The Landecker Party
by Nathan Ripley
Mount Pleasant
They’d opened another American Apparel on this side of the bridge, this one a fifteen-minute walk away from our place. Glass, plastic, primary colors, sex as branded by a Montreal megalomaniac pervert who’d drive his own business into the ground in just a few more years. I bought a gray T-shirt from a girl named Crissie who I’d seen last Tuesday at Rivko’s doo-wop night at Shine, and around the city for the last few months, roughly since the start of the 2007 school year.
“You hear about the Landecker party?” I asked her while shaking my head no to the plastic bag she was offering.
“Who’s Landecker?”
“It’s a booze, not a very good one. It sells okay back east, and now they’re trying to make an impact out here, I guess. Anyway, Landecker threw us a sponsorship — my friend Mark and I do shows — for a house party. Free drinks. It’s our place, 16th and Oak-ish. I can write down the address if you want to come. Friends are cool too. Not many, but feel free.”
“Cool,” she said. Crissie was nineteen, tops, about four years between us. “Getting booze to sponsor your party is like, it’s like — getting food to sponsor your dinner, or something. Sorry, that’s lame.”
“I’ve been trying to make the same kind of joke for the last week and I still can’t get it to work.”
Mark and Esther were still playing around when I got back, mixing some brutal new-country Tim McGraw shit with a pretty great house track, creating a sickening aural soup that made them giggle and made me want to pour a warm Coke onto Mark’s PowerBook. We were on the lower floor of a shitty two-level, and Mark and Esther had the music cranked already, hours before anyone was due here.
The upstairs neighbor had been gone all week, his Jetta missing from its usual parking spot. Nice dude, a kid from Taiwan who near as we could tell was AWOL from his Sauder School of Business program and waiting for his parents to find out and haul him back home. We were surprised he was living in this place, one of the last true dumps on the block, instead of one of the endless condo buildings, only about half of which were tarped and scaffolded up for leaking roof repairs. He’d introduced himself to us when he moved in over a year ago, told us his name was Phil, waved off our occasional invitations to driveway beers, but clearly did some extremely committed partying of his own. In hangover he metamorphosed into a disapproving phantom, leaving us imploring Post-its about needing sleep. He’d knock on the door and run back upstairs, leaving notes on our door that said things like, Pls turn down your Call of Duty. But I’d seen Phil at an after-hours in the West End no less than three times in the past month, a booze-free and drug-heavy space where Mark and I netted five hundred dollars to split for playing from two to seven. A pretty shit deal, looking back on it, but we used each gig to get better at mixing, at reading a room. The more serious we were at clubs and parties, the more we could goof off at home.
Mark took mercy on me and switched from Ableton over to his iTunes, putting on a Hot Snakes record at low volume. There were twenty-four green bottles of Landecker around the living room, kitchen, and bedroom, which we’d collaborated in cleaning up and turning into a secondary hanging room for the party, carrying the couch over from my apartment on the next block and leaning the mattress against the wall. It looked pretty good in there.
“You going to do the tent?” Mark asked. He was sitting on this beautiful leather office chair with a circular base that his dad had given him, a piece that looked alien on a carpet we’d been staining into an accidental pattern and between the two living room couches, both road salvage — this was before bedbugs reared up big-time and made street furniture an idiotic risk.
“If I need to,” I said.
Mark just looked at the ceiling, taking a pack of Belmonts out of his pocket. He’d gatewayed into smoking last — after booze, which we started with when we were fifteen and playing in a shockingly bad death metal band in Kamloops; weed, which we’d dealt to pay for gas money for two summers of touring cross-country in our slightly better prog-rock band; and MDMA, which we both embraced eagerly when we sold our Orange amps and Les Pauls for the laptops and decks we needed to start making money in the clubs. We pirated all the software.
Esther, unwrapping a sleeve of red plastic cups in the corner, looked over at us. “What Mark means is, Could you please set up the tent, Raj, neither of us have the basic skills required.” She was three years older than Mark and me, about ten years better at communicating, and Mark would collapse mentally if she left him. Esther didn’t need him at all, and all three of us knew it, but she got something out of hanging out with the two of us, watching us knock heads, develop, devolve. She got paid double what we did for the same gigs and was worth it. Rivko had her sub in for him when he couldn’t do the doo-wop night, and she’d gotten to open for Steve Aoki once, Diplo twice. Guys we mocked endlessly and envied deeply.
I headed out back with the tent canvas, seeing through the kitchen window that the poles were already out there, probably from an earlier rage-filled attempt by Mark to get it up. It was a big one, tall enough to stand up in. I had it rigged in twenty minutes, and Esther and Mark carried a white table with folding legs out into it right as I finished up. We put three bottles of Landecker on it, and Esther took three steak knives out from where she’d tucked them into her belt.
“What are these for?” I asked.
“We need to ventilate the sides or it’ll just become a hotbox for cigarette smoke, especially if it rains, which it’s supposed to. I want to be able to tell people something nice if they try to smoke inside and complain that there’s no covered porch.”
“It’s the point of the fucking tent,” Mark said.
“Did we have some fight I don’t know about, dude?” I said. Even with just the three of us in the tent, it was markedly hotter than it was outside.
“He’s just stressed about the party,” Esther said. “His hero Rivko’s coming. So’s Lana.”
“Lana’s Occasional Lana?”
“Yep.” Lana took party pictures, good ones. Instant social capital for events, people who did parties, deejays. Enough notice for us, scored piecemeal through these pictures, through people talking about what we did for parties, could eventually mean regular higher-paying gigs, could mean avoiding getting a job. The point of all this shit.
I took a steak knife and started poking and slicing the sides of the tent my dad had given me when I moved out to go to college. I’d only gone camping once the whole time I was out here, anyway.
It was rammed by nine thirty, and had been pretty busy since eight, people stopping by to predrink our vile Landecker before properly going out for the night, then clocking that most of the people they wanted to see were in the room with them, the drinks were free, and Mike and Esther were doing pretty great on the music. So people stayed and the rooms filled up.
Landecker, I should say, truly is disgusting. I just tried some again at the Opus Hotel last night, where I was waiting for an LA commercial-director pal to turn up. First time I’d had any since the party, and I was wondering if it was just the memory of what we had to do later on that night that tainted its taste in my head. No. It tastes like Jägermeister with Scope and Palmolive notes.