The Model (Part 2 – scroll down to read Part 1 first)

So we left the AIDS apartment, started walking around East London and eventually wound up at a party in an abandoned warehouse. This area can best be described as Williamsburg before it was safe. Inside, everyone was dressed up. There was a guy with mutton chops wearing an outfit straight out of the old west, a few girls dressed as Flappers, a girl with a 40’s thing going on, one wearing a poodle skirt, a guy wearing daisy dukes, suspenders and nothing else, and then my personal favorite – girl with full face-make up like she was in the Broadway production of CATS. (I know that's 2 Broadway analogies in 2 posts, but who doesn't love a good musical. Am I right fellas?)

Logically, I asked if this was a costume party. Model girl said, “No. This is East London.” --"Oh, East London you say?" -- makes perfect sense to the American. Apparently, these people dress like this every day.

I don't even know how to explain how crazy this place was, but let me try by painting you a picture:

Do you know the super creepy scene from THE SHINING when Jack Nicholson finds all of the ghosts partying and everyone is dressed weird? Well I was at that party if that party also had lots of drugs. Everyone was F'd up on drugs I had never seen before. They were doing Ketamines (horse tranquilizers), MDMA and acid so recreationally it was like they were out on a leisure walk in a heath rather than gluttonously filling their bodies with illegal narcotics. There was also coke and hash – but that was the equivalent of milk and oxygen to this group. There was no beer, or any drink not in an open container, so at this point I was paranoid that everything had acid in it and I officially became the sober guy at a drug party.

Some other model came over and was talking to model girl and me. We were all sitting on a couch, and 2 minutes later these girls were fully making out. I declined their offer for drugs, and they went to a room together (a more suave guy may have seen their drug offer as an opportunity for a 3 way, but I'm not that guy and this was all way over my head). I stepped outside where a girl on acid told me the stars were moving really fast. When I looked to the sky I realized that it was only the clouds moving in front of the stars – she acknowledged that my hypothesis made more sense.

The girls came out of the room, everyone smoked hashish, the new model left, and model girl asked if I wanted to go back to her place and keep partying. It was now 5:30am, and I lied saying I had to work in the morning, so she called me a cab (which was not a real cab, but some guy with a car, who charged me 30 pounds to get home), kissed me goodnight and said “Well, I hope you enjoyed seeing the real London.”

The next day at work, I told this story and the general response from the locals was “Sounds like a fun Saturday in Shoreditch.”

SO HOW WAS LAST NIGHT? Kind of a cross between A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and THE SHINING. Scratch that. It was just a typical night in East London (but I wish I brought my camera).