There’s No Party like an I.E. Party
Where’s the noz?
WORDS BY Christopher Buchanan
GRAPHICS BY Johnathan Arellano & Benjamin Uribe
9:45 PM. A dim Saturday night draped in fog that rolled over from the Santa Monica Sea. Halloween weekend of God-granted 2024. Lucky us to even be here. I sat dazedly in the backseat of a black Toyota Corolla as it slowly made its way through a soft pattering rain along the 60 East. In the approaching hour, we’d be celebrating Bop-o-ween in the Inland Empire, hosted only by the notorious IE.parties.
@IE.parties is an enigmatic Instagram page with a healthy following of nearly 45 thousand and a nested impression in brain-grooves of teen, young-adult and pervy middle-aged Inland Empire residents. They act as the Panama Canal for every shindig’s promotion efforts. If the page had posted your party, it gave you credence in the desert… A kind of Suburban Celebrity. You’d be the Big Kahuna… El Presidente… As it goes, it is the only page the town is big enough for.
When I first stumbled upon IE.parties, it was by complete accident; through a friend of a friend of a cousin of a teen mother I knew, probably. What caught my attention most was the decadent flier that had a poorly photoshopped room with two stacks of .png cash, a Louis Vuitton bag and stick figures in suggestive, bent-over positions. Just yiking or having full-on relations? I was never sure. The cherry on top was the name of the function: Get-Yo-Ratchet-Right. I became obsessive.
Nary was there a weekend without a party flier that could’ve come straight from an elementary design class and a flurry of Instagram stories to chronicle the night. IE.parties cashed in on a certain low-quality charm, a disregard for the structure and niceties social media pages usually have to put out to cater to the “wider audience”. Milquetoast posts and infographics won’t be seen anywhere aside from Borefest 2024. There was no place for that in the Empire.
At one of these parties, the only guarantee of safety was a “strict security” provision on nearly every flier. It appealed to the more debaucherous sect of society, one that leaked galaxy gas....
Every weekend story post from the account looked like Project X if it were part telenovela, part Freaknik. Balloons full of nitrous oxide, witchlike concoctions of lean, hips that never stopped moving, some couple with their tongues so far out of their mouths they could’ve caught flies… Was that an AR-15? No, cherry bombs in the backyard. It was sacrilege that I’d never been drunk or socially supported enough to attend. Now was the appropriate time.
I needed an evening ball that weekend more than anything. Classes have been helle, or hell in Middle English for anyone else who may have spent the last eight grueling weeks in a medieval literature class with a muppet octogenarian for a general English degree you stumbled into. I walked out of class the other day about halfway through to some sass from the old cat — I have yet to return. Could this be cowardice? Most likely. Pride? Probably so. That is why I needed to get a piece out, to even out my academique Karma.
We were lucky enough to attend the Bop-o-ween special, which would take place a few days after Halloween. A clever flip, but not their most original title; they had once advertised a Free Diddy Party in September and what they called Spongebop sometime during the summer. It seemed there was regard for the social consequence that would befall IE,parties if they were in any cityscape hooked on respectability politics… Luckily, word didn’t make it out of the desert very often. It was a solitary place, so to make any legible noise, you and a couple dozen others had to do so in unison. IE.parties knew and capitalized off of that fact.
What made our attendance a lucky break in the first place was the fact that the architects of the whole thing blocked Bum Diary on Instagram quicker than I could flick a lighter to quiet my nerves after sending the suspicious interview request.
I was furious! I had been a loyal supporter since Spongebop, at least. True… I may have never attended, but I guessed my story reposts must have garnered me enough merit to not be blocked straightaway. I was practically a club promoter minus a sick addiction to snow. Clearly, IE.parties wasn’t ready for any sort of exposure, no matter how small. In my eyes, they had made themselves a merciless villain.
Perhaps it was my fault… Honestly, I came at them like a textbook federal agent. I hastily crafted up and sent a pretty disingenuous message asking about an interview, draped with all kinds of exclamation points. Who did I fool myself into thinking I was talking to!? It wasn’t five hours before all the Bum Diary account owners were separated from IE.parties by an everlong mile.
It’s not as if I have to kick this piece up to Mr. Big Boss ten microseconds before deadline o’clock strikes to keep steady rent on my mold-ridden, just-getting-by apartment with a water-jungle fish tank and an oak dining room table that has only hosted conversation by way of tossed mail — this was pure sport and sick curiosity... Vague desperation. Jesus... Just in just writing out that grim fate oak dining room table fate, my stomach went mad with nausea — in another universe, this was my life.
In that universe, I probably ended up without a college acceptance and stayed in the Inland Empire for God-knows-how-many-more-years. It’s a peculiar spot, wedged in the place between boredom and profound discovery. There’s nothing around to excite the neurons, so you are forced to breathe some creative air into yourself as a means of avoiding mental comatose. To many, this is no bad number.
The other day I read a piece for a class by Walter Benjamin, a 20th-century German-Jewish philosopher who lived and croaked as things went way wayside in Germany, once contemplating why storytelling had gone awry in an essay titled Handkerchief. In it, Benjamin talks a lot about how people hardly tell good stories anymore because they’re too busy moaning and groaning about how terrible and ugly their real lives are. On this point, I think he’s a fool: Complaints are the ecstasy of an expert audience... This bitch at my job.. My dumb-fuck professor… This no-life loser… There was this ugly mother-fucker in class… All timeless tales for the Good Listener.
I only mention Benjamin because he said something beautiful about boredom in Handkerchief.
“I realized that people who are not bored cannot tell stories. But there is no longer any place for boredom in our lives. The activities that were covertly and inwardly bound up with it are dying out.”
Even in the desert, boredom has no home. In the Empire, you can drive your way down any main road and see the same things in every direction… But with a buzz ball, a couple 99 shooters and maybe even an inhalant sourced from somewhere in Indonesia, you’ll start to see the small difference in the dry details as they all spin around your head. Suburban homes, full of far-out migrants trying to make something out of nothing or violent drunks who would kill before giving up their two o’clock Corona or a single mother failing to communicate with her baby’s father that things need fixing before they all fall apart or just simple, happy families who’ve never sat anywhere for dinner but over an old oak table.
When there’s nothing in any direction for miles, you can either look far out, toward the horizon, or deep within, to try and channel the heat.
There is contentment, even pride, in that sort of freedom. A drink and a drive and carne con arroz when you get home. It sounds like an insignificant living, but there’s no pressure to be anything but as you are.
I probably dropped a quarter of my first Twisted Tea on my Dickie’s shorts on that rainy ride to Pomona. Luckily, this event would take place at a vacant factory, where the parade could still march on. Before something like this, I would usually face a harder concoction… But for Bop-o-ween, I had to remain modest. Just a buzz would do.
For the sake of the story, I hoped to find the owners of the page during the night. How I’d ask around without getting my ass beat for doing more KGB work, I hadn’t a clue. I felt having the page inaccessible to me was injustice – bad blood was boiling. Fascism hard at work, evidently… First, it will target purveyors of information… Next, the fighters… Lastly, the vulnerable. Or, I had just fumbled the story terribly. Bad weed and Twisted Tea had me twisted tight and paranoid. If I had a choice, I wouldn’t continue to suffer under this violent dictatorship any longer and just find those sly cats. A second Twisted Tea has hit my south cortex, or what have you. A third there soon after… Anger mounts.
We finally rolled up with wet tires in the drylands. As we hit the corner, the nice dream concluded.
I wish this could be any more interesting, but the police seemed to have made it there about 10 minutes before us… The party started at 9, so they only got about an hour and a half of IE beauty in before someone had to interfere and change the signal. All I could do was guess where the night had gone before we came.
The only person I talked to directly was a young man in a ski mask heading in the opposite direction of the fuzz.
“What happened to the party?” I asked.
“It got shut down hella quick. You want some galaxy gas? I got it in my car.” He responded with a no-funny-shit expression.
The prospect always existed in my mind… It was as close to tradition as you could get at one of these things. It was practically a drink out of the Holy Grail. However, after a huddle-up and hesitance from my friends, I gave him a tough, resigned No. Paranoia ruled as those lights performed their blue and red light circus.
Another girl asked us where she could park. When we responded that there was no destination, she asked if there was something else we knew of. Another negative. Her spirit still hungered for merrymaking and vice, as I assumed the tide of partygoers heading to their cars also felt strongly. I doubt she and anyone else in search of it couldn’t find something to get into right after they rolled off.
I looked to the distance in hopes I might spot whatever 16-25 year-olds probably ran IE.parties. What they probably saw was another flashing light trying to dim their good time, desperately trying to be a part of whatever had led to the sonic-speed police intervention. How nervous I’d been about taking a balloon to the face or getting too close to an officer showed me I had gotten too old and wise for this crowd. Loss and gain, I suppose.
All three of my roommates had work in the morning, so it was probably a good thing we had to cut the whole thing short. As we pulled off to go see some familiar friends, still within the bounds of the Empire, I looked in the rearview and wondered who else in that dirty old factory had work in the morning. Who among them must will themselves out of their warm bed in hours to face a world that they were hardly prepared for? If I had to bet I’d say damn near everyone of the ones pulling off to see another function through its 4 AM conclusion. I could guess and guess all I wanted, but I could never properly live it.
This all sort of reminded me of a Joan Didion piece in The White Album... One of the beginning unnamed chapters — I can't be bothered to look for the exact number. Didion is covering the Manson murders, en route to speak to Linda Kasabian, a witness to the crimes and member of the Family. Didion doesn’t too much discuss Kasabian as much as she does her own feelings about having had such an open house for whatever patrons the wind blew in during the ‘60s. Her fear, grief and all her other poor feelings are apparent — but Kasabian’s? Not so much. Kasabian worked mostly a vehicle for Didion’s feelings about her own naive youth. A youth where someone could convince you of an imminent race war that you could only survive if you struck at the root, the institution. A youth where someone could waltz into your house and you believed they left trouble at the door. A youth where you’re huffing galaxy gas and watching two people you’ve never met before, but share almost every adolescent memory with, fight to near-death over a $100 prize.
IE.parties very well could have been a vehicle for my feelings about being a still-naive elder. Someone who still has that itch, but can’t reach far back enough to scratch it anymore. Solemnly arthritic. There was no story in that vacant facility aside from a few arrests, but I still chased it with the fervor of a rookie reporter. Was I looking for a party, or a means to make contact with that inner heat, just once more?