Zazen - By Vanessa Veselka Page 0,54
soup, pomegranates, star fruit, bread, dark chocolate, raspberries, blueberries. Crystal punchbowls full of mango and papaya juices sat beside a decanter of cold mint tea and a pot of mulled cider on a camp stove. People were hanging out eating. Some were taking a break from the growing intensity of the party and others were just freaked out by the whole thing. A girl beside a wedge of brie was talking loudly about the other rooms and bragging about how she’d been out there several times already. Her hair was full of glitter and she looked like she had been crying.
Maybe this was the other Piazza. The other city upon a hill.
To the left of the safe room was a large alcove with a gauze curtain. I saw a woman go in and I walked over. More and more people were coming in through the front and the sound was growing. I pressed myself back against the wall near the alcove. It was pitch dark behind the gauze but I knew they could see us. I could hear bodies moving. Someone laughed.
I spent the first part of the party on the edge of the safe room but after an hour I gave in and left the safe room. I passed a place called the Den, which was set up like a rec room with board games and mattresses all over the floor. I looked in for a second but it was mostly hippy guys in skirts snuggling with their bi girlfriends. In the main room of the warehouse was a DJ. Mirror called it the Big Tent and had divided it into three rings, each reserved for serious BDSM play. Mirror warned me weeks ago that she was going to banish pretenders to the Den.
“Anybody wandering around PVC not doing anything is going to get it,” she said. “It’s not Stand and Model. I don’t want to see sorority girls in pleather.”
As far as I could tell, there weren’t any. Mirror had painted the safe word, EXTREME on the cement floor of the warehouse, her own line in the sand, and it seemed to be working. In the first ring were five muscular gay men. A totally old school pornographic map—real leather, metal cock rings—everything. Two of them at least were over fifty and breaking out the canes. It was the kind of thing none of us had ever witnessed, something from old magazines, unassimilated pre-death sex. I saw Mirror walk by beaming.
The ring next to that was a gender mixed role-play. I recognized one of the bottoms, a boy from a camp I taught at once. She was a girl then, Trina. Her parents were Christian hippies. They had a group house somewhere upriver and took in runaways. I knew some people who lived there for a while and said it was pretty cool, that they weren’t bad. Trina was a neat kid too but I liked her better as a boy. It seemed more natural. He was part of a role-play involving a police officer and a bad storeowner. He was the kid caught shoplifting. It was pretty wild. People started to gather and everything got super electric, and with the audience getting into it so much, the players in the scene pushed more. Trina yelled for help and said he was innocent, but no one believed him.
In the last ring two men and a woman were doing Japanese rope torture. The woman moaned when the thin rope that ran between her legs was cinched tight and the top, a tall shirtless man who tied knots as delicately as if he were making lace, tugged on it again. The crowd surged.
Outside the rings, on one side of the main room was straight up orgy. There were some pillows thrown around and a rug but that was it. It was slow when I first came in but now it was really going. On the other side under a row of broken out windows the swings were set up. Mirror had painted sawhorses, a workbench and a rack bright primary colors so it would have a playground / construction site theme. Mitch was standing by the swings in a kitty collar with the liability paperwork.
The party was packed, easily closer to two hundred people and still more were coming. The synthetic hum of the music resonated in the huge warehouse and was absorbed by bodies. Ambient loops vibrated the aging and rippled windowpanes that remained. It was getting harder to