Everyone was talking about the party at Ben’s last night. It was his End of the World party. Only two days ago, watching his regular dose of morning TV Ben caught an interview with Edgar C. Whisenant, a former NASA engineer and Evangelical Christian who predicted the Rapture would occur sometime between September 11 and September 13, 1988. Ben figured Monday September 12, 1988 would be the perfect time to throw his End of the World party.
Almost two hundred people showed up and turned Ben’s house upside down and inside out. Mimi, Ben’s bored and disillusioned girlfriend had only stayed at the party for an hour. The last thing she remembered was talking to Ira a handsome boy in her photography class with a penchant for taking acid and wearing his father’s brown corduroy suit. As Mimi got into her cab to leave she saw Ira climb a large Oak tree in Ben’s front garden and yell “look everyone I’m a corduroy branch”. Ira’s declaration of love for nature in his hallucinogenic state or attempt at performance art, whatever the school of thought, set off a chain events that left a trail of chaos and destruction.
Ira’s two companions Cecilia and Celeste who he met on the way to the party on the number 33 bus, and with a similar liking for hallucinogens and vintage threads, stripped naked and ran through the streets of Ben’s neighbourhood singing the words to the Tears For Fears song “Shout”, an anthem from their teenage years. David and Bryce, two Fine Art students who normally liked to think of themselves as Renaissance men threw a dining table chair, a microwave oven, a lamp with a naked woman painted on it and Ben’s silver Dancelli bike into his mould-ridden swimming pool. A food fight broke out in the kitchen and spread to the lounge room and up the stairs into Ben’s bedroom, with David and Bryce’s class mates smearing jars of Dijon mustard and raspberry jam on the walls and hurling vegetables and fruit at each other like the rebellious children in their schoolyard when they were ten years old. The entire Architecture class moved Ben’s lounge room furniture outside to his front garden and plugged his TV into the same Oak tree that Ira, the handsome photography student in his corduroy suit, climbed two hours earlier. Three Fashion students who remain nameless placed Ben’s clothes and coveted sneaker collection into his bath and then set them on fire. Lola a lone Graphic Design student who had only come to the party to dance carved the words “Voodoo Ray” into Ben’s antique dining table.
At 3:35am someone called the Police and the almost two hundred party-goers left and made their way home. The world didn’t end as Edgar C. Whisenant predicted and Ben’s neighbours finally got some sleep.
Image: photographed by Nicolas Kantor for Glamour UK
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