RETURNING from an autumn trip to Mount Cook, Mark Carswell, Carsy to his mates, lay naked in the back of the station wagon while a friend drove. Why was he naked? “I felt like it, it was a sunny day,” he says, as if driving round naked is something we all do.
At Tekapo, they passed a cop car, and Carsy ducked down to cover his arse – literally. “What’s going on?” he asked his mate. “He’s turned around, he’s pulling up,” replied the driver, pulling over to the side of the road. Panic-stricken, and admittedly “a bit high”, Carsy cowered in the back seat with nothing to cover himself, terrified of poking up his head. After a few minutes of back-and-forth (“Where is he now?”, “He’s just getting out of his car”), Carsy took the chance and looked. His friend was having him on; the cop had driven on, oblivious. Ecstatic over the ‘turn of events’, Carsy threw open the door and exploded from the car – jumping high to celebrate his freedom.
The photograph of that moment is now the logo of Carsy’s business, Cosmic Corner.
But the man behind New Zealand’s most popular party stores wasn’t always in the business of creating and facilitating good times.
 “I did my degree at Otago and became a suit in Wellington for a year. On the 50th week I went in and resigned. I’m just not a suit and tie guy, I couldn’t bear the constraints,” he says.
Carsy spent his early 20s in a variety of jobs, including working in the ski fields, and selling handmade paper and grains of rice he wrote on, on at the James Smith markets.
At 28 years old, Carsy got his cosmic brainwave. “There are stages in life where you start to hone in on your path and your life focus. For me, that was Cosmic Corner.”
He rented a shop for $150 a week, and on day one made the “magic number” of $69.
“It was all up from there,” he says.
Now with six stores nationwide, Cosmic Corner has become known best as a provider of legal highs, the 12000 other items in store include clothing, jewellery, fire sticks and poi, dress-ups, and
 “The store is based on the markets that became my favourite places while traveling the world. There’s always one guy selling sunglasses, one guy with clothes and a guy with legal highs - they’re alive, and that’s what Cosmic’s about. There’s an energy that feels like ‘this is the start of something fun’.”
Carsy loves a good party, but he’s also aware of the need to act responsibly.
“If we’re providing legal highs they must be safe. We’ve always been very careful about how we retail; and we will only sell stuff we would take. We’ve always restricted our dosage and kept it to a sensible rate, but unfortunately there was no government regulation and the people around us were providing the public with very strong doses of all sorts of things. In the end we were pleased to see BZP over and done with, it had gotten out of control,” he says.
Carsy doesn’t support prohibition, or banning something entirely, but thinks regulation is necessary. Recently, legal highs mimicking the effects of marijuana were made R18 – but Cosmic Corner were regulating who could buy them from the start.
“If you’re 18, you’re a so-called adult who can enjoy freedom of choice on all sorts of things, and with that comes self-responsibility. I’ve seen it with children – if you trust them to take responsibility they won’t abuse it, and it’s the same with adults, trust them and they fly.”
Carsy is careful to credit the whole family with the company’s success. The staff are equally passionate about Cosmic – a business that has offered many an outside-the-mainstream young adult a place to belong.
“There have been so many amazing people through that place, and there’s 60 of us who still make it what it is. Cosmic is nothing without all those people,” he says.
All Christchurch staff still have jobs, even though the two stores there are both closed.
“It’s very important that you carry on, that you stick together and support each other. It’s really good to have a purpose at times like this, I’m seeing people without purpose in Christchurch who are beginning to get lost.”
Carsy hasn’t yet been allowed to revisit the main Cosmic Corner store, fittingly located on Christchurch’s High Street.
“It was a good old building, but the roof’s caved in from the weight of rubble from our next door neighbours. I’m so lucky all my crew are ok, but I don’t hold out much hope for the building,” he says.
When one thing passes, another is born – and the Wellington store will move to a new site, where Cuba Street’s $2 shop used to be, in May.
“It’s four times bigger than the biggest store we’ve ever had. There’s a stage with a $30,000 sound system so we can have live music, a big fashion section, we’ll be selling local music so any new musician who wants to sell a CD can just drop it off to us,” he says.
There will also be an ‘Amsterdam coffee shop’; selling good coffee and legal smoke to keen, adult punters 24 hours a day.
The store will also be called just “Cosmic”, no corner, which is what most customers call it anyway.
In Carsy’s words, “We’re alive, we want to party, we want to play up, we want to have fun.”
Melody Thomas