By Walter Agnew Moore II
Cultural Attache from Ten Thousand Monkeys

You know, if you take 5 1/2 Mexican people, and 3 1/2 Irish people, and 1 Tennessee Hillbilly, and stir them all together in a bar called Duddley's Draw until closing time, and then spill them out in the street to find their way to Walter's place where there is a refrigerator full of beer and a big bottle of Ricard and a small but surprisingly powerful stereo with the Pogues and Steve Earle and lots of Mexican Rock CD's lying around it, if you do all this, you come up with a party that can flat wreck an apartment.

Highlights:

—A dude who "knew about Ricard" pouring pint glasses of it for several people, who then proceeded to drink all of it, with interesting results.

—A row of chicas reading my row of rejection notes cunningly tacked to the kitchen wall for just such an occasion and then turning and looking at me with smiles and dilated pupils.

—An Irishman (the shortest one, invariably the most psychotic of any group) taking out a sharp knife and hacking strips off of an old towel so the Hillbilly would have something to chew on to keep his teeth from grinding together.

—Many couples packed into the dance-floor that was formerly the tiny space in front of my couch. One dude singing as he danced with his girl: "I hate this music, I hate this music, just because I'm Mexican everybody thinks I'm supposed to love this craaaap..."

—Finding various things like the soup dish or toothbrush holder broken (clawed?) off the wall in my bathroom.

—Being asked for a map of Venezuela by a lost girl who wandered in off the street.

My dance partner was the Desert Rose of El Paso, a self-proclaimed writer-revolutionary-feminist-100% Mexican-except-for-her-great-grandmother-from-Hong-Kong-but-still-100% Mexican-dammit person who took offense at everything I said but was still ready to cut a rug. Problem was, when we'd do roll-outs in the confined space, half the time it was like she was deliberately judo-slamming me into the wall. But of course, it had to have been accidental.

Crashed about 4 am, and jumped up again when the stereo alarm went off 2 hours later, complete with Placebo cranked up to volume 11.