Drenched in Bodily Fluids - How I Spent New Year's Eve 1999
"Ten, nine, eight, seven...," the amassed crowd counted down. It was New Year's Eve, nineteen hundred and ninety nine, we were covered in blood, and the world was about to end.
Let's back up.
That year, on the lips and minds of the nation was the upcoming year two thousand. Holy fuck, the turn of the millennia! Never mind the actual millennia shift wouldn't occur until two thousand and one, it was the year two thousand, baby. The future was upon us! Flying cars and hovering skateboards would soon be littering the streets world wide as we'd all be on our way to solve world hunger, cure cancer, and make meaningful contact with alien life. It was the year I was to graduate high school and strike out into the world as my own man, presumably aboard my very own rocket ship to Mars. We'd collectively survived the havoc wrought upon us by "Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace" earlier in the year and it was smooth sailing towards the new millennium.
It started as a low rumble, what was being referred to as the "Y2K" computer virus, but soon turned into a full blown hysteria. The story goes, back in the day, when all the eggheads gathered to make our modern computers, to save computing space, they designated the year as a two digit number IE "91" for they year nineteen hundred and ninety one, "92" for nineteen hundred and ninety two, and so on. The trouble was, by that point, the computers we'd allowed to control all aspects of our lives wouldn't be able to recognize the switch from the year nineteen hundred and ninety nine to two thousand, not having enough coded digits to represent it, and would revert to "00." This would, in theory, cause all the computers to short circuit and malfunction. At the stroke of midnight airplanes would fall from the sky, ATM machines would shower the streets with cash, and home appliances would revolt against their owners, and in retaliation for making them reheat endless amounts of leftover Chinese food takeout, or repeatedly burning slice after slice of Wonder Bread, enslave, then kill us all, plunging the world into an eternal, machine dominated darkness. Or, so the theory went.
This apocalyptic omen ensnared the world in its grasp and soon an entire industry of "Y2K" survival guides and products began springing up at every corner store. Suddenly it was time to prepare for the end times.
My father, who at the time worked for IBM (they know a thing or two about computers) assured us this was all bologna, and nothing was going to come of it. His take may have brought my mother some comfort but it didn't stop her from preparing in her own way.
My folks were already avid shoppers of the expansive, bulk purchasing warehouse Sam's Club, so giant cubes packed with eighty eight cans of Mountain Dew, or industrial sized packages of Quaker Oats chocolate chip granola bars weren't an uncommon site in our household. We'd have enough processed and artificially sweetened food to ride out the apocalypse just by way of being American consumers, but slowly our middle class trophy second fridge began to fill with bottles of water, our junk drawers becoming overfilled with batteries of all size. Batteries being of utmost importance to keep our flashlights powered in the dark as we looked for our pillowcase-sized bag of Lay's Classic potato chips, hiding from roving gangs of home blender death squads after the machines were firmly in power. It was looking grim.
I'm not sure if she ever fully believed Y2K wouldn't in fact happen. I'm not sure if anybody did. The mania was omnipresent, looming over us all, and any New Year's Eve plans like a hawk waiting to strike.
It was into to that trepidation that I informed my parents that I would not be spending that New Year's Eve safe and sound at home surrounded by surplus batteries and an army's worth of Pepsi products, but instead downtown at the local rock venue, the Ogdan Theater, in attendance of the band GWAR's concert event dubbed "GWARMAGEDDON," surrounded by a motley crew of heavy metal headbangers, and punk rockers.
For those not in the know, GWAR is a heavy metal assortment of art school flunkies and musicians that have made a decades long career out of dressing up like monsters from outer space, telling crude, off-color jokes. Their live performances routinely consist of the band, in full costume, playing their brand of heavy metal while parading a bevy of monsters and contemporary public figures on stage to be ritually slaughtered, spraying the audience with gallons of their blood, among other bodily fluids. It's truly a spectacular thing to witness. You could say I was a fan, having recently, and permanently, emblazoned the visage of their guitarist Balzac the Jaws of Death, in tattoo form on my left shoulder. The fact that GWAR decided their New Year's Eve, nineteen hundred and ninety nine performance would be held in Denver, Colorado made it an event not to be missed.
My mother's hesitation was not that her son would spend the holiday surrounded by "psychos" dowsed in the blood of the slain, but that I would be "downtown," her presumed hot spot for end of the world chaos to most likely erupt first. She knew, me being eighteen years of age, there wasn't much she could do to stop me. I wasn't all that worried, and even so, I was willing to risk it in order to be in attendance at GWARMAGEDDON.
"I don't like it," she said, "but if anything happens, just run." Fair advice.
I couldn't think of any place I'd rather have been on New Year's Eve nineteen hundred and ninety nine, then awaiting the end of days, banging my head away while drenched in the liquidy expulsions of then GWAR frontman Oderus Urungus' monster penis "the Cuttlefish of Cthulu." The majority of my friends were in agreement, except for holdout Ken, who thought the end times should be greeted well dressed, and for some reason, decided he'd ring in the new year apocalypse on the stairs of the Colorado state capitol building, dressed in a suit. He implored us to join him but his pleas fell on deaf ears. As tempting as standing around in the dark wearing a tie sounded, it couldn't compete with GWAR.
"6, 5, 4...," the crowd chanted in unison. We'd all just been through the best two hour performance of GWAR's career. The entirety of the Ogdan Theater had been coated in blood, the floors slippery underfoot, our bodies glistening under the now raised houselights. In an unusual break of character, the members of GWAR had reappeared on stage after their encore, out of costume, their human counterparts exposed, to lead us all in a countdown to midnight. I took a moment to take to soak in the bloody tableau, and admittedly, felt a momentary nervousness. I closed my eyes.
"3, 2, 1..."
I opened my eyes.
No plane had crashed into the Ogdan Theater. No microwaves had formed in rebellion. Everything seemed as it should, and we'd survived, relatively unscathed, to the year two thousand. The crowd burst into exuberant cheer. Amongst the celebrating hordes, to my side appeared our well-dressed friend Ken, his fancy suit bathed in multicolored bodily leavings. The fear of missing out got the best of him, and last minute he decided to attend the concert.
As we left the Ogdan and stepped into the cool, January first, New Year's air, we took a look around just to be sure we weren't sheltered from computerized mayhem by the theater's confines. All clear, but a new threat was imminent...
The Ogdan Theater was situated one city block from another live music venue, the Filmore Auditorium, who on this night was playing host to the annual, New Year's Eve concert event by Leftover Salmon, the local, groovy, good times, jam band, whose assorted mass of hippie revelers we exiting at the same time we were.
The two crowds merged. The stinky, wet, sweaty, covered in goo hippies enveloped us, giving our blood-soaked personages a once, twice over, like we were the weird ones here. Somehow we managed through the patchouli mass, a threat that seemed more dire than wayward electronics.
We'd made it through Y2K. We'd survived GWAR, and we escaped the hippies. We had the millennium to look forward to, and plenty of bottled water to toast to that for years to come.