By Cain Arsenault
Don't Be Fooled By A Big Butt And A Smile
Wrapped up tight in a comforter with my jeans and socks still on, my stomach doing back flips and the taste of death in my mouth. Questions flooding my head. Where am I? How did I get here? When??? What is this sneaking suspicion that it all has to do with a pig? Did I really drink that much?
The deluge lets up as the room comes into focus and I realize that I am home. Lying there, I remember how someone told me years ago that the true measure of a party is how completely lost you find yourself the next day in your own home. Somehow lost is a gross understatement for how I'm feeling here; It's more like I just woke up in someone else's life and it all seems vaguely familiar because it's theirs...or is it mine? Wait a second......fuck I need coffee.
A half pack and a pot of espresso later I'm sitting and contemplating the meaning of it all. The pig that is. This Sport Pig. Spying an unused drink ticket sitting next to my keys on the desk, I pick it up and last night comes spilling out like the Amsterdam I left behind. Well, maybe not an Amsterdam. Morning-after recollections are never that smooth. Somewhere in the mess I get a flash of this huge ass with Chinese characters off to the left of it so naturally I had to pause and think on that for a moment or two...about the Chinese bit, not the ass...[well, maybe a little bit about the ass...ok...maybe a LOT about the ass]...and then I get another flash of an address in the bottom right hand corner and it hits me that I'm remembering the flyer.
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*EDITORS NOTE: The characters described in the above paragraph were in fact Kanji, which is Japanese, although Kanji is comprised largely of Chinese lettering. We apologize to our Japanese readership for our stupid gaijin reporter's typically white-bred presumption. He shall be beaten severely.*
*EDITORS NOTE: Another interesting fact to note is that the phrase on the flyer roughly translates into "don't be fooled by a big butt and a smile" which incidentally is a lyric from the song Poison by American R&B/Hip Hop group Bel Biv DeVoe. How strange that they never mentioned the influence of Confucianism on their music in interviews.*
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This latest edition of Sport Pig was held at this dim sum joint called The Bright Pearl deep in the heart of Chinatown. I remember getting the flyer for it and thinking that whoever was in charge of booking the venue must have been in the grips of some kind of drug-induced psychosis...after three days of cheap scotch, rock-star lines and about an hours sleep, she came to wandering through Chinatown with no clue how she got there; and looking up, the skies parted and as though the finger of god had slammed into her brain it all came clear: DIM SUM!
Now I can't claim to really understand the kind of connections that were going on in her head at the time... such drug addled terrains ... where only the truly freakish would dare to tread... but connected she was. And the Toronto party scene would never be the same.
Walking in the door, Justin Peroff [BSS] and L'il Jazz were trading off on the decks spinning the sweet sounds of some older hip hop, taking me back to the halcyon days of when I first started clubbing...tracks like the NWA classic "Express Yourself", Snoop's "Gin and Juice" and that "Mistadobalina, Mista Bob Dobalina" track...Del the funky something or other I think...hmmm...fucked if I know. With such an auspicious beginning to the night, I really couldn't have asked for more... besides the complimentary bottles of Amsterdam that is. Normally I would have expected a proper press stash of Crown Royal and some good speed but the one promoter I met was so disarmingly accommodating that...ahh who am I kidding? Free beer is free beer.
Meandering my way back from the bar after snagging a few bottles, I find my girl over by the dance floor gettin' her groove on; sidling in next to her, we smile at each other as I pass her a beer and start to scope out the room, to get a feel for the party.
Looking around I was struck by how much the layout and the steadily growing crowd conspicuously lining the outer edges of the dance floor reminded me of a school dance; of course, I mean that in the loosest possible way cause let me tell you...the dances that were held at my school were nothing like this. The music was actually something to get off your ass for, the bulk of the crowd had some degree of fashion sense instead of self-conscious overcompensation, and people were genuinely friendly instead of sizing you up based on who you showed up with. Everyone was there...the indie kids, the queers, the hip-hop heads, the punks, the lesbos, electro-geeks, and scenesters...even a few others that looked like they showed up just cause the flyer had a great ass on it...
... and seemingly out of nowhere comes "London Calling" by the Clash and glancing stage-ward, I notice that k-os has taken over the decks in a none-too-subtle fashion, jackin' the vibe and energy in the room up to the next level. If you were listening close enough, you would've heard the unspoken somewhere in between the lines of the shift... like a call for debauchery...or was that the tequila talking? The party was quickly turning into a shitfest in the most uber sense of the word; a place where things could and would happen; good things, sexy, things. Things you'd never forget even though you can't remember the details the next day kind of things. Like walking into the washroom and
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*EDITORS NOTE: At the request of the legal department at Pink Mafia, the company responsible for the Sport Pig parties, we had to excise a significant portion of the text in order to avert potential arrests and lawsuits. While we don't commend nor condemn drug use, group sex, and public displays of nudity per se, we do acknowledge that Metro's finest may take issue with the behavior of a certain percentage of those who were in attendance that evening. We apologize to those of you who would have enjoyed reading such salacious accounts. Just for the record, we feel cheated too.*
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You knew just being there that down the road, those responsible for the party would eventually become total fat bastards, drunk on their runaway success and so completely pretentious that even their own company wouldn't be cool enough for them anymore. Don't hate them for it though. They'll be the ones with the funniest stories when you're all in rehab together 10 years from now.
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