The night of the Swedish Meatballs

Is there such a thing as sex, drugs and rock'n'roll in a remote wasteland such as Sweden? (Other than that time at a Backyard Babies release party of course when someone slipped PCP in my beer and I ended up half naked licking the paint off a metal fire door all night. That's a story for another camp fire though...)

I grew up in a town just outside Gothenburg and wanted more than anything to be a rock star. Me and my friends were all poster children for “Rockstars ‘R Us” and we walked the walk, talked the talk (and dressed the dress) of the estranged rock'n'roll rebel. We were young, stupid and the closest thing any of us had ever come to a blowjob was the amount of work you had to put in with the hair dryer to make your hair stand up to the sky like a platinum rainbow.

Why the girls in high school didn’t beat us over the head with our Mad Max plated boots and told us we looked like a bunch of dorks I don’t know… (Because they were too busy dating the jocks of course. Duh! And also... Who were they to say anything? They wore pumps and white socks.)

One instance in particular stands out from back then when me and my very best friend decided that things were just to dull for words and we thus decided to throw the Glam Metal Party of the century in a warehouse on an ice cold night in January.

The place was used as an indoor golf course during the day so it was HUGE. We rented it for $300 from the nice gentleman who owned the building and promised to return it in the exact same condition the next morning... Stupid stupid stupid... (Yeah yeah… Most of all your warning lights are flaring red here already but I was never blessed with an angel on my shoulder so I blame my stupidity on the devil ushering me with his pitchfork towards impending doom.)

We put up flyers every-fucking-where and told every-fucking-body to come on down at this date, at that time and that so-and-so would be there for sure. We lied through our teeth to make it sound like the most awesome thing to ever hit these godforsaken boondocks of a pitiful fun-starved town. (We almost got expelled from school for promising free drugs and booze at the show on the cafeteria bulletin board.)

The night rolled around and it was so fucking cold the piss froze in your bladder. I kid you not my friend… You have not experienced cold until you've been in Sweden in the darkest night of winter, but hey... we were all Swedes and kinda used to it so that didn't spoil the party. As it turned out other things did...

At first things went smoothly... Me and my friend had a door each (no security of course – they wanted money) and just accepted people's $10 and told them to go in and have a blast. Everybody brought their own booze and pot and also helped themselves to the cheap watered down vodka and watered down OJ that the warehouse owner had donated to the party and we had poured in paper cups.

After two hours we were still on the doors serving a never ending line of people looking to get in from the blistering cold. There was the foot ball team, the local biker gang, the outcasts and the homeless... Pretty much everybody and their fucking hillbilly cousins. We had told the owner of the warehouse that the party would be for maybe 100 people tops but 600 paying party goers showed up. It was only a little later we realized that a side door was standing wide open and only God knows how many freaks had gotten in that way for free. Bastards…

Everybody was rocking out having a good time. The band we had hired for free went on at 11 and the sound was OK and people were enjoying the show. We didn't have a light rig so we had promised a girlfriend of ours that if she stood by the circuit breakers and just flicked the light on and off the whole night, we'd give her $50. Man, were we classy.

During the show however some kind of fight broke out in the men's room and much hollering ensued. I locked my door and ran (in my brand new zebra snake skin boots no less – too snazzy for words) to see what was going on. Two bikers were on the floor stabbing at each other’s eyeballs with switch blades, cheered on by their comrades and bleeding all over the place. The toilet bowl in one of the stalls behind them added some class to the scenario doing its best geyser impersonation spewing out water with impressive force for all to admire. Blood, piss and shit flowed in the masses of water out into the venue.

Right next door to the warehouse, actually wall-to-wall with only a pull-down gate separating the two, was a clothes store. Some geniuses figured out they could steal clothes through the bars of the gate by making lassos of their belts to pull the racks towards them. This went on until someone busted the gate and the burglar alarm went off...

Then the flood came... In an effort to stem the approaching tide heading towards the dance floor from the toilet a friend of mine ripped down the fire hose from the wall and started blasting away at the oncoming stream of feces and urine with the result that he pretty much splashed said bodily wastes on everybody in his way. The tide turned alright and flowed into the wall-to-wall clothes store between the bars of the broken gate instead. My friend panicked and tried to shut off the water. Didn't work...

By now rivaling gangs had decided that since this turned out to be a such a pretty war zone anyway why let it go to waste and not take the opportunity to settle the score once and for all? So the Iron Wolfs (note spelling) and the Bandidos flew at each other all guns blazing.

In the middle of all this chaos the band was still playing a cover of "Still of the night" or something and me and my buddy just stood there looking on in disbelief at the general devastation. We soon snapped into action however and as I ran to call the police my friend pulled the switch for the fire alarm.

So now we have: an indoor river of water and excrements inches deep all over the floor, both in the venue and in the clothes store... two drunken biker gangs fighting each other with knives and spiked bats till the last drop of blood... one fire alarm and one theft alarm blaring... "Still of the night” played by a bunch of 15 year old kids who should be in bed by this hour... hundreds of people just milling about like rabid ants looking for a way to get out (we had locked the doors remember?) only to finally just throw an iron bench through a big window and leave that way.

When we heard the sirens approaching we high-fived each other and started ushering people out the now unlocked doors. In the very last minute we realized that our best friend, who was a famous kid actor on TV, was all passed out on the floor, covered in God knows what. Now, if the police would have found him he would have been taken into custody to sleep it off and then his parents would have been notified. His parents were Nazi as all fuck so we didn't want to bestow that unfortunate fate upon him, especially since it could ruin his career forever. We took one of the big green astro grass roll out carpets that were used for the indoor golfing, put our friend in the middle and rolled him up like a Swedish Burrito. We proudly carried him out via the fire exit and leaned the roll against the outside back wall. My, weren’t we clever! High fives all around again…

Inside the police were now arresting people at random and calling for back up. The officer in charge asked us where either our parents were or where the permit was, it was hard to hear over the chaos, but we had neither anyway so we just shook our heads like two dumbasses. If there ever was a Beavis and Butthead moment in my life, that was it. (“Huh-huh… He said ‘permit’ huh-huh”)

Three hours later the venue was empty (if you can call an ocean of human waste “empty”) and we had gotten the police off our backs by giving them the name of the guy who owned the warehouse ("Uh... He went out to get cigarettes or something." ) and by cunningly assuming the names of two kids at school that we hated anyway.

So there we were... trying to mop up a catastrophe of biblical proportions when we decided to call it a night and just put all the money ($6000 minus what we paid for the PA and the "light switch girl", leaving maybe $5700) and a note that said "Sorry" on the warehouse owner's desk. Feeling much better we walked out through the broken window, locked the door and put the key in the mailbox as agreed. 

In the aftermath the owner was fined heavily for illegally lending his premises to said occasion without a permit, supervision or ample security. He was also fined for entering into an agreement with minors (we were 16) and then everybody else sued him. The clothes store next door for theft- and water damages, his neighbors for disturbing the peace and the town for having to dig up the whole street outside to get to the clogged up sewage pipe caused by the gloves and scarves people had flushed down the toilets... (Did I mention it backed up the sewers in parts of that residential and commercial grid for two days?)

We saw him months later roaming the streets with a bloody bandage around his head, dressed in clothes he probably found in the Salvation Army's clearance bin. He didn't recognize us and we gave him a buck. He said "Thank you and God bless you". We said "You're welcome dude."

Oh FUCK! I forgot about the guy we left outside rolled up in a golf carpet! We remembered him as we kicked back at my friend’s mom's house later that night (where we supposedly had been ALL night if anybody asks). My friend said "Dude! Did you unroll J?" only to be met with a raised eyebrow from me: "No, you did... Didn't you?"… … … “FUCK!”

We ran back to the warehouse, sliding all over the frozen streets like two drag queens on ice, and got to him before he was totally paralyzed from the bitter cold. He had to go to the hospital for alcohol poisoning and cold damages. The doctor said he could have died from the cold but that the amount of alcohol in his blood saved him. How’s that for irony? He ended up the talk of the town anyway, despite our efforts to keep him safe...  Fucking kid never made another movie…

Good times…