A person built a city, tenderly, a daydream city, a block and ten minutes between classes at a time. First they materialized a field, and stood-while-not-standing-actually on the field, made an inferno and leveled it. A firestorm of white sulked and the person watched until their phone rang and then a person left the whiteness for their actual location, which was a room, which wasn’t near the field. Then they forgot about the bonflower until they caught the bus, which purred or waited.

The bus was full of strangers. A person looked out of the window, was borne back to the charred and buttery space by the thrum and hob of the bus, the animal and bent mustard diabetic smell of perfume and bodies. Charred from the fire, buttery from the butterflies a person popped into existence while imagining what the strangers they saw from the bus liked about themselves. The butterflies collapsed from the smoke. A person reached their destination,

And a person left the bus and a person dreamt roads on the field, in squares first, which wasn’t right, and then in circles, which also wasn’t right, so a person made his streets tessellated and rose half of the field to a hill, for contrast. A person likes contrasts. Sometimes contrasts are nice.

A person dreamt museums and libraries and people, bars, bicycles, willow trees. The people became planets, pregnant barren planets with their own gravity & some offered more comfort to life than others. Some planets vacuumed others in with their compulsive gravity and filled their lungs and arteries with poisonous gases. The alphabet died. A person could do that, walking home in the sunshine. Eliminate comma fevers, clause sicknesses, language. They didn’t have to be there. They could be corrected. A person, drinking coffee in their yard, could imagine a system of broadcasts where no language was necessary. In this play epoch of daydream everyone understood through morphic resonance.

A person dreamt this place inside their carriage of terror every once in a while. Sometimes it was a field of vegetables, or a BMX track, or ribbons of beauty. A person had to sleep, eventually. A person wondered if that this field was renewed in sleep; if the planets and fantasies and resentments became a garden of skulls and time to compost for the next day, every one an epoch, all forgotten but the soil rich for new flight.

The Damnation of Party-Faust

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Party-Mephisto: A young white man, slim, sort of a fish-belly pale Italian club-rat, with narrow features and an irritating little beard, like carefully-groomed rumpled stubble (utterly contrived), and perfect oily hair, and thin lips and beady black eyes that he swings around like a laze-beam. Perfect white slacks around pipecleaner legs, white leather shoes w/ upturned toes, impossibly black T-shirt, white leather jacket. He is always smiling.

Party-Faust: A young white man in faded black chords, beat red sneakers, yellow T-shirt w/ a big black star on the chest, shiny golden blazer thrown over his shoulder, held the way MJ holds his jacket in Billy Jean. Cleanshaven oval face drawn tight like he recently lost a lot of weight, large green eyes and perfectly orthodonted teeth (except for one little snaggle on the lower left that he worries compulsively with a fingernail). He looks dehydrated & dreamy & is extremely full of himself.

Party Guests: A large group of typical human beings, men and women, young and happy

ACT I

(A wild party in a vague space—drink, music etc. PARTY-FAUST doesn’t live here but he’s still the host. He and PARTY-MEPHISTO stand slightly apart from the crowd. PF looks tense and depressed and PM looks pretty pleased about that)

PM: Jesus Christ Party-Faust you sure do get down.
PF: Alas that I cannot party with the gods. I am naught but a lowly worm who can barely turn a mother out. No matter what party-heights my party-art can raise me to, ne’er shall I taste the wine of the party-sublime, nor glimpse the visiage of party-providence.
PM: Alright Party-Faust I can tell you’re just bursting with despair over there and this bash is gonna flounder without its motor (that’s you, big guy), so I’ma lay it on the line for you: (produces a little golden bottle from nowhere) do four shots of this demon-tequila with me and you will party like no man before or since.
PF: Nay, damned party-spirit, assail not mine ears with such sweet lies, for what hope can I, a lowly mortal party-beast, have of reaching the plane of such eternal party-starters as Party-Aristotle, or that holy Party-Plato with the light in his baby blues and all the best drugs.
PM: Those chuckleheads got nothin’ on me, Herr Fest-Faustus. Put that pout on ice and dig this for a minute.

(PM puts two fingers to his lips and whistles a whistle that rings out over the thump of the techno and shakes the ice in all the glasses and the bricks on the mantle, the fireplace erupts in red flame and a dozen baying black party-poodles bound out of the inferno, they pull down a fat guy and rip him to pieces while the crowd circles round and cheers and claps)

PF: (a little shaken but excited) Stay this madness, party-demon! That guy owned me 8 bucks.

(PM lights a Pell Mell, takes a drag and exhales an impossibly dense nimbus that engulfs the entire party besides PF and himself, the clapping and the techno die out, replaced by at-first quiet but sustained & ever-crescendoed chords on an unseen pipe organ. PM holds out the pack and PF takes one and lights it w/ an entire book of matches, holds it in his mouth and eyes the cloud hungrily as he pulls on his jacket and picks his snaggletooth and rubs his belly under his T-shirt. As the smoke cloud clears—the blood and dogs are gone, the guests seem gaunter and much more made-up—PF hops nimbly atop a nearby minifridge and turns to address the crowd, Pell Mell in hand so he can gesture w/ the cherry and take a drag when he holds for applause. PM melts against the wall in shadow to smoke, jacket at his feet, eyes on flicker between PF and the crowd)

PF: Friends! Rats! Drunken scum! Stay your tongues, grab a handful of ass if it’ll shut you up, and listen for a minute to your humble haggard host, me, your Party-Faust.

(deep bow w/ cig held high to a general whoop of shit-faced approval)

PF: Cram it, Janet!

(the crowd crams it)

PF: (heartfelt, brooding) The body before you is bruised and broken, the soul ratty and careworn, the belly full of iron, the liver curdled, the lungs like blackened porterhouses. A pack and a half could not stay these shakes. Yet here I stand before you monsters, here I smoke and chatter needlessly. How can this be? What force of man or god could sustain so wretched a creature? The answer is easy:

(he kicks open the door of his minifridge soapbox with a flourish, revealing more handles of liquor than it can possibly hold, great cheers, a bucket line forms and soon the booze has spread among the crowd)

The best of friends! Whisky, rum! Those who never let you down! Vodka, scotch! Oil of conversation, liquid courage, the unbroken cure for all that ails! Tequila, moonshine, beer
& wine! There is a balm in Gilead, and he can help us to forget, for a single endless instant, the shit and mud and deep dark holes inside us all…light the fires, with blood and puke and pelvic hammering! Join me in an incantation, a witching-ritual to seal this night away from the closing dark! Ready your drink and heed my words!

(shots are poured with a collective gentle gurgle, PM oozes up and pours a pair of healthy slugs from a golden bottle pulled from nowhere, then joins the crowd front and center)

(the bottle wears a tiny gold sombrero)

(all eyes are on Party-Faust as he raises his shimmering shot and lowers his cig hand until the palm grips his skull, ashes tumble in his hair)

This head…this black head throbs with the thumping bassline of the underworld, the Olympian subwoofer of Vulcan’s forge. My sputum swims with cerebral cortex! I close my eyes to nightmares of astronomy and nesting spheres! The music sears my synapses! Let us forget the head!

(cheers, shot, pour another)

(PF spreads his fingers wide before him, barely holding his glass and cig)

These hands have lifted ten thousand skirts and gripped twice as many creamy hamstrings, knocked teeth from big mouths and holes in shoddy plaster, pressed together in mad prayer to Bacchus for bail money and miracle beer. My knuckles ache! Fingers scrabble on white-hot prison walls! Let us forget the hands!

(cheers, shot, pour another)

(PF drops his arms to his side and looks at the floor)

And this demonic health, my indestructible constitution, that granite troll no drink can drown, no vapor choke, no endless bender blot out for good—damn the motor that turns this party! Damn the platelets and the macrophages! Let us forget our health!

(cheers, shot, pour another)

(PF holds his hands to his chest, and looks out, imploring)

Finally this heart…this heart is broken in a thousand places. The fractures run from my beat brown soles to the tip-top of the party-firmament, where the moon gives black light and the stars go strobe when God claps twice. I am torn in two, betwixt the instant and eternity, the Asian and the Blonde, betwixt parties past and parties yet to come, betwixt myself and all of you. If I…

(a beat of silence)

(suddenly profound, thousand-mile stare) If I could taste the One True Party, if I could be there when the lights come up and the vesicles empty and the world ends, if I could throw the bash that justified the whole and worthless human race, why…

(a beat of silence)

I’d sell my soul.

(two beats)

(remembers himself, turns back to the crowd, with deepest contempt) And all of you with it! Here’s to Hell and a black sun rising!

(huge cheers, shot, resounding cheers, resumption of dancing with yet wilder abandon, thin glass bottle bottoms rising from time to time above the crowd, towards the ceiling. PF hops down and shakes himself out, motions offstage with a nod to PM, who has already donned his jacket and lit two more Pell Mells, one of which he wordlessly hands over)

PF: Come, black imp, and summon my party-familiar. We’ve got a bar or two to barnstorm. If I just sold what I think I did then this ought to be one hell of a night.

exeunt Party-Faust and Party-Mephisto, lock the doors and burn down the theatre