottom of the bottle Once drunk enough, people begin to walk up walls There is an elf mincing against the mantelpiece; Darth Vader’s in the bathroom. In the kitchen: a man clad in bubble wrap MCs are the loudmouths from the back of the class, the kids with ADHD who couldn’t spell and had to mangle and trim their words to fit. Sobriety is for narcs

Who are you? My name is – I didn’t ask for your name: I asked who you are.

A platter of pecked food buckles the trestle table, picked unrecognisable by fingers without cigarettes A good bookshelf will explain the party’s manifesto Food is bullied aside by barging booze You swill from hard bottles, oversized wine glasses, chocky mugs, thin crystal, beer caps, cans, buckets, hoses, funnels, kegs, troughs, the sink, any film of alcohol trapped on a flat surface The host swirls through the crowd sprinkling blessings

Jerks interject. Buttered mouths now spit sandwich grit Envies are expressed; exits are eyed The ironic artist dons a suit cut from a bureaucrat The odd revelation /stops conversation /like absent train tracks Crossed legs open legs folded midsections kneeling paeans As night is the negative of day, at parties you must dress the inverse of work What’s passed around is puffed like a locomotive Party-parasites guzzle the host’s fluids

Your enemy redeems himself with an adroit joke expertly dropped It’s no different to the mask you wear every day at the office Bagged beer, bubbling bong, pinched joint, tongued tab, fellated pill Discussions in the dark: some conversations run off cliffs; some go home with the girl; some intersect; some grow organically, thick-stemmed; some deviate Topics of conversation orbit like solar systems Generations jostle; cultures collide; attitudes abut In the party’s climax, you speed-date soulmates Strangers encounter parallels. They’re lines strung from the same power-pole, intervals on the same octave

Life’s become liquid Parties are the melted, blurred, mutant inversions of every other day

You take a drunken tour to fetch more bottled ambrosia, lit by the empty fuel light and cigarettes’ laser pointer tips A bassline maintains the mood Any protractor will tell you that there are hundreds of unexplored angles DISTRUST YOUR DOPPELGANGER

LEDs dot the dark Lighting better suited to a pet shop Light’s limited coz light removes the mystery from the night The house is held together only by parties. Parties are putty. Disorder is mortar. Oxygen become helium

There are no communities without cooperation You leave with an incomplete bottle of booze and invitations to return to unfinished fights, half- drunken drinks, undone seductions, agreed conspiracies The best way to kill regret is to drown her In winter, your breath’s so tangible you can grab it, put it in a cage, frame it

The Über-consumer guzzles engine oil Alcohol will cause a scorpion to sting itself to death

After Hours You drool your way into Sunday, mascara smeared as the clock Your pores weep exhaust Suffering makes you holy Liquor has crippled, brought early enfeeblement, blurred every boundary You bring dirt, jizz, lipstick, shoes, mud, ash, bottle caps between the sheets As you surrender to sleep, phantoms dance behind your eyes.